In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Lewis and
Clarke to find a waterway to the Pacific coast.
They were to find the source of the Mississippi and then portage their
canoes over the watershed and sail down a westward flowing stream all the way
to the Pacific Ocean. After many
struggles and setbacks they did indeed find the source of the Mississippi. Merriweather Lewis then climbed up the
Limbhi pass eager to see what lay beyond and hopefully a passageway to the
Pacific. .Instead ahead of him for
hundreds of miles and high into the sky lay the snowcapped peaks of the Rockie
mountains. With that inimitable early
pioneering attitude he wrote in his journal ‘And so we proceeded on’.
They were now travelling off the map, the information they
had was hopelessly inadequate and bore little resemblance to what actually was
in front of them. The Geography of Hope
gave way to the Geography of Reality. Canoes had to be replaced with horses and a
teenage Indian squaw became their guide…what was new country for them was home
for her. Their mission also changed from finding the
elusive north-west passage to China to simply exploring what was there. They embraced this new broader mission to
such an extent that after wintering on a very damp Oregon Coast they split into
two groups for six weeks on the way home and explored as wide an area as they
could. Embracing and then thriving in the
new reality that faced them required courage and humility in equal measure.
Courage to not turn back when the map ended, when their
canoes ran out of river, when clearly they could not accomplish their given
mission and when the new country seemed so daunting and when they were already
so tired and depleted from their journey so far. Humility to accept that they needed to trust
a teenage mother to replace their map, that they needed to learn new skills and
to let go of their previous expertise (you can’t canoe over mountains). Humility to also admit the end of their given
mission into which they had invested so much, in order to embrace the greater and more daunting
mission before them even though they were already running on empty.
Ted Bolsinger, in his book ‘Canoeing the Mountains’, explores
this story and its relevance for the church today, a theme I’ll probably come
back to another time. My interest is
primarily how this may reflect something of our own personal experience of
life. There is a sense in which the future
is always an unknown country and while we may have a general idea where we are
heading (what is your Pacific Coast?
your retirement, your death, your children flourishing, a sense of well
being…???) we actually have no idea what may lie in between. It can be healthy to have a geography of
hope so long as it is very provisional and we hold to it lightly when the
landscape we thought we would encounter turns out to be quite different. This can be unexpected circumstances such as
sudden ill health, unemployment, a new job opportunity, finding love, your
children making radical choices and so on.
It can also though be about personal changes such as a sense of calling
to a new vocation, a religious conversion, a loss of faith, a therapeutic
journey, resetting of priorities and so on.
In this new landscape, the courage to lean into the unknown
and unfamiliar and the humility to accept that yet again we are starting over
as a learner can release us to explore the fullness of life that God calls us
to, no matter how daunting the changes may seem. As we look for new guides we find new enrichening friendships, as we become
learners we discover just how much we didn’t know we didn’t know, and as we
accept the challenge to leave the old mission behind we realise how great our
calling actually is. The Geography of
Reality is simply the truth and as Jesus once said ‘You will know the truth and
the truth will set you free.’ Happy
exploring.
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