Flip-flops
Photo Courtesy of Jim Burklo
Special to United Methodist Insight | July 8, 2025
For about five years I served as the pastor of Sausalito Presbyterian Church up in Marin County, just over the Golden Gate from San Francisco. It was a gorgeous old wood-shake-sided church with a pointy steeple and a dark wood interior – a destination in itself, in a town that is a major tourist attraction. When the weather in Sausalito was particularly lovely, the town was overrun by tourists from all over the world. When I walked down the hill for lunch, I passed by hordes of people peering into the shops on the waterfront, looking for ... what?
The tourists mostly came from the same place: a town called Where. It’s the generic community with its mall or downtown which has all the usual chain stores. We all know what’s at Where. Knowing what we all know, and bored with it, the people of Where became tourists looking for ... what?
Looking for clothes in Sausalito? The town had much of the same clothes sold in all the Wheres of Ohio, Iowa, Omaha, and Oklahoma. Looking for ice cream? What Sausalito had to offer was essentially no different than what’s available in the Wheres of Nashville, Asheville, Louisville, or Jacksonville. In a way, it was not Sausalito they were visiting. Rather, they came to make a pilgrimage to a generic Elsewhere. At Elsewhere, you can expect to find salt-water taffy stores, tee-shirt stores, stores that sell wind-up toys, ice-cream, and fast-food. At Elsewhere, so you don’t feel totally homesick for Where, you’ll find several of the usual chain stores, and even a sweet little Presbyterian church to remind you of the one back home.
But the tourist may get the desire to seek out someplace beyond Elsewhere. The tourist may realize that a certain amount of anxiety with the unfamiliar might be a healthy thing. At that point, the tourist ventures further, wandering off the waterfront and visiting with the grizzled guy who carves totem poles by the mudflats near the docks on the north end of town, and then visiting the studios of the local artists at Liberty Ship Way. The tourist then climbs up the public stairs to catch the amazing views, and from there, who knows? To the clubs where the local people hang out and listen to jazz? Instead of just snapping a picture of that pretty little church, the tourist goes inside, and after worship goes to coffee hour, and gets to know a bunch of people who might see the world differently than the way people see things back home.
The soul is like a tourist who gets bored with Where and decides to go Elsewhere for a vacation. The soul prays or dreams to get to Elsewhere, and once there, finds that things are not too much different than they are in Where. But after praying or meditating the way to Elsewhere many times, the soul-tourist begins to realize that Elsewhere is just a prettier copy of Where, an idealized projection of his or her own everyday reality, and there must be more to experience than what is found Elsewhere. So the soul strays from the well-trod path and discovers that within the heart there is a realm that isn’t familiar, that doesn’t correspond to how he or she thinks things are or ought to be. The realm Beyond Elsewhere is both beautiful and terrifying. In this place, the soul doubts its assumptions about itself and about the nature of God. The soul confronts its prejudices, questions its neat theological constructs, challenges its habits and beliefs. It’s more work to go beyond Elsewhere, but it’s also exhilarating and energizing. And as the soul travels further in this place, it begins to gain faith in its ability to live and love despite, and even because of, the uncertainty and ambiguity around it. In Where, the soul barely pays attention to God at all. In Elsewhere, the soul worships the God it thinks it knows. Beyond Elsewhere, the soul worships the God it knows it does not know.
All of us are tourists, trying to get a break from Where. May we all take a vacation from the main drag of Elsewhere, and seek out the less-beaten paths that take us beyond Elsewhere and into the mystery and majesty that is God.
This summer, let’s vacate! Let’s vacate our smart phones, which keep us hooked on doomscrolling and on the algorithms designed to feed our preferences and our prejudices. Let’s vacate our grudges against people who have done us wrong. Let’s vacate the mental cable channels that keep our minds spinning in circles that go nowhere. Let’s vacate our assumptions about other people, and open ourselves to their points of view – not that we need to adopt them ourselves, but so that we can know people more fully. Let’s vacate our holy habits, our daily drills, our rigid routines, enough to open ourselves to new experiences, to the fullness of the sacred creation around us. Let’s vacate the human-made world long enough to occupy the natural world long enough to remember that it is our sacred source.
Let’s integrate our physical vacations with spiritual vacations – and make them much more than just time off from work. Let our vacations become spiritual retreats in which we rise to a higher consciousness and savor it.
The trouble with vacations, as we usually think of them, is that they end. And then it is time to get back to work and the daily drill. The trouble with vacations, in other words, is time itself – time as we define it. But a spiritual vacation is not just a vacation from the usual routines of work and life – a true spiritual vacation is a vacation from time itself! It is an embrace and a practice of timelessness, of eternity. Think of the last time when, for you, subjectively, time evaporated – when time stood still, because you were so enraptured with what you were experiencing that time didn’t matter, time didn’t register. I suggest that you intentionally set up your vacation so that such moments happen. What makes time stop for you? Do that, go there, and you’ll be on a vacation at a totally different level. It won’t matter that you have only two weeks or a month off – because you’ll taste eternity moment by moment, and it will stick with you when you go back to work and your day-to-day existence.
Let’s go on vacation! Let’s leave Where and go to Elsewhere and from there forget about the salt-water taffy and the tourist traps, and go Beyond Elsewhere, to the kingdom of heaven within and without, to the realm of the eternal, to where God who is Love lives beyond space and time – and stay there!