Lessons from a Sabbatical

Sermon

I’m happy to say, I came back with a lot of that. My new digital camera performed even better than I hoped, especially in museums where flash or tripod were not allowed. I’ve got photos galore. I’ve go maps. I’ve got figurines. I’ve got reconstructions, books, a great volume of notes I took from the wonderful INSTAP library I would go to on break from working on pottery. All that plus all the data I mentioned last week about developments in Minoan pottery and how to conduct statistical surveys of pottery, how to wash, sort, join, restore and interpret pottery….I feel like I should throw my robe open like the capacious coat of some shifty guy on the street and offer you your pick of these one-of-a-kind items. It was wonderful to see my friends again and to renew those precious connections that have lasted many years now. And the tan – well it was coming along prior to the whole dog bite, hospital turn of events.

It was exciting and deeply moving to be back in Greece. That place affects me like nowhere else on earth. The landscapes are so majestic and stirring, and I feel, as Kazantzakis writes, that the land is humanized somehow, that it listens and interacts with humanity. I played the land country music out my car windows and gazed at the same landscape every day with undiminished wonder and admiration. I lit candles in the tiny village chapel and besought my help from the hills. It is a topography charged with presence – and the most spiritually inspiring place I know.

And it truly was fascinating and fulfilling to be working at the epicenter of Aegean archaeology, with experts who knew the answers to my questions, or knew exactly where to refer me for more information. If I didn’t recognize a piece of pottery I was working with, there were not only people at hand to describe it to me, there were people to show me illustrations of how it was in numerous books illustrating every kind of Minoan pot under the sun, and professional artists to draw the piece for me and show me where and how it would have fit. What a smorgasbord of information and insight. Of course there were days that were just really hot and fairly boring, when our work was not fitting stuff together or sorting it for interpretation, but just taking hundreds of shards out of bags and displaying them so we could work on them while doing our best to make sure we didn’t lose the bag and label that came with it – because any piece of pottery , no matter how distinctive or beautiful, is useless without it’s label, its context that tells where and when it came from. There were a surprising number of pottery bits in the gravel of the outdoor courtyard near where I worked that were just such orphans – a label had blown away, or a shard had fallen from a table – and that was it, this piece of pottery so many thousands of years old was then of no more value than the rocks around it. So we’d lay out shards and bags and shards and bags and shards and bags. Sometimes laying out the excavated contents of a room could take days – shards and bags for days – so it wasn’t always fun and fascinating.

But a lot of it was for me, and I did indeed get out of my sabbatical what I hoped for – a better sense of the religion and culture of the Minoans generally and especially a better sense of what we understand about the last days of Minoan culture when it was being subsumed and oppressed by the later Mycenaean culture of Trojan war fame. In the end, so much about this people is still mysterious that part of what I learned was more about what we don’t know than what we do, and what we are arguing and debating rather than what we’re sure of. But still – now I can debate too, and now I have my own ideas about whether there was one great goddess with many different incarnations or many separate goddesses, and I know about some of the Minoan gods as well, about whom I knew nothing going in.

I chose this plan for my sabbatical because I missed the scholarship and study that were part of my preparation for ministry, and that used to be a greater part of ministry itself a hundred years ago and more. Back then pastoral care and administration were not so emphasized, rather academics were; ministers were supposed to be able to read the New Testament in the original Greek and the Hebrew Bible in the original Hebrew. Thus were they prepared to comment on those texts every Sunday in their sermon. Today’s model is better for parishioners and the health of the church, even for the pastor who must be better-rounded professionally and so is challenged to be a better-rounded person. But much as I believe in and appreciate the contemporary model, I miss some aspects of the older one. There are plenty of days I would like nothing better than to shut myself up in my study all day and read and think, and let everything else go, and let my wife do all the cooking and cleaning. Yeah, that was quite a set-up once upon a time. Nowadays I have to struggle just to get minimal reading done in time for a sermon. So the chance to do all this study was heady stuff, pun intended. Imagine then, my surprise, when I realized that the most meaningful understandings I was getting out of the sabbatical had little or nothing to do with my studies and work at the Center.

The team excavating at Mochlos this year was unusually young – mostly college students, the youngest was 19. They were beautiful kids, firm of body, clear of skin, not a wrinkle in sight and full of potential. They worked like dogs, digging on the island in the unremitting sun from 6:30 in the morning to 2:30 in the afternoon, then after lunch working at sorting fine bits from dirt they’d dug until 5:30 or so. I don’t know if I can capture the light and heat of Crete in words. When I stepped out from my room in the morning, the sunlight would blaze before me and the heat would hit me like a wall I had just walked into. These were the conditions in which the kids worked every day, all summer. And still, with such hard labor every day, and then staying up predictably late every night, they stayed beautiful, unwrinkled and full of potential.

Really it was almost annoying at times. Being around them made me feel very old, made me notice new wrinkles and new places in my body that were markedly less firm than in days of yore. I am about to turn 40 – no longer can I depend on more than half my life still being before me. That’s been on my mind a lot the last year or so. Relative to the kids, I was almost twice their age. But what I noticed after a few days is that I felt like I also had at least twice their wisdom, twice their experience, twice their ability to understand nuanced situations, and concepts like why compromise was important, and why our conduct in this small village mattered though everyone else we knew was half a world away. I don’t remember feeling callow when I was 20, but I undoubtedly was, and these kids were now, and I wasn’t any more. I understood a lot of stuff they didn’t, I noticed dynamics in the group and paid attention to how to respond to them to make things easier or more productive. I saw more than one side of a story in the village intrigues and conflict that are perennial in small Greek communities – heck in communities period – and that helped me at least not make situations worse, even if I couldn’t make them better. Some of them were making life decisions they were way too young for, and then struggling under the burdens they were not emotionally ready to carry. They were unable to order their food in Greek, even food they ordered every day, all summer, and gave a lot more time to drinking and playing darts, pastimes which never lost their allure for a single night all summer, than to learning local ways, and learning to speak with the people they saw and depended on every day. For many of them, this summer in a foreign country and culture was, other than the hard work, not that different than spring break in Fort Lauderdale.

How crotchety and old I sound saying that! But it seemed true to me, and still does upon reflection. But what I felt in relation to them wasn’t crotchety – it was just wise. I was a lot more wrinkled, and a lot less firm, but all those wrinkles and unfirm form didn’t just amount to years and lack of fitness, they also amounted to experience and thought and change and deepening. I felt like a guru, or a camp counselor, and a lot of them treated me like one, coming for advice on love, change, religion, interactions, health and decisions. The 20 years I had on them weren’t just mileage, they were gifts of clarity and sensitivity and vision that I never really saw, let alone appreciated, like I did this past summer. I may be older – well, obviously I am older, but I’m also better, and I honestly think I didn’t really know this before. It’s a humble revelation; nonetheless, it was indeed a revelation to me.

This is the kind of thing I hesitate to share in a sermon because I don’t think a preacher’s pulpit should be about the preacher any more than it absolutely has to be – and it shouldn’t be about the preacher personally, it should be about whatever in the preacher is universal – what the preacher knows is shared by others. Having had a sabbatical and some personal growth from it is fruitful and meaningful to me, but I’m not sure how relevant it is to the life of this community. I’m sharing this thing about the value of being 40 and not 21 because not only does our society devalue older folks in favor of younger ones, but also I know that growing older is hard for many of us, at many different ages and stages of life. And I believe that this ‘older and better thing’ is true for everyone, if we are living according to our Unitarian Universalist principles and purposes, if we are paying attention to how we live and how we grow and how to be true to what we believe.

Someone in her 90’s, who had led a life of great independence and strength, once said to me that being old was the hardest thing she’d ever done. And I believe her – growing older, facing our mortality, perceiving the breathtaking moment that is a lifetime and the injustice of souls that fade from this world and the ties that bind – it can be terrifying, especially when we may be unsure if anything other than annihilation waits on the other side of death. Those issues of growing older and ever more mortal perhaps sharpen as more time passes – for myself this was the first experience in a while of appreciating rather than regretting my own passing years and while it doesn’t take all the other uncertainty and dread away, it is something even just to feel this for a change; satisfaction and pleasure at who I am and what I have learned after all these years, because of all these years. Here’s something we could do better within our faith and within this church: to honor that wisdom we gain with time, the vision that comes from memory and experience, the authenticity and capacity that can come with a life that honors reflection and authenticity.

I also learned how intrinsic it has become to me to be a minister. I couldn’t help but pay attention to, and then worry about, group dynamics. It was surprisingly hard not to be the group leader and reorganize things or mediate a conflict or rebalance the treatment of some people. What relief to come back here and have issues and conflict and challenges to dive into right away – and to have folks bring them to me for help –thank you!

This actually leads me to my larger point. If I could lead multiple lives, one would surely be as a dolphin trainer, and another would be as an archaeologist, or so I had always thought. Now I have learned that that 6:30 to 5:30 schedule is not for me, and the community of a single excavation is too small. I didn’t need my vocation reconfirmed; I’ve never had any doubts since I found it – but I got it reconfirmed anyway. I love this work. I love this community. When I was in the hospital worried about my leg and whether it would still be with me when I returned to you, my sister called – hers was the most helpful call of all. She reminded me of who I am, and who I am with you, and the life I have here, and promised I would get it back, and that’s what was most sustaining; being reminded that I wasn’t all about an ever-worsening wound and a room shared with 3 women and their dramatic, hypochondriacal families, and running out of usable veins for the IV, that I was more about all this here and now with you. It made me feel better, it made me remember who I am, and it gave me a sense of what was waiting when I came through the other side of that unsought adventure.

So the sabbatical wasn’t entirely the rest and renewal and study I anticipated – some of it was and some of it really wasn’t. It was also about raising my pain threshold – a wholly unanticipated benefit which has already impressed some doctors stateside. And it was about, most of all, a new appreciation for this phase of my life, and a renewed devotion for this extraordinary fortune I have to be a Unitarian Universalist minister, to be your minister in this exciting, authentic, vital community. To be your minister in this disturbing time when our mission and our value are so clear and compelling amidst a country going you-know-where in a handbasket. I am so glad and grateful to be home. with good work and exciting choices ahead of us. I am blessed to have this life and blessed to share this church with all of you. Thank you for making all this possible. Amen.