Or maybe I should have entitled this a spiritual survival guide to the hottest, dustiest and driest of all our beautiful seasons here. Yes, summer is nearly here. In other climates that would mean we could take off our shoes and socks and go barefoot! But with burning hot sand and various nasty creatures such as scorpions and snakes that do not like to be stepped on, perhaps the barefoot part has to wait for a vacation trip to an open beach somewhere else. Summer is here and we dress for survival. Time to escape! Flee the sun if you can. Get away to some cool spot. Time for breezy cottons and shorts. Give your body some freedom.

Welcoming summer here has a whole different meaning. Summer what does it have to do with a sermon. But give your spirit some freedom too. Your mind may have gotten a little set in it's tracks, a little worn around the edges, after all it has been a long winter and a busy spring. Open the doors of your soul wide as well and let the gentle breezes in. Become as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: like a transparent eyeball, experience the renewal and joy of a refulgent summer!

But before I encourage all of you to go out there and be a nineties version of a transcedentalist poet perhaps I should ask : What does summer mean to you? What memories comes into your mind's eye as you hear the word summer? To me it is a heady mixture of freedom, blue skies, warm sun, cool shade, plenty of natural beauty and most of all having enough time to remember who I once was and perhaps still am, apart from my work as a minister, much as I do love it, apart from all my other roles as wife, mother, woman with an accent, a Dane, an American etc. Summer is perhaps as much a longing as a season.

Just imagine what it would be like to be ten or twelve again and run barefoot in the sand, at the ocean's edge, collecting sea shells and not care at all about wind blown hair, sandy wet suit or for that matter what you looked like at all. Back then there would be no thoughts of aching feet, no worries about all those things I had to do once I got home or concern about what I looked like in a bathing suit. The older I get the better I understand the paradoxical saying that "youth is wasted on the young."

But the truth is that I am more at peace now than I was then and we cannot regain innocence or deny our life experience. Fewer things seem brand new or even new to me at fifty but that is part of life's bargain, we know more, we have seen so much, those of us who are past our first youth. No, it is not really childhood I long for. Sure I would love to have that energy but no one could convince me to go through the storms and turbulence of adolescence again. If you think about it would you? Now I know there are quiet and very stable, settled teenagers but I was not one of them.

My longing when I look closer is for something else. An experience of peace perhaps, of being just like the woman in the picture on the front cover, sitting on a pier, quietly looking over the summer landscape, a picnic basket beside and her feet dangling over the water. A picture of contentment and tranquillity. Very much at one with all of the world around her. Is this what you want this summer? Take off your shoes and wiggle your toes, at least metaphorically, as we get ready to welcome that laziest and most languid of seasons. Summer that season of childhood memories, that seen through the lenses of time may take on a golden glow. And yet such memories and especially sharing them with others may give us a sense of being grounded and connected. Even if it is done in the middle of winter. Jane Ranney Rzepka writes in her book: A Small Heaven about:

"When I remember growing up, I picture being outdoors. In Ohio for three days one week, our children, trudging through the deep crusted snow got the tour:"

This is where Mommy:
Made pottery out of real mud and baked it in the sun;
caught fifteen frogs in a day, and then wondered why;
followed a brook through the woods in search of the Erie Canal and - maybe - Japan;
discovered the strangest things ever: echoes;
chewed on Sassafras leaves and Allegheny birch twigs and thought everybody did -
and don't they still taste good?
Swam in the river in the pitch dark with girlfriends, each with their hair in gigantic rollers;
and played tough Saturday basketball with friends in a barn and nothing was more important.

"The kids just looked at me the way kids do. But to me the earth seemed more solid that day, and the foundations never seemed firmer."

What she recalls resounds with me also. Yes, that is what I am looking for, that sense of standing firmly on solid earth, of having deep connections, roots that will feed my spirit from springs I have nearly forgotten. Which is one reason we go in search of such sacred memory places. With meaning only to us. That watering hole, that stone, that mountain where we found a part of ourselves. Or we may instead go in search of exotic places, so different from what we know everyday that we can really see them, as if with a child's eyes. Wonder, awe, excitement, food, fun, an earthly paradise, what are we really looking for? Is it only a Dionysian abandon in which we forget ourselves and perhaps all but our senses? New Orleans with its Mardi Gras rites and music, food, heat, dance and a certain mystery may not seem like a sacred place to you but it is to me. Because it is a place where the boundaries between reality and dreams appear blurred. Think about it, the whole city is built in a swamp and lies literally 16 feet under sea level. If it wasn't for levies there would be no city at all. In the new modern aquarium we saw among other wonders some white, not albino, but white mutated alligators with bright blue eyes. They had a scientific name of course, they were leucistic, very rare in nature, but they keep catching more of those white gators out there in the swamps. Somehow they did not seem out of place there, after all this is Louisiana where almost anything can and does happen. And that by the way is one definition of a sacred place, a place where the ordinary, the profane meets the transcendent. Where ordinary laws may be suspended. Mircea Eliade wrote about sacred space as a symbolic transcendent center of the world, an axis mundi, surrounded by the chaos and disorder of all that is considered profane. "The sacred is something altogether other to the profane. It does not belong to the profane world, it comes from somewhere else, it transcends this world. It is for this reason that the sacred is the real "par excellence. "A manifestation of the sacred is always a revelation of being. Every sacred space represents an opening towards the beyond, towards the transcendent."

How do you know you are in a sacred place? Because you are already treading carefully and treating it with respect. There is a sense of awe, or that opening of the soul toward something beyond our narrow selves. The Vietnam War memorial provides an example. It sits in an often profane setting, Washington, DC, surrounded by loud T shirt vendors, careless tourists, and is dutifully visited by school children far too young to remember anything about that war and how it nearly tore this country apart, divided families, and many of our churches. The wall is simple, a V cut into the ground with walls of black granite inscribed with the names of those soldiers and nurses who died. One enters the memorial where the wall is low with few names and descends into the point of the V where it towers about you with name after name. Even now, every day people bring photos, toy cars, mementos and of course flags to the wall. Even today veterans still come with bitter memories, with wounded souls and share the space with those who are proud of their sacrifice. Here they meet, those who fought in and those who fought against the war. What makes this sacred is of course the memories of so many lives lost but even more the way it is for many a place of healing, a homecoming, a place where politics no longer matters. Mary Scriver writes in her book Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke: Lessons on being where you are, "When you are in a sacred place, the world around you is given order for now you are in the center, you are in the axis and every space around you must find its place in relation to that. Sometimes we call this feeling home or being centered or being grounded. In a sacred place you are very here..." At the granite wall realizing the immense loss, yet remembering, healing.

Certain places can bring a nation together. Like that wall can. But our personal dwellings too can be seen as sacred. They are after all our centers, hopefully places where we can find some measure of centeredness. In Japan taking off one's shoes when you enter someone's home signifies that the threshold separates the profane street and the inner sacred space. Have you ever wondered about the custom or why a groom carry his bride over the threshold? We may paint our doors certain colors, we shake hands at the door, we hang reefs on them, we put up welcome signs, and we may even put something there to ward off evil. We have at home three small Chinese house gods that are supposed to ward off demons and dragons. So far it has worked there has been no reported dragons or demon sightings near my house (if you do not count the puppets that Bruce makes, that is).

"Sacred Spaces are different for different folks," writes Scriver. "Some are impressed by elaborate plush surroundings and others need the grim, solid walls of an old stone building. Some go in for modern sweeps of glass and some like the feel of logs. Some like the woods while others would rather take the church right into the canyon of city skyscrapers where the people are. Somewhere, sometime, there is a sacred space for each of us. One knows because it feels different than any other space.

"For some of you that may be a mountain. For others the sea. For a friend of mine who grew up in Chicago it is the feel of a large city with its restless streams of people that feeds her spirit. Perhaps our vacation dreams, our summer longings has deeper roots than we might imagine. Perhaps we are really looking for meaning, for a connection we feel we have lost. Perhaps we are looking for what some of us may call God. Scriver talks about how one can read a place like a page in a book. "First go find a bit of ground and sprawl on it. Look around. Smell. Taste the air. Listen. Notice things...Second be still and let your mind turn until it comes to rest. Reflect on what you see. Let the land whisper suggestions, stories, mythologies and old symbols: spider webs, snail shells, leaves and stones, roses and grass, caves and cliffs. If you are comfortable with left brain thoughts it is fine to think of geology and biology and zoology and paleontology and all the other wonderful ologies of human cultures. Let yourself come to rest halfway between the atoms and the galaxies.

"And third...well I get nervous about this third step... It is opening oneself up to the transcendent, the mysterious, the unknown and unknowable. Somehow it seems to have to do with the sky. It is the possibility that we human beings have misunderstood the whole thing. It is the shift away from the conviction that God put the world here and stocked it with goodies just for us, to the conviction that this world is the ultimate web. Opening means giving up your attempts to control."

What she writes about, that opening ourselves up is a hard thing for many of us to do. It is not easy to let go of our need to feel in control and to admit how little we actually know and instead learn to trust the mystery, whatever name you choose to call it. We can learn from the sea to let go, to trust, to let the tides come and go instead of fighting them. We can learn from the seabirds to ride out the storms, let the winds carry us. We can listen to our souls, our deepest longings and see where they lead us, set sail on our own explorations of the spirit. Let the power of the sea restore your soul, ride out the storms as they come and remember that it is out of chaos that the ancient stories tells us creation is born, out of the sound of wings moving over the waters. If we learn how to trust ourselves, each other and this wondrous Universe into which we are born, we need not fear the journey.

Let me close this sermon with one of my favorite readings by Marni P. Harmony: I say it touches us:

"I say that it touches us that our blood is sea water and our tears salt, that the seed of our bodies is scarcely different from the same cells in a seaweed, and that the stuff of our bones is like the coral. I say that the tide rolls in on us whether we like it or not, and the sands of time keep running their intended course. I say we have to go down into the wave's through to find ourselves, and then ride her swell until we can see beyond ourselves into our neighbor's eye. I say that we shall never leave the harbor if we do not hoist the sail. I say we have got to walk the waves as well as solid ground. I say that anyone who goes without consciousness of this will remain chained to a rusty anchor."

May the journey find us worthy. Amen.

Footnotes:
Exaltation by Marni P. Harmony, UUA Meditation Manual for 1987.
A Small Heaven by Jane Ranney Rzepka, UUA Meditation Manual for 1989.
Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke: Lessons on being where you are by Mary Scriver, Moosemilk Press, Edmonton, Canada, 1994.
Symbolism, The Sacred and the Arts, essays by Mircea Eliade, Crossroad, NY 1987.