February 11, 2018
Mom and Dad took me to Saint Mark’s, the little Episcopal church in my home town and there were water and oil and the holy words and I became what’s now called a “Cradle Episcopalian”. I was six weeks old. And then a few years later there was the Bishop laying his hands on my head and intoning with his powerful voice “Defend oh Lord this Thy child with Thy heavenly grace that he may continue Thine forever – – – “.
How I came to love the splendor of the liturgy, the ceremonial, the unparalleled magnificence of the language in 1928 Book of Common Prayer. Yes I was an acolyte of course, and a licensed teenage lay minister, reading evening prayer every Sunday. It was a romance, beautiful enough to seduce a boy and adolescent. And it was all absolutely and irrevocably true and unquestionable. Heaven and Hell, sin and salvation, ten commandments, the stern but all loving father, the sacrificial son on the cross, the holy ghost flitting about. Billy’s gong to be a priest, all the LOLs in the church were convinced. (For those of you who have known only the recent electronic language, LOL long before you came along meant Little Old Lady, laughing or not).
This was The Way It Is. The path to salvation. Don’t go down the road to perdition, it leads to the fiery pit. Follow the Yellow Brick Road, set off for Oz, bring your heart and mind and courage and the little dog, don’t fall asleep in the field of flowers, get to Emerald City, find the Wizard, so you can go home. Click those ruby slippers, say those words, there’s no place like home, amen brother. And so this was my belief and faith. Thus it is in the unexamined cocoon of an encapsulated life, never going beyond those safe boundaries. Family and church and society all endeavor to keep you within the straight and narrow, and woe be unto you if you grow out into the wide world and see its staggering expanse and richness and complexity. Beyond Mom and Dad, St Mark’s, and the confines of my home town, my education, and my conditioning, the old map of the world no longer represents what I have seen and experienced.
Why am I recounting this? No, I haven’t recently re-seen the Wizard of Oz. But after seventy six years of quest and experience, I have seen that there are many paths to an ultimate reality, some of them rich and complex, some austere, some of them incomprehensibly mysterious. I have also seen what Krishnamurti said, “truth is a pathless land”. And what Lao Tsu said, “the Dao of which you can speak is not the true Dao” (you can substitute God or Truth or Energy or any other absolute). Middle Age mystics sought to surrender the mind and ego to the cloud of unknowing, within which a glimpse of the nature of reality might begin. In the end I cannot know. Its not a Yellow Brick Road, the path to reality dissolves into the unknown. Give up knowing. Amen.
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