I once heard a story, told as a true story, about resistance fighters who were lost behind enemy lines in a war, I believe during WWII. I don’t recall the exact details, but I do remember the main point which was that this small group was in desperate circumstances until, luckily, they found a map in a dead comrade’s pocket. And they used this map to find their way out of the mountains to a town where they knew they would be safe. It was only later that they discovered that the map they had used was a map of the Pyrenees… which was kind of amazing, because they had been lost in the Alps.

This brings up some fascinating questions… first of all, if these people could use the wrong map to find their way home, what good are maps?! But another question might be, does a map have to be of the exact terrain in order to be useful? Or is there something intrinsically useful about maps? And if there is something intrinsically useful, what about a map might actually help us find our way through our own difficult times?

“In the middle of my life I found myself lost in a dark woods.” This is the place the poet Dante found himself at the midpoint of his life. His epic poem, The Divine Comedy was a narrative of his inner experience, and it became a kind of map that helped his fellow travelers through their own similarly agonizing experience. What maps are there for us when we find ourselves lost in our own dark woods?

I was with a friend last weekend and he was showing me a mountain just outside his new hometown. It was all green trees and wilderness, and at one point he wasn’t sure if we’d passed a cross road that would take us back to our destination. So he pulled the car to the side of the road and got out his book of local street maps and quickly found out where we were. We had been headed in the wrong direction, but he quickly changed course and we were soon where we wanted to be, just in time to meet the people we were meeting.

We need maps because the way is often unclear. This is true of street directions, and also of other simple, practical things such as making a meal or fixing a faucet. This is why we have atlases, and cookbooks and home repair manuals.

Still at other times it’s a process that’s unclear; we don’t know how to get from point A to point B. This is true about complicated projects, such as our elevator and expansion project. We’ve never done this before as a community. And even though many of us could figure out how to put an addition onto our own home, it’s much more complicated to do this as a group project; at times the way forward hasn’t been at all clear or straightforward.

It helps to have processes and tools to make the maps that will help us find our way through complicated projects. Joe Rando has been keeping a Gant Chart for the AIM Committee. He has a computer program that he puts critical dates into, and the program creates a chart that shows when other processes should be started and decisions completed. It’s an amazing tool that is helping AIM find a way through the technical parts of this building process. The Stewardship Committee has also used the Gant Chart to figure out the critical dates by which we need to know crucial information about the financing of this project. The Gant Chart is an important map through this building process.

There is also a Short Term Planning Task Force that’s hard at work collecting information that will be used to make decisions about how we’re going to have worship and religious education along with caring and fun during construction. They’re working on issues such as: when construction begins, how close together do children and adults need to be on Sunday morning? At other times, where will we meet for social activities? How will new folks and visitors find us? How will church members and friends find the new Interim minister and other church services if and when they need them?

The Task Force is hard at work, and soon there will be opportunities to hear what they’ve come up with, raise questions and offer your ideas. I think we need to make a map or a timeline of this Short Term Planning Process and circulate it among ourselves. Such a map would help everyone understand where we are and where we’re going.

What we’re learning is that being lost brings up lots of anxiety for both individuals and groups. Anxiety isn’t much fun. Sometimes it feels like something is constantly nudging and pushing you and it gets very uncomfortable as the pressure builds inside. At times it feels like you’re going to burst because you can’t contain it. And sometimes individuals do erupt.

When anxiety builds in a group, it sometimes feels as though something is pushing and pulling the group apart. And that’s accurate—at times fear gets loose and starts charging around like a bull in a rodeo, which sends everyone running for safety. A site map that clearly describes the safety zones at the Anxiety Rodeo would be really helpful. I think there should be a whole section just for leaders to jump up and cling to, like rodeo clowns.

A safety zone would also be helpful when we’re off course in our own lives, those transition times that we go through over the course of our life when we suddenly find ourselves in places and situations we’ve never been in before. I’m thinking of the shift from childhood into adolescence; the shift from adolescence into young adulthood; the shift into middle age, into old age. I noticed a report in the news last week that said that our unhappiest years tend to be in our middle forties, the time perhaps when modern people find ourselves lost in the middle of a dark woods.

I have always been grateful to have had older friends. For years I’ve been hearing from people that life gets really good once you’re in your fifties. This is also what last week’s news report says; that the happiest years of our lives tend to be in our fifties and beyond. But before I heard this report, it was helpful to me to have had people share their stories about their own life journeys, because stories are like maps. They might be of another person’s life experience, but something of their experience applies to our own. The way they figured out how to go through life can inspire us and help us on our journey. I think this is also true of any great literature…Dante, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and poets, always the poets, their stories are maps of the territory they’ve found; they give us stories and poems as gifts that might help us feel less alone, less uncertain of how to be on our way.

There is a spiritual aspect to great literature that is evident whenever a hero or heroine wrestles with ultimate questions or problems and finds within him or herself, or in the larger community, a source of strength and courage that enables the main character to grow and make a contribution to others. Often the hero does this when he’s completely lost and off the beaten social path, or blocked and has to find another way.

The poet, Antonio Machado writes, “Walker there is no path; the path is made by walking…” Which suggests that even the ordinary journey we’re each on has an ultimate dimension. How we journey through life makes a difference. Just as our moral character is created with each decision we make about how to act, so our spiritual life is created by our decisions about how we’ll proceed through life. Will we treat others with kindness and compassion? Will love and humor be the most honored guests in our home? Will we be patient with those who are impatient with us? Will we return love for hate, or even love for indifference?

The poet and essayist, Wendell Berry, offers us the woods as a sacred destination. He tells us that the woods are a sacred place because they’re not separate from the whole of creation; the woods are part of eternity even though they exist in time; they contain the seed of eternity within themselves.

“What is the way to the woods? How do you go there?” The poet asks. How do we get somewhere we’ve never been? He says we go through “the six days’ field” or ordinary time, which he says “is kept in the body’s years, the body’s sorrow, weariness, and joy.” We go through ordinary time, through our ordinary human experience. When we come to the narrow gate at the far side of the field, he says, we come into the grace of the shadow of trees, the shadow of the mercy of light. We come into the compassion of the opposite of the daily, the ordinary. We come into the grace of shadow of the natural world, which is sacred time and place. And to enter, we must leave everything behind.

What could possibly prepare us for this kind of ultimate transition—either the death of our body, or the death of a part of our former self that we’re evolving out of into something more complicated? Like a caterpillar into a butterfly, something inherently the same, but absolutely different in form and function.

The Sources of our faith offer us many possible places to look for maps for our spiritual journey: in our own experience of transcendence and wonder; in the words and actions of prophetic women and men; in the great stories and texts of the world’s religions; in humanism and human reason; and in earth based religions. Our sources help us find a way into the future by helping us have a conversation with what we each understand as the ultimate source of our existence.

To me, the sources of UU faith are really sources of authority; they put us in conversation with what we each understand as the ultimate source of our existence. They can help us make a claim about who we are and formulate the ultimate questions we want to ask. When we know this and trust that as harsh as life is at times, we know that we, like every other person deserve simple recognition and respect, from life, from God, even from the indifferent powers that be in the universe.

The sources of our faith can help us figure out how to wrestle with this ultimate dimension of reality with courage and dignity. They can help us figure out how to stay on the path we are making with each decision, each action, even when the way forward is unclear. The good news is that in this process of wrestling our way forward step by step, sometimes in the fog or darkness, we will find something so much larger than our own self.

This congregation is entering a time of great transition. Not only will there be work on the building, but at the same time there’s going to be a change in ministerial leadership. We have in hand and are also creating more good maps for getting through the practical stuff. But what map will help this congregation travel together with faith, hope and love through this upcoming uncertainty? “Walker, there is no path. The path is made by walking.” (Or rolling…as the case may be as we work to make this building accessible to all.)

I don’t have a crystal ball. Even if I did it wouldn’t show me what’s going to happen in the future, because as the poet tells us, “there is no road. The road is made by walking…”. We have to listen from the center of our beings for the call of the future; we have to listen for it with our arms and hearts full of our longing for justice and love. And when we hear it, when we feel it, then we have to travel toward it together. The way in which we travel will help to create it, will help to bring the future into being. How we treat each other is an ultimate matter.

To support us in this, we have the wisdom of the world’s traditions that all say that the most important things we can do are to act with love and kindness, even at the same time that we’re honest and direct with one another. Our religious tradition has left us a map that says democratic process can take many different forms, but being open about standards and processes, and carefully holding content, and being accountable to one another and to ultimate principles is key.

I’ve been thinking about those people who were stranded behind enemy lines, and how they might have found their way out of the mountains. What did they see on the map in their hands? I imagine that no matter what path they saw, they must have believed something about it. And they probably had a belief or an ethic about traveling together. Their faith must have informed their journey. I believe that how ever cold, hurting, lost or frightened they might have been, they must have traveled in good faith.

In the weeks and months ahead as we travel into a brave new time in the life of this congregation, may we read our own maps in hand, the maps we are creating together, and find in them our ultimate concerns and values.

May we be wise and apply those values to all our conversations and decision making.

And at the end of the process, may all who have traveled find that they have arrived safely together.

Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths 1985, V”, A Timbered Choir

Antonio Machado, “Proverbios y Cantares #29,” Border of a Dream: Selected Poems, translated by Willis Barnstone