The Wall & The Tunnel: Petra, Prophecy, and the Difference Between Facades and Ways Through by Eric Hepburn (April 5, 2026)

There is a wall, a veil, between our world and the spirit world... the sages and prophets found ways through the wall, they brought back teachings from the spirit world. They left behind signs so that we could find our way through. Some folks who came after, got really into sign making. Some thought that the tunnels through the wall should be enlarged, decorated, celebrated... Some spent their lives making their religion's entrance look more beautiful and inviting than others' Some forgot that the signs were about getting through the wall - they just wanted to celebrate the tunnel as a beautiful place to BE.

Behind the preacher hangs an image of the Monastery at Petra — a grand facade carved into a mountain in southern Jordan. This sermon reads that image as a parable of all religion: behind every facade was once a dark natural cave, and through that cave, our earliest spiritual forebears crawled — emerging changed, with signposts to leave behind.

The Unfolding in Word traces what happens next. Disciples follow. The tunnel gets widened for easier passage. Rooms are added, altars, artwork — and then the architects arrive to carve a beautiful entrance. Somewhere in the obsession with making the facade grandiose and the tunnel accommodating, the point gets forgotten: getting through the wall. Some traditions even post guards at the far portal, so that only authorized people may cross and report back. But prophecy — as a visit to a temple acolyte makes vivid — cannot be tamed and institutionalized. A tamed lion and a wild one are no longer the same animal.

Along the way: Eckhart Tolle's Voice of Wisdom on religions used in service of ego versus truth; ancient drum-accompanied journeying at the mouths of caves; Plato's cave revisited; an Easter story about dress-up clothes — respectability and anxiety, or anointing and honor, the same practice pointing at facade or at passage; Brené Brown on fitting in as self-erasure; the bodhisattva vow's insistence that we all get there together or none of us do; and the hard truth that choosing to stay stuck hurts everyone you love.

https://youtu.be/gRwEk5MACMo

---

The Pulpiteer Podcast Transcript

Lightly edited for readability: transcription errors corrected, filler words reduced, punctuation repaired. Bracketed items are editorial.

[00:00:00] Eric Hepburn (host intro): Welcome to the twenty-ninth episode of the second season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for this week's episode. Today's episode is called "The Wall and the Tunnel." This week, we'll begin with our Great World House segment, and then turn to the Voice of Wisdom, delivered by Jamie Moore.

The Great World House — Eric Hepburn

We pause to honor the Great World House, of which we are a part — lifting up the needs, the hopes, and the voices beyond these doors.

Now — I keep making digressions from the usual here, but I'm going to go out on a limb this morning and say that there probably isn't anybody here thinking, "if I could just hear one more news report about what's going on in the world, that would really fill my cup today." So I'm going to stand out on that limb, and talk about something a little different. There's a reflection of the micro in the macro — so we're going to take the Great World House and bring it home this morning. Because today is the first day of my third year with you all.

Time flies when you're having fun. I hope you're having some reasonable proportion of the amount of fun I'm having doing this. Some of you let me know that you are — and I appreciate that.

Two years ago today, I gave my first sermon in this pulpit as your half-time minister, and we talked about three prophets. We talked about Jesus. We talked about Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of Nonviolent Communication. And we talked about Alfie Kohn, an education researcher who has shown, through research, that sticks and carrots don't work — that the core of what we mistakenly want to think of as compliance is really about deepening and creating trusting relationships. That's how we started together, two years ago.

And last year, I sat up here and gave you a sermon letting you know that the honeymoon was over. Anybody remember that one? The honeymoon is over. It was a good honeymoon; I enjoyed it; we had our fun times together, as you should on a honeymoon. But over the next year, I said, you will start to see some conflicts arise — things people put on the back burner that are going to come to the fore. And you might be tempted to think of those conflicts as: "oh my gosh, I thought everything was going well, but it's not." And I invited you to think of them a different way. Conflict is the nature of a relationship asking to deepen. That thing that was comfortable on the back burner for a while isn't comfortable there anymore. Something that's important to you — something you'd decided it was okay wasn't getting met — suddenly matters again. And it's normal, and natural, and okay to take that thing off the back burner and say: hey, this thing we haven't been paying attention to needs some attention now. It needs some love now.

Conflict is not things going wrong. It's things going right — a willingness to feel safe enough, and brave enough, to show up and say: I love you, and I'm not getting all my needs met. Whoa. That's a brave space. That's not a failure, folks. That is a deep success. It's a deep success to feel like you can stand up and say that. Amen.

All right — that part of our journey is not over. It never ends. You only get one honeymoon per relationship. So it'll happen again. There'll be some conflict.

I'mma preach you another message today, though. I realized, sitting up here while Candice introduced the new theme for the month: oh heck, it's the first Sunday of the month, and I'm supposed to be preaching on the Soul Matters theme — but I'm not, because my anniversary is more important to me, and I will claim the right of what I need to talk about. But I am grateful to be here with you all. To be in relationship with y'all. And, when it comes up, I am grateful to be in conflict with y'all — because I don't see it as a fight that's got to have a winner and a loser. I see it as an invitation to do the thing we talk about every time we light the chalice: mature and deepen, grow and heal. It's an opportunity for all those things. So don't be shy about your voice. If the way we're doing worship has been working for you and it starts not working for you — speak up. Give me a call. We'll go have coffee.

I have become a deep believer in the bodhisattva vow. The bodhisattva vow is a Buddhist thing, and it says this: the monastic, all by themselves off in the wilderness, achieves only a simulacrum of enlightenment — only a partial version — because the truest and deepest enlightenment can only happen together. We are all getting there together, or none of us are getting there. So your voice is not tertiary to the process. It is the process. Your willingness to surface something uncomfortable — something that's working great for you, or not working great for you — those matter deeply. That's my invitation to you, for this Great World House segment today.

A Voice of Wisdom — read by Jamie Moore

Let us enter a still place within, opening our hearts and minds to receive this Voice of Wisdom. After the words are spoken, we will breathe together in silence, preparing ourselves for the Word unfolding among us.

Today's Voice of Wisdom comes from Eckhart Tolle:

"All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the truth. If you believe only your religion is the truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. Used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority, as well as division and conflict between people. In the service of the truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening — that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form."

The Sermon: The Wall and the Tunnel — Eric Hepburn

The image behind me on the screen is called the Monastery. It's part of the Petra Archaeological Park in southern Jordan, carved in the first century AD. Like me, some of you might look at this and immediately think of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

For me, sometimes what I experience as spiritual revelation comes in the form of images — and then I have to do the work of translating those images into words I can share. Because, unlike for some people, painting and drawing are not super effective for me. I'm not that good at it. But this image captures what I see in my mind's eye when I think about the world's religions.

[a microphone issue is resolved] Is that better? Good lord. I just want to say: I did double-check the batteries. That was straight-up user error — I thought I'd flicked the switch to not-mute, but it was flicked to mute. Thank you, tech team, for keeping me straight.

So — this image: Petra Archaeological Park, southern Jordan. Revelation for me sometimes comes visually, and this comes closest to representing what I see in my mind's and heart's eye when I contemplate the relationship between the normal world we inhabit every day and the spiritual world — the world of unity with the divine that all spiritual practice, and all religions, point at.

Let me unpack it this way. I'd like you to look and see that there's only one entrance here. And I'm going to invite you back in time — thousands of years before this facade was carved — and I want you to imagine that in the middle of that single door there used to be a small cave, or a crevice. A natural feature, if you will.

Now, in some of the oldest recorded spiritual practices among shamanic peoples, there is a practice called journeying, done in the accompaniment of a drum. You go and sit at the mouth of a dark cave, or a crevice, or a feature of nature, and you meditate and focus on it while drumming begins — drumming that resonates with the beating of your own heart. And after some time of taking in the visual of this real place, you close your eyes and imagine yourself moving into, and through, that space.

That can be an effective method for some people. Not for everybody. That's one of the reasons there's such a beautiful diversity of spiritual practices across the world: it is not a one-size-fits-all proposition, where every practice works for every person. Part of the beauty of the diversity is that some of us need something different. It's why you can't have a worship service without some powerful music — because powerful music is an entrée, for some people, to a place where they can connect to the deep oneness we're yearning after. Some people — lucky for me — like words, because that's my craft. And, obviously, from the history of world religions: ritual is another thing that does this. For some people, a ritual they can repeat every week, in a reliable way, helps them relax into a place where they can feel that connection.

But here's the point I want to make today. This beautiful facade, and the building inside this mountain, started off as something less inviting. It started off as a dark cave you could crawl through — and you would emerge on the other side, Indiana Jones style, with cobwebs in your hair, dirt on your pants, the taste of fungus in your mouth. And that was the religious experience of our earliest forebears who found a way through the wall between our world and the spirit world. And they came back, and left us some signposts — like Eckhart Tolle said. Signposts that said: I had this deep spiritual experience that made me realize the oneness of all things, the oneness of all creation. And it changed the way I'm capable of loving you, and the way I'm capable of loving myself, and of caring for that bright green, verdant world out there. All of that changed in me when I made it through the wall to the other side — in ways I couldn't foresee or predict. A world that felt shallow and sepia-toned before now feels vibrant and colorful.

The metaphor I've used up here before about [Plato's] cave is a reminiscent echo of this. If all you have ever seen is shadows on the cave wall, cast by firelight, it is a disorienting experience to walk into a world saturated with color and natural beauty, and realize the deep interconnectedness of all of it. And when you have that moment — it is almost impossible to be content holding that knowledge alone. You want to go back and say: no — brother, sister, sibling — wake up. Let me undo your shackles. Come outside with me. Let me show you.

That's the tunnel. The tunnel: our ways through the wall, so that we can experience that spiritual unity that miraculously changes the way we look at ourselves, each other, and the world we exist in. It adds dimension and depth and beauty. And nature no longer feels red in tooth and claw, like something out to get us. It feels like your deepest soulmate, who has just called you back to a wedding.

But there's a danger here, and the danger is part of what I want to talk about.

So — we've got our early, intrepid spiritual explorers, who crawl through the dark, damp cave. They experience something fantastic. They come back out to this side. They try to reintegrate among normal people — which is incredibly hard to do when you don't look at the world the way they do anymore; when what seemed important to you mere days or hours ago suddenly feels trivial, but you know it's still the nucleus around which their lives revolve, and you're trying to tell them: no, no — that's not the real sun; the real sun's over here. So you get prophets getting murdered. You get the normal unfolding of things.

But some of them convince people to come after. And those people go through the tunnel, and have the experience, and come back out, and now they're disciples — fellow prophets — saying: I saw it. Yes. You're right. We've got to find a way to get more people through the tunnel, because it would change everything.

So — being the good civil-engineering humans that we are — we begin our tunnel expansion projects, known broadly as religions: the institutionalization of spiritual practice. We get out our bulldozers and our shovels and our picks, and we begin widening the tunnel so that traversing it is not so hard. And sometimes we have negative unintended consequences. Sometimes there was an important landmark in the tunnel — a batch of lichen, a sparrow's nest — accidentally destroyed by the construction, and suddenly a signpost for how to get through gets obscured.

And because civil engineering is its own form of joy — says the former civil engineer — some people say: well, this wider tunnel is all good and fine, but it would be really nice if there were some places for people to sit. Maybe some rooms where we could prepare a feast. A place where people could lie down and rest. Maybe an altar. How about some artwork? We could turn this tunnel into an amazing and beautiful building. And then some other people came along — these were not civil engineers; these were architects — and they said: okay, but if we really want to attract a lot of people to our tunnel, it has to look really beautiful on the outside. We've got to build a facade here — a sense of grandeur and elegance, something that draws people in and lets them know there's something important here. And so we spend hundreds of years carving the facade of our religion, of our denomination, into something grandiose and spectacular and beautiful.

Are you starting to smell the scent of danger? Are you starting to sense that at some point, in our obsession with making the entrance grandiose and the tunnel accommodating, we might have forgotten the point — which was to get through the wall?

As a matter of fact, we even see evidence, in some religions and traditions, that at some point in this process they decided they had better set guards at the final portal — that certain people had the right to go through and come back and report, but maybe not everybody else. Because what if their accounts conflicted? One could make the argument that the infallibility of the Pope is such a structure. But you see it in leadership everywhere. I was at the Mormon Temple, about twenty years ago, and you walk the spiral and see the history of their religion, and at the top there's an acolyte to answer questions. And I said: I really respect that you all stayed open to prophecy. You didn't say, "oh, Nicaea happened — no more prophecy; all the prophecies that matter are written; we're done; canon closed." But I'm curious about something. You stayed open longer — how do you stay open now? You know what they told me? "Oh — well, now prophecy comes through the leader of our religion." And I said: hold on. Are you telling me that you believe you have tamed and institutionalized prophecy? "Well... yeah." Okay. I've heard enough.

Anybody here ever mistaken a tamed lion for a wild one? They are no longer the same thing. Prophecy is not to be tamed. It is a reassertion of the wild that is in us and around us — shaking us out of the complacency of the comfort of our built structures. I don't think you can institutionalize prophecy. It's the voice from outside that says: I think you're spending too much time on the facade. I think you're a little too worried about making the kitchen nice, and not worried enough about finding a way to get more people through the tunnel. Because the transformed people — the people changed by the spiritual journey — are what creates the heaven-on-earth, here and now, that all the prophets spoke of, including the one this day is dedicated to.

Eckhart Tolle says something I've been struggling with recently. He says the first experience of spiritual awakening happens by grace, not by effort. And — maybe it's because of my job — I just deeply want him to not be right about that. I deeply want him to not be right, because I still want to imagine that through some magical control I can exert — the right teaching, the right workshop, the right ritual in this space — I can make that happen for you. Because helping you find your own way through the tunnel is my heart's deepest desire. Helping you connect to that sense that every night I spent alone in anguish, believing I was alone and unloved, was a lie. That the universe out there is not an uncaring, cold, dead place. It loves me. It loves me just as I am — flawed and all of it. It loves me. You deserve to know that. I spent too many years of my life not believing such a thing could be true. And I want you to well up in tears when you hear me say it. But I can see, for many of you, that they're still the tears of fear — that it might not be true; of how frightening it is to think that there is a love like that out there, that cares about you; whose flourishing is not separate from your flourishing; whose desire is for completeness and harmony, for joy and grief — and also for us to stop being each other's biggest problem. To stop waging war, and being greedy, and doing all the dumb stuff the prophets have been telling us about. I mean — how many thousands of years do we need to heed the messages? Apparently at least this many. At least this many thousands of years. Because we ain't there yet.

So now I'm going to tell you an Easter story. I'm going to pivot — I think I've covered the first three bullets in my outline — and I'm going to tell an Easter story.

I don't think my experiences are unique, because I see them replicated in storytelling, from cinema to books. I want to talk about getting dressed up for Easter Sunday morning, as a child. Here's the way I see it mostly unfolding — from my own experience, and from what I see represented in books and film; I'm imagining, from the broadness of that, that it might resonate with some of your own personal experiences. There is a cultural expectation that you get dressed up for Easter. You go out, you buy a new outfit. You don't play in the mud on your way to church. We've all heard the tropes that land that way.

But here's what I want to say. There is a way to do that which is about the tunnel, and getting through the wall. And the way we experienced it — the way I'm describing now — is all about building facades. Because the [feel] of it, the feeling-tone of it, was: stay clean, or the neighbors are going to think badly of us. The [message] was: you get dressed up to show that you're elect. You show up to church, everybody nice and prim and proper and on their best behavior, to show that we are the ideal model family — and to project that. And when you, as a small child, began to deviate from that script, the response was usually not loving correction. It was anxiety-provocation. Does that resonate for anybody? Anxiety-provocation: somebody's going to think our family is not among the best families, or that we're not as wealthy as other families. Because somehow — in the history of a religion created by a guy who said you could get a camel through the eye of a needle before you could get a rich man into heaven — we created the prosperity gospel. We somehow decided that if you're doing well financially, it's because you were chosen by God. Man, we are capable of tremendous inversions, folks. A religion founded by a guy who said that about wealth and needles and camels turns into a set of practices where families spend more than they can afford, to buy clothes to impress their neighbors — and they teach their kids that the holiday is about social status and standing and respectability, instead of about learning the lessons of the guy who started the whole thing.

Now — I know I'm wearing a t-shirt today. That's for a different reason. We'll talk about that later.

I want to invite you to this thought. We don't have to abandon or ridicule these practices. There's another pathway. I'm not saying it's the right pathway; I'm not saying you have to pick it. But I want you to be able to imagine it. So I will describe it for you.

There was a man who made it through the wall. And he came back, and taught us things about loving one another, and loving our enemy, and kindness, and compassion. And those things tried to change the world. To honor his teachings, once a year, we will go, and we will — each of us — pick out an outfit that we think calls to us as ourselves in angelic form: the best version of ourselves we can imagine. We will go, and with mindfulness and some solemnity, select this outfit. And in the morning — Easter morning, before we go to church — we will bathe, and our family will anoint each other with oil, and we will put on this outfit that reminds us that there is a way through the wall, and that the teachings we bring back matter deeply — to us individually, to our community, to the thriving of all life as we know it. These teachings matter. We are celebrating that, and showing honor to that — by buying a special outfit, by using a special kind of care and attention to show up to this day. By deciding that this day is special and sacred and holy — because we make it so with our attention.

And when your four-year-old daughter is walking, and she trips and falls, and there's now a beautiful green grass stain right on the white fabric at her knee: she just brought Mother Gaia into the place. She didn't mess up. She didn't sully the ceremony. She added depth to the ceremony, by bringing nature into it with her.

There is a different way we can do all of this. I want you to see it with me.

Brené Brown says this: fitting in is the opposite of belonging. Fitting in is self-erasure in pursuit of conformity. But belonging — belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. And true belonging only happens when we present our most authentic selves to the world.

So — I am not opposed to tunnel-widening. I'm not opposed to altars, or rituals. But they are not, in and of themselves, the point. They have a purpose: to connect us to that deeper thing we all yearn for — that deeper thing that, until we experience it, we're afraid might not exist.

And the bodhisattva was right. Individually, one can go down the tunnel, and stand at the mouth of the cave, and maybe take a step or two into the spirit world and bring back some messages. But if we are to live in contact with that, it must have the critical mass of all of us. And that means a personal commitment from each and every human being on this planet: to deepen, and mature. To develop in wisdom as they progress through their lives. To not accept: "yeah, well, you know — I'm content to stay stuck where I'm at." Because — as any of you who have families know — stuck people don't only affect themselves. The idea that it's your individual right to stay stuck if you'd like, and that it's only about you, is just another illusion on the road to disillusionment that passing through the tunnel leads through.

Your choosing to stay stuck hurts everyone you love. Your choosing to stay stuck hurts everyone you love.

There have been times in my life when the journey seemed too hard, and not worth it — just for me. But the realization that my son, for instance, was going to live in the consequences of my refusal to get unstuck? That did it for me. I don't know what will do it for you. But I bet there are a few people in your life who you love that much. Who you love enough to get unstuck for.

Amen.

[00:39:09] Eric Hepburn (host outro): Until next time — thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give. The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted on Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew this week was Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, Keith Hutchinson, and Andrea McDaniel. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn. See you next time.