The Fundamental Things Apply
Sermon by Steve Edington
January 4, 2009
My final accomplishment of 2008, just a few minutes shy of midnight on December 31st, was to reach the final page of this book that I'd been reading in bits and pieces over the previous several weeks titled Positively 4th Street by David Hajdu. It's a heavily researched chronicle of the early musical careers of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan along with those of Joan's sister Mimi Baez and her husband Richard Farina. Like many of these types of books it reflects the outlook and the biases of its author - and gets a little more gossipy in places than it needed to, but it was still a good read. It begins as the 1950s are ending, and as its principal characters are finding each other, mostly in the environs of Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City's Greenwich Village - with some side trips to Europe thrown in. It ends in mid-1966 with the tragic death of Mr. Farina in a motorcycle accident in Carmel, California just as he had published his first novel.
In addition to soaking up information previously unknown to me - like the fact that Bob Dylan and the novelist Henry Miller once played a game of ping pong - I used the book as a marker about what was happening in my own life when the events I was reading about were taking place. The book's time span covers my high school and college years, which began with my having absolutely no clue as to who these people were, to having my world view significantly shaped by some of what they were writing and singing about. Bob Dylan's song, "With God on Our Side," which Ms. Baez strongly promoted at her sold out concerts when Dylan himself was still relatively unknown, provided one of the early cracks in my near-fundamentalist mind set. It was one of a great number of factors during my college years that put me on the path my life eventually came to take.
The core story of the book, as those familiar with the lives of its characters might guess, is the Joan Baez/Bob Dylan romance of the early 1960s. As the author tells it, it was Ms. Baez who was far more caught up in the romance of their relationship than Mr. Dylan, who in a rather cruel and abrupt way, broke it off when he became attracted to the woman who became his first wife. Some years later - well after this book ends - these two reconnected as musical friends and cohorts, and to the best of my knowledge remain so to this day, as they now live out the 7th decade of their respective lives.
Ten years after their break-up Joan Baez offered up her version of her days with Bob Dylan in a song that is widely regarded as the best one she ever wrote titled Diamonds and Rust:
Ten years ago I bought you some cuff links;
You brought me something.
We both know what memories can bring;
They bring diamonds and rust.
Just on the other side of midnight, in the first few minutes of 2009, I put my book away and went and listened to a recording of Ms. Baez singing Diamonds and Rust. And as I did, I decided it provided the better set up for what I wanted to talk about this morning than the recurring theme piece from the movie Casablanca, "As Time Goes By," which we heard earlier. Still, I'm very appreciative of Jed and Geoff and John for playing that song for us today, so I'll play off both of these pieces - on this first Sunday of a New Year - as we take up the topic of "The Fundamental Things Apply." [And besides Diamonds and Rust would have been much more of a challenge for you guys to do than As Time Goes By. Not that you couldn't do either one of course!]
Actually diamonds and rust are the fundamental things we encounter as our times go by. What they each represent are equally necessary, equally essential, pieces of the life journey. We need to appreciate and value both, because the things that wear away - the rust - are just as worthy of our attention as those eternal verities - the diamonds - that we also seek. So, let's start with the rust.
I'm far from being the first person to note that the one really constant thing in our lives is change. Our lives would be very static, to say nothing of being downright boring, if that were not the case, in fact. To do a variation on this theme, I'd say that one of the more permanent things we have to deal with in the course of living is impermanence. Indeed, one of the core principles of Buddhist philosophy and practice is that all life is impermanent - it is, that is to say, continually wearing, or rusting, away.
This is a reality we can grudgingly and reluctantly, perhaps even fearfully, accept; or it is one we can embrace in a way that can actually give our lives added depth. We all know, usually before our age even hits double-digits that we're not going to be around forever. But there is a time in one's life when you feel you have all the time you'll need to accomplish all you want to do, which is a de facto kind of immortality. In your rational mind you know that at some point the rust will start to set in even though you don't really see or acknowledge it. But, as the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes wisely counsels us, that there is a time to gain and a time to lose; a time to receive and a time to cast away.
A much more contemporary author, a woman named Judith Viorst, picks up this same theme in her book Necessary Losses. Ms. Viorst is the author of a number of children's books; the best known one being Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. But Necessary Losses is clearly for grown-ups; or, as she herself would probably put it, for those who need to learn how to be grown-ups. And part of that learning process, so Judith Viorst maintains, is learning how to let go of certain things.
The subtitle of Necessary Losses reads, "The loves, illusions, dependencies, and impossible expectations that all of us have to give up in order to grow." This is one of those books where you can get the point just by reading the title and subtitle, but it's worth working your way through all of it anyway, particularly for the way in which its author maintains her very wry sense of humor even as she deal with a very weighty subject.
I'll read just a few lines from a chapter Ms. Viorst titles "Shifting Images." "We start to feel a time of letting go, of one thing and another: Our waistlines, our vigor, our 20/20 vision, our trust in justice. We give up hoping to read all the books we'd once vowed to read and go to all the places we once vowed to visit. We even give up hoping that we will succeed in being underweight, or immortal. We feel shaken...we do not feel safe... Suddenly our friends, if not us, are having divorces, heart attacks, cancer. Some, even our age, have died. As we acquire new aches and pains our health care is, of necessity, supplied by internists, cardiologists, dermatologists, podiatrists, urologists, gynecologists, and psychiatrists, from all of whom we want a second opinion; a second opinion that says, "Don't worry, you're going to live forever."
Well, I did say she has a wry sense of humor. Of course, as Ms. Viorst herself well knows, no such second opinion exists. But I don't think its actual immortality we really want though, so much as it is the time we feel we need to see all of our hopes and expectations realized, rather than having some of them go to rust. But realizing we don't have that time is one of the necessary losses the author is writing about. And it is a necessary loss because is makes us focus on what we really do want and on who we really want to be in whatever time we have to accomplish that. It is the reality of rust, in other words, that drives us to seek out, and hopefully find, our diamonds. So give thanks for rust. It is one of those fundamental things that apply as time goes by.
Well, what about the diamonds? How do we give voice to them? In looking for a hook to hang this one on I found myself making a run from Joan Baez to St. Paul - and I'm not talking about the city in Minnesota. For all of my pronounced disagreements with the man's theology, which forms the basis of the Calvinist doctrine of original sin, I still think Paul of Tarsus pretty well nails it in that oft-quoted passage from the 13th Chapter of the Book of First Corinthians in Christian Scripture where he says that the three eternal verities, as it were, are faith, hope, and love.
Indulge me in a brief side-bar here. I said "oft quoted passage" since it is found in the well-known "Love Chapter" that gets read at countless weddings. ("Love is patient and kind...it bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things, etc.") They're very beautiful words. They've certainly come in handy for me any number of times when I'll be working with a couple on their upcoming wedding and they'll say something like, "We don't want a really overly religious ceremony ourselves, but do you think you could you read something from the Bible so our parents will feel OK with it all?" This is the passage that works every time. The reason it works every time is because it is one of those Biblical passages that transcends the religious context within which it's written to point to a universally recognized truth. In this case it's the truth that faith, hope, and love will always abide, and will always be among those fundamental things that apply.
I'll offer my take, then, on these three diamonds. For me the notion of faith as being the blind and unquestioning belief in unbelievable things turned to rust before I got out of college. But that has not stopped me from being a person of faith. In fact, I would say my true faith journey began once I let go of the rather infantile notion of faith as unquestioning acceptance - which is far more akin to spiritual enslavement than it is to faith anyway. Faith, as I've come to understand and live it, is simply the ability to trust in life and in the ongoing process of life. Truth to tell, it's not always such a simple ability at all, given the ways in which life can test each of us at times. The faith which I now try to maintain is one that allows me to believe that I possess the resources - both within myself and, in some mysterious way, from beyond myself as well - that help me respond to both the joys and the trials that come my way.
I find the terms faith and trust to be largely interchangeable. For all of the dangers and uncertainties and fears that are around us we still need to be able to trust in ourselves and in the ultimate trustworthiness of the Larger Life within which we are contained, and within which we have our individual lives. It is this kind of trust, this kind of faith, that enables us to pick ourselves up again when some of the more cruel and capricious directions life can take are visited upon us. Without this kind of trust those dangers, uncertainties, fears and cruelties, real as they are, would overwhelm us and leave our lives devoid of meaning and devoid of hope.
Hope, then, is the second diamond; the second fundamental thing. Hope is a powerful and deeply resonant phenomenon. It was one of the core themes of Mr. Obama's successful Presidential campaign. A broad ranging desire, that was really more of an ache at this point in our history, for hope in our country - even if not precisely defined - helped drive that campaign on the course it took to its eventual outcome.
Hope, as I pointed out in a sermon in early December is not the same thing as optimism or in believing that everything will always turn out OK, because it doesn't always. I don't belittle optimism since it's an attitude I try to maintain for myself whenever I can. But blind optimism is no better than blind faith. Hope, however, is bigger than optimism. To live in hope is to believe that human beings - like you and me - who live with conviction and compassion, can effect positive change in our world, even if we do not live to see its full fruition. Hope is the willingness to plant a seed for justice, for peace, for a more reconciled humanity even when you know you won't see the full bloom.
Hope also means living with an attitude or stance that the future is open and that the past, powerful as it may be, does not fully define the future. Hope is believing that life continues to be worth the journey, with all of its knowns and unknowns, and however bleak it may seem at any one time. The writer of the Book of Proverbs correctly reminds us that "where there is no vision - which is to say, no hope - the people perish." For all of the ways in which hope can be manipulated or exploited on occasion, it still remains a part of humanity's life blood, which is why it's another of those fundamental things that always apply.
Then there's love - another diamond; another fundamental thing. I'm not speaking primarily of romantic love or sentimental love here - real and wonderful as it all is. Life would be pretty lonely without such love in fact. But the love I'm aiming for here has to do with feeling a strong sense of identification with, or connection to, the larger web of life within which we are contained. It has to do with caring deeply and passionately about life.
This, I know, is not a stance or attitude that one constantly maintains on a conscious level. Neither you, nor I, go around continuously telling ourselves how much we love life, what with all the other things that are generally on our minds. But we do well to cultivate an underlying and sustaining assumption about ourselves that we are a part of something greater than ourselves however we choose to name or define it. Such a stance, I feel, is essential to meaningful living.
Cultivating such a stance, that we are a part of a larger life that calls for our love, also serves as a critical reminder that we do not live for ourselves alone or by ourselves alone. The late Kurt Vonnegut once wisely noted that "one human being is no human being." Truly that is a fundamental thing. We need the love, the care, the companionship of others in order to be human ourselves. "You can live by yourself, you can gather friends around you, you can love one special one" as the Rev. Fred Small reminds us in his wonderful song Everything Possible. And whatever your choices along these lines may be, you still cannot be a full and complete human being all by yourself. Fred, in the same song - which we've heard sung here from time to time - goes on to further remind us that "The only measure of your words and your deeds will be the love you leave behind when you're gone."
Diamonds and rust; they are both fundamental to our lives as we move through the seasons of our lives as the years come and go. Rust is the reminder, the necessary reminder, that our lives are time bound, which in turn compels us to discover and live out our diamonds. This is one on the many reasons as to why we have a community here. We are here because one human being is no human being. We are here because each of us needs ways of finding meaning and purpose in our time bound lives. We're here because we need a place where we can leave some love behind before we are gone. And we come here in search of a deep peace that will abide through all the seasons yet to come.
Whatever this upcoming year may bring us, as individuals and as members or friends of this religious community - let us continue to build a home of faith, hope, love, and peace for all who come our way.
Stephen Edington
January 4, 2009
