A Poem from my past, "Sailing Nowhere"

SAILING NOWHERE

I was placed in my boat of reed,

And placed in a river run smoothed.

I drifted past Moses’ landing place,

Nestled amongst the rushes,

Past Peter’s boat and fishing nets,

Past reformed basilicas and black minarets,

And factories of manufactured creeds and needs.

All, whose only purpose is to clean the streets,

Tattoo feet, and recycle old shoes and dirt.

I sailed, past them all,

Into the unknown of the ocean.

I wrote this poem back in 1971, during my sophomore year at the College of St Thomas. As you can tell from the poem, I was questioning everything.  It was at a time when, as a society we discovered that all the authorities we trusted had duped us. The government fired on and killed protesters at Kent State University, Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia, and free speech was gradually being more and more suppressed. Trust in anything institutional became a very rare commodity. As it can be noted in the poem, this distrust included all institutions, even religious institutions.

In Fowler's study of faith development, there comes a time when the myths in which one believes, begin to be questioned. This questioning begins around the age of 12, when a person begins to think abstractly. It intensifies around the age of 18 years as one breaks free from home and encounters more and more of the world. "Sacred cows make the best hamburger," Mark Twain once noted, and all sacred cows are questioned unconditionally and examined. Fowler also notes that there does come a time in a person's life when he or she will return to a former system of belief. The big difference is that the person doesn't believe because he or she is forced or told to do so from outside authority. Quite the contrary, the person now believes only because he or she accepts the belief on his or her own terms. It is important that a person must own the belief as his or her own. 

It was no different for me. Though I did not accept that which I was taught, I continued to go through the motions. I did not skip Mass on Sunday, and I continued to follow the rules, though I was not sure that it was not just another fairy tale. Little by little, I began to reconstruct my faith. I learned to separate faith and belief from what can be at times a very human, sinful institution of the Church. The history of the Church is not the "perfect society" which I was taught when I was young, but fraught with deception, avarice and greed, murder, and all other sins connected to human behavior. As an institution, the Church is in need of conversion just as much as I. While I no longer placed my faith in a very human institution, which was bound to disappoint, I placed all of my faith in Jesus. My study of Church history showed that Jesus never has abandoned the Church, but raises new leaders to replace the weak, and inspires others, most often the least of people, to heroic heights. Long should have the Church fallen, but never has. The other thing I discovered was Vatican II and a new vision for the People of God.

The cynicism of that time in my life did reveal one truth. When one has no belief in anything, it is a journey to nowhere. The Beatle's expressed this in the song, "Nowhere Man."

"He's a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.

Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Nowhere Man please listen,
You don't know what you're missing,
Nowhere Man,the world is at your command!

 He's as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowhere Man can you see me at all?

Nowhere Man, don't worry,
Take your time, don't hurry,
Leave it all till somebody else
lends you a hand!

Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Nowhere Man please listen,
you don't know what you're missing
Nowhere Man, the world is at your command!

He's a real Nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody."

We are encountering a time in the life of our local Church where people are as disillusioned as I was back in 1971. Folks have lost trust in the institutional Church in which they were raised. They feel betrayed and are outraged, ready to jettison everything. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that their trust has been misplaced. As us baby boomers have found, human insitutions are bound to disappoint. It is only in Jesus that one can place full trust. Jesus is the center of all our belief.