Doors & Floor Off: Looking for Terra Firma

Peg and I recently celebrated our honeymoon on the beautiful island of Kauai.

We are very grateful to several people at Spiritual Life Center, who know so much about Hawaii. When we told them what we were looking for, they all suggested the island of Kauai.

It is probably the least developed of all the Hawaiian islands. Its beaches are beautiful, and we can’t say enough wonderful things about Hanalei Bay.

We did many interesting things in Kauai including going on a helicopter ride over the island. It was incredible flying over interior parts of the island that were used for scenes in the Jurassic Park movies. We saw waterfalls flowing down over large mountain sides, and the helicopter also flew into the craters of extinct volcanoes.

Before we got in the small helicopter, one of the tour guides asked Peg if she wanted to do the helicopter tour with “doors on or doors off.” Peg said “yes,” and they interpreted her answer as meaning that we would do the helicopter flight without doors on the mechanical bird.

When we got onto the helicopter, Peg asked me why there was only a door next to the pilot. I said there was probably some federal regulation that pilots had to have doors.

Let me tell you it was really something doing the helicopter flight over the ocean, mountains, waterfalls, volcano craters. etc. without doors. We were safe, but Peg insisted that the next time there would be good old fashioned doors

by our sides.

So we came back to Sacramento, and a few weeks later, it was the SLC Gala. What a lovely night. The food was fantastic, the volunteers were superb, and the music was delightful. It was such fun.

We really did accomplish three things that night at the Gala. First, we raised a significant amount of money for SLC. Second, we really did honor our Director of Music & Arts — Paula Mandella. And third, we had a good time, it was community building.

So it came time for the live auction, and one of the items was a plane ride to Lake Tahoe in a relatively small aircraft. I was amazed that Peg and I won the bidding on this item.

Okay, after the Kauai helicopter flight, I probably should not have joked with Peg about this. But she asked me if there would be doors on this flight. I told her yes. However, I then told her that this flight to Lake Tahoe would be on an airplane with “floors off”. Needless to say, I did not win the “sensitive humorous of the year award” for this comment.

But it really got me thinking back to two times when I did feel unsafe. I have been through two earthquakes in my lifetime. They were not major devastating earth shakers in terms of being measured on the Richter scale. But both of them were enough to really jolt me.

The first earth tremor, believe it or not, was experienced in New England – which rarely gets earthquakes. We were in a room on the second floor of an old motel. It was late at night and things really began to shake, rattle, and roll. I was concerned that the structure would collapse. It didn’t and we lived to fight another day, as it were. But it was scary.

The second earthquake, also surprisingly, happened when I was in the United Way headquarters on the Potomac river in Washington DC. I was in a room where somebody was making a presentation and everything began to shake. At first, I thought it might be because a freight train was going by us just a little ways off. But then I realized it was much more than that.

All of us quickly evacuated the building and it was hours later until we got the all clear signal. Then we were told to get our belongings and we were instructed to go home ASAP!

For the next several days, I could not stop thinking about the experiences of standing on ground that was not firm — land that felt like it was being mixed by a whirring blender.

This thought crossed my mind: “There really is no terra firma — no solid ground that you can count on in the final analysis. Rick, you have been through two of these earth shakers.”

Then my mind raced forward and saw these earthquakes as metaphors for life in general. There was the earthquake of my father‘s death when I was a teenager. The earthquake of going through unemployment. The earthquake of divorce. The earthquake of several medical findings in my family.

And before I was even born… There was the earthquake of the Great Depression and what it did to my family. There was the holocaust and family members that we had lost in Europe. I said to myself, “In this world, there really is no firm land that you can always count on. There is no terra firma!”

But then this thought came to me: “The only terra firma that we have is God. But when we have God, we have all of the terra firma that we need to get through the earthquakes of this world.”

So “doors on” or “doors off” — or “floors on” or “floors off” — we can have terra firma no matter what the outside world is doing.

Many blessings,

Rev. Rick