Perhaps you have heard the joke about someone toasting their twenty-year marriage with words like "Here's to a wonderful twelve years!" So what about the other eight? Those were perhaps years of greater struggle. Maybe those were years in the wilderness.

Gretchen Thompson is an Associate Minister, like me, in one of our large Unitarian Universalist congregations. Her book, Slow Miracles, from which I read earlier, is a collection of real life stories about urban women fighting for liberation. Most of the women are poor. Most of them are fighting such things as homelessness, violence, and racial injustice. They live on the edges of society and somehow find the strength to be sources of love and agents of change. They live a wilderness existence, through which small, slow miracles emerge. After long struggles, some experience new kinds of liberation. I chose to read you the story of Laura, one of the few middle class women in the book, because of the image of grass growing through concrete. This is something I have noticed and reflected on many times. Isn't it amazing that eventually grass can grow through concrete? That such a hard, unforgiving substance can be worn and resisted and finally broken through by a tender blade of grass? This is an illustration of the power of life and love. Life force wins in the end. Health can break through oppression. Have you ever been surprised by the triumph of the small and the weak, by the breaking through of goodness and hope? Slow miracles. Liberation after years in the wilderness.

In between these stories, Gretchen tells her own painful story. A child of two alcoholics, witness to and victim of rage and abuse, she goes through years of eating disorders and addiction until finally, during a crisis, she has a small awakening. A long period in the confusing wilderness of self-hatred begins to change and heal. A turning point comes when an unknown doctor holds her hand tenderly for a long time in silence and elicits her promise that she cannot go on like this. She writes: "Some kind of holiness, some kind of untold healing passes from his hand to mine. I feel it move from him to deep inside me where my wounded soul lies curled in fetal folds. I feel it like a love cast rescue rope, as surely as I am alive. It gives me the strength to say the promise, Yes, I will not go on like this." Wellbeing comes slowly. Old concrete finally crumbles in its weakest point, cracks, allows a tiny seed to take hold, push up, to the light.

Thompson calls her own story within the book Pharaoh's Daughter, referring to the daring woman who defied her father and saved the baby Moses. Gretchen writes about "the Moses story with its riveting symbols: the burning bush, the splitting sea, the endless stretch of wilderness and its surprise of manna, the yearned for land of milk and honey." This is the story I am drawing on today as I speak of the wilderness. The wilderness, as metaphor, is something we all experience: periods of struggle, confusion and aimlessness.

The exodus story is one around which our western history and culture pivot. Exodus is the oldest book of the Bible. It is the story that reflects and influences our linear view of life, that we move from bondage to liberation, believing that there is reason to hope in the future, that freedom and progress are always possible. It is the story from which marginalized people through the centuries have drawn hope: the people of Israel, led up out of slavery, wandered in the wilderness for 40 years and finally came to the promised land.

But note! There is no direct, immediate path from slavery to freedom. Why is there this long period of wandering, rebellion, and confusion...an endless camping trip? Why would the tradition come down to us this way? There is a lesson here. To me, the significance of the wandering period is that we must expect life to be complex and confusing, not simple. Freedom is not easy. It brings great responsibilities and challenges.

I want to reflect on this experience of wilderness as a necessary part of life and the human journey. There are three stages in the journey. First, times of being imprisoned one way or another; second, times of wandering and confusion; and third, times of liberation and fulfillment. The story suggests that perhaps we cannot go directly from bondage to freedom without an adjustment period, a time when we struggle to grow and learn, to bond with others and get along in community. During the wandering years, we may learn rules to live by, stop worshiping false idols, and most of all, keep faith. Wandering in the wilderness is a challenge to our faith in ourselves, the future, our community, and life itself, in traditional language, faith in God.

To some degree, all individuals, families, communities, and even nations go through times in the wilderness: periods when growth is necessary but the direction is not clear. Positive change may be happening at some level, but we have to muck about for awhile. I think we make a mistake in assuming that there is a once-and-for-all linear sequence from bondage to liberation. This is actually rare. I do not believe that problems get solved once and for all. Problems diminish when we address them, but new problems arise. There is always a new challenge. It is more accurate to view these stages as cyclical. We cycle through periods of bondage, wilderness, and freedom. And perhaps the cycle spirals upward, and there is progress over time. I believe there sometimes is real progress if one takes a long view.

African American Christians have readily identified with the story of Moses and the exodus. Their long painful story from slavery to freedom has been marked by periods of struggle and setback. Our society is in the wilderness regarding race. How often I have heard people lament in recent years that race relations seem so much worse today than 30 years ago during the Civil Rights era. I disagree. The civil rights era was a breakthrough period, a time of euphoria and hope. The same was probably true after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The moment of liberation can seem wonderful and miraculous, like the parting of the Red Sea. But then the reality has to sink in and the real work of change begun. Real work for real long-term change is hard, slow, and long. Today, we are being forced to do the real work of undoing racism. The civil rights era was just a glorious beginning. We are still in the wilderness. The promised land has not been reached. Over the long term, the global community is going to have to overcome racial hatred. It is a long, long time in the wilderness of ignorance and fear, but finally, eventually, we will all be the same color, figuratively, if not literally.

I have spent years in the wilderness. I am sure you have, too. The hardest period of my life was young adulthood. In my twenties I had to come face-to-face with repressed childhood traumas of surgeries and my parents' divorce. After graduating from college, something in me that had been holding pain at bay collapsed. I had what I called a mini-nervous breakdown and found my way to therapy. There I began a long process of facing events and fears of my early life. In the caring presence of a professional helper, I began to understand, to grieve, and to heal. In my 20s, I was like the people of Israel wandering in the wilderness. There was manna; good things happened. I had fun adventures. I struggled to find a professional path. I fumbled with attempts at relationships. I moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota to San Francisco to Chicago and back to Minnesota. During the time of wandering, I worshiped a few golden calves, rebelled, got lost, made plans, learned some rules to live by--all things experienced by the people of Israel in their 40 years of wandering. The resolution of this stage of my life came with my decision to attend seminary in 1982. I settled into my place here at Cedar Lane at the age of 34 and found wonderful new challenges and a steady course. It would be a bit of a stretch to call it the promised land, but I can almost see it from here!

Significant life changes can take us into the wilderness. Events such as graduation, serious illness, job changes, divorce, the death of a loved one, or retirement can cause us to lose our way. We may be forced to ask, How do I reinvent myself in this new situation? What happens next? How long must I wander in confusion? When will I catch a glimpse of the promised land?

Last Monday I rented the movie Shine, which is based on a true story. Geoffrey Rush won an Oscar for his portrayal of David Helfgott, a brilliant pianist who suffered a severe nervous breakdown on the brink of a promising career. His story is a moving illustration of the exodus story, all the more apt because his abusive, confused father was a Jewish concentration camp survivor. We cannot imagine what such a person might have endured in the slavery of Nazi oppression. In the movie, we only get hints of father Peter's earlier experience. We know that he was unable to pursue music as he had wished, that his own violin had been lost or taken away. Now, after the war, in the 1950s, he has moved to Australia with his silent, frightened wife and children. All his energy and hope are focused on his musical son David, whom he professes to love fiercely, but whose soul he cannot relinquish. David is enslaved by his father's obsession and lives in an emotional prison.

David's talent and skill as a pianist provide the means of his liberation when he finally breaks away to study in London as a teenager. However, he is already starting to show signs of emotional collapse. After a remarkable performance of Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto, the piece his father had always wanted him to play, he has a serious nervous breakdown. He enters a long wilderness. Returning home to Australia, his father rejects him. He spends years in a mental institution. He is a gentle, mumbling character, visited by his sisters but lost to the world.

One day an activities volunteer is playing the piano. He joins her and begins to play. She is amazed and then recognizes him as the prodigy of long ago. She decides she can care for him at home but finds he is too much of a handful. In a group home, he starts to play again, but the piano is locked because he makes too much noise. On a rainy night he stumbles into a restaurant and starts to play. The patrons love him. He becomes a regular and gains public attention. His father even comes to visit him once, but no reconciliation is possible. David babbles and stutters and his father walks away. Still, David is moving toward the promised land. He has an appealing childlike joy that attracts people to him, despite an inclination to run around naked.

One day he meets a free spirited woman and, wonderfully, they fall in love and marry. She helps him return to the concert stage and his liberation is fulfilled. Since the movie came out, Helfgott has performed many times, despite some eccentricities. The music critics are not impressed, but ordinary people love him for his triumph over adversity. Many long years in the wilderness are redeemed in the fulfillment of his promise.

At one point in the story, David remarks that his name "Helfgott" means God's help and laughs at the irony. What does this mean, "God's help"? What help can we expect in times of wandering in the wilderness? God does not come in dramatic cures or instant liberation. God comes in slow miracles, the hand of a helper, the surprise of love, the manna of good fortune. No God I care about wants us to suffer. God is the love that pulls us through the wilderness.

When we speak of faith, what do we mean? Faith is not the same as belief. Having faith does not require belief in a deity. Faith is the perseverance and hope that get us through the wilderness. To me, faith means faith in life. Faith that one day the grass will grow through the cement. Faith that life is beautiful and worthwhile despite all the years in the wilderness.

Have faith in life, that even in the wilderness, gifts come, lessons are learned, covenants are made, and false idols are spurned. Have faith in yourself and your comrades. Have faith in your potential to grow and learn and one day find that wilderness is not to be feared. It is "the boundless territory of the soul" (Sara Campbell). And it is the path to liberation.

Note: Copies of Gretchen Thompson's book, Slow Miracles, are available through the publisher, Luramedia, at 1-800-367-5872.

"First Lesson" by Philip Booth, used as a meditation 11/16/97

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