And a world begins under the map—On the need to make errors and poetically, creatively, magically, invoke new worlds of being
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| One of my many falling-apart maps |
A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation.
This piece begins and ends with a reading of a poem by the American poet and pacifist, William Stafford (1914–1993), called “Course in Creative Writing.”
Course in Creative Writing by William Stafford
They want a wilderness with a map—
but how about errors that give a new start?—
or leaves that are edging into the light?—
or the many places a road can’t find?
Maybe there’s a land where you have to sing
to explain anything: you blow a little whistle
just right and the next tree you meet is itself.
(And many a tree is not there yet.)
Things come toward you when you walk.
You go along singing a song that says
where you are going becomes its own
because you start. You blow a little whistle?
And a world begins under the map.
At the local liberal, free religious community where I am minister, we have begun to recognise that we need to begin to make a new path to ancient truth, one that is safer than the known way. We are doing this because we can now see that the known roads still being followed by so many liberal religious institutions are leading inexorably towards dissolution and disappearance.
In such a situation, as we willingly set out to make a new path that is clearly heading into uncharted territory, a kind of wilderness, there is an understandable nervousness amongst some that everything will assuredly go wrong and that it’s best to stick very close to the status quo. What we need to do, or so the argument goes, is to take a map — that is to say a pre-prepared blueprint for action — to take a map with us into the wilderness that would at least help reduce the possibility of us making errors.
But what if the making of errors is precisely what need to learn or, rather re-learn, as we make with our footprints this new path to ancient truth?
Think back to your childhood. Painful though it often was, when we were children, making errors was a daily experience. But hindsight shows us it was always our errors that gave us the new starts we needed to grow and develop and so push out ever further, well and creatively into the wilderness out of which a new world was unfolding all around us. In the process we discovered that we ourselves were leaves edging into the light and began to see that there were so many places that the old roads of our forebears just couldn’t find.
But, nevertheless, we had a yearning to seek out these places and, by making a path that we felt was safer than the known way, we willingly entered into a wilderness land where the language required to make sense of it all was so very different from the by now tamed, formal languages we had learnt at home, church, synagogue, temple and school. We quickly discovered it was a land where, figuratively — but, perhaps, sometimes also literally, especially for those of us who became musicians — we had to learn a new language in which it was necessary to sing to explain anything, a land in which, when we blew a little whistle just right, the next tree we met was fully alert and itself so that we, as leaves edging into the light, could truly feel our deep kinship with it.
This is nothing less than a process of invoking whole new worlds of being, a process I am explicitly going to call magical. It is, I think, what Stafford is getting at when he says, “where you are going becomes its own because you start.”
Anyway, as children, we knew we must daily cast such creative poetic spells because we also intuited that many a tree, and also infinite other possible kinds of being-in-the-world, were simply not there yet and that, if we wanted to meet, greet and embrace them, and give them the opportunity to be and to meet, greet and embrace us, then this required of us more journeying, more edging into light, more song singing, whistle blowing and spell-casting. We sensed that our desire to call a new world into being was simultaneously to experience the new world calling us into being.
But this walk, this song singing, this whistle blowing, this spell casting, this creative writing of new worlds, always-already requires the making of errors. Without error — which simply comes, remember, from the Latin “errare” meaning “to wander” — no new world can come into being because errors always-already open up new starts, new essays in the art of living. As some of you will already have realised, this is also to speak of the power of poetry, which comes from the Greek word poeisis, meaning “making” or “formation.”
But, as adults we all too easily forget the vital need always to be creating new paths to ancient truth by stepping boldly into the wilderness, magically and poetically. Not surprisingly, religious organizations, are particularly prone to forget this need. This is because our culture’s old maps cast such powerful spells over us. They encourage us to believe that our ultimate safety is only to be found by continuing to follow the known ways, the known destinations, the known religious and political traditions, and so on. But this captivating spell causes us to forget that all maps and blueprints are always-already wearing out and will eventually fall apart because reality is always forming under them by those people who continue to err, by those who continue to wander — errare — , by those who continue to sing and play new songs, write new poems and cast new spells, just as we all did when we were little children.
Might not something like this have been what Jesus’ had in mind when he said (Matthew 18:3), “Amen, I tell you, unless you turn back and become as children, you most certainly may not enter into the Kingdom of the heavens”?
It seems to me that Jesus’ call is not for us to return to some pre-adult state of naivety and innocence, but to return to an error-making kind of holy wandering or errare in which we dare, poetically, magically and creatively to write into existence the kingdom of the heavens which is nothing but the Ideal Community.
And, so, here, once again, is the poem “Course in Creative Writing” by William Stafford:
They want a wilderness with a map—
but how about errors that give a new start?—
or leaves that are edging into the light?—
or the many places a road can’t find?
Maybe there’s a land where you have to sing
to explain anything: you blow a little whistle
just right and the next tree you meet is itself.
(And many a tree is not there yet.)
Things come toward you when you walk.
You go along singing a song that says
where you are going becomes its own
because you start. You blow a little whistle?
And a world begins under the map.
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