Chapter 13

The Cinnamon Roll

I realize my mythological structure is rather bare when it comes to a mythic story to hold it. That is why I go to church most Sunday mornings. It is nice to be in the midst of the flock without being the “paid shepherd.” I attend a United Methodist Church, since that has been our family tradition since my great-grandfather left his Iowa Quaker community and settled in a small Kansas town.

And what I personally attend church for is the flock itself. The people. The food. The fellowship. Did I say “food?” My wife and I go to Senior Lunch, and it’s pretty much church – without the sermons and theology.

That is not to say I ignore the sermons, the liturgy, the hymns. These are the elements of the environment. And I do listen to the sermons (which are well done), as a retired professional retail theologian.

I write all this to set the stage for this particular morning. We were reading the Call to Worship, reading it from the large screen above the chancel. I don’t remember the particular words. But in the midst of those words, I realized something important.

We are, and need to be, grateful people. When I take a momentary break of listing everything that is bad about the world, I am hit by the sheer splendor, the cascade of marvels beyond imagination, the unfair fortuitousness of my whole existence, and I feel gratitude. I want to give thanks.

But the weakness of my clever theology is that the Universal I Am is all spread out there among zillions of stars and gazillions of galaxies. It feels like my gratefulness is spread infinitesimally thin. When we say, “Thank you,” it’s nice to have someone to say it to.

And that is where God comes in. Is there a God? All I know, for myself, is that I need God to be there to hear my expressions of joy. And expressions of grief. And expressions of anger. And mostly joy.

Is this the reason for “the one true religion – many of them?” It is not that some scheming people decided to invent God in order to control the masses. Having a God is how we ordinary humans – each with our own particular Me, yet somehow built from the I Am – get in touch with all this. We support shamans and priests and preachers and deacons to help us organize a reality around the Holy.

And yes, we give God an authority beyond everything else. We give our holy men and women an authority to explain all this to us, to connect us to this presence.

At the beginning of this book, I told you that I started following my suspicions. And that was what this whole book has been doing. We discovered the I Am and The Me and the multitude of ways we struggle to get along and be happy and come through pain and suffering. We took a peek at what it looks like for a group to break down their barriers and how a simple understanding can calm the real, lived world.

We were on a Wild Goose chase. It circled above us, calling us with its honks. And, evidently, it brought us – well, me – around in a complete circle. It is more like the spiral of a cinnamon roll – when each trip around moves to a different place, a deeper place.

Morning worship moved on as it always does. Another hymn. Another familiar melody floating out over padded pews and old memories.

And then we sang Blessed Assurance.

I have always had a difficult relationship with that hymn. Or perhaps with parts of it. “Perfect submission, all is at rest” sounded to me less like salvation and more like dissolution. Like the extinguishing of self. Like drifting into some endless spiritual anesthesia where all sharpness and surprise disappear forever.

Perhaps that says more about me than the hymn.

But standing there among the flock – retired now, no longer the man with the microphone and the carefully timed sermon illustrations – I heard it differently.

Or perhaps I suspected it differently.

Maybe “perfect submission” is not the surrender of consciousness into nothingness. Maybe it is what happens when the frantic little Me loosens its grip for a moment. When the endless calculating, defending, fearing, comparing, regretting machinery finally grows quiet enough for something deeper to be noticed.

Not conquered.
Not explained.
Not systematized.

Just noticed.

And perhaps “all is at rest” does not mean the universe stops moving. God knows it never does. Galaxies spin. Civilizations rise and collapse. Arthritis flares up. Dogs grow old and break our hearts. Nations scream at each other across glowing screens.

But for one brief moment, the soul stops trying to win. The Me stops clawing for certainty. And beneath all the noise, the I Am simply is.

Maybe that is what the old hymns were saying in the only language they had. Perhaps it is us theologians who want propositions, diagrams, and flow charts. Instead, we get long-loved words in a song.

Because sometimes human beings do not need an explanation nearly as much as we need a melody sturdy enough to carry our gratitude. And we might notice the Wild Goose.