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Out of the Mist: A Geography of Spirituality
Fran Dearman, Intern Minister,
Unitarian Church of Edmonton, August 13, 2000
I was born and raised on Vancouver Island, which is a ridge of
volcanic rock set out on the rim of the Pacific, the ring of fire,
home of
whales and earthquakes and great green forests. I was shaped and
sustained by what I saw and heard and learned there. What am I to
learn here, what have you all seen and heard here already, here, ‘over
on the dry side’, under the northern lights?
A Geography of Spirituality..... What might these words mean? What
might they say to me, or to you, what might we hear from them, what
might that look like?
Spirituality may have a different range of meaning for each of us.
We might understand the spiritual as that which is not material,
not physical. We might understand it as a force that moves and causes
motion, but cannot be seen, like a breathe of wind wafting through
heart and mind and body, moving all three in fused unison. We might
understand it in its most basic sense as breath, the breath of life,
growing out of the essential meaning of the original Latin word ‘spiro’, ‘I
breathe’.
And when we seek to understand this breath of life, this spirituality,
each of us may see it or seek it or experience it in different ways.
Perhaps we see spirituality as a distant goal, something to seek
out, to strive for, something we hope we may reach through a perfect
action, at a perfect place, in a perfect form. Perhaps we see spirituality
as a force that overwhelms us, that sweeps over us like a great wave.
Perhaps we see spirituality as a possibility born/e within us, a
state of peace as natural as breathing, something we sink into, like
floating on our backs in a still, calm pool.
Each of us may see and seek spirituality in different ways. It is
a difficult word to pin down. ‘Geography’ is a little
easier to define. Geography is how we measure, draw, and write about
the earth. How we describe the earth. Not how the earth unfolds itself
to us, but how we unpack the earth. Not what the earth tells us,
exactly, so much as what we hear the earth say.
So. A geography of spirituality. What do we hear when we listen
to the breathing of the world? The earth has so much to tell us.
How much are we able to hear? This will be different for each of
us, for we each have taken different paths, we each see with different
eyes.
I would like to tell you what I have seen, with my eyes, and heard
with my ears, having journeyed in these last few weeks from the sea,
through the mountains, to this great city by the plains of the North
Saskatchewan River.
I left Vancouver Island two weeks ago, in mist. The mist thickened,
and the ship that conveyed us across Georgia Strait projected the
mournful drone of the foghorn. The vessel rose and fell with the
waves, and the waters ebbed and flowed with the eternal tides that
rise and fall and flow around my island. I have made some study of
these waters. I have made my living on these, and other seas. I have
learned from them that ebb and flow and flux is the nature of Life,
that all things change, that all change returns to some seeming of
its former state.
I have also learned that where the waters meet the earth, the effect
can be mighty and violent and irreversible for what comes in its
way. Currents can set us far off our accustomed courses and call
for drastic alterations in order to make a safe landfall. Tidal waters
channelled through narrow straits can create a wall of water overwhelming
to small craft that pass before it. A vessel caught in this frenzy
of moon and rock is at the mercy of powers that may be far beyond
the powers of the vessel, and it becomes a plaything of the cold,
blind, unforgiving laws of physics, which are no respecters of persons.
There is a place in the Gulf Islands, cradled in the Strait of Georgia,
a narrow gap between two points of land, a place called Boat Pass.
There you can sit safe on a rocky ledge and look down at such a boiling
of the waters twice daily, four times at the new and full moon. I
have done so, and I have read there a profound lesson in humility.
I learned there a sharp reminder of human frailty and vulnerability.
I learned there also the hopeful affirmation that we can learn from
experience, and we can accommodate harsh realities. This I learned
through reading the Tide Tables and realizing that human skills can
empower me to predict when that tide is about to come to the boil,
so that I in my little boat can plan to be somewhere else.
The sea also breathes into us a sense of beauty, shimmers of light,
lacy edges on tidal pools, great networks of wave trains fetching
halfway from Japan. And the sea is full of life: great whales and
killer whales, seals and sea lions, the flashing leap of fish, the
cries of birds. And the waters of the sea rise as clouds and fall
as rain upon the mountains - plentifully - and make the trees grow
big and tall.
There is a cluster of trees up island known as ‘Cathedral
Grove’. Great tall trees a hundred feet high, trees it would
take a dozen of us to circle at the base with joined hands, trees
that were already old five hundred years ago. I look at these massive
wonders and I am swept by a profound humility. All my years and all
my endeavours are but a hand’s breadth across the rings of
their seasons of growing. Given time and a steel saw, I can bring
them down, and cut them up, and chop them into kindling. But what
could I ever do, what monument of my life could I ever build, that
would compare to the sheer grandeur of their existence?
So. The geography of my island, sea and rock and forest, have taught
me much. They have been the safe place where I go to seek meaning
and enlightenment. They have been the wave of insight that sweeps
over me. They have been the stillness that I sink into where what
whispers inside me can find a silence where it can be heard. Surely
that does not only happen on a rock at the edge of the sea? What
happens in the mountains? On the plains? By the river?
We drove here, some friends and I, through Hope, through Golden,
through the Icefields Highway. I became aware, very quickly, that
I was surrounded by an awesome beauty that I had not yet learned
to read. I became aware that for one of my companions, who had grown
up in Alberta, what we were seeing had an intensity of meaning I
could not begin to fathom. These mountains, these streams and rivers,
these towns and wildlife, all had a piece of her childhood, her youth,
her family, her growth into understanding, that I could never share.
But day by day I began to assemble my own engagement with this new
geography.
We saw eagles and elk and mountain goats. We saw bison. We saw muddy
rivers and clear mountain waters. By the Columbia Glacier we saw
a tree, a tiny knee-high tree, a tree that they told us was old five
hundred years ago, clinging to the rocks, seizing on its brief growing
season each summer, enduring through the bitter winds of each fierce
winter. What could I ever do, what monument of my life could I ever
build, that would compare to the courage and faithfulness of such
an existence?
At Emerald Lake I saw a place where it seemed to me that I could
sink into myself and listen for the small, still voice, where I could
pause and let body and mind and spirit knit themselves back into
blessed unity. I’d like to return there some day, and rent
a boat, and row out to the middle, and just lie back and listen to
the wind sigh down from the mountain.
We saw Maligne Canyon. There’s a place to seek out mystery!
Where does the river go in winter? They tell me that in the freeze-up
those rushing waters hold back from carving out the rock, and all
the world turns still, and one can walk between the canyon walls,
through a wonderland of glistening ice and frost-rimmed beauty. As
if the heart of nature had gasped and stopped still and held its
breath for just a moment to gaze on the beloved.
We saw Athabaska Falls. There is an overwhelming force! Thunderous!
Deafening! Sweeping all before it! I just stood there, amazed, awestruck.
For a moment I experienced a sudden impulse to fling something into
the pounding waters. Perhaps my watch? Perhaps some acknowledgement
on my part of that mighty power sustained so many years that the
great rocks were worn smooth with it? Or perhaps a demand on my part
that the river make some acknowledgement of me?
After a little while it came to me that I had seen this thundering
crashing spray before, that I was sensing an echo of other waters.
I laughed when I recognized it! I had met them in a poem, years ago!
Now, if you go down to the sea in ships, and occupy your business
on the great waters, one of the realities of life is that you spend
a lot of your time bored to tears, pacing back and forth, marking
time and just waiting for something to happen. If it is freezing
cold at the time, this may not be an enjoyable experience. Some of
us meet this challenge by memorizing songs, poetry, and very bad
jokes. Once, long ago, I learned by heart a poem by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, called ‘Xanadu’. There’s a river in
it. It begins: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a stately pleasure
dome decree / where Alph, the sacred river, ran / through caverns
measureless to man / down to a sunless sea.....” And at one
point in the poem, Coleridge describes how this river bursts out
of a chasm in the ground, so powerful that it seems to be tossing
up boulders into the air. As I recall it, Coleridge says:
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething
as if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing
A mighty fountain momently was forced
amid whose swift, half-intermittent burst
huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail
and mid these dancing rocks,
at once and ever, it presently flung up the sacred river.
It seemed to me, then, that I was looking at that river I had never
seen, a river so powerful that it flung great fragments of rock into
the air as if they were grains of wheat. It seemed to me that at
last I understood the thunderous immensity of what Coleridge had
been trying to describe. And I laughed.
And I’m not precisely sure what that has to do with rivers,
or spirituality, or Athabaska Falls. What I do know is that how I
experience all of those things is mightily affected by all I have
ever seen and been and known. None of us can step in the same river
twice. No two of us can truly understand the same river the same
way even once. We cannot ever fully see through each other’s
eyes, because we cannot ever fully know the links of understanding
that accompany each person’s chain of experiences.
Spirituality may be something that grows within us, or something
we seek, or something that sweeps us away. As we seek to understand
this breath of life, this spirituality, through our reading of what
is written in earth and air and water, each of us will come to different
understandings in different ways. If I am joyful, can I read sorrow
in rain? If I am sorrowful, can I still read joy and hope and new
beginnings in a bright spring morning?
I wonder. I wonder what might be the message in the Northern Lights.
I wonder what I might carry to Maligne Canyon this winter, to hear
it echoed back from the frozen walls. I wonder what the great humming
Prairie is whispering to us all.
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