Is Anything Sacred?
Sermon by Steve Edington
September 23, 2007
When we had our Water-Sharing service two weeks ago my contribution was from a water fountain just outside the Exhibit Room of the Boott Cotton Mill Museum at the Lowell National Historical Park. I promised then - or threatened, depending upon how you look at it - a follow up sermon based on that little vial of water. The Exhibit, which many of you have already heard me speak of time and again (and I promise to let it go after today) is of the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac's signature novel On the Road, which is in the form of a 120 foot roll - or "Scroll" as it's usually called - of taped together pieces of very thin paper. It's in an especially prepared display case that allows for 36 feet of it to be shown at a time.
Owing to my being on the Committee that worked to bring this exhibit to Lowell, and that put together a summer long series of programs and activities to accompany it, I've spent a lot of time in and around that exhibit room over the past three months. The Exhibit will still be around until the middle of next month, but I'm pretty well done with my involvement in it.
I've had a fun time, a busy time, and even an occasionally trying time, over the past three months. But the thing I'll primarily take away from this whole experience has been just watching the people who came to see it as they moved around the room. The display case runs on a diagonal across a rectangular room that has displays illustrating various stages of Jack Kerouac's life and times - from his Lowell beginnings, to his heyday as a supposedly "Beat Generation" writer, to his tragic demise and death. It's running for another three weeks if you've not seen it yet and would like to do so.
As I said at the conclusion of my sermon last Sunday, this is an essentially secular document and is displayed in an essentially secular setting; but in a way that a bit hard to describe the whole setting has a decidedly religious or spiritual flavor to it. A number of those who came through the door did so with the appearance of pilgrims on some kind of a holy quest. Many of then gave the appearance of believers coming to a sacred shine they'd been wanting to visit all their lives. Something about the aura of the area was touching an area somewhere within the hearts of those who came into it.
I especially recall one rather boisterous group of junior high age youth, on a field trip with a local summer youth organization, coming in. As they entered into the exhibit room the joking and jostling and posturing that generally goes with the territory of a group of kids that age subsided to a great degree. They actually became quite subdued as they looked at the Scroll and the displays around the room, and then went and took their turns at an old manual typewriter that was set up where people could type out notes about their impressions of all they'd seen. As I observed these things over the past few months, the thought quite often floated through my head that, "Gee, there's got to be a sermon in all this somewhere!" So, this is it.
As briefly as I can make it, here's the back-story on the Exhibit: Between 1947 and 1950 Jack Kerouac made four cross-country trips, usually in and out of New York. They came following of the death of his father - whom he buried in the St. Louis de Gonzague Cemetery here in Nashua. Shortly after Leo Kerouac died, his son Jack met up with the guy who became, for a time, his soul mate of the road, Neal Cassady. Neal was from Denver, and then San Francisco. In April of 1951, with the journals and notebooks he'd made while on these travels spread around him, Kerouac typed up the first version of what became On the Road over the course of three weeks in a New York City apartment. In order to not have his thought processes interrupted by having to change paper, he taped together tissue thin sheets so he could just keep on typing. He was actually anticipating word processors by about 50 years. Six years later, after a series of revisions and redraftings, On the Road was published.
The original scroll manuscript remained a part of the Kerouac archive until the spring of 2001 when it was sold, mostly to settle an estate tax bill - for which I do not know the details. The buyer, at a New York City Christie's Auction, was James Irsay of Indianapolis, Indiana. He paid nearly two and a half million bucks for the thing, the lion's share of which went into the U.S Treasury.
Mr. Irsay, to his eternal credit within the Kerouac community, arranged for this long hidden manuscript to be exhibited, without charge to its viewers, at various locales around the United States - the current one being Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. He also saw to it that the contents of the manuscript were published in an "original scroll" edition of On the Road this past August to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the novel's publication in 1957. James Irsay owns the Indianapolis Colts NFL football franchise. Devout Patriots fan that I am, I now have a warm spot in my heart for Mr. Irsay - and the Colts, too, except for when they play the Patriots. End of back-story.
To pick up now on the thread I started a few minutes ago, my involvement with this Exhibit has provided me with yet another reaffirmation of my belief that there is within the ordinariness of life and living a sacred or holy dimension to it all. It is not a sacredness or a holiness that is bestowed or imposed by some Supernatural force, power, or being, but one that is discovered instead in our own human interactions within this natural world in which we live and move and have our being. It is, I feel, a dimension to living or a perspective on living for which we all have some need at some level of our existence. What I saw on the faces of many of those who visited the Boott Mill Museum this past summer was some evidence that that level had been touched. Jesus was right when he said that we do not live by bread alone. You do not need to be a Christian, or even a believer in a Supreme Being God to grasp the truth of that statement.
As I've said on other occasions I've come to find debates and conversations about the existence or non-existence of God as a Supreme Being to be boring and not at all helpful when it comes to my own spiritual journey. Last summer I happened upon an article in a New York Times Book Review section that noted that there is currently a genre of books out in the Rick Warren Purpose Driven Life mode about how one needs the presence and power of a Supernatural God for any kind of meaningful living; and then there's a countervailing genre of books like Richard Dawkins The God Delusion or Christopher Hitchins God is Not Good which contends that belief in the God of which Warren and others speak and write in a dangerous delusion.
What we've got are these two camps lobbing grenades at each other and lining up their cohorts. And then there are folks like me (and I know I'm not alone) who feel there has to be some kind of a third way, that neither of these camps are getting at, when it comes to spiritual nurture, and in having a set of beliefs that give one grounding and guidance. There's more than one third way, actually, and I regard our religious community here - and our fellow liberal religious congregations around the country - as being places where those various third ways can be pursued and discovered.
For me that third way is to affirm one of the passages found in OTR, and to which I alluded last Sunday, that "all of life is holy and every moment is precious." Kerouac wrote that out of his Catholic background. But it's a universal affirmation that transcends the bounds not only of any one religious tradition, but the bounds of traditional belief in God as well. To see life and living as having an essentially sacred or holy angle to it is really a choice about how one wants to walk through life and a choice about how to look at it. This stance is quiet similar to the philosophy of a "reverence for life" that Albert Schweitzer advocated and lived out, and for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1953. Belief in the inherent sacredness of life is not something that can be empirically proven; but then there's no empirical proof to our first Unitarian Universalist principle which holds that we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. That, too, is a choice we make as to how we'll view and treat our fellow human beings.
In holding out for the inherent sacredness of life, I do not mean that we'll actually find every single moment of living precious and holy. I know Mr. Kerouac didn't, even though he wrote the words. One evening this past week I found myself having to take apart a clothes dryer in order to get it out of our laundry room so a new one could be put in. In the midst of the dust and the dirt and bolts that refused to loosen and metal edges that scraped the skin from my hands, and my uttering all kinds of very unholy utterances - well let's just say I wasn't too much in touch with the sacred right then. But to lose touch with life essential holiness doesn't mean it's gone; it just means we have to go in search of it once again.
Seeking, and at times finding, an essential sacredness to life also gives one a call to awareness and a call to respond whenever and wherever that sacredness is violated. When people go hungry or needlessly suffer from disease or are caught in the ravages of war, the sacred is violated. When the earth is despoiled by human greed and overreaching, the sacred is violated. When a person's essential human dignity is demeaned because of their race or gender or ethnicity or sexual orientation, or station in life, the sacred is violated. When we see the sacred violated or profaned, or when we violate it ourselves, we are then called to renewal and to recommitment to be persons of faith in the best sense of the term - the faith that we can be agents of healing and reconciliation in the broken places of life.
With the publication of OTR Jack Kerouac went, quite literally, from obscurity to fame overnight. It was a fame he eventually proved to be tragically unable to handle, and a fame that brought him much undeserved ridicule by those who would not take the time or effort to get at what he was really trying to say. Shortly after he came into spotlight, Kerouac was on a New York radio program called Nightbeat and the host asked him what it was he wanted. His response was "I want God to show me his face." That was not exactly the response the show host was expecting, and Kerouac chose not to elaborate - which have left people like me debating what he meant over the ensuing 50 years.
If you can indulge me a bit (which you actually do every Sunday I'm up here anyway), I'll read a bit from the chapter in the book I got out a couple of years ago as to my own take on this matter:
"'In the faces of my questioners was the hopeless question: But why?' So wrote Jack Kerouac in the wild aftermath of the publication of On the Road when, as he put it, 'everything exploded.' But the question is never to be fully answered just as the face of God is never to be fully revealed. The important thing, however, is that Jack Kerouac made the effort. And, even more important, as I'm sure he would tell us himself if he could, is that we make the effort for ourselves as well.
"I turn to Kerouac when I need some encouragement in making that effort for myself. Whether it's a visit to his grave - which is a half-hour's drive from my home - or simply reflecting upon his joyful and tragic, ebullient and troubled, divine and demonic life, I need to say 'thank you' to him now and again. I thank him for pointing out a precious kind of beauty in the tired and forlorn face of a diner waitress. I think him for seeing a strange kind of saintliness in the often wild and crazy way of his companion of the road, Neal Cassady. I think him for allowing me to see a land I can still love even with what all its politicians have done to it, through the window of a Greyhound bus. I thank him for noting the spurting froth on the rocks of the Merrimack River as it flowed through his hometown of Lowell, even as it now flows alongside mine. I thank him for having the courage to recount his own dark nights of the soul on Washington State's Desolation Peak and at California's Big Sur. For in each of these revelations Kerouac offers at least a fleeting glimpse of that elusive face of God, and a passing intimation of the Divine that resides in the ordinary and even, at times, in the destructive.
"Jack Kerouac died a lonely death, and one that gave the appearance of a defeated man. But his life and literary legacy have proved to be far more lasting in the years following his death than in those preceding it. While he died in isolation his spirit now touches the lives of countless individuals - many of whom make the trip to Lowell to pay their respects and offer their thanks to Jack Kerouac."
[From The Beat Face of God by Stephen Edington]
If you go to see the scroll manuscript as it now on display, you'll see the final 36 feet of it. But you really don't see it to its end. The last few feet of the scroll, no joke here, got bitten off by a dog when Kerouac took it to show it to one of his friends and literary companions, Lucien Carr. Mr. Carr's dog tore off the last couple feet of the thing and chewed it up. You can just barely make out, if you look real hard, a penciled notation along the jagged edge at the end of the manuscript that says, "Dog ate." It was the most expensive meal that dog ever had - a chunk of a two and a half million-dollar document.
What this means, among other things, is that the original text of the line, which I consider to be the most significant one in the book, was digested long ago by a long deceased canine. The line, which is in the novel's final paragraph, is "the father we never found." On a literal level it's a reference to Neal Cassady's hobo, bum, and tragically alcoholic father, Neal Cassady Sr. At various points in the novel Neal tries, to no avail, to find his old man with whom he'd grown up on the streets and in the flophouses of Denver.
On another level it refers, I think, to America's search for itself in the years following the Second World War. There's an overlay and an underlay to this book. The overlay is that of a kind of giddy joy and exuberance and even craziness at the prospect of the open road - or of an open future. But the underlay - which is what the novel's self-righteousness critics seem to miss - is one of sadness and despair and a desperate kind of reaching for some kind of elusive answer. Even before reaching the age of 30 Kerouac was able to see these two sides of the road - which are the two sides of any seriously taken journey of meaning.
I think this overlay/underlay, which is the core message of the book, was also Kerouac's metaphor for America's search for itself when it found itself to be a world super-power. Another line in the book goes, "Whither goest thou America in thy shiny new car?" Where, that is, are you going America with your newfound wealth and power - your shiny new car? And just as the father was never found, the question has never been rightly answered - even some 50 years after it was posed.
Finally, "the father we never found" is the answer at the end of the road that never quite and never completely shows up. It's that elusive face of God that is never fully revealed. It's that inherent sacredness or holiness or reverence in life that cannot be fully and finally and forever found, or continuously lived out. But the pursuit of the Sacred is still worth the journey - a journey with its joy and its despair. For on that journey we can at least touch the Sacred now and then, however fleeting the touch may be. We may at times reach the sky that generally eludes our grasp. I think that's all Kerouac was really looking for - at least some moments now and then when he could truly touch the earth and reach the sky. And even if the father, so to speak, is never fully and finally found, our journeys of meaning and spirit are worthy of our travels nonetheless.
Is anything sacred? The answer to the question depends upon how and where each of you go looking for it, on the various roads that you may find yourselves. Consider this place and this congregation one of your touchstone way stations on that road, as we continue on our quests to touch the earth and reach the sky.
Stephen D. Edington
September 23, 2007
