Last
Sunday, while you were on your Thanksgiving break, the season of Advent began,
and the first candle on our Advent wreath was lit. Now there are two lights, the second Sunday. Advent is a special season of watching and
waiting; of looking for the subtle and surprising signs of God’s presence in
the world. I love Advent because it has
a spiritual subtlety that is very necessary in the commercialized excess of the
holiday season. It reminds me that I
could miss the presence of God if I’m not looking carefully for it. Advent is about cleaning your lens and
looking at the world in a new way. And
today we have a baptism for baby Charlotte to remind us of the beginning of life,
and the journey of faith chosen by her parents.
Look
around this morning. Take a good
look. If you hadn’t noticed, this is the
best time of year at Kent
One
of the great figures of the Advent season is John the Baptist. You heard him calling for repentance in the
gospel reading from Matthew. John the
Baptist was a prophet, one of the most significant in our tradition. He left society and lived in solitude, in the
wilderness. People had to leave society
to find him. John went off the grid to
find God. In solitude, he sought God
with all of his heart, and society eventually followed him, seeking some small
portion of what he had, that peace of mind that passes understanding. He had many followers, including Jesus
himself.
The
theme of the wilderness is a rich one in the gospels. Like John, Jesus too sought God in the
wilderness for forty days. What would a
modern-day John the Baptist look like?
What would it mean to leave society for the wilderness, even for a short
amount of time?
As I pondered the questions, I thought of the writer Robert
Sullivan. Robert Sullivan is an explorer
and writer, but not the usual kind. His specialty is the
Meadowlands. Yes, that’s right, the Meadowlands in New Jersey: a former
glacial lake that has been receding for the last 10,000 years, becoming the
swampland you know now--and at one time the largest garbage dump in the
world. You’ve driven past it on the way to somewhere more important: Newark
Airport possibly, maybe a discount mall, or you went there for a Giants or Jets
game. Robert Sullivan is obsessed with
the Meadowlands. Like Henry David Thoreau, he wanted to get back to
nature, but he chose the most unlikely spot in the United States, maybe the
world. The comparison with Thoreau, however ironic in talking about an
EPA waste site, became absolutely just when Sullivan found that the Meadowlands
did, in fact, have a Walden Pond. It’s just that no one ever went there;
no one even looks at the map of the expansive swampland. So Sullivan
decided to go on his own Thoreau wilderness adventure, exploring the Meadowlands
for weeks at a time in a small canoe.
Here is Sullivan’s adventure and vision in his own words in his
book The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a
City.
“Sometimes, I sit on the top of Snake Hill until dusk, and I
spread out my maps and marvel. I marvel
that I am in the middle of a thirty-two-square-mile wilderness, part natural,
part industrial, that is five miles from the Empire State Building and a little
bit bigger than Manhattan.
I marvel that the land before me was called ‘a swampy, mosquito-infested
jungle…where rusting auto bodies, demolition rubble, industrial oil slicks and
cattails merge in an unholy, stinking union,’ by authors of a 1978 federal
report, and that now it is a good place to see a black-crowned night heron or a
pied-billed grebe or eighteen species of ladybugs, even if some of the waters
these creatures fly over can oftentimes be the color of antifreeze.
I marvel that on the edges of the Meadowlands there are places
that are stuffed with people (some blocks in Union City have the highest
population density in the United States) but that in the middle of the
Meadowlands there are acres and acres of land where there aren’t people at all…
On the top of Snake Hill, I am on mysterious ground that is not
guidebooked and that reads like a dead language…I am in the middle of a place
that forces of progress have perennially targeted but have never managed to
completely control, a place that people rush past on their way to the rest of
America, a place they spit at with their exhaust pipes. There, with the
sun burning through smog and lighting up the reeds, with eight lanes of traffic
providing backup, I sing the Meadowlands. I am the dot on the Meadowlands’
exclamation point.”
To go out in a search for peace and enlightenment in the
Meadowlands of New Jersey is absurd—it’s completely crazy (which is exactly
what Sullivan’s wife thought by the way). But that’s what Robert Sullivan
did, and that’s what he found. All of the madness of our culture and
world was right on the edge of a wilderness, almost totally unexplored.
That boggled Sullivan’s mind. He found peace, renewal, and the
unbelievable power of nature still pulsing in the Meadowlands, even as man’s
so-called ingenuity is destroying our natural environment. Mother Nature
is still a very powerful lady. Sullivan is a wise man of our time,
finding renewal, inspiration, and peace in the last place anyone would look
The wilderness is spiritually lively, for both
the ancient and modern seeker. In his
book Thoughts on Solitude, Thomas
Merton, the Trappist monk and spiritual writer, wrote this about the wilderness
in considering the Desert Fathers, the early Christians who left society to
live in the wilderness in search of God.
“The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness
had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God because it was no
value to men. The wasteland was the land
that could never be wasted because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit. The desert was the region in which
the Chosen people had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the promised land in
a few months if they traveled directly to it.
God’s plan was that they should learn to love him in the wilderness and
that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic
time of their life with Him alone.”
The wilderness comes
in many forms. Our founder Father Sill
left his monastery on the Hudson River to go out into the wilderness to found a
school, one that would be different from the other Eastern prep schools. It would be a school for young men of modest
means. His initial fundraising efforts
yielded a mere $300, but he kept going forward.
I can’t even imagine the number of times this school might have
failed. But Father Sill persisted, and I
have no doubt that he believed he was guided by God. All of the little details of running a school
were put in the light of God’s guidance, including the construction of this
beautiful chapel where students might learn about the ways in which we are
always part of God’s plan. Where an
alumna’s child could be baptized today. What
a wonderful journey this school has had, and all of us get to play a part in a
school that is now thriving. We keep the
fire burning. It is humbling to be in
this space together with the past in mind.
We should always look back to the wilderness of our origins as an
idyllic time. The wilderness is now a
land of promise for all of us.
Expect the unexpected
during this Advent season, the best time of the year at Kent. Where is the wilderness in your life right
now? Where is the neglected place that
is alive with new interest? What have
you overlooked about yourself? The
promise of Advent is the promise of God’s love and presence among us. It’s happening now. May God bless us during this holy Advent season,
that we might awaken to the voice of God calling us his beloved, and calling us
home.
