If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Any Road Will Take You There

by NANCY K. BARRY, Professor Emerita of English

Editor’s note: Nancy Barry gave this sermon as a guest preacher at the Decorah United Church of Christ. She is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

The title for this worship service, “Traveling Mercies,” is taken from the great writer Anne Lamott, whose words I am borrowing to help get us focused. What does it mean to travel with mercy? What does it mean to travel with grace?

The title of the talk: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there,” is indebted to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, one of the more famous quest stories out there. I’m offering both these thoughts this morning for all of us who are now in the thick of summer travel, those trips both gentle and rollicking that we plan for ourselves and our families when the days are long and we think the only thing we need to pack is a bathing suit. Oh, we think, if only it were as simple as the author of Proverbs tells us in chapter 3:

21 “My son, do not let wisdom and understanding out of your sight, preserve sound judgment and discretion;

22 they will be life for you, an    ornament to grace your neck.

23 Then you will go on your way in    safety,    and your foot will not stumble.

24 When you lie down, you will not     be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will     be sweet.

25 Have no fear of sudden disaster    or of the ruin that overtakes the    wicked,

26 for the Lord will be at your side    and will keep your foot from being    snared.”

Oh, we think, as we load our destination into Google maps, if only it were that simple.

I recently completed a road trip all the way from Iowa to Pennsylvania and Maryland, and then back again. I was keenly intimidated by the trip because it started with a drive to Chicago, which I dreaded. I have lived in Decorah for 33 years now, and I have definitely become what everyone would recognize as a small-town driver. That is to say, I lift half of my right hand from the steering wheel in a wave to other drivers stopped at a four-way intersection; I rarely go over 25 miles per hour; I’m happy to let someone sneak into my lane if they have mistakenly stayed in the left-hand turn lane at the intersection of Heivly and College Drive. In short, I am the opposite of what anyone would call a city driver, and for that reason, the trip into downtown Chicago made me very afraid.

So I did what modern travelers do: I entered my destination days before into Mapquest and I printed out the directions, and I saw clearly how they took me through Madison, Wisconsin; even though I didn’t memorize the route, I did study it on paper.

And just to be doubly sure I would get there safely and on time for my late lunch date, I decided to plug the address of that restaurant into my phone app for Google Maps, assuming it would echo my printed instructions that took me through Madison. That’s when I fell into the rabbit hole of artificial intelligence. Instead of leading me to Madison, my Google Map app took me into the wilderness of southern Wisconsin. I was headed east, but way south of Madison, and the road was winding, circuitous, and up and down many steep hills, which always confuses my sense of direction.

As my anxiety about where I was going began to rise—maybe I had plugged in the wrong address to the restaurant?

Maybe the GPS didn’t really know where it was taking me? I decided to pull over and hit the reset button. I stopped the car, turned off the phone and turned it back on again, only to have it tell me, “no available signal.” I could almost hear the phone laughing at me at that point. I sat there for several minutes, imagining Alice and NOT Proverbs, so distraught by the confusion I completely forgot I had an old-fashioned MAP of WISCONSIN sitting in the side panel of my driver’s door.

That’s the first thing that happens to us when we travel with high anxiety—we forget the very resources we have. I decided I needed more human intelligence, so I found an old-fashioned truck repair shop, where I got out and asked like a child: “How can I get to Chicago?” “Chicago!” the mechanic exclaimed, as if no one in their right mind would ever want to go there. But he pointed out a reasonable route I could understand—continuing east through Galena. I followed his directions, abandoned the car GPS, and eventually did in fact get to Chicago, where I had to pick up the pace and keep vigilant and, somehow, with traveling mercy, got to a downtown parking garage where I left my car for two days.

So one lesson I want to stress this morning about traveling: trust the new-fangled machines if you must, but always help yourself by looking at an old-fashioned map. The maps have something the AI map apps don’t have: CONTEXT. The big picture. The capacity to really know where you are in relation to the whole state. That is the beginning of wisdom and it’s important that we not surrender it too quickly to a gadget that soothes us with a calming voice that says to “turn left in 600 hundred feet,” as if to prove it is smarter than we are.

Of course, there was a moment in that lost episode when I really did think: Nancy, this is what travel is all about—if you could stop worrying so much, you might be able to enjoy this. But my anxious soul would not relent. There was a branch of wisdom out there, but I could not locate that. It’s probably my worst trait as a traveler: letting the anxiety about the trip take away from the imaginative anticipation of the journey.

When I was a child, I lost someone keenly important to me, and ever since then, I have been vulnerable to a state that psychologists call “separation anxiety,” a mindset as familiar to me as packing a toothbrush. It means that before I go on a trip I have to spend my time saying goodbye to all the people that I’m leaving—you never know, the worrisome traveler in me laments, you never know about the return.

Thinking about return trips makes me remember the story about a famous trip our national voyagers we call astronauts took in 1969–in fact, this week is the anniversary of their landing that fragile module on the moon on July 20. I was 14 years old that summer and I can recall a lot about that night–how we huddled around the TV in our pajamas, listening to Walter Cronkite talk about the old ideas regarding the man on the moon, playing cartoons and outdated sci-fi movies to pass the hours before the module touched down.

What I did not know, until 25 years after the fact, is that the White House speechwriter, William Safire, had created a completely different narrative in the event that the landing, or the subsequent departure from the moon, didn’t go so well. NASA evidently was staffed by engineers sufficient in their intelligence to know we have never gone to this place before and come back safely home. They had to be prepared if the module crashed when it landed, or worse yet, couldn’t rise up from the lunar surface when it was time to go. Safire, the wordsmith, had scripted a farewell service for the astronauts and the country watching that trip turn into a tragedy. Only when we were celebrating the 25th anniversary of the successful landing and return did he write about that alternative narrative, but when I read about it, oddly enough, while on a plane ride, did its significance make my blood turn cold and catch me without breath for a few minutes.

The other odd thing about that plane ride—a safe one, to be sure—that I will never forget is that I was seated next to what looked to me to be a very young child, traveling solo. His name was Joseph, and something about the way he fudged his age made me think he was in fact not supposed to be travelling by himself on the plane. He said he was 12 but I didn’t believe him for a second, partly because of how much he squirmed. So there I was, reading about a 1969 space trip that could have ended badly, and next to me was Joseph, wriggling his way to see out of the window. I was relieved when the flight attendant came to check on him, but I still worried most of the flight about where he was going and how in the world would he manage the trip. We played “rock, paper, scissors” for awhile and then I told him I was probably going to fall asleep.

“You can sleep on a plane?” he asked in astonishment.

“Pretty much,” I replied, wondering if the astronauts ever slept on that moon mission. When Joseph had to wait for the attendant to take him off the plane, I waved goodbye to him like an old friend, and wondered if he were now landing at his home place or the setting for some grand adventure. You never know, I reminded myself, you never know. I kept looking for the map for this traveling stranger inside my heart, to trace what we owed one another in the big picture, as I worried that no one would be there for him after landing. Which is another way of saying, traveling can be hard on our imaginations, and even when we think we’re on a solo voyage, invariably strangers, like Joseph, or the mechanic in southern Wisconsin, meet us on the trip.

Once, while driving through downtown Cincinnati, I saw a huge, flashing neon sign lighting up a bank building, which presumably was named Central Bank and Trust. The only problem was, the letter “e” was missing from that first word, so I immediately thought the message might have been saying CONTROL & Trust company.

Traveling mercies have everything to do with trust and control. We can’t be fools, we should bring maps, but we do need to surrender ourselves to the journey. We need to admit our directions could be flawed. We need to ask for help or company when we need them, and we must remember that all the surprises along the way may in fact be a source of delight. We don’t need to grimly script a funeral service every time we set out—I worry about such a sad story told to a congregation dead set on their travel plans in the middle of July. Indeed, we should remind ourselves those astronauts made it back from the moon, and Joseph was delivered safely to his family, and those scripts we write worrying it will all turn tragic are hardly ever needed. If we plotted all the tragedies that might befall us whenever we ventured out, we would never go out. Somehow, someway, in the midst of becoming adventurous, we must inhabit the kind wisdom of Proverbs and Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies and soothe the anxiety with trust. It’s foolish to imagine we will never be anxious, but somehow we need to trust that the very journey will teach us what we need for getting back. To travel this pilgrim life means we must put our hearts on the trust meter, rather than the control quotient. We must welcome the kindness of strangers, say Amen to the unpredictable and unexpected. Sure, go ahead, put the address into the map app on the cell phone, but keep an old-fashioned big picture map inside your head too. The journey is what matters—it IS more than simply a route to get us from one place to another. Instead of panicking when the directions falter, give yourself a gentle reminder that you’re not headed to the moon, and keep your eye out for a mechanic or a young child. We will find ourselves back home, and we will be made different by the journey. We will voyage out and then return, with something in our psyche re-arranged for all our trouble. Between the flash of control and trust, divinity is shaping our travels and the best we can do is to pay attention, rapt attention, because if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will lead you there.