January 1999
 From Your Minister
by Rev. Jane Ranney Rzepka, minister, CLF
Calling the Phone Booth
The Arctic Circle in January. Northwestern Montana. A tiny village in Honduras. Eastern Turkey. An RV, nowhere in particular. Members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship have written, e-mailed, or telephoned from all of these places.
Isolation.
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It's 115 degrees, nobody's around but buzzards and Joshua trees, and the nearest paved road is 14 miles away. There in the middle of the Mojave Desert sits a phone booth.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the phone rings and rings. "The callers? A bored housewife from New Zealand. A German high school student. An on-the-job Seattle stockbroker. A long-distance trucker calling from the road. There's a skunk owner from Atlanta, a pizza deliveryman from San Bernardino, California, and a bill collector from Denver. Receivers in hand, they're reaching out—at all hours of the day and night from nearly every continent on the globe—to contact this forlorn desert outpost."
One Texan spent 32 days camping out at the booth, fielding more than 500 calls. "This phone," he said with a weary sigh, "never stops ringing."
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We hear so much about the importance of community. At the same time, a great many CLF members are choosing solitude, in one form or another, to one extent or another. In a society that values the gregarious personality and interpersonal connection, it takes a special strength to maintain a way of life quite literally off the beaten track.
Of course I know that lots of CLF members feel isolated—not by choice—but by circumstance. For one reason or another, you can't get out much, or you're surrounded by people who seem very different from you, or you're so busy with work that you don't have time for friends. Whether you live in Manhattan or Buenos Aires or Tulsa,
it's easy to feel isolated.
At the moment, though, I'm talking about the person who has a yen for adventure, or contemplation, or a quiet life alone, and acts on that inclination.
I feel the tug myself. You e-mail me from a cabin in Northern Michigan? I wonder about trading places! You're headed to the Peace Corp in Guatemala? Where can I sign up! Antarctica? Let's go! There's something in me that wants to "reach out and touch" the isolation in much the same way that the stockbroker in Seattle, the German high school student, and the pizza deliverer from San Bernardino feel the need to telephone a phone booth in the Mojave Desert. The slow pace, the quiet, the uninterrupted thought, the reverie.
Even though life almost any place involves its share of pressure and annoyance and hard work, some folks do pursue a solitude that's rare. For so many Unitarian Universalists, this sense of peace, this centered feeling, is what we mean by the word "spirituality." Away from the fray, separated from interpersonal obligation, deprived of the external stimulation of civilization's noise, a person is often more easily able to hear the rhythms of life, to experience connections and an "at-homeness" on the planet, and to notice causes for appreciation and gratitude.
I remember the feeling. Once, for me, it was about stars.
I would have thought I knew about stars—we all do. Sometimes when you come home at night and you're unloading the groceries you picked up on the way home, the stars catch your eye and you notice. Or you're in the back yard on a summer night, and for once the bugs aren't too bad, and the stars come out, and you notice. Or you're on a boat, or in an airplane, or driving along, or walking the dog, and there they are, the stars, and you notice.
But one winter, when I was on sabbatical in the Sahara Desert, I "noticed" in a different way. In the Sahara, if you get out far enough, you have only two things: sand and sky. No clouds. No lights in the distance. No airplanes above. No sounds. No moisture, and therefore no plants, no insects, no animals. No hills, no roads, no buildings. Just sand and sky.
If, in the middle of the night, you wake up in your sleeping bag and open your eyes, you will be enveloped in a complete darkness unlike any other, and piercing that darkness is a night sky of many, many, many more stars than you ever thought possible. You roll your head around as you lie there and there are stars past your cheekbone and beyond your hairline and down past your chin and your toes and over past your other cheekbone. Stars stretch to that place where the sky meets the land—bright stars, dim stars, shooting stars. In the desert, you don't just notice the stars out of the corner of your eye as you unload your groceries; the stars clobber you, they grab you by the scruff of the neck, they command your attention and you all but come to your knees with the wonder of it.
A sense of spirituality—some simply call it religion—feels life-giving, to be sure. But it helps to have a context, and that's where the Church of the Larger Fellowship comes in. When you want to know how other Unitarian Universalists understand the quiet, the gratitude, the connection, the holy, we have people and words to turn to in Quest, the loan library, by phone, and on the CLF list-serve. If you're curious about ways in which other Unitarian Universalists act on their beliefs, garner strength during difficult times, find companionship when solitude is not enough, the CLF may be able to help.
With a little back-up, the much-maligned "isolation" turns into blessed solitude. And maybe we won't need to call the phone booth in the desert quite as often.
Jane Rzepka, Minister
Quest January 2000 Contents
Last updated June 12, 2005
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