Traveling Lightly, or Putting Down the Cabbages by Rev. Leah Goodwin

In the world of transportation, of movement between places, two types of people exist: those who travel lightly, and those who fairly emphatically do not.

I make this claim as an unashamed member of the latter camp, part of that group of reluctant nomads whose tents are pitched swiftly and nests feathered thoroughly, who break camp with heavy hearts and heavier bags.

Not much mind-meeting is to be had between those who travel unencumbered and those who labor in their journeying. For the latter, travel is a process to be endured and a skill-set to be mastered.

Traveling lightly, on the other hand, is an art. It is an art, and not just an area of competence, because two quite separate aspects—the technical and the stylistic, or put another way, the strategic and the attitudinal— must come together in its successful execution.

There is the technical aspect of such travel: the miniature bottles of shampoo and Lilliputian toothpaste tube; the careful selection of clothing, shoes, ties or jewelry such that a few items combine into surprisingly many, and at least passably interesting, outfits; the clever use of suitcase space for layering, rolling, folding, and (very rarely) squashing said items.

And then there is style—the attitude with which one’s peregrinations are conducted. When it comes down to it, traveling lightly has less to do with mechanics—with the poundage of one’s suitcase—and more to do with a person’s spirit. Anticipation at setting forth, forward impulse at the road’s bend, joy in serendipitous encounter, serenity amid frantic rush and patience during delay, confidence in safe arrival—all these are the marks of one who travels with easy yoke and light burden. Those who travel lightly enjoy being in transit. Those who do not, regardless of the weight of their baggage or the promptness of their flights, in their deepest hearts just want to go home.

Magic dwells in light travel. Alchemy resides there, transmuting struggle into high adventure and folly into revelation. If you want to be religious about it, traveling lightly is a gift.  It is a state of grace.

***

The other day, a new and already dear friend told me a Sufi tale about this gift of traveling lightly. He was generous enough to share it with me, and now I will pass it on to you:

Many years ago, a people were driven from their beautiful island home. They migrated to another island, poor and sparse by comparison to the home for which they longed. Someday, they were promised, they would be able to return to their homeland, but that day would be centuries in the coming.

Remembering their homeland made life in exile more miserable, and so the islanders tried to forget.

Hundreds of years passed, and the people’s collective memory dimmed. Many now claimed that there had never been a homeland. But a few people believed the myth of their origin, cherished the dream of return, and passed that belief down through the generations.

One day the swimming instructors, who were the only ones who had preserved the old ideas, announced that it was time to swim home. Most of the islanders by now had never even heard the story of their homeland. They looked at the swimmers with curiosity (and no small degree of pity), shook their heads, and then went on with their lives.

The swimming instructors, meanwhile, told anyone who would listen about the paradise that was their true home. Most thought the swimmers were one card short of a full deck, but a few people here and there believed them. These believers presented themselves for swimming lessons so that they might make the great journey.

Such a person would come up to a swimming instructor and say, “I want to learn how to swim.”

“All right,” the instructor would reply, “But what’s the deal with the bushel of cabbages you’re dragging behind you?”

“I’ll need them for food when I finally arrive in the homeland.”

“Ah. But the foods of the homeland are far tastier and more nourishing than cabbage, so you don’t need to carry all of that with you.”

“You don’t understand; I need this cabbage or I’ll starve. How can you expect me to voyage out into the unknown without any food supply?”

“But it will be impossible for you to swim if you’re dragging those cabbages along with you. They will tire you long before you reach home; then they will drag you under, and you will drown.”

“Well, in that case, I suppose I can’t go. You call my cabbages a hindrance, but I need them to survive.”

Since so many conversations with the swimming instructors ended like this, very few ever managed to make it back to their homeland. There were a few, however, who looked up at their instructor and said, “You know, cabbage is really pretty tasty. Care to join me for supper?”

***

Letting go of the cabbage. Silly though the image may seem, this ability to let go, to trust in the journey itself, to realize one’s own dependence and fragility and yet trust in the reality and worth of one’s journey—this ability lies at the heart of traveling lightly, whether a person is on the way to Kansas City or the Kingdom of God. It is strength in weakness, foolish wisdom.  Letting go of the cabbage is possibly the truest gift we have.

***

Jesus knew a thing or two about traveling lightly. He had the technical part down pat— after all, he wasn’t much for baggage or property. “Consider the lilies of the field,” he said; “they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I tell you Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like these!”  He sent the disciples out with a cloak, a pair of sandals, and a staff—and instructions to give all these things away should someone have need of it.

And our Lord knew a little something about the spirit of traveling lightly, too. He lived for the journey. He took on his own humanity, in fact, so that he might travel the road we travel—which brings us to this morning, and our Lord’s journey up a mountainside to give a sermon.

The message of the Sermon on the Mount, and particularly of the Beatitudes that appear in its opening chapter, is often read as The Ten Commandments Part Two, the “newly revised and expanded edition” of the rulebook Moses was given by God.  They are the “new law,” the authorized handbook to a soul-making life given to us by the Big Kahuna Himself, the word of God direct from the Divine Human source without fire or cloud or special effects, at least as far as their delivery goes.

The problem with this interpretation arises when we domesticate that new law, when we fail to see just what claims Jesus makes with his litany of blessings.

The Beatitudes, like the Ten Commandments, are strikingly well-crafted. They are short and incisive, brief and powerful, punchy and packed to the gills with implications. And they carry empty space within them, space for meaning—“space for the Kingdom,” as Willie VanDoren put it last week in this pulpit.

I invite you to hear the Beatitudes again as though for the first time, to let them fall on your ears not as familiar platitude or doctrines, but as though you were hearing them hollered from a mountainside by an itinerant rabbi named Yeshua:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

If the Beatitudes shock us or seem ridiculous, it is because they tell the story of a world that is foreign to us—as foreign to us, some twenty centuries later, as it was to the crowds who listened to the Lord in his own mortal day. They are, in the words of Patricia Farris, “more description than instruction, more report than directive. They compose a litany in which all the promises point to the same reality . . . the Beatitudes turn the world upside down with their shocking promise of hope to the hopeless, comfort to the bereaved, power to the powerless.”

The language of the Beatitudes is not the vocabulary of the law court, but rather the language of storytelling, of epic, of fairy tale. The Greek here is in the indicative rather than the imperative; until the final beatitude, the sentences are statements of reality as opposed to commands. Jesus does not exhort us to do, or to be, these qualities for the sake of reward. He is not telling us that we ought to do these things—be spiritually destitute, mourn, suffer oppression, hunger and thirst—in order that we might be blessed. He summons and commands us with this litany of blessing, yes—but not to the literal enactment of his words.

No, with these blessings the Lord speaks something far more radical. He is, actually, “calling it as he sees it.” He is speaking of something deeper and truer than the very real afflictions, spiritual and physical, that he sees in the crowd before him: desolation, mourning, hunger and thirst. He is teaching the crowds, teaching the disciples, teaching us, about the way things really are. Jesus is telling the story of our origin, which too few of us remember and even fewer really believe. He is telling us about life on our own beautiful island across the sea, our own nearly-forgotten homeland.

He is telling us, my fellow children, about the kingdom of heaven.

And he tells us this story not in riddles (which is what divine love looks like to world-weary eyes) but in our mother tongue, the language of blessing.

“Blessed,” or to use another translation, “honored,” are the outcasts and the miserable and the persecuted. The damaged are made whole, the afflicted are healed. This is Jesus’ claim: that somewhere that seems unimaginably far over the horizon but is really already in our own hearts, in some time that seems a long way off but is really already here, the kingdom of heaven waits.  This is the kingdom that Swedenborg described in Heaven and Hell 267—the one in which “the intelligence and wisdom of one individual is shared with another . . . where everyone shares everything of value . . . where the very nature of love is to want what is one’s own to belong to another,” where no one is left out and no one is powerless, and above all no one is ever forsaken.

As our reading from Micah rather fiercely reminds us, God does not abandon his children:

Hear what the LORD says: Rise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the LORD, and you enduring foundations of the earth; for the LORD has a controversy with his people, and he will contend with Israel. “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!  For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery; and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised, what Balaam son of Beor answered him, and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the saving acts of the LORD.”

“With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?  (Micah 6:1-8)

In the shelter of the divine, made whole in our poverty and girded with God’s wisdom, we are each summoned. We are called, brothers and sisters, not to bring the kingdom, which is already here, but to reveal the kingdom. We are to live so that the kingdom of heaven shines forth. We are to act so that the shocking promises of the Beatitudes cease to be shocking, so that the beauty promised in that litany no longer turns the world upside down, but describes it as it is, right side up, blessings and all.

The road to the kingdom of God may not cross land or sea, but it is a road nonetheless, and all of us have journeys to make to get there. And it’s not an easy journey—not even one we can imagine with our mortal minds, really. After all, “the nature of the wisdom of heaven’s angels is almost beyond comprehension because it so transcends human wisdom that there are no means of comparison—and anything transcendent seems to be nothing at all.” (Heaven and Hell 265)

The very glory of the kingdom makes it hard to see, at least at first.

And so how are we to make our journeys toward the Kingdom? How are we to transfigure ourselves and the world so that the real world, the heavenly world, might come to be? And what supplies do we take with us on our journey home?

It’s simple really. Simple to say, and probably shockingly simple to do, if we can just convince ourselves of who we really are, and where we really are.

Put down the cabbages.

You won’t need them.

Put down your protections, your cynicism, your stratagems and darkness and doubt and self-blame. Put down the selfishness, the fear, the apathy. Lay them all down.

And then remember the blessings.

Remember the story of your homeland. Listen to the origin myth, and know that it is true.

Open your soul’s eyes to the Kingdom.

Because, really, knowing that heaven is already here is all the baggage you will need. So travel lightly.

And start moving.