I grew up in a small town that had an airport. It was a hub for the larger Houston airport. I remember playing outside in the yard and every time I’d see a plane take off into the wild, blue yonder, I’d want to be on it. Kind of strange for a young child, don’t you think? I grew up, and went to college. In those days, especially in the south, most young women went to university to get their M. R. S. degree. When my boyfriend graduated from Texas A&M, I became a bride and he became a first lieutenant in the United States Army. Less than a year later, I was the warrior’s wife waiting for my husband to come back from Viet Nam.
After he healed from the physical wounds of war at Brook Army medical center in San Antonio, we moved to Houston. It just so happened that our new home was on a flight path into Houston Hobby. Now, I was a happily married woman, but when I saw those big jets fly off, I wanted to be on them.
After we had our son, we moved to the northwest part of Houston, and our home was on a flight path into Intercontinental Airport. Still happily married and young mother, every time I saw one of those huge jets flying off for only God knew where, I wanted to be on it.
The Puritans believed that humans were not good enough to want God on their own. They believed that our yearning for God came from God. It was God, who called us to relationship.
Read any mystics’ reflections on the contemplative life, Hildegard of Bingen is a good example, and you will always find their reflections on how we desire God and God’s love. I read a treatise on the monastic life “The Search for Meaning and the Desire for God” The writer, a theologian from the Australian Catholic University wrote:
GOD is a communion of love; and we are called to enter into this communion, to seek God with a sincere heart, and "partake of the divine nature", to become one with God. It is God's own Spirit that accomplishes this union...
(Drasko Dizdar, theologian at Australian Catholic University)
One of my professors at the Lutheran School of Theology said to me that we are born with a God-shaped hole in our soul, and it has to be filled. Of course, he said, God wants us to fill it with God’s love, but we have free will and can fill it with whatever we want.
When I was twelve I was real concerned with the disparities of life I saw in my own small, White hometown. It upset me that the Black children rode a bus right past our school to go to a Black school 15 miles away in Beaumont. I was also concerned about the hungry people in China and India that my mother talked about when we didn’t eat all our supper. I read the newspaper and the news wasn’t always good news. I said to my Sunday school teacher that I couldn’t wait to die, because when I got to heaven I’d tell God exactly what he did wrong down here.
When I was fifteen I felt called to be a missionary. Not a minister, because they were all men, but I had met women missionaries, and I wanted to go overseas and spread the Word!
My life was the church. Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night prayer meeting, Friday night visitation, Saturday teen social. During my junior year of high school I made a trip up to Springfield, Missouri, to visit Bible Baptist College. When I graduated, I wanted to go there for college and then become a missionary. But during the spring of my senior year, our pastor preached a sermon on the “Objectivity of the Bible.” He said it was true, all of it, not subjective, and even with contradictions it was the inspired word of God. Those who did not believe that and believe in Jesus were going to hell.
After church, in the foyer, I went up to him and asked him about the people from China, and India, and Africa who had never heard of Jesus, were they going to hell, too, even if they’d never heard of Jesus? And he said, “Yes, Lillie, they are, and you will too if you don’t believe that.” And I said, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to go to hell.” I turned around and walked out and never went back; never looked back.
It was difficult, because my life was the church. And I was mad at God. How could he? I didn’t go to church again until I saw the minister from Beaumont Spindletop Unitarian Church perform a wedding ceremony in a garden and I thought I’ve got to check this out. And I did, and so from my early twenties, I’ve been a Unitarian. I was still very mad at God; but I was comfortable at this church where most of the people were older and were mostly humanists or agnostics.
After I got married, I didn’t go to church for a long time. Then I woke up one day and I was divorced. I started back to college and I started back to church. I chose an Episcopal church and I learned to love God again. It happened this way. One day in adult Sunday school a woman said, “My God she…”
My God she… and I had an epiphany at that moment. I realized when I heard those words that God was not a narrow, exclusive, judgmental God sitting “up there on a throne.” Each of us had our own vision of God and it was as individual as we were individuals. All we wanted was a God that brought love into our lives. And that was what brought me back to God.
I like the people there and I liked the people at the Unitarian church, so I went to both churches for several years. I also graduated from college and entered the corporate world. I worked for some very big computer companies and I finally got to fly on those jets to places I’d never been, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, even Washington, DC.
Successful in my career, I received many awards for my contributions, but when I drove to the airport for business trips, I looked at those jets taking off and I wanted to be on those planes going to places where I was not.
If we have a desire for God and God’s love, if we have a God-shaped hole in our souls and we seek to be filled by God’s love, then we must, each of us, find our own way to be in relationship with God.
In our story of Luke, when Jesus said to the crowd, if you want to follow me, if you want to be my disciple, you must be prepared to pay the price. In the story at that time, he was foreshadowing the challenging road ahead for him and his followers. Jesus knew he would have to pay the ultimate sacrifice for his beliefs, and he knew his followers would be faced with adversity and hostility. He knew it would not be easy to continue on after his death.
What he was saying, is something we all know, there is a cost to any relationship.
When my brother died, I left the corporate world. I was forty. It no longer mattered to me how much money I could bring home on payday. I felt I had to “give back with my life.” I returned to university and prepared to be a teacher. When my mother died five years after my brother, I had been teaching for one year. I never went back to teaching. Two weeks after my mother died, a voice within said, “Are you going to die too and not answer your call to the ministry?”
It just so happened that a friend of mine was moving to Chicago. Chicago. That is where the Unitarian Universalist seminary is Meadville Lombard Theological School. I had never been to Chicago, but I sold or gave away everything, got on a big, ol’ jet plan, and flew to Chicago. The apartment was right off the lake on Elm street, and when I went to the patio on the roof top, I saw that it was on a flight path to O’Hare. I’d watch those jets fly in and out, wondering where I’d go if I was on one of them.
Of course, I didn’t plan on applying to Meadville Lombard right away. I thought I’d work first and then, maybe, apply later. What is the rush, I thought, God had been calling me to service since I was fifteen. If it’s a real call, it will happen someday. I was not getting any younger, but this thought never occurred to me. Finally I got on the subway and went south to Hyde Park and visited the campus. I asked for an application in November and it sat on a dresser at the apartment for months.
One morning, on a very, very cold morning in February, I was waking up, in that sleep-awake stage where you could be dreaming, or just thinking, but you’re not quite awake. I found myself in a chapel, it was like our chapel over there, except standalone, there are several like it around the campus of Meadville Lombard. In the chancel and all around the altar were red and gold flower arrangements. At the altar stood Tina and Robin, friends of mine, and a couple from Austin, Texas. Everyone was quiet and looking around. There wasn’t a minister and it was their wedding. I happened to be sitting on the front row and was as concerned as everyone else that the minister was missing. Tina turned around, walked over to the rail right, just like that rail over there, and stood right in front of me. She got in my face and she said, “When are you going to do it?”
When are you going to do it?
Jesus said there is a cost to any relationship. And Jesus knew about relationships. That is what his message and his ministry were all about. He was a relationship kind of guy.
He taught that a relationship with God was more important than the Law.
He taught that people were more important than the Law.
He taught the crowds that gathered around him by the sea that there was always enough food to share with others.
He taught the Roman centurion that love can save a beloved friend’s life.
He taught the men gathered at the well that to judge another is to judge one's self.
He taught Zaccheus, the chief tax collector, that when a person accepted responsibility for one’s actions, and made amends, people could forgive him.
He also taught that there is a cost of having a relationship? Any relationship?
Zaccheus had to make amends.
The men gathered at the well had to let go of judgment and accept the woman at the well as a worth person.
The Roman centurion learned to trust.
The crowds that gathered around him learned that by giving a little, a lot more could be realized.
The people learned that relationships were more important than the law.
And most of all, hopefully, we learn from Jesus that God isn’t behind the curtains of the ark, but accessible.
Relationships are about mutuality, giving some, taking some, trusting, risk-taking, and being present for and to the other person.
It takes energy, patience, and acceptance.
And most of all, it means letting go.
Letting go of pre-conceived ideas about anything and everything
Letting go of expectations
Letting go of anything that gets in the way of mutuality
We yearn for God. We desire God. And God calls all of us to something. If we don’t think we have a call, then we are not listening.
The cost of a relationship with God is the same as the cost of any other relationship.
We have to see our relationship as mutual—not that we are equal, but that it is a mutual relationship.
Some giving, some taking, trusting, risk taking, and being present for God and to God
It takes energy, patience, and acceptance.
And most of all, it means letting go.
Here is where we can learn from the Buddhist tradition of nonattachment.
For those of us who have studied or practiced meditation or contemplative prayer, you will recognize what I’m about to say.
Nonattachment is not only letting go of worldly possessions, and it is not only letting go of our attachments to people, money, and prestige, it is above all else, letting go of our “ego.” Our ego is that voice in our heads that keep us thinking about the past or the present. It is the voice that won’t shut up, no matter what we do. It is the voice that gets in the way of real serenity, real peace, and real relationship with God.
To practice meditation or contemplative prayer is to open the way to an empowering, mutual relationship with God.
The cost is high. It takes time, energy, desire. It takes letting go of many things.
The cost is high.
Finally, I applied to Meadville Lombard, what else could I do? And when they called to tell me I’d been accepted for that fall, I said, “But I applied for next year.”
Perhaps, all along I knew what the cost would be for accepting my call and entering into a mutually, empowering relationship with God. I left behind family, all my friends, and had very few possessions. I’ve moved several times, through several ministries, and had to make new friends each time I moved. I have been lonely, afraid, doubtful, insecure, and half the time I wonder “how I got to be here.”
But at some point, God reminds me that I am not trusting enough in our relationship. Then, I’m embarrassed, because I’m supposed to trust explicitly God’s plan for me. But, then, that’s what relationships are all about, and when there’s doubt, the trust has to be pretty strong to overcome the doubt. And loneliness, and fear, and insecurity, and you name it.
I moved to Hyde Park when I was accepted into Meadville Lombard. I rented a room, one room and a bath, in the attic of one of those huge, brick homes you see around the University of Chicago. I had a patio though. It was about two feet by two feet and it was the landing of the fire escape right outside the outside door of my room. The first day, after I was settled in, I stepped outside. It was a beautiful fall day in Chicago, the leaves were just about to turn, and the air had a promise of cooler days to come. I sat down on the landing, looked up in the sky and saw a jet flying over. I was, once again under a flight path. This time it was Midway airport.
There was one difference and it came to me, not like a sweet, knowing epiphany, but a bolt of lighting that can knock one over. I had no desire to be on that jet leaving for parts unknown, flying into the wild blue yonder, places I did not need to go.
Following Jesus, being part of a mutually empowering relationship with God is not easy. There is a cost, a significant cost. Jesus gave his all. God offers a relationship of eternal, unconditional, universal love. What are we willing to give, what are we willing to pay?
Reading
Luke 14:25-33 (Contemporary English Version)
25Large crowds were walking along with Jesus, when he turned and said:
26You cannot be my disciple, unless you love me more than you love your father and mother, your wife and children, and your brothers and sisters. You cannot come with me unless you love me more than you love your own life.
27You cannot be my disciple unless you carry your own cross and come with me.
28Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. What is the first thing you will do? Won't you sit down and figure out how much it will cost and if you have enough money to pay for it? 29Otherwise, you will start building the tower, but not be able to finish. Then everyone who sees what is happening will laugh at you. 30They will say, "You started building, but could not finish the job."
31What will a king do if he has only ten thousand soldiers to defend himself against a king who is about to attack him with twenty thousand soldiers? Before he goes out to battle, won't he first sit down and decide if he can win? 32If he thinks he won't be able to defend himself, he will send messengers and ask for peace while the other king is still a long way off. 33So then, you cannot be my disciple unless you give away everything you own.