Seek Mode

Seek Mode

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the sermon, can I interest you in a small musical number? It’ll make sense, I promise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzbMGOsHsQo

This is from the recent live reproduction of the movie/musical “The Wiz”, which is itself a retelling of the now famous movie “The Wizard of Oz”, which was itself based on a story by L. Frank Baum. Such retellings, re-castings, remakings makes one wonder. The message is the same no matter the cast or the medium.

I’m sure if we thought about it, we could retell the story and get the jist of it, especially the ending and the message. But, if we have heard the message so often, wearing so many different hats, and we can tell the story, why do we keep needing to hear it over and over? More to the point, why do we still deal with the struggles it points out?

We have in our mind an answer to something we lack. “If I just do this, get this, live there, work there, contort my body, mind, spirit, in such a way,….then!” We still look for and follow our own “yellow brick road” and its immaterial whether we “ease” or not, because at the end of it all, we find ourselves standing before a fraud that has disillusioned millions into believing that “this” or “that”, “these” or “those”, “here” or “there” is the answer.

Imagine what it would have been like if someone hadn’t told Dorothy that what she needed was inside of her. Imagine if she hadn’t believed it. Would there have been a purple road, a green one, a grey one? Would she have followed another one towards another answer? 

It’s what we do daily. Humankind, especially in the Western world, suffers from the need to seek. And we don’t know how to turn it off. We get all these things hoping to be full enough not to have the gnawing need to seek. Then we go to these classes or read these books all about “not seeking” and then we ask “how do we not seek?” not understanding that we are really “seeking not to seek” which is still seeking. And then we sit down because we are flipping confused!

It’s at that point, the sitting down, the “planting ourselves” where we are that we realize that we have been seeking what was inside of us all along. I think it’s pretty ironic that it is Dorothy that points out to the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion that they have the brains, the heart and the courage inside of them and have had these things all along. But she cannot see what she has inside of her. How often has that been the case for us? It has certainly been the case for me on multiple occasions. Lucky there was someone there (Glinda) to tell her. And I don’t doubt that many of us have had our own Good Witch/Wizard or even Bad Witch/Wizard, our own people we look to for solutions who tell us quite plainly that what we need won’t be found “out there” but within.

It’s also possible, and indeed necessary to serve as such a person for others. To help them see themselves as they are, not as they wish to be. To hold up a mirror to their faces and help them accept the reality.

May the Force be with you all!