The More Things Change...
Sermon by Steve Edington
October 17, 2004
This past summer was an especially full one for me. I've already shared some parts of it with you, the California parts, which took place nearly 3000 miles away. The most meaningful piece of my whole summer, however, happened just about an hour east of here in North Hampton, New Hampshire at the home of one of my seminary classmates, Dave, who has also been a close friend for over 35 years. His home doubles as a counseling and retreat center that he and his wife operate. During a weekend back in August, Dave's home and center became the site of a reunion for these four guys who are now coming in range of their sixtieth birthdays.
These four guys - Dave, Sam, Gordon, and yours truly - shared an apartment just south of Rochester, New York during the 1968-69 academic year when we were seminarians. Even though we had the apartment together for only one year we formed an especially close bond that has continued over the years. I think this was in part due to the fact that we were partners in buffoonery, nuttiness, infantile behavior, and in going out of our way - in ways that need not be elaborated upon here - to be the best rogue divinity school students we could possibly be. My son will be 21 years old in a few months, and there are still things from those days that he does not need to know about his father. The four of us, this wacky brotherhood, also just happened to be quite academically talented. We were very astute students. So our divinity school could not get rid of us.
We stayed in touch over the years, checking in with one another whenever we could, but the last time all four of us had been all in the same place at the same time was when Michele and I got married 26 years ago; and joyful as that occasion was, it was not a time for a class reunion for four guys. During my sabbatical earlier this year I made it a point to visit with each of my three onetime classmates and continuing friends, and out of that round of visits came the decision that we would all get together again - which is what brought us to North Hampton on the 13th, 14th, and 15th of this past August. On the Friday night, with our spouses joining us for dinner and afterwards, we spent an evening just getting all the silly, stupid stuff out of our systems. "Remember when we did such and such and all that..." One of the four had been our resident photographer and he presented a slide show for us, and starring us, that, well... can just stay there. I couldn't believe he kept those things for 35+ years, but he did.
But the purpose of our gathering was not to simply relive our days of glory and notoriety, although the weekend would not have been complete had we not. At some point the conversations did get around to many of the life experiences that had made up the content of each of our lives since the late 1960s; and we were a little surprised, I think, and certainly grateful to discover, that the bond we had made nearly four decades ago was still as strong as ever. All of us had raised children to the point that they were either in college, graduate school, or into a career. Only one of us was married to his first wife. Three of us had had to deal with the difficult realities of a divorce. We had all lost our fathers. I was the only one who still even had one parent alive - mainly because my mother was only 19 when I was born. Another of us had lost a sister to breast cancer.
I'm the only one who is in the full time ministry, although the other three are in human service professions that are a form of ministry themselves I believe. Actually Dave has just re-entered the ministry on a part-time basis with the Unity Church. Gordon attends the Unitarian Universalist Church in Bloomington, Indiana and Sam has linked up with the United Methodists of Greenwich, Connecticut. Our respective spiritual journeys made for some pretty good conversation right there; and once I was able to explain my fascination with, and explorations into, the lives and writings of the Beat Generation writers and poets my three compatriots figured maybe I hadn't gotten too far over the edge with all that business after all.
I'm not out to re-create our conversations this morning. They were intensely personal anyway. We'd each and all been through some pretty painful stuff at times. We'd each had some despairing moments now and again; while also having a lot to celebrate and affirm, and laugh over, about the courses our lives had taken since the time when there were more years in front of us than behind. The most amazing part, for each of us, was how easily we were able to pick up our dealings with each other, with the same level of trust and openness, as where we'd left things so long ago. When it was finally tim, on the Sunday afternoon, to split up and head off to our respective homes, families, and jobs once again we found we were looking at each other and wondering, "How did we manage to do this? How did all that nuttiness create such a lasting bond?" Maybe we need another weekend sometime just to figure that out.
As I reflected a little on this question since that mid-August weekend, I played with the idea that for many people the early 20s are when they begin to construct an identity that is truly their own, and to make some choices - some more consciously that others - as to how one is going to be in, and relate to, his or her world. And while you're not locked into that identity, or to those choices and decisions, for the rest of your life, they do shape the course of your life nonetheless. For me, my college years involved a lot of just shucking off certain aspects of my upbringing - primarily my near-fundamentalist and evangelical religious background - while also deciding what it was from the first 18-20 years of my life that I still wanted to hold onto.
While our upbringings were hardly identical, the four of us had each gone through this process while we were in college, and we met just as we were all coming to terms with the next set of issues or questions in the maturing process which are: OK, now where to from here? And: Having decided what I no longer need to sustain me in my life, what perspectives do I wish to live by instead? Whatever immature behavior we may have indulged in at times, we were also reaching towards that kind of human maturity. And some of those perspectives that shaped our respective world-views, and our understandings of ourselves, in the late 1960s had stayed with us, and had shaped, at least in part, the courses of our lives. Certain things had stayed the same through all the changes we'd experienced. Since I happened to believe that some of these constants go well beyond the four of us, I'd like to share and offer a few of them today. Out of a rather long list of constants, I've narrowed it down to three for the sake of time this morning.
The first has to do how we chose to define a successful life. I was struck, largely in retrospect, how in our weekend conversations none of us mentioned how much money we were making, or the kind of houses we lived in, or the type of car - or cars - we owned, or the "stuff" we'd managed to acquire, in our courses of living. We'd all done well enough for ourselves, to be sure. I know we each felt some measure of pride and accomplishment when it came to our material achievements and possessions, and rightly so. None of us, after all, had signed on to a life-long vow of poverty back when we were in seminary, as impoverished as we may have been at the time. That time being the late 1960s there was a certain anti-materialistic spirit in the cultural air we were breathing, and I think we were affected by it to a degree.
But beyond the temper of the times we also did attain and cultivate this idea that the purpose of life was to serve, more than it was to just scoop up stuff. And while we definitely wanted to scoop up our share of good times - as we did then and in the ensuing years after our year together - the idea that the purpose of life is to serve Life Itself, or to serve some Higher Calling beyond the self, however one may wish to phrase it, had remained a constant. As we talked about the things that had been most important and meaningful to us over the years, apart from and in addition to the fulfillment we found in our family relationships, they all had to do with the those times when we'd done something with our lives that had in some way - small as those ways may have been - enhanced and improved the lives of others: The counseling and therapy offered by those who had chosen that career, that had been able to help psychically and spiritually wounded persons get past some of the broken and destructive parts of their lives, or overcome certain addictions. The community organizing and community advocacy efforts by one of us that had brought a greater measure of justice when it came to decent housing for citizens in need. Assuring the availability of mental health services, again for those in most need of them, with little ability to pay. These were the kinds of things that had let my friends and former classmates know they'd led worthy lives.
As for me, I offered that the things that have meant the most to me have simply been those times when someone has said to me, "You know, when you said or did such-and-such that really make a difference in how I looked at life - or it really helped me get through a hard time." My mind being the sieve that it is these days, I've more often than not forgotten the incident these folk are talking about, and have to be reminded of it. But even when I have to be reminded of it, it is still deeply gratifying to know how a simple word or act of kindness has made a significant difference to someone else.
Don't get me wrong, we were not nominating ourselves for sainthood in these types of conversations. We each knew one another well enough to know that there was no way on earth, or in heaven or hell for that matter, that we could get away with something like that. All we were really doing was reminding ourselves of something Winston Churchill once said: "We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give." Don't get me wrong again, we did not go around quoting Churchill to each other back in those formative days, but the truth of his statement did manage to remain a constant with us over the years.
The second constant that I'll just touch on now is that we developed a strong appreciation for the land of which we were, and are, citizens while also believing that its powers that be could and should be called to a higher and more excellent way in seeking the ways of peace, justice, and fairness for all. OK, that's putting it in too high minded of a way. Let's say, again with the times being what they were, we were strongly influenced by the civil rights and peace movements, and by the participation and leadership in those movements by persons of faith. We learned in those days, as students of religion and theology, to distinguish between what it means to love this land, its beauty, its people, and the promise it represents for so many; and the idolatry of believing that there is a God who has somehow bestowed "most favored nation" status upon us. That is to say we made the distinction between an honest and critical patriotism, and a nationalistic kind of idol worship that goes under the guise of patriotism. We'd each and all maintained that distinction as a constant over the years. I'll be saying more on this subject over the next couple of weeks as the election approaches, but I briefly want to note it here today.
None of us pursued careers as politicians, or as political activists, or chose to invest any large portion of our lives in the political arena. We each and all had other priorities to which I've already alluded. But the importance of critical citizenship has stayed with us as a constant in our lives. Some of those old sociology of religion courses having to do with the interplay of human and spiritual values within the life of a society of culture; and how the exercise of political power affects the realization, or not, of those values actually stuck with us. Our professors - well some of them at least - did not labor in vain after all.
The third constant I'll speak to is a little less tangible than these other two, and yet, I feel, the most important. We had each and all managed to maintain the basically faithful, trusting, and hopeful stance we'd had towards life and living when we were in our early 20s. This was the time when we had the sense - not all that unusual for persons of that age - that the world is there for your taking and shaping. I believe one of the greatest gifts or attributes one can have is the ability or wherewithal to live with an essentially faithful and trustful attitude towards the process of living itself. We'd all managed to maintain that. We'd also had our moments, ours times, when hope was hard to find and when our sense of life's essential trustworthiness had been severely tested. Recounting some of those times made for some of our more tearful moments. The hopeful eagerness we'd known in our early 20s had certainly been tempered. But, then, a life that hasn't been tempered and tested by the passing of time is one that hasn't really been lived with any kind of depth.
I think we had learned to appreciate, or at least understand, the interplay between trusting in life, and keeping faith with life, on the one hand while knowing that you will occasionally be betrayed or let down by it on the other. Needing to trust while also handling betrayal or the breaking of trust or deep disappointment, is one of those dynamics that is a constant over the journey of life itself. Some of the stories and experiences the four shared had to do with how well - or not - we each managed to handle that dynamic of trust and betrayal at certain points in our lives.
Along this line I recalled some words from a book called A Blue Fire by James Hillman. He says: "You cannot have trust without the possibility of betrayal. We can be betrayed only where (and by those whom) we truly trust... Where one cannot be hurt or let down, where what is pledged in words is forever binding, means really to be out of harm's way and so to be out of real life." I fought with these words when I first read them - which was well before the weekend I've been describing here this morning. What's wrong, I wondered, with always being out of harm's way. Well, nothing really was the answer I finally had to give myself, except that life doesn't work that way. Living, as our four way conversations reminded us, is anything but a risk-free, fail-safe venture. To choose to trust in the worthiness of the life journey is to also choose to accept the possibility, or run the risk of betrayal, disappointment, and loss.
Just as no one gets out of here alive, no one gets out of here unscathed either. If there is one enduring constant throughout the life journey that is it. To reach for, and attain, whatever measures of fulfillment and wholeness that there are to be gained - as we each and all had done - is to know the occasional wounds that go with the reaching and the attaining. We all knew that, intellectually at least, when our friendships were first formed. Part of our rejoining was a way of confirming, many years later, what we'd always known.
I said I'd offer three constants. I'm going to slip in a fourth here at the end. However meaningfully one may attempt to engage with life, a healthy sense of the absurd is also a good and necessary thing to have. One of the reasons I think we sometimes carried on like the "Four Stooges" back when was because we knew how terribly, how impossibly, short we were going to fall from the lofty ideals of ministry that were being put before us. It was good to have our own silliness to fall back on now and then. It's just another one of those paradoxes of living we encountered then and still do now: Take life as seriously as you can or need to but don't forget to leave a lot of room for a good laugh at yourself and your efforts and your surroundings from time to time.
As for who or what it is, and has been, that has ultimately sustained us over the years, well we each had our different names and understandings of the "Ultimate It." References to God came easier for some of us than it did others. But beyond the terminology and the concepts was an essential love of life that had kept us all going, and that had called us back to each other's presence. Saint Paul the Apostle, for all the arguments I have with him, was nonetheless right in that well known and oft quoted passage is the 13th chapter of First Corinthians that the three greatest eternal verities are faith, hope, and love - and the greatest of these is love. Not love primarily as sentiment but love as a bond of caring with and for all that calls out for our care. This is the kind of love we seek to engender here. It is the love of which we sing in our closing hymn that is drawn from the passage to which I just referred. Let us sing it together.
Stephen D. Edington
October 17, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
