Sources of Inspiration

Often these summer days I find myself thinking about a place on the road from Hanska to Lamberton, Minnesota, in the southwestern part of that state, in the town of Jeffers, to be exact, where the prairie hunches its back in a long, rocky ridge. From the top of that ridge you can literally see for miles, perhaps as many as ten or fifteen in any direction. In a relatively flat land-Minnesotans call it “rolling,” but to a New Englander it looks pretty darned flat-such “high places,” as the Bible calls them, are uncommon. So it is not terribly surprising that at the top of this ridge, where the rock is exposed to the elements, ancient tribes of the earliest wandering residents of that area carved primitive messages in the rocks. The Indian petroglyphs that are carved on the stone of the ridge at Jeffers are thousands of years old. They depict, among other things, ancient hunting parties, reminding moderns of the days when the Great Plains teemed with buffalo. Today it is a tame land-tornadoes and blizzards aside-and it is marked by the hand of American agribusiness. But on the top of that ridge, if you cannot palpably feel the past; if you are not humbled in the presence of the eternal now; if you are not inspired by the thought of those ancient wanderers; then you must be completely insensitive to the spirit of that, or any place.

In an otherwise uniform landscape, that ridge must have stood out like a proverbial sore thumb, and so those ancient nomadic hunters must have used it as a gathering place. In a land where a fifty foot hill may be the highest point in an entire county-as it is, in fact, in Brown County, Minnesota-such a high place as the ridge at Jeffers must have seemed like the neighborhood of the sky gods.

It is a testament to the “spirit of place” that it continues to hold our attention despite the ravages of modernity and so-called civilization. Most of us Unitarian Universalists-who tend to take inspiration from the natural world-are familiar with the spirit of place, but I suspect those of other religious persuasions are as well. Places–particular spots on the face of this, our Mother Earth–provide us with much of our religious inspiration. For me, Jeffers, Minnesota is such a place.

This area of coastal New Hampshire is also such a place. New England, of course, is an old place, as American places go, with old houses that speak to us still of their former inhabitants. Not everyone is affected by the spirit of place, but I am; I have drawn strength from it. It is one of my major sources of inspiration.

Many authors have managed to capture the spirit of their particular places: Thoreau in Concord, for example, or Sara Orne Jewett the coast of Maine in The Country of the Pointed Firs. Willa Cather captured the prairie in books like O Pioneers! and my personal favorite, My Antonia, certainly one of the greatest American novels. Ole Rolvaag captured the peculiar barrenness and loneliness of the Dakotas in Giants in the Earth. Mark Twain, of course, captured the Mississippi River valley; Faulkner and Eudora Welty the deep South; Edward Abbey and Tony Hillerman the American Southwest; Robinson Jeffers the California Coast; Wendell Berry his native Kentucky River valley in his novel A Place on Earth and others.

For me, books have been one of the greatest sources of inspiration. As a young person I didn’t consider myself a great reader, reading basically only what I had to read. But in college I got the reading bug, and thank God I did! In my junior year in college I became an English major, and, except pecuniarily, I have never regretted my decision. It forced me to read widely and systematically. For a long time this had the effect of making me like what I was supposed to like-if it wasn’t in the Norton Anthology of Literature, it wasn’t worth reading-but I have gotten over that. Ultimately, I began to like what I like. Nowadays, I read books mostly because I want to, not because I’m supposed to. And, not surprisingly, there is a lot of great stuff that isn’t in the Norton Anthology.

Still and all, a lot of so-called great literature really is great. The Scarlet Letter is a great book because of what it tells us about the human heart (and it’s not all good); The Great Gatsby is a great book because of what it tells us about the American Dream (and it’s not all good); Huckleberry Finn is a must read for Americans because of what it tells us about the issue of race (maybe Moby Dick, too). And so on, and on.

So much inspiration to be found in books! Someday I plan to create my own, personal list of the world’s greatest literature, my own list of “must reads.” It will contain a lot of the accepted “greats,” but there will also be a fair number of obscure names on my list.

About twenty years ago now I discovered Wallace Stegner’s wonderful novel Crossing to Safety, which concerns the lifelong friendship of two couples. Perhaps I was so taken by it because of its subject matter: the nature of friendship. Because for me friendship has been one of the greatest sources of inspiration in my life. And have I been blessed by friends! Friends with humor and wit, occasionally biting, friends who have brought out the best in me, friends who have been loyal through difficulties and long absences. I’ve lost too many friends through death, but a true friend can never be really lost. As Wendell Berry has written of a friend who died, “He’s hidden among all that is, and cannot be lost.” To me, friendship seems to be at the very heart of the religious. We long to be accepted and loved as we truly are. Certainly, if there is a God, that God loves and accepts us! As a good Universalist, I believe that. But if we are lucky, we also receive God’s love and acceptance through the medium of friendship. The best marriages are friendships-they’d better be! God knows, most of us are hard enough to love and to accept! The names of my friends are like talismans, leading me through the occasional dark nights of my soul which are the inevitable price of my living.

The people I have known in my ministries have inspired me. Some have been friends, others only acquaintances. So often in the adversity of their struggles for greater personhood, they have inspired me. They have given me the strength and courage to say and do things that need to be said and done. They are an inspiration to me, and they can be an inspiration to each other; indeed, I know that they often are.

With patience, with love and acceptance, with learning to look below the rough exterior, you will find that, more often than not, your neighbor is a source of inspiration. Too often, we fail to get to know each other well enough. We must be willing not only to be heard, but to listen to one another. We will be amazed at what we hear. We will be amazed at what we say about ourselves.

Music has also been an inspiration to me. Some years ago now, some friends and I spent a night revisiting some of the music of our misspent youth. Often too busy these days to turn on the stereo, I had forgotten how much music has meant to me. It felt good to get in touch with places in myself that had been out-of-touch for so long.

I have been blessed-or cursed, as the case may be-by very eclectic tastes in music. I like almost all of it. That means that I have drawn inspiration equally from Mozart and Patsy Cline. Something in music speaks to the innermost me, to my soul. Music is like smell: it has the strange, wonderful evocative power to carry us back to very specific times and places and even feelings. When one of my friends played Tim Buckley’s sixties song “Buzzin’ Fly,” I felt something in me that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. I can’t really articulate what it was, but it had a lot to do with youth, love, optimism, hope, and the sense of immortality that goes along with being young but which passes so very, very quickly. Music touches the emotions directly and non-rationally. Though not so much in recent years as in my rock ‘n roll past, it has been one of my greatest inspirations. It’s good to know that it is there when I am ready to go back to it.

I want you to know that I have found inspiration in the church. Alas, not every week! But those of you who come to church fairly regularly don’t come expecting a peak experience every week. You know that there will be weeks, most weeks, in fact, when the ordinary pleasures of a familiar face or a few minutes of time to commune with yourselves is the high point of your Sunday worship.

But there will be those other weeks-occasional, yes-when the sacred bursts through the ordinary, when we glimpse the path of the divine, when we feel that we have been touched by the Holy and been made whole if only for a moment; times when the “feeling flows from eye to eye,” as one of our Unitarian Universalist hymns puts it, when we know that we have experienced the “something more” that the religious impulse leads us toward. And we will be glad that we endured the more mundane weeks and were there to be a part of the inarticulate presence of ultimate reality. We will be glad that we have had that special experience, that meeting with the ground of our being, with God or with the Goddess, that moment of deep inward self-revelation. Such moments can keep us going for a very long time; they are the source of our trust and our hope. And unlike so many of our experiences, we will have had this one in the company of others traveling the mysterious journey with us. We will know that it happened, because we will have looked in the eyes of our neighbor and seen it there, too.

At such moments, we are glad that we are not alone. Solitude is necessary and nice, but it is not enough. Thoreau enjoyed the solitude of Walden Pond, but each night he walked the one mile back to the civilization of Concord to eat dinner with his mother, or to irritate his friend Emerson by his over-zealous attentions to Emerson’s wife, Lydian. No doubt Lydian was a source of inspiration to Henry!

I wish that I had time to name all the books, show you all the places, listen with you to all the music, share with you all the friends, be with you at all the times of inspiration on the journey through life. Alas, there is not nearly time enough for that. But what I can do is to share these few, brief moments with you. For this short time we are together. The past is gone, and we cannot predict what the future will bring. But we have this present moment, now, and it is precious.

These are the days that have been given to us! This is the time, and this is the place. May we be ever thankful for these moments spent in each other’s company.

And for all the sources of inspiration, no matter how grand or how humble, we give thanks. But most of all, we give thanks for life, itself. Amen, and blessed be.

– The Rev. Harold E. Babcock