Channing Memorial Church
Unitarian Universalist
Ellicott City, MD
The Reverend Susan LaMar
October 12, 2003

 "Hide and Seek"

Matthew 7:7-8         

            Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who seeks finds, and to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 

Gospel of Thomas, Saying 2

Let him who seeks, not cease seeking until he finds, and when he finds, he will be troubled, and when he has been troubled, he will marvel and he will reign over All.

“Illumination”  by Kathy Kennedy Tapp[1]

In the humid half dark of

first night

a brief pinpoint of light     

for space of one breath,

  then

gone. 

I search the sky,

  stumble through dark grasses,

glimpse another quick

flash. 

Where are you? 

The shadowy field   

transforms  

     to a sparkling realm –

bright energy points       

explode everywhere,

a thousand starry

blinks. 

Presence. 

Teasing, comforting, coaxing.

  Firefly God,

You are everywhere,

Playing        tag.

            Blink on inside me.

 Imagine January in St. Paul Minnesota. Think cold. Think bitter cold, as in down around zero! Now think treasure hunt. Outdoors. Now think thousands of people, not eating or sleeping as they compete to find a small, blue plastic medallion. Would you do that? 

For going on forty two years, Minnesotans by the thousands have participated in a  hunt for a piece of blue plastic and a chance to win $10,000 and a trip for two to Hawaii.[2] The hunt is sponsored by the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and a clue is printed every day – actually in the middle of the night – until the medallion is found. It is always hidden in a public place, and never buried underground, although it may be under several feet of debris or snow.

  “The medallion is so elusive,” said one hunter. “It’s like a mythical object. It would be just a transcendental experience to find it, to get to hold it.”  

“The hunt,” another insists, “is not about money. It’s about community.” This hunter is a self-employed salesman who admits to losing far more money over the years than he could hope to make up by finding the medallion. “You’d think it would be a battle royal out there,” he says, “but it’s amazing how much you start sharing.”  

“Noodling” it is called, when hunters swap interpretations of clues. A special vocabulary among those who join the hunt. 

Our salesman gave up free tickets to the Super Bowl this year, in favor of the hunt, “I mean, c’mon” he says. I’m going to be sitting out there in San Diego when the medallion hunt is going on?” 

“I will be doing this for the rest of my life. I guarantee it,” says another hunter, 18 years old.  

Life work. Transcendental. Community. Sharing. The Search. All profoundly spiritual terms – spiritual experiences, really --  applied to a seemingly secular activity. 

What is it about searching that is so gripping to us humans? I wonder if there is something hard-wired into us. Perhaps it is left over from our lives as hunter-gatherers. I imagine that those who were not fanatical about that probably did not live to reproduce – so here we are, products of that hunting and searching evolution, with nothing to hunt for.   

So we make things up. 

Hunting/searching games begin when we are infants – peek-a-boo, hide and seek, sardines, button, button, who’s got the button, treasure hunts, scavenger hunts, Easter egg hunts. There is one that I can’t remember the name of that we played in elementary school where the teacher would hide an object – a pink eraser, perhaps -- in plain sight and the class would set out to look for it, each of us returning to our seat when we saw it, without telling anyone else where it was.  Even playing the lottery is a form of searching – coming up with elaborate, pseudo-scientific systems to choose just the right numbers and combinations of numbers to win the jackpot in a game that is totally random. 

Seeking the grail, Holy or otherwise, is a fascinating and intriguing undertaking for many of us humans. It can be all-consuming life work. Oh how we want to believe that by following the clues we will discover the secret to life and to happiness.  

So often we look for success and happiness in the clues offered by others – family, culture, society. We bury our heads in the map, perhaps forgetting to look  around the terrain itself. Oh how we long to grasp those little firefly sparks, those teeny glimpses of the divine and have them ignite our souls!  

But we may be looking in the wrong place, or in the wrong way. 

Figuring out what it is that we are searching for, or NOT knowing what we are searching for and continuing the search anyway is a more interesting task, to my way of thinking. Explorers setting out to see what was on the other side of a world that they suspected was round. Going off into space just to see what it feels like. These are the folks that I find most interesting. Perhaps it is the difference between a search and a quest. 

My favorite image from the newspaper article from which I learned about the St. Paul treasure hunt is what happened two years ago. The fanatical thousands were all converging on a park after diligently following the clues for six days. A sixteen year old boy wandered down to the park just to see what was going on. He was kicking randomly through a pile of leaves – and BINGO – he found the blue medallion after just 20 minutes, much to the chagrin of the die-hard hunters who had been freezing their tails off for six days. [In fact, some of them were so irritated that they staged their own medallion quest a few weeks later, putting up their own money for a prize.] 

That image captures for me the kind of quest that is spiritual. That boy didn’t even know what he was looking for. He just became curious, opened his eyes, and there it was! 

The scripture verses this morning hint at searching for the unknown. Ask, the words say. But ask who? And it will be given you. . . What will? What is “it?” Seek and you will find. But it doesn’t say what you’ll find. Whether it will be what you were looking for or something else. And sure, the door will be opened for you, but what will be behind it? Something you want to walk through for, or not? 

Thomas had a completely different take on the seeking and finding. For him finding was only the first step – “when he finds, he will be troubled,” he says. Spending time being troubled, spending time in some kind of a struggle, is what will eventually lead to marvelous things – whatever they may be.  

I think that a difference between a treasure hunt for a finite object and a quest for spirit and meaning has to do with mutuality and openness. Asking and seeking and knocking, with an expectation of some kind of a response coming, is an opening process. We are asked to exert ourselves in particular ways: ask, seek, knock. In the original Aramaic, all three words reflect the sense of creating space with sincere intensity.[3] According to one scholar, the “results of these efforts – ‘given,’ ‘find,’ and ‘opened’ – in Aramaic emphasize processes of nature that happen easily, such as a loving action or a natural response to something that has already happened.”[4]  There is a commitment, but the commitment is to opening up to something of which we may not yet have seen a glimpse. Or perhaps just a glimpse or a hint as the poet we heard earlier, Kathy Kennedy Tapp,  suggests: 

            A brief pinpoint of light. . . bright energy points. . . a thousand starry blinks. . .  

The giving, the finding, the opening, happen among us. Among us as humans, and among humans and other animal and plant life all over the earth – every atom, every molecule. Infinite participants, each on quests of one sort or another, conscious or unconscious, mutual and fluid. In my belief system there is some kind of “Godness,” some kind of holiness, some kind of divinity flowing among it all.  

Any one of us might at any time be the one doing the asking, seeking, or knocking, or may be the one giving, finding, or opening a door for someone else. How often does it happen that a chance encounter, sometimes with a total stranger, offers you a word or phrase or idea that stays with you for days, perhaps changes your life? A starry blink. 

I was walking in the woods near my house the other day, thinking that since I had been in Maryland I had not yet seen any particularly interesting birds, when a flash of movement caught my attention off to my right. A pilleated woodpecker landed on a tree, not 50 feet away. A starry blink. 

My musings about mutuality in a life search led me in another direction a well. What would it feel like to be the blue plastic medallion? To be the one being sought, so diligently, so tirelessly, so fanatically, so fervently. Imagine it. Like being the first one chosen for a softball team in the school yard, times seventy times seven. Just by being yourself. By being still, and waiting, to be found.  

I think sometimes that by trying so very hard, to chase after so frantically, that which we think is important, we don’t hold still long enough for what is really important to find us.  

I wonder, you see, about some of the people searching so diligently, whether they are seeking or whether they are, in an ironic way, hiding. Hiding from the possibility of mutuality. From the possibility that the real object of desire is not an object at all, not some “thing” that one can hold in the palm of one’s hand. But rather a starry blink, waiting to ignite inside them. Inside us. 

“I’m hiding, I’m hiding, and no one knows where,” we say. “I’m hiding, I’m hiding, and no one knows where,” says God. The toes and the hair are all around us, as starry blinks, as passing handshakes, as kind smiles, as listening ears. As difficult work ahead, done together. As the mutuality of community.  

Many of us have spent time this weekend on Friday evening and much of Saturday, in exactly this spirit of mutuality. Where have we come from? What will we be together? What will be together? What will we be together? What will we be together? What will we be together? What will we be together?  Who is we? What will the ministry among one another look like in the near term, and for a long time to come?  

These are not questions for answers printed on little blue medallions. These are questions that are part of an ongoing, continuous,  transforming and transformative process. It will require lots of  “noodling” together. Perhaps feeling as though we are chasing down meaningless paths, or totally misinterpreting clues, only to discover something by accident as we kick around the leaves that are piled in front of us.

It will take faith that there is something to hold on to in the long run – perhaps not something that we can hold in the palm of our hand -- but something that we can hold in our hearts. 

And what about you? What are the toes and the hair all around you? Who is asking, or seeking, or knocking all around you? What have you already found, that you are struggling with, that may lead to something marvelous if you noodle it out with someone else? What are the starry blinks waiting for your attention? 

May your quest be warmed by this community.