as preached at Harris Manchester College, Evening Chapel service, February 4, 2026
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
I begin with Dante’s confession of disorientation because, though I am meant to offer guiding words of reflection, I fear that I, myself have become lost.
Perhaps your experience is similar. Perhaps your straightforward path has become obscured in the murk and the mire. We are caught in disruption and dissolution.
Change comes quickly. Cultural, economic, political whiplash seem constant. Greenland, Gaza, Iran, Epstein files, Putin, Ukraine, Sudan… There are too few houses, not enough doctors. AI is changing everything. The climate crisis is accelerating… Like a dancer caught in a chaotic reel, the jig going ever faster faster, I feel as if I am unmoored, spinning, spinning, spinning… What about you?
More than a century ago, in a similar time of disruption, Walter Lippmann described the situation. We are caught, he remarked, up in the “the faltering method, the distracted soul, and the murky vision. … We drift.”
We drift. The master homiletician Kay Northcutt argues for a model of “preaching as spiritual direction.” She claims “the preacher’s spiritual life is … foundational” and holds that our difficult task is to be “God’s person.” We are called to practice the presence God, she believes, so that we can guide others into divine relationship.
To practice the presence of God, humanistic Unitarian Universalist that I am, I do not take Northcutt’s advice literally. Just as my religious forbearer Henry David Thoreau seemed to be “equally at home everywhere,” I have sought the sacred–that submergence of the particular within the universal… I have sought the sacred in all places.
From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
So wrote denise levertov of her pursuit of immanence, the finding of the sacred in all things. Her words can seem to point the way to the straightforward–spiritual, political, cultural–path that now seems lost. It is the one in which the road is known, the destination is fixed, and the trodding a constant rhythm.
What about you? Does the straightforward pathway glimmer in your keening? Or, like me, like Dante, do you find yourself, somewhere upon the journey, the forest trail unclear, the way opaque?
Here I land upon my announced subject: pilgrimage. Life is a pilgrimage. Beings instantiated from the mixed up matter of a long dead star, we, animated celestial dust, transition from sacred nonbeing to sacred nonbeing. Along the way, within the forest, the straightforward pathway can be lost. Along the way, within the forest, sometimes in can be found.
Life is a pilgrimage. Thoreau advises us about the essential nature of the practice. It is to be a person who is “‘going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land.” The pilgrim, by tradition, sets out on a journey towards a blessed destination in pursuit of personal transformation and greater unity with the highest.
Our lives are ever structured thus. The final destination for each, whatever our spans, is the dissolution of the particular into the universal that comes with death.
Along the way, we change. Only a fool thinks that they are the same at twenty and forty or even at sixty and eighty. The child might be mother to the adult but the difference between the two can be profound. Especially now, when we live amid consistent disruption.
In these times, the experience of pilgrimage is pervasive. I speak not of the metaphorical journey of our lives but rather of the real pursuit of a holy land–a place of safety and security–by millions of refugees and migrants. Today, there are almost 120 million displaced people in the world. That is probably three times as many as there were immediately following the second world war.
Here it seems necessary to pause, to break the flow, and confess that some of my disorientation stems from the awful response of my country to the displaced. The deaths of Keith Porter, Jr., Renee Nicole Goode, and Alex Pretti, Liam Ramos with his bunny eared hat and Spiderman backpack, I will not rehash the headlines or summon the imagery, complete with fascistic stylings, that haunt the landscape of my home further. Watching, resisting, what is happening, I feel akin to my coreligionist, Kurt Vonnegut, who observed, shortly before he reached his own final destination, that he felt he was “a man without a country,” because of the horrors that our government wrought.
The poet Sharon Lin might help us to reorient ourselves to the nature of the pilgrimages of others. In these times of mass displacement, she tells us of the arrival of “boats from faraway / headlines,” of how “[l]egislation rules out / the legality of workers,” and of the way in which “[a]ny place can be a / refuge.”
Any place can be a refuge, Thoreau similarly disrupts the traditional structure of pilgrimage. He rejects the idea that the holy land is a specific place. Rather, he praises those “who never go to the Holy Land in their walks” and instead find holy land to be everywhere for “the saunterer … is no more vagrant than the meandering river.”
The meandering river, I invite you to consider how you have engaged with the three varieties of pilgrimage I have named: the pursuit of the holy land, the recognition that the sacred surrounds, and the journey of refugees. Even in my disorientation, even as I drift, I detect teachings in each.
Refugees, my father’s family are Ukrainian Jews. I grew up with bone chilling stories of the journey from Odessa to the holy land of Chicago. I see young Liam Ramos and I think of my grandfather Morrie, who at an even younger age, set off on a two year expedition from the known to the unknown and traveled the length of Europe before finally arriving in the United States.
It is told that I am only here because of the kindness of a murderous Cossack. In some remote corner of Eastern Europe, the story runs, my ancestors were cornered by those intent on killing them. They escaped slaughter when one of the would be murderers saw my grandfather and could neither bring himself to butcher a child or leave one an orphan.
Refugees, this disorienting note calls us to compassion. In these times of instability there is no guarantee that we might not find ourselves uprooted, adrift, or even fleeing terror. We would wise to extend the welcoming hand and remember Paul’s words, “But by the grace of God I am what I am.”
By the grace of God, scholars that we are, ever carrying knowledge of the disruptions of the world as we do, Thoreau’s invitation to discover “the secret of successful sauntering” and have “no particular home” gifts us with the ability to reroot ourselves after we have become uprooted. Learning to attend to our surroundings and move through them, as he advises, can help us to recognize “the … air and sunshine in our thoughts.” Doing so allow us to feel the beauty of the place we are in, to be shaped by its beauty, even as we mourn the beauty in a place we have left behind.
Beauty we have left behind, I return to the more traditional notion of pilgrimage–the journey to Holy Land. Pilgrims historically set out for a destination dreaming of reorientation, the finding of a fixed point, to settle themselves after disorientation. Such an impulse is not foolish. It comes from the deep desire I suspect we each have. We want to find some final destiny, some place set aside from the confusion of the world.
My humanistic impulses make me suspicious of such narratives. But the teachers of pilgrimage–Dante, Thoreau, even Sharon Lin–do not promise us escape from ambiguity. Instead, even amid drifting, they suggest that the journey contains its own gifts.
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Dante begins confused. The Italian’s path is uncovered when the pagan poet Virgil sets him on a pilgrimage towards the celestial city. Outside the Gates of Heaven, Virgil stops. He says, “you have reached / the place past which my powers cannot see … / Expect no more word or sign from me.”
This is as far as I can go.
This is as far as I can go, the truthful conclusion to the journey of any reflection. No text, no teacher, can fully point the way out of the forest dark or luminate the straightforward pathway that has been lost. No guide, not Dante, not Thoreau, can make your life’s pilgrimage for you.
But even when the destination is unknown, the forest dark, we continue to travel, we continue to breathe. So, invite you to arrive where you already are, a breathing being surrounded by the light of night.
Breathing in, peace
Breathing out, love
Breathing in, peace
Breathing out, love
Amen
