Tag Archives: faith

You Have Left The Planned Route

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“Right now there are thirty-one satellites zipping around the world with nothing better to do than help you find your way to the grocery store.” 

 Ed Burnette, Hello, Android: Introducing Google’s Mobile Development Platform
Heather in the Highlands, 2015

The Highlands of Scotland are filled with magic and mystery. The hills fairly echo with legends and tales of clans and kings, so it’s rather fitting that it was in the Highlands that I first heard that disembodied, decidedly British voice that would eventually entice me to listen for and respond to its every command.

In the summer of 2004, Dave and I, together with our son, and soon-to-be daughter-in-law, made our first unescorted trip to Scotland.   We were all so exhausted and jet-lagged when we reached our first night’s lodging that our heads barely hit the pillow that night before we were asleep. The next morning refreshed and fortified with a full Scottish breakfast we followed the map north to Cawdor Castle.  We had a lovely time exploring the castle and the grounds while talking of Shakespeare and Macbeth, but like many first-time tourists to the Highlands, we could hardly wait to reach our next destination…the famed Loch Ness.

From the Gardens at Cawdor Castle, 2004

As we prepared to leave the car park at Cawdor Castle, Jeremy and Jenna…driver and navigator respectively… suggested that we try out the GPS system that came with our car, after all, why not? At that time…sixteen years ago…none of us had any experience at all with a navigational system. How difficult could it be? It might be fun. Confident that like most techy things programming the guidance system would be rather intuitive, Jenna plugged in our desired destination, and within minutes we were off.  Our British friend guided us skillfully through the twisting streets and roundabouts of Inverness and in less than forty-five minutes we arrived on the eastern end of the northern shore of the Loch Ness. Easy Peasy.

On the Shore of Loch Ness Waiting for Nessie, 2004

We found a wayside pull-off where we parked the car, looked for Nessie, posed for pictures, and collected pebbles from the shore. It was blissful to be on this amazing adventure together at a place we had all heard about from childhood. Such a delightful morning.  As we listened to the waters caressing the shore someone shared that they had read that the southern, less-traveled side of the loch was even prettier than the more populated side. “Sounds good.” we agreed. “Let’s go that way.”

“Two Roads Diverged In A Wood And I – I Took The One Less Traveled By, And That Has Made All The Difference”

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

“Sometimes The Road Less Traveled Is Less Traveled For A Reason.”

Jerry Seinfeld

We planned to go south to the ruins of Urquhart Castle, around the end of the Loch near Fort Augustus, then turn north again along the quieter side returning to our B and B for a much-anticipated nap.  We’d rely on our new found friend…Gladys…to guide us.  Surely, she’d know the best route. 

Urquhart Castle and The South Side of the Loch, 2004

She didn’t. 

Well…actually…maybe she did, but there was a slight problem in communication.

Somewhere near Fort Augustus, we made a wrong turn. What we didn’t know at the time was that Gladys would recalculate the original route and find a new way to get us to our destination.  What a disaster! Bliss became calamity. We tried to self-correct using instinct, our maps, and the conflicting and confusing instructions we were getting from Gladys. We never saw the loch again. The roads were narrow, twisty, and unmarked. We were completely lost.  Filled with frustration, Jeremy pulled the car off the road and asked to see the map for himself.  

“I’m 100% sure this is where we are,” said Jenna pointing confidently to a thin blue line.

“Jenna,” Jeremy laughed, “That’s a river!”  

With perseverance and pure dumb luck, we eventually made it back to our B and B well past nap time. The next morning at breakfast as we were lamenting our experience a fellow traveler overhearing our dilemma clued us into the rerouting feature. We had been fighting against poor Gladys for hours. She must have been so confused.  At this point, Dave mentioned that perhaps we should look at the manual.  

“There’s a manual?”  J and J said in unison.  “There’s a manual?!

”Well, yes,” Dave replied.”But I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”

The kids just rolled their eyes.

“When all else fails, read the instructions”

Annonymous

Navigational systems have made advancements since those early days, but I think they could be still be perfected by the addition of an elementary school teacher to the design team. A teacher would add features that could make the entire experience smoother and much more pleasant.  For example, when making a turn or exiting a round-about successfully, a friendly voice would add words of confirmation and support to let the driver know they were on the right track and that they had made the maneuver correctly…Excellent, Nice job, or Way-to-go.  If an error was made the voice would remark in calm, reassuring tones…Whoops, Almost, or Sorry, not quite.  To avoid panic she’d quickly add…Relax. We can figure this out together.  Give me a minute to find the best way to help. Then as the route was being recalculated the driver would hear a few bars of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds. “Don’t worry about a thing ‘Cause every little thing gonna be alright.”

Three Little Birds, 2016

For the most part, I have found my experiences with GPS to be very satisfying. The Voice-in-the Box has directed me safely through city traffic at rush hour and on backcountry roads that have no obvious names, but every so often that sweet little lady has led me on some wild adventures as well. For example: repeatedly directing Dave to turn the wrong way on a one-way street in Amsterdam; leading us to the terror-inducing pass in Colorado widely accepted as the highest standard passenger vehicle road in the United States; twice taking us to ferry crossings where the ferries were no longer running; and once in Vermont on my way to a bridal shower I was routed past two naked bike riders on their way to the Montpelier segment of the World Naked Bike Ride… yes, there really is such a thing…through a trailer park, and ending in a gravel pit with a cheerful…”You have reached your destination”.

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.“

Helen Keller

I have never worried too much about taking a wrong turn or misreading the map. Perhaps that comes from growing up in Michigan which is divided into mile-square sections and bordered by the Great Lakes. Finding your way primarily involves following roads that are laid out in right angles. Go too far in nearly any direction and you’ll eventually come to one of the big lakes. Of course, go too far south and that’s another story. Hello Ohio and Indiana.

Once, when my children were small, I became disoriented in an unfamiliar city and we found ourselves in a parking lot instead of on the highway.

“This is what I call an adventure,” I said cheerfully.

“It’s also what we call lost,” replied my young son.

True, I suppose, but the best adventures and the most interesting stories always seem to involve getting lost..literally or figuratively… and then finding your way again.

During the last several months I have often felt lost, disoriented, and adrift. Frankly, I could use some help. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we had a GPS to help us find our way through these distressing COVID times? Sometimes it feels like I’ve lost contact with the satellite without a clue of how to proceed. Am I heading in the direction of the beautiful side of the loch or just wandering aimlessly on the back roads? I would happily make a legal U-turn as soon as it is safe to do so if I had any idea when or where that might be. Like everyone else, I want to know how much longer I’ll be on this highway before my next maneuver and when I could expect to reach my destination. I’d also be grateful to know what other obstacles, delays, and detours lie ahead and if there is an alternate route.

Waterbury, VT, 2019

I really, really want someone to give me the kind of message I would get from OnStar. “You have left the planned route. Directions will resume automatically when you return to the route. Do you need updated directions?”

Oh, Gladys. Where are you when I need you.

We’ve all left the planned route and yes, we need updated directions.

Crossing The Threshold

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“I’m a dweller on the threshold, And I’m waiting at the door, And I’m standing in the darkness, I don’t want to wait no more…I will walk out of the darkness. And I’ll walk into the light. I will sing the song of ages, And the dawn will end the night.”

Van Morrison, from Dweller on the Threshold
Crossing the Threshold
Star Island

The entire world is standing on the threshold…the narrow place between the world as we knew it just a few months ago and the world as it is becoming.  We watch as other states rush to open and we wonder when or even if we can safely return to activities we once took for granted.  So many questions.

On St. Patrick’s Day, 2019, I was on my way to church when I slipped on the ice and broke my ankle. At the time I was living in a two-hundred-year-old, cape cod house in New England. My house had plenty of character complete with sloping floors,, small doorways, and uneven transitions between the rooms. 

I never mastered crutches, so until I could be given a walking cast my mode of transportation through the house was a knee scooter. One knee and lower leg would rest on the padded seat of the scooter, the other leg provided stability and power and I had handlebars for steering. I got pretty good at making wide turns, moving on the straightaway, and even backing up. The challenge, however, came when I needed to cross the very uneven threshold between one room and another. I really had to concentrate and plan my actions so that I moved the scooter forward without putting it or me off balance. Sometimes this also involved carefully lifting the front wheels slightly off the ground, over the wooden boards, and then setting the scooter back on the floor. Occasionally, it was necessary to rest briefly before repeating the process and moving the rear wheels over the obstacle and into the adjacent room.

Crossing a threshold…literally or figuratively… involves moving from where we are into where we will be. For now, we find ourselves sheltering in place, and much like my knee scooter, we remain directly on the threshold…waiting to make the transition from life before the virus to life after. Eventually, we will cross the space between known and unknown, until then, however, we can only guess at what lies ahead.

Waiting on the Threshold
Lower level in St Peter’s Dom, Trier

Many of us find this condition unsettling, uncomfortable and our equilibrium is off-kilter. No one enjoys being in a state of limbo, but perhaps we could consider this resting on the threshold experience as an unexpected gift. A gift of time that we can use to catch our breath from the abrupt change in our lives, plan our actions for the days ahead, evaluate what we really want to keep and what we have learned to live without.

Although we are together in this space between beginning and ending some of us have had our engines running at full speed…teachers, parents, essential workers, and those working from home have not had the benefit of a little breath-catching time. The unanswered question of when, if, and how things will return to something familiar is an unwelcome complication and an additional stress for all of us, but especially for these folks.

Moving forward…getting all our wheels on the same plane…is going to take courage, bravery, and a good deal of faith.  “Thresholds are dangerous places, “ says Alix E. Harrow. “neither here nor there, and walking across one is like stepping off the edge of a cliff in the naive faith that you’ll sprout wings halfway down. You can’t hesitate, or doubt,” he says.  You can’t fear the in-between.”

The In-between
Montreal, 2019

None of us is sure how long we’ll be staying in this in-between…it would be so much easier if we did… but already we have begun to inch our way toward the other side. Until we sprout wings lets stand on the solid ground of where we are, pull on our big kid pants, lace up our shoes and put one foot in front of the other and step out in faith toward the other side. The length of our stride isn’t important. It’s that we just take those steps and keep on moving forward.

George Harrison of the Beatles once said of Elvis Presley that although they were devoted fans and his music was a great influence on their work, The Beatles always felt sorry for him, because he was alone and they had each other. They had their mates. Everything is better with a mate or two by your side and this pandemic is no exception, but even those of us who have been sheltering in place solo are more like The Beatles than Elvis. We’re all full of trepidation as we stand on this unique threshold, but we are not standing alone. We are making this journey into the future…taking tiny steps toward the other side…with neighbors, family, friends, and many helpful strangers…supporting each other with love and walking side by side. We’ll get through this together. When we support each other we find we are supporting ourselves as well.

Walking With Grandpa
Cochem, 2019

One of my friends, said recently, that we can’t really cross a threshold until we can imagine what lies on the other side. It seems that lately when I imagine what might lie ahead the soundtrack is similar to one of those movie scenes where the intensity of the horns and strings gradually increase and you hold your breath as the suspense builds until you find yourself shouting at the screen trying to warn the protagonist…”Get away! Get away! And for God’s sake, don’t open that door!” But…sometimes imagining what’s under the bed is much worse than the dirty socks that got kicked under there in the first place.

It’s also true that sometimes amazing adventures are simply beyond our imagining. Could Lucy have imagined Narnia as she pushed her way towards the back of the wardrobe or Alice imagine the adventure at the bottom of the rabbit hole? And remember, in the movie version, it wasn’t until she landed in Oz that Dorothy found color

The Dublin-based creative agency, The Tenth Man created a moving video called The Phoenix. It offers hope and an important reminder that this crisis will not last forever. We will cross the threshold. It will end.

“When this will all end we will be reunited, so now, just for a minute, let’s imagine it. The moment you’ll hear that voice again. See that face again Feel that embrace again. And we will embrace, the old, the young the family, the friends, friendly rivals, the rival rivals those you wouldn’t have thought twice about touching before and we will cry Oh, we will cry. Fat hot wet tears will roll down our faces as we hold each other tight and for far too long because when this will all end it won’t feel right to ever let go again. And when this will all end you’ll ask me to dance and I will say yes let’s dance.  Let’s dance for the dawn of a new world, for those we love, for those we’ve lost, for another chance and you’ll put on your red shoes and dance my blues away and as we sway you’ll look In my eyes at my soul reviving, burning, arising,  And those fat hot wet tears will fall and we will never ever forget it and we will never ever let go again. And this, this will all end.”

Yes, This will all end and we will find ourselves on the other side of the threshold until then we’ll just put one foot in front of the other and move slowly toward the other side.

Originally shared with the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Michigan, Mt Pleasant, Michigan

May 10th, 2020