Sometimes I realize how small my world has become... and return thanks!

From time to time I am startled to discover and realize how small my world has become:  most of my attention and commitments are focused on a discrete group of people in a small town in the rolling Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. There are about 100 active people in our faith community - and about 40,000 in our town - and most of my time, energy, prayers and attention is focused here.  Sure, I travel - I was blessed to go to Istanbul, Turkey this summer with the Jazz Ambassadors and spent a lovely time in Montreal - and I get down to NYC from time to time to see my daughter, too. I read the NY Times every day and listen carefully to NPR.  But it has recently become clear to me that my vision and experience these days is very narrow... and that is a blessing to me.

When I was a young hotshot in seminary, I was engaged in all the big issues.  I remember Jim Forbes once calling me into his office to ask me to "cool it" as I was class president and in the midst of organizing not one but two buses to Washington, DC to protest President Reagan's policies in Nicaragua.  He said, "Man, even Gandhi took a break after South Africa. You aren't ever going to have this much focused time again for study and reflection. Don't waste it, ok?  There will be time enough later to get yourself killed."  For good or ill, I didn't much listen to Brother Forbes in the day, but his words have come back to me over and over again.

They call to mind the life of the late Henri Nouwen.  I read his journal, Gracias, about his time after Yale while he wandered in Latin America each night before I went to sleep on a train moving across the former Soviet Union.  I was on yet another peace activist mission and found myself haunted by Nouwen's restlessness.  "Why can't he just settle down?" I thought. Many years later, my spiritual director in Cleveland, Fr. Jim, noted that I needed to pay real careful attention to such observations:  "They are telling you something about the health of your own soul" he said. And he was right - like Nouwen I was profoundly restless.  (At this moment, a host of old favorite songs come to mind from the Coaster's "Searchin'" and Del Shannon's "Runaway" to Dion's "The Wanderer," Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty," Springsteen's "Hungry Heart," James Taylor's "Country Roads" and most of Paul Simon's oeuvre!)

The good folk in AA talk about this a persuing the geographic solution - and I've played with that most of my life - "If only I was in __________ (fill in the blank) things would be better!"  Now the only problem with the geographic solution is that wherever you go, you always have to take yourself with you! 

So, on this sometimes rainy, sometimes sunny autumn day in the Berkshires - after burying a lovely woman and shedding some tears with her family, and checking in on new appointments and meetings at church and writing up tonight's lesson about the origins of the season of Advent and why it can grow the soul - I see my vision has become very narrow... and I return thanks.

Nouwen eventually found himself spending most of his last days at L'Arche in Toronto - the spiritual advisor to a community supporting adults with disabilities founded by Jean Vanier - a small place with a very narrow focus, too.  He had gone from being a hotshot in the limelight to a wandering spiritual misfit... until his heart was broken and he found a place to get grounded in a small community of faith.  I want to confess that at close to 60 I get that- and am so grateful that I return thanks every day.  Once an artist told me something about the personal being the most universal, too. I have come to believe that if I can be real and connected here - encouraging and trying to live the alternative way of Christ's peace in community - then small ripples and gentle music will flow outward and that will be enough.