Let's consider islands and bridges. A string of island is called an archipelago. Islands in an archipelago each have a distinct identity- they have individual names- but they are also part of a larger whole. When there are bridges from island to island in an archipelago there is unity in more than name only. You can get there from here. You can go to visit. You can come to know the population of other islands and be befriended. You can even go and make another land your home. A bridge can get you there.

Just as islands need bridges to be connected, bridges need something solid on both ends in order to serve any real purpose. One cannot build a bridge to a cloud, and a bridge that stretches only halfway across an abyss is actually a diving board to disaster rather than a means of connection. Even the most pleasant imaginary country is still an illusion rather than a destination. Our work is not just about building bridges. It is about forming connections and having real relationships with a real God and actual people rather than falling in love with theories and abstractions.

In his book of sixteen essays called "No Man is an Island", Thomas Merton wrote that "Without a life of the spirit our whole existence becomes insubstantial and illusory. The life of the Spirit, by integrating us in the real order established by God, puts us in the fullest possible contact with reality - not as we imagine it, but as it really is."

Life in the Spirit is the bridge that gets us from here to there - from our lives as they are to our life as God would have us be. We do not exist in isolation but we need some means of transport that will move us beyond the island realm of our own ideas and desires to the wider vision of God's prayer for us.

The title of Merton's book is taken from a passage written in 1624 by John Donne, an Anglican priest and one of the Carolingian Divines.

...No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were.

There will be storms to try men's souls, and waves that test the mettle of women. Even children are not exempt from the errant force of the winds of this world. But there is a highway that carries the willing over the wind and the waves. There is a guide that goes from island to island, a causeway paved with reasons to believe and reasons to hope.

Jesus prayed for his disciples- for their protection and for their unity. Jesus gave the Father's word and His own life- so that we might have solid rock under our feet, sufficient light for the way forward, and daily bread for the journey.

People are capable of great self-sacrificing nobility when their eyes are fixed on something larger than their own self-interests. Monday- Memorial Day- is proof of that.

We are meant to travel through this life as a band of pilgrims not as lonely pioneers. We are on the road to eternal life as long as we walk in the ways that Christ has prepared for us. The bridges have already been built. Christ's baptism, His ministry, the cross, the empty tomb and the Upper Room are not isolated islands, they are part of the causeway of the way, the truth and the life that now stretches out before us.

Even when Christ's feet left the road and he ascended as the disciples watched, the bridge building continued. Even past the limits of this life the King's highway goes upward and onward. Now there's a bridge to that place where crying and weeping are no more and God will wipe away every tear. There is a place prepared for us and we will be gathered in, on the King's highway, when the time is right.

This may be hard to understand. But is it really so hard to believe? I can only vaguely describe the physics of aerodynamics but when it is time to visit my son In Tennessee I get on a plane and routinely trust my life to something I can't fully explain. I also ride in elevators all the time trusting that they will carry me up to the next level. I couldn't repair one nor could I describe the electronics that cause elevators to function. But that doesn't stop me from stepping in through the doors, pressing the button and trusting that the manufacturer of the elevator knew what he or she was doing.

Each Sunday I step through these doors, sit, stand and kneel-pressing the familiar liturgical buttons- and trusting that in the end I will arrive at the top floor as promised by the maker of all things.

This is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is his son. Whoever has the son has life. If this is indeed a true promise, don't we want to be connected by this bridge rather than pinning our hopes on lesser things?

Bridge building requires effort, expense and time. We cannot build connections to everything and we have to prioritize what we need to build first and what might need not to be built at all. I'll give you two concrete examples.

A search on Google using the phrase "bridge to nowhere" will return about 236,000 results. Most of these hits concern two bridges in Alaska for which the final price tag would be over two billion dollars.

One bridge would stretch from Ketchikan to Gravina. It would be almost as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and higher than the Brooklyn Bridge. But here's where the similarities dissolve and good sense seems to depart - Gravina has a population of less than fifty people. The second proposed bridge would connect Anchorage to Port MacKenzie, a swampy rural area that boasts just one resident.

Elected representatives are supposed to look out for their local economy but even a good intention becomes a bridge to nowhere if it becomes disconnected from the larger context of the common good. The Alaskan bridges were just two of 6,371 special projects, or "earmarks," in the Transportation Equity Act, a bill that marked a new zenith in pork barrel politics.

At the same time that these two Alaskan "bridges to nowhere" were proposed, millions of dollars of work were needed on the bridges of New Orleans that had been severed or damaged by Katrina. This disconnect was not lost on many of the citizens of Alaska. To their credit they were among the voices trying to get Stevens and Young, their elected representatives to look at a larger picture that considered how we are all connected.

The two bridges were proposed in October of 2005. By November a clearer, larger understanding prevailed and the funds were redirected. The bridges will not be built but paradoxically we are all more connected because of this reversal.

Here's the second example. In June the General Convention of the Episcopal Church will meet in Ohio. Our Maryland delegation will gather in a body with deputies from across the church. Two major decisions stand before them- how will we respond to the Windsor Report and who will we elect as the next Presiding Bishop? Hundreds of resolutions will come before our deputies, as will the temptation to think only of local needs or the island realm of our own ideas and desires. But across the water is much of the rest of the Anglican Communion, over seventy-two million souls, who wait to see whether we consider ourselves an island "entire unto itself" or as members of one body.

John Donne saw that we all inescapably connected in this world and that the loss of any was cause for shared grief. Thomas Merton wrote "one who really loves another is not moved merely by the desire to see him contented and healthy and prosperous in this world. Love cannot be satisfied with anything so incomplete. If I am to love my brother, I must somehow enter into the mystery of God's love for him."

Jesus prayed for his disciples, "Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one…Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth." Christ prayed, then He sent His disciples into the world- that risky, messy place filled with actual people who desire life but don't always know how to connect with it. Christ promised to provide a way forward, but having done so, told us to walk in it. May we seek the connection that truly links us one to another and be not islands but know ourselves as one body. AMEN.