-- Joseph Campbell
Meditation: by Mary Jean Irion (from A Grateful Heart, edited by M. J. Ryan, p. 111)
Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are.
Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart.
Let me not pass by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow.
Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so.
One day I shall dig my nails into the earth,
or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut,
or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world,
your return.
Reading: by the entrepreneur, author, and blogger Chris Guillebeau from The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life (p. 7)
People have always been captivated by quests. History’s earliest stories tell of epic journeys and grand adventures. Whether the story is African, Asian, or European, the plotline is the same: A hero sets off in search of something elusive that has the power to change both their self and the world.
In the Judeo-Christian story of creation, Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden and sent to toil the earth. In the Buddhist story, the question and practice and struggle is emphasized over creation – sacred texts skip straight to the quest for enlightenment.
The world’s best-known literature reflects our desire to hear about struggle and sacrifice in pursuit of a goal. From Aesop’s Fables to Arabian Nights, many classic stories are about adventure and quests…
In modern times, Hollywood knows that quests are an easy sell. Consider the blockbuster franchises Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, and countless others. The tougher the odds and the higher the stakes, the better…
Most of these quest stories are told over and over in different ways, often with a fair amount of exaggeration. They can be engaging stories, but for the most part they aren’t real. We enjoy them because, for a brief time, they have the power to alter our belief in what’s possible… Maybe there really is a holy grail somewhere out there, just waiting to be discovered.
Reading: by the Guatemalan writer Jeanne Mendez (Santa Cruz la Laguna), a piece on “Keepsakes,” that appeared in Sun Magazine (Feb. 2014)
We kept it in a teapot my husband’s mother had given us years before. It was a tiny skeleton key, dull silver in color with a cloverleaf design at one end, and it unlocked my husband’s “treasure chest,” a beautiful green wooden box carved with flowers and leaves.
When I had spotted the box at the secondhand shop near our New York City apartment, I’d known right away that he would love it. I gave it to him that Christmas with three chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil at the bottom and the key taped to the gift tag.
“Every boy needs a treasure chest,” I said.
At first he used it as a place to keep his pipes and roach clips and nickel bags of pot. Eventually other treasures found their way inside: An old Indian coin. A torn piece of a dollar bill whose other pieces were kept by four friends. (They’d planned to get together and reunite the dollar in Central Park in the year 2000, no matter what, but some of them died in Vietnam.) A Carter/Mondale campaign button. A lock of hair from our son’s first haircut. A photo, taken on our honeymoon, of my husband mooning me from a secluded lake. A business card from Famous Ray’s Pizza on West 11th Street — our favorite.
In the days after his funeral, when I was alone, I’d open the box at night and breathe in the smell of old wood and carefully pick each item up. Then I’d put them back and turn the key in the lock.
It was nothing, really: just a grown man’s treasures in a tiny little box.
Hidden Treasures
A Sermon Delivered on November 9, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
In the Gehrmann family, searching for hidden treasures is a well-established family tradition. Ever since our kids were old enough to be actively involved in their birthday celebrations, rather than simply presenting them with their gifts, Elaine and I would hide them around the house. The kids’ challenge was to find them, with the help of little clues we wrote on slips of paper.
Now that they are ostensibly adults, our kids help set up the treasure hunt for their parents’ birthdays. So for instance, on my birthday last month, our daughter Sophia, who was home from college, was in charge of writing the clues. Since we have a shared family fondness for movie trivia, the clues touched on TV shows and videos we had watched together. For instance:
Frank Underwood's now President,
Now he's got the power,
If you go upstairs,
You'll find something hidden in the _________.
(congregational response: “shower”)
and
Remember in Superbad?
The baddest kid was McLovin,
If you're looking for more presents,
Check in the __________.
(congregational response: “oven”)
* * *
Searching for hidden treasures is a game lots of children like to play. But a fascination with treasure hunts isn’t limited to the young. A lot of fully grown adults have made the search for hidden riches a serious hobby, and sometimes even a full-time job – whether exploring ancient ruins, dark caves, desert islands, or the watery ocean depths.
I have never been a very serious treasure hunter myself. But I confess I do get a vicarious jolt of excitement when I hear of treasure hunters who actually do strike gold.
A while back the New York Times reported on an unemployed British man living on welfare who made a remarkable find in the field of an English farmer. “It was the stuff of dreams: a hoard of early Anglo-Saxon treasure, …dating from the seventh century [with] more than 1,500 pieces of intricately worked gold and silver.” Experts said it was one the most important discoveries in British archeological history. One of them said looking at the trove of priceless artifacts brought tears to her eyes.
In my mind the best part about this particular discovery is that, as the article said, it wasn’t “the outcome of a carefully planned archaeological enterprise, but the product of a lone amateur stumbling [around] with a metal detector.”
The amateur’s name is Terry Herbert. Terry Herbert spent the last eighteen years, or so, scouring fields and back lots without finding anything of much value. But ever since that day in July when his metal detector started to beep in the farmer’s field, he says, he has been seeing piles of gold in his sleep.
He says, on the day of his discovery he changed the mantra that he usually used for good luck. “I have this phrase that I say sometimes — ‘Spirits of yesterday, take me where the coins appear’ — but on that day I changed ‘coins’ to ‘gold.’ I don’t know why I said it that day, but I think somebody was listening.” (“Experts Awed by Anglo-Saxon Treasure,” by John F. Burns, NYT, Sep. 25, 2009)
* * *
Now some would say that our impulse to hunt for hidden treasure is similar to the temptation that sometimes drives us to buy lottery tickets hoping to win “Mega Millions” or the “Lucky Day Lotto” jackpot. It is all about money, and dreams of being rich and never needing to work another day in our lives. It is an expression of our baser greedy instincts that imagine the acquisition of worldly treasure as the key to human happiness – a kind of secular salvation.
Religious people have long known that this is not the way to really find happiness. If our goal is real happiness, personal fulfillment, wholeness, a sense of spiritual health, and a life of purpose and meaning – then we need to turn our attention to a different kind of treasure.
The Christian scriptures offer a clue in the words attributed to Jesus. He said, don’t lay up treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up your treasures in heaven, where neither moth or rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Spiritual teachings hint at a different kind of treasure, a treasure we can’t hold in our hands, but in our hearts. A treasure that is not material, but mythical. Some kind of “holy grail” somewhere out there, just waiting to be discovered.
* * *
In my family, we know all about the Holy Grail. That’s what the silly medieval knights were looking for in the classic British movie spoof “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” It’s what Indiana Jones was trying to find in the movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” a mysterious cup that holds magical healing powers, and the promise of eternal life.
But these are only two modern takes on a much older story. As Alan Lupack, a professor of English at the University of Rochester, explains, the Holy Grail first found its way into the literary imagination in a 12th century re-telling of the King Arthur legends. The Holy Grail was thought to be the actual cup from which Christ drank during the last supper. The same cup Joseph of Arimathea used to catch his blood, as he hung on the cross. As the story goes, Joseph brought the grail to England, where it remained, guarded by Joseph’s descendants. The keepers of the grail needed to be of pure thought, and word, and deed. When one of them failed to maintain this spiritual clarity, the grail disappeared. In the King Arthur legend, the grail quest was not a treasure hunt, but rather the highest spiritual pursuit.
* * *
The scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell offers a different angle on the origins of the Holy Grail. One ancient story says the Grail was brought down from heaven to earth by angels – neutral angels. You see, this happened during the war in heaven between God and Satan, when all the angels caught up in the conflict took sides, some with Satan and some with God. The Grail was delivered to earth by the few neutral angels, right in the middle of the battlefield between the forces of good and the forces of evil.
And so the Grail represents the spiritual path that leads between the opposing polarities of good and evil, fear and desire… and charts a middle way. “The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness,” Campbell says.
* * *
Searching for spiritual treasures is a tricky enterprise. It is often a confounding adventure that can leave us feeling as if we were on a hopeless wild goose chase. Trying to follow our dreams, we may find ourselves traveling to distant lands, like poor Isaac, in the Hasidic story, who heeds the voice he heard in a dream, and heads off on a journey through forests, over mountains, across rivers, to the place where he thinks his treasure must be. Only to discover that what he is looking for is actually buried under the stove of the house in which he had been living all his life. His treasure was right there.
Where can we find our treasure? Is it close by or is it far away? Is it in heaven or on earth? Can it be held in our hands or only in our hearts? Is it here now or will we find it in time to come? Heck – would we even know a treasure if we saw it?
Maybe our greatest treasures arrive without our knowledge. And maybe we don’t even notice when they slip away. Maybe we have eyes and don’t see. Maybe we have ears and don’t hear.
For as long as men and women have practiced religion, for as long as we have worshiped and prayed, for as long as we have believed and doubted – the spiritual quest has had the same goal: to teach us to open our eyes and ears, to open our minds and hearts, to the real world and the fullness of life. When we truly learn this lesson, we will find surprising and unimagined treasures.
At its best, religious ritual can help us on our way. Joseph Campbell tells the story of a ritual he experienced that was remarkably effective. It took place years ago in Kentucky. It was arranged by two couples from the University of Vermont. It involved forty-nine people, and Campbell was one of them.
Starting off in the morning, they were divided into seven groups of seven, and were told to each spend the day thinking about seven things without which they wouldn’t want to live. “What are seven things for which you feel your life is worth living?” they were asked. After thinking about that all day, they were each supposed to gather up seven little objects, small enough to hold in your hand, to represent the seven cherished things. Seven treasures. And you were supposed to know which was which.
In the evening they went down a wooded road in the dark to the mouth of a cave. At the entrance of the cave was a man wearing a mask of a dog. This was Cerberus, of Greek mythology, guarding the gate of hell. He put his hand out and said, “Give me that which you least cherish.” When you gave him one of your seven little objects, he let you enter the cave, carrying the six remaining things you most cherished. As you slowly continued further into the depths of the cavernous darkness, you passed five further stations where you were asked to give up the one thing you cherish least. Until you were left with one object in your hand that represented what you treasured most.
“And you found out what it was, believe me,” Campbell says. “You really, really did. And the order in which you gave up your treasures was revelatory: you really knew what your order of values was.”
Then, finally, you came to an exit guarded by two people. You had to pass through the middle, right between them. But before you could go, you had to give up that which you most treasured.
“I can tell you that ritual worked,” Campbell says.
“All of the participants with whom I’ve talked had an actual experience of moska, “release,” when they had given up their last treasure. One damned fool was the exception. He [didn’t] give up anything. That’s how seriously the ritual was taken. When he was asked to give up something, he just stooped down, picked up a pebble, and handed that over. That’s the refusal of [life’s] call…
The exciting thing to me was the actual experience. It was a [joyous feeling]. Watching your earlier [objects] go really did change your feeling for the treasures you’d given up. It increased your love for them without the tenacity. I was amazed.” (from Reflections on the Art of Living, excerpted in God in All Worlds, edited by L. Vardey, p. 214-215)
A spiritual treasure hunt can be perplexing and paradoxical. When we let our treasures go, we may discover that they continue to remain with us. Rooted in the depths of our being they remain unmistakably and unshakably present. When we open our hands, we may realize that the treasures in our hearts remain more secure then ever, where neither moth nor rust can consume, nor thieves can steal them.
* * *
It may be that we all need a treasure chest. Every child needs a treasure chest. A little box with a tiny key, in which to place our most cherished treasures. Piles of gold and silver don’t fit into it. And frankly, the tiny treasures that belong into this box are more precious than gold.
Jeanne Mendez knew the true value of her husband’s treasures: the torn piece of a dollar bill, the lock hair from their son’s first haircut, the photo from their honeymoon, the card from the favorite pizza place.
If you had a tiny treasure chest, what would you put in it?
The objects we most treasure, of course, are only symbols of something else. The objects we accumulate, and sometimes hoard, are symbols of happiness, memories of love, tokens of affection, reminders of the dreams we once had, and the dreams we still hope to fulfill.
When we lay up these treasures - the real treasures of our lives - we aren’t cultivating greed, we are cultivating gratitude.
In our search for life’s greatest treasures, we may not need to travel to distant lands. Maybe all we need to do is allow ourselves to be guided by gratitude. Then we may learn that every day is a treasure. Then our eyes and ears will be opened. Then our hearts will be full of joy.
May we have the wisdom to recognize the clues all around us.
May we have the courage to pick up the key that will unlock
The hidden treasures of our hearts.
Grateful for yesterday’s gifts of love,
May the goal of our quest be to build a better tomorrow.
Amen.
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