The Road Less Travelled as a Spiritual Path

Rondebosch United Church (Congregational & Presbyterian) - Sermon

10 July 2022

Don Shay

The Road Less Travelled as a Spiritual Path

An invitation to consider spiritual direction, counselling, therapy, somatic practices or coaching for your wholeness and spiritual development.

[Don will play honeyguide bird call]

Be still and know that I am God.

You are deeply loved.

Be still and know that I am God.

You are enough. Now. As you are.

Be still and know that I am God.

You are very precious to Me.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of spending a week in a tent in the Okavango Delta in Botswana in the unfenced Kwapa Camp where wildlife guides and trackers are trained. Various creatures wandered through our camp each night – porcupines, honey badgers, kudu, bush babies, genets, leopards, lions. I was reminded of the Spirit leading Jesus into the wild for 40 days to be tested. Only my tests were around how do I face my fears and anxieties and hold that together with the excitement of beauty and wildness and the wholeness of nature?

I was attending a workshop on Tracking and Depth Leadership, where I literally learned the language of tracking – observing carefully, listening to the warning cries and sounds of the wild, following the foot prints and clues left by animals on the ground and then using our intuition when the clues ran out. And the depth leadership lectures and discussions each day helped us do inner work with Jungian concepts of engaging with our shadows, identifying and crossing the thresholds of our growth edges while working with our anxiety and fear around crossing those edges, and how to create safe containers to do inner work and in

working with people we coach or in our organizations.

One of the wonderful gifts during the trip was being with people who knew birds from their calls – and then on one outing saying ‘there is a honeyguide in the trees near us.’ We found the honeyguide – or should I say it found us. I didn’t know the way of the honeyguides, which guide the honey badgers to the beehives to open them up for both to feast. As we would drive short distances on our game drive and then stop … the honeyguide was clearly following us and beckoning us to follow it – to the beehive and the honey. At one point we

had to make a decision – carry on down the road we were on or go into the bush to follow the honeyguide. This was one of many profound spiritual lessons for me – as Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says, nature is the first Bible – and God is like the honeyguide - always inviting us to an abundant and whole life if we learn to discern God’s language and calling and follow in trust.

[Don will play honeyguide call]

During my time in the Okavango, watching animals hunt, I was also reminded of two powerful truths. The world is a beautiful, amazing place. And the world is a violent and dangerous place. Part of my work, our work, in life – is integrating various tensions and paradoxes like these. Here are some other paradoxes:

Our thoughts like ‘I feel anxious lots of the time’ versus Jesus’ words: “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to your span of life?” Matthew 6:25-27.

And another paradox: Our thoughts that ‘I am not enough’ or ‘I am unlovable’ compared to Jesus’ words: “I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they

ever dreamed of. I am the Good Shepherd.” John 10:10 And in 1 John 3:1 we are told “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are!”

[Don will play honeyguide call]

I want to reflect with you on a challenge within my Christian experience that used to puzzle me, and share some insights from depth psychology (which is the work of Carl Jung and others), the Enneagram (which is an ancient spiritual development framework) and recent trauma research.

Firstly, anxiety, fear and depression are dominant experiences for many people – some of us and some people we care deeply about. This seems counterintuitive for people with faith in Christ, who loves us deeply, forgives us and tells us not to be anxious. And secondly, at some stage in my late 20s I noticed that I seemed to be repeating the same patterns of thinking and behaving that I kept confessing as sins and asking for forgiveness for and help to deal with. Why couldn’t I live in some kind of overcoming grace and the power of the Spirit and leave these patterns behind? I am an Adult Child of an Alcoholic parent and I wondered if that played a role in these recurring patterns. I knew some other forces must be at play.

Once I read M. Scott Peck’s book ‘The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Psychology,’ I realized that therapy and psychological tools were important processes for me to explore. I have been fortunate to have trusted counsellors and therapists and friends to talk with. Carl Jung’s work on the unconscious and how we unknowingly hide lots of dangerous and painful things in our early lives in order to protect ourselves and ensure we receive the love of our caregivers … helped me start to learn about doing shadow work … and approaching the anxiety around my edges of developmental growth in more creative ways. Some people working with the Enneagram see our personality development and the 9 Enneagram Types as having links to deficits in the holding and caring containers of our early childhood. And thirdly, Dr Gabor Mate’s work on addictions shows clear links to childhood trauma and the addictions being a coping strategy to avoid pain and soothe oneself – an originally wise and safe strategy that is no longer useful or helpful as an adult. Mate and others’ work also challenges medical models that see addictions as primarily genetic or a moral weakness problem.

So how do we get to a point in our lives where we can say wholeheartedly:

I am enough.

I am complete.

I am deeply loved.

I have significant others who listen non-judgmentally and who really

understand me.

Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Sometimes prayer, going to church, doing Bible study and being part of a study group isn’t enough for finding deep healing and wholeness – other forms of support are needed. My encouragement to you is to consider following ‘the road less travelled’ by pursuing Spiritual Direction or Therapy or Coaching or long walks with good friend who really listen and care. Some of you carry deep trauma that you may or may not be aware of. I think almost everyone who grew up in apartheid South Africa has experienced certain forms of personal or structural violence or trauma that is holding back the fuller development of the whole society. There are certain kinds of somatic or body therapies – beyond talking or talk therapy – that are required to heal certain kinds of trauma, including yoga, meditation, breathing practices, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy or EMDR, trauma release exercises or TRE, etc. Part of my wife Suellen’s lung cancer healing journey included seeing a somatic Jungian therapist and doing yoga most days.

[Don will play honeyguide call]

Jesus is the honeyguide calling us through and beyond paradox towards healing and wholeness and real life – as what he clearly wants for us. May we be observant and sensitive to the signs and calling and opportunities Jesus presents to us – trusting and faithful that he will lead us to this real and deep life. I’d like to repeat the meditation Richard Rohr has shared and which I have adapted, which I will read slowly, with spaces to be quiet and meditate.

Be still and know that I am God.

You are deeply loved.

Be still and know that I am God.

You are enough. Now. As you are.

Be still and know that I am God.

You are very precious to Me.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.

I’d like to end with a song called Mystery that I find particularly moving - about God as the Great Mysterious Life Force in all of nature – from the Missa Gaia – or Earth Mass album by the Paul Winter Consortium.

Mystery

Lyrics written by Jeremy Geffen, music by Paul Winter, sung by Susan Osborn, from Missa Gaia – Earth Mass album released by the Paul Winter Consort in 1982.

[Please use your imagination and replace ‘man’ with person or people; original wording is used below.]

And it lives in the seed of a tree as it grows.

You can hear it if you listen to the wind as it blows

It’s there in the river as it flows into the sea.

It’s the sound, in the soul of a man becoming free.

And it lives in the laughter of children at play,

And in the blazing sun, that gives light to the day.

It moves the planets and the stars in the sky.

It’s been the mover of mountains, since the beginning of time.

CHORUS

Oh Mystery, you are alive, I feel you all around.

You are the fire in my heart.

You are the holy sound.

You are all of life. It is to you I sing.

Oh, grant that I may feel you, always in everything.

And it lives in the waves as they crash upon the beach.

I’ve seen it in the gods that man has tried to reach.

I feel it in the love that I know we need so much.

And I know it in your smile my love, when our hearts do touch.

And when I listen deep inside, I feel best of all,

Like a moon that’s glowing white, and I listen to your call.

And I know you will guide me, I feel like the tide,

Rushing to the ocean of my heart that’s open wide.

Oh Mystery, you are alive, I feel you all around.

You are the fire in my heart.

You are the holy sound.

You are all of life. It is to you I sing.

Oh, grant that I may feel you, always in everything.

Oh Mystery …

[Don will play honeyguide call]