Todays worship sharing topic in my worship community was about how we re-find or renew Center? A Friend shared a sort of amusing dream where he was in a vehicle with his parents and his father was struggling to get the vehicle to work correctly and to find directions. His mother kept suggesting she had some magic words for finding direction if we wanted them. When he finally asked she said: Use GPS. We all laughed in recognition of the stubborn part of each of us that will not take guidance.
I have a lot of reliable ways to re-center. I wonder over and over again why I don't make regular use of my spiritual practices. Why I am so determined to try to navigate by my own brain? I liked the metaphor that I could have direction if I would just decide to turn on the GPS.
I thought of a time in my childhood where my Dad and my sister and I were visiting Cambridge and trying to go to the Friends Meeting there. There is a round about quite close to it that does not connect directly to it. We kept going around this roundabout, getting off at different spokes and not finding the Meeting. We were already 10 mins late, I was begging my Dad to stop at a gas station and get directions but being a man he stubbornly refused insisting he was going to find it. We were 15 mins late. Finally at 30 mins late he said we were too late and it would be too embarrassing to enter late and so we gave up never having gotten there.
Many Friends shared this sense that we actually do know how to center but that we allow ourselves to be distracted, to be "too busy", to try to gut our way through things. That for reasons mysterious to most of us we refused to turn towards the guidance that is available to us when we will turn to it.
