There’s an old saying that wherever you go, there you are. But I find that’s not entirely true. Out of my ordinary setting, I discover a different version of myself. Sure, I’m still me, but that hidden self, that forgotten self, that undiscovered self that I only uncover when I’m somewhere I don’t usually go, has gifts to give that I’ll never know if I don’t, now and then, get away.
In the rhythm of the church year, from September to September; September to June are the program months, the months when we do the work of the church year. We begin the Sunday after Labor Day with our service of Ingathering. And we end, in June, with celebrations of the year just past: a flower communion, volunteer recognition; and our final business of the year: the congregational meeting and elections and approving the budget for the coming year.
And then in July we take a rest. A well-deserved and necessary rest.
As the poet Wendell Berry says in a reading from our hymnal:
“The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task and are its health.
Rest and rejoicing belong to the task and are its grace.
Let tomorrow come tomorrow.
Not by your will is the house carried through the night.”
The “task” as Wendell Berry sees it, is both work and rest. “The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task and are its health. Rest and rejoicing belong to the task and are its grace.”
The work of the church year from September to June is only the first part of the task. We complete the task, and give it grace, by resting in July and August, letting the church carry itself, or be carried by something else, through the summer, as the house carries itself, without our worry or will, through the night.
Taking time off isn’t abandoning the task, it’s completing it. The Sabbath completes the week. July and August complete the year. Without the rest, the work remains open, hanging, unresolved. So we rest to finish what we have begun, to make a good ending, to complete the task, before we begin another.
Last week, I spoke of the spiritual health of doing nothing. Or at least trying to do nothing. Or trying to not try at all, but merely to be. That’s one way of taking a rest from work.
Other folks perform a more active exercise of leaving work behind us for a time. July is for many of us, the month of vacation. And though our desire to go on vacation seems only to prove Blaise Pascal’s observation that the tragedy of humanity is our inability to sit quietly in a small room alone, I see that “getting away from it all” also has its spiritual benefits. That is, if you can’t sit quietly in a small room alone, then it’s better to get out of the room completely than it is to sit there giving yourself electric shocks out of boredom.
So get out of here, if you need to. Go away. Leave it behind. Let it be.
I took a week and a half vacation at the beginning of July. I flew to Guadalajara with Jim to visit his mother who lives outside of Guadalajara in a village on Lake Chapala called Ajijic. From Guadalajara we flew to Mexico City where we met up with some friends from Los Angeles and had a wonderful time at the museums, and the Ballet Folklorico, and enjoying the wonderful food of Mexico. The weekend before we went to Mexico we took another quick trip, just two days up and back to San Francisco, to celebrate our ninth wedding anniversary and to catch an opera by Richard Strauss we wanted to see, Die Frau Ohne Schatten.
Vacation is taking the opportunity, however long it is, however often it occurs, and regardless of whether you actually go anywhere, of interrupting the routine of your life. To finish a work mode of your life (whatever that is for you) by appending a rest mode, and thus completing one task and readying yourself for another. What I mean by vacation are those occasions in life, when we stop the regularity of our lives, and for some time we find ourselves in a physical or psychic place we don’t usually go, doing something we don’t usually do, surrounded by people we don’t usually see.
Many years ago, I had a temporary job working as a courier for the television studios.
Twice a year, for about six weeks at a time, I was paid to hand deliver videotapes around the country. This was in the early-90s before the internet, and before digital recordings. So television production companies would make videotapes of pilot episodes of television shows that they were thinking about picking up for production, and they would show these pilot episodes in small television markets around the country to test the audience reaction.
The videotapes were extremely valuable and it was also crucial that the tapes got delivered exactly where they were supposed to go at the right time. The courier company explained to me that airline companies sometimes lose packages, but they never lose people, so the television companies hired people, people like me, to personally take the videotape where it was supposed to go and then to bring it back.
What that meant was that twice a year, I would get hired to make a series of one-day trips, flying out and back to little cities all over the United States. I would do one or two trips a week for four or five weeks, and then be done. I did this for two or three years.
I would go to the airport, pick up a package from the courier company, fly to some city, hand the package to somebody from the local television station, and then usually have several hours to wait around. And then in the evening there would often be another package for me to pick up and I’d fly home.
I got paid, minimum wage. But the airline tickets were in my name, so I got a ton of frequent flyer miles. Some of the couriers just brought a book to read and spent the day sitting at the airport. But the best part, for me, was that I got to spend the afternoon visiting all of these little cities all around the United States away from my regular job and life.
I went to Tulsa, Oklahoma and I walked around Oral Roberts University. I went to Kansas City and had a beer at a gay bar one afternoon with a bunch of old farmers in overalls. I would visit the local art museum. Or just walk around the downtown. I went to Fayetteville Arkansas and Lafayette Indiana, Boise Idaho, Albuquerque, Rochester New York. If there wasn’t enough time to get all the way into town, sometimes I’d just walk out from the airport down the side of the road for a half an hour looking at the billboards and the countryside and then turn back.
And like any kind of vacation, it was wonderful simply to goof off for a day. But there was also this delightful strangeness of waking up in the morning in Los Angeles, and then in the afternoon find myself walking down a street in South Carolina, or Wisconsin, or Oklahoma.
There was a thrill to be “me” in a place where I usually wasn’t. Removed of all of the normal context of what it meant to be me: me defined by the places that I work and live, and me defined by the people that I know, and me defined by the work that I know how to do, and the things I like to do for fun, it became interesting to see what it meant to be “me” stripped bare. Me without my talents, or my history, or my relationships, or my responsibilities. Anonymous, with no agenda except to hang around, nothing to do, in a place I hadn’t chosen to be and often never cared to see, just to be me.
Getting “out of here” was how I was able to meet that person, that version of me, I never met at home.
The part of “vacation” that presents such a wonderful spiritual opportunity is this possibility of becoming aware of the aspects of ourselves that our regular life keeps hidden or ignored.
Each of us is much more complex, more multi-faceted, more internally diverse, and interesting, than we usually get to be. Each of us has to play a role in life, with our friends and family and on the job. And we play it so well we start to forget that it’s a role. If we’re fulfilled in life, our regular self probably is an authentic version of us, but that everyday person is probably also a narrow slice of the much more complex person we are and could be. The everyday self is a narrow self that gets to expand when the walls that define our routine life are removed for a time.
Our sense of self gets narrowed down to just those things that we need to do in order to be successful in the very small part of the world that we normally inhabit. And then on vacation, suddenly a different person is invited to come into being. Suddenly we’re a person who needs to figure out a subway map. Suddenly we’re a person who needs to order lunch at a restaurant in a country where we don’t speak the language. Suddenly we’re a person who needs to figure out how to start your day without that particular cup of coffee from the particular place you’re used to getting it, and how much to tip, and when to be wary and when to be trustful, and when the party actually gets started in this culture.
Who is this person walking the cobblestone street of a little Mexican village? Who is this person walking through downtown Fayetteville? Who is this person who doesn’t know how the light switch works in a foreign hotel, or the plumbing? Well it’s me, of course, but not a me I know very well. That’s interesting, to me.
If who we are, is, in part, defined by where we are then who we could be is a revelation available to us when we get out of here.
And yet, of course, as the phrase goes, “whereever you go, there you are.”
We’re always at the focus point of our attention. Whether at home, or in Kathmandu, or in Fayetteville, Arkansas, it’s me I find standing at the intersection of the cardinal points of north and south and right and left. And life always happens centered on me.
And this inescapable self-centeredness, colors what we think about the world. The world around us is always seen through “me-colored” glasses. My view of the world is filtered through the me who interprets what I see in the context of the way I live, and where I live, and the people I know, and what I think and do. As travellers, we’re always spectators. We look at foreign places and cultures the way we look at paintings in a museum. We notice details. We notice the strange. We’re pleased. But not participants. We’re distant.
And so, there are those thinkers who warn us against travel, and advise us to just stay home.
There was an article in the New Yorker, just last month titled, “The Case Against Travel” by Agnes Collard (June 2023). Her subtitle was, “It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us we’re at our best.”
Among the folks she references as warning against travel she mentions Emerson. As a Unitarian, that got my attention. The writer’s summary of Emerson’s objection to travel is his annoyance with the kind of traveler who goes to a strange place but stubbornly refuses to let the experience change them. Emerson doesn’t criticize the person who travels because they have work to do, or who goes abroad deliberately to study, or perhaps to see a painting that can only be seen in a particular museum.
What Emerson objects to, and the point of Agnes Collard’s article, is how many travelers say they go traveling in order to be transformed, but instead collect experiences abroad, and souvenirs of those experiences, that they have no interest of ever repeating or incorporating into their life. They collect experiences like postcards, or collect actual postcards as proof they have been somewhere, but not to let the experience change them in any way. Emerson criticizes those travelers who end up changing the place they visit, the way some popular destinations transform into tourist traps, rather than letting the travel transform the travelers.
Rather than, “travel is so broadening” as Sinclair Lewis had his bourgeois character Babbitt say, G.K. Chesterton says, “travel narrows the mind.” It confirms who we are, rather than expanding our possibility of self. Travel is “A fool’s paradise” says Emerson, because we think it will do one thing, but does the opposite.
I rode an elephant once, in India. The experience didn’t change me. It’s just one more thing, I did. I’ve been to Estonia on a cruise, once. I’ve also been to Fayetteville, Arkansas. I’m still just me. Wherever you go, there you are.
The cosmic joke of the phrase “wherever you go, there you are” is “Christ! There’s that guy again!” “I came halfway around the world to get away from him, and there he is, standing in my shoes.
We go on vacation to get away, but we take it with us: overstuffed checked bags full of the clothes we wear at home, a charged-up cell phone and a laptop to check email from the job. When I got to Mexico City, Jim and I met up with four friends from Los Angeles we had arranged to take the trip with. And one morning we met up with another friend who had recently moved to Mexico City from Los Angeles. So what was I getting away from?
But I see in that phrase, “Wherever you go, there you are,” not just the cynical sense that it’s impossible to truly get away, but in the positive sense, that however much you do choose to get away, that there will still be some essential you, that always travels with you. That’s not frustrating to me, it’s interesting. Because that’s the me I want to get to know. Even if, as Agnes Collard says, travel brings out the worst version of ourselves, I still want to know who that is.
I think Emerson is wrong. The me that has only ridden an elephant that one time in India, is me. Clearly not the essential me, because I’ve never taken up elephant riding. But that experience taught me something about who I really am.
I’m a person who’s been to Estonia, and Arkansas. And those experiences did change me, if in no other way than in that I now have an example to include in a sermon decades after making the trips. I’m a person who will never again go parasailing, because I went parasailing, one time, on a beach in the Caribbean and learned that I’m a person who hates parasailing.
It’s not a tragedy that we take ourselves with us when we travel. Because we’ve brought ourselves with us, we have the opportunity to experience ourselves in a different setting and walk around a little and see how that feels and what we like, and what we’ll never want to do again. And then we bring ourselves home again, a little confirmed by the experience and happy to be back in our routine, and a little transformed because at least, now we’re a person who forever after has been there, done that.
In our Call to Worship, Clinton Lee Scott, described the ultimate traveler: the sun.
He says, the sun comes to us, “unsullied from its tireless journey.” He’s talking about the possibility of each new morning, beginning clean and bright, regardless of what happened the day before. But what I like about travel is that it does, “sully” us a little. We accumulate the experiences of travel. We bring them home with us. The mountain ranges and the seven seas. The gleaming towers and the hovels of the poor. The good we witness, and the ugly, in ourselves and others. We bring back the vastness of human possibility, and the expansive sense of ourselves we learn from travel. That empathy and insight makes us better people.
And Scott tells us the sun comes to us as a messenger.
The sun’s daily message is a reminder of the vastness of the planet and humanity. Even on those days when we wake up in our own bed, in the midst of our routine, our last vacation long past, and the next vacation, far distant, the sun brings the message of all those elsewheres all around the earth. It tells us the news: the mountains, the seas, the fields, the homes, the shops, the factories. It connects us to the towers, and the poor, to the good and evil, honesty and thievery of humanity.
The sun’s message, is the lesson of vacation:
Life is more than your city, your home, your routine. Out of here, we learn that we are not the center, the focus, the point, of existence. We are one among many places of beauty, and beings of inherent worth and dignity. We are more than the life we’ve have, and we could choose to change if we’re unsatisfied. The earth is more than what you see here, what you know of your day. There are billions of ways to be human. Here is one. There is another.