Religious Liberals - Do We Matter Anymore?
Sermon by Steve Edington
September 18, 2005
One of my more wayward summer meanderings of the past couple of months took me and Michele to a little bump in the road of a town called Coalwood, West Virginia. We actually drove for over two hours from my mother's home in Charleston over two lane winding roads. It was not a trip I'd recommend for those prone to carsickness. There's not much to Coalwood these days since the coal mine there closed a decade or more ago. So what were we doing there? Well, I wanted to see where Homer Hickam grew up and where he shot off his rockets when he was a teenager back in the late 1950s. Homer went on to become a NASA engineer. And then he wrote a book about growing up in Coalwood where he recounted how he became fascinated with rockets after Sputnik was launched by the Russians in 1957. The book was called Rocket Boys and it became a New York Times best-seller, which in turn got made into a movie called October Sky. Homer went on to write a couple more Coalwood books and now he's livin' the life as the saying goes.
If you go a few miles down a dirt road at one end of town, and if you follow a hand painted sign, you can find a little square concrete pad where Homer and his buddies launched their home-made rockets. They called it Cape Coalwood. The site is featured in a rather emotional closing scene in the movie. Go rent the DVD and watch it.
Like I said, there's not much to Coalwood now-but at each of the three or four ways into the town there's a sign that says "Coalwood-Home of the Rocket Boys." You take your civic pride wherever, and however, you can get it. Coalwood even has a Homer Hickam Lane now.
I've never met Mr. Hickam. Maybe some day I'll get my chance. But as I drove back to my mother's home I thought about some of the similarities in our stories, even though I'm far from being a rocket scientist. One thing that's drawn me to his writings is that I know exactly where he's coming from. We each grew up in small, and very provincial, West Virginia towns in the 1950s. We were each the beneficiaries of a good education that expanded our horizons well beyond the bounds of those towns. We've each written books. His just happen to sell, and one got made into a movie. [I must be careful here-envy is one of the seven deadly sins after all.] We've each retained an appreciation for our origins even as our lives have gone to other places. We're about the same age, Mr. Hickam and I, (he's got just a few years on me) and it seems like we're both looking back to the same place, and trying to figure out how we got from there to where we each now are. There's an element of spiritual journeying in trying to figure something like that out.
I don't know about Mr.Hickam's religious or spiritual path, but mine, as many of you know, has certainly taken me to places well beyond where it began. It was the questions I began to ask within myself-since I was reluctant to ask anyone else about them for fear I'd be considered crazy or an outcast-clear back when I was still in that little town, that eventually led to my being a minister is the liberal religious tradition rather than in the conservative and evangelical one in which I was raised. And raised in a very loving and caring environment, I must still acknowledge to this day; even as Mr. Hickam says the same thing about the way he was raised.
Homer asked questions and pursued truths in the world of science that took him well beyond a life in the coal mines, a life that his coal mining superintendent father wanted him to pursue. The questions I asked and the truths I pursued weren't so much about science. They had to do with religion and philosophy and literature, and they in time took me well beyond the faith my father so dearly wanted me to hold onto. That's the connection, you see, I feel with this rocket scientist and writer whom I've never met. He and I, each in our own ways, had to say "no" to our fathers in order to go where we knew we needed to go. That's really why I drove to Coalwood.
I still haven't stopped asking questions about my faith and my faith community-all these years later. I decided to use one of those questions for my sermon title today by calling it: "Religious Liberals-Do We Matter Anymore?" But then I realized I didn't like the question; because I didn't want to go, at least at the outset, where I knew it was going to take me. It was too predictable. I could decry the increasing influence of the ideology of the religious right on public policy, and how such ideology continues to trump science. The FDA's ban on approving a so-called 'morning-after' pill because its use is an alleged form of abortion is but one of the latest of many examples I could cite. Then I could go on and speak about the increasing marginalization of a liberal religious voice and presence in our society. But as strongly as I feel about such things, I realized that this is not where I want to go-or at least it's not where I want to start.
How about instead of "Do We Matter Anymore?" we just begin with the question of simply "what matters?" What matters to us-right here and right now, and then see where that might lead us as we begin another year in the life of our congregation. Let's start, as I often like to do, with the personal. We come here and we come back to this community in this fall of 2005 because we matter to ourselves. Some of us had to leave other places; some of us had to say 'no' to other places and other people in order to get ourselves here. It matters to us that much.
We matter to ourselves; matter enough to step back from the busy and often confused lives we live and search for a deeper reason for being, beyond all the day to day reasons that pull us out of bed in the morning. We each value our lives enough that we seek some connection for those lives with what Paul Tillich called That Which is Greater than Ourselves and Whose Name we cannot full know. There's a larger life, and a sacred Spirit of Life in which we are all held and grounded, and we come here to find that sacred connection; and we do so free of any dogma or party line that says "This way only..." Our many and varied journeys of the spirit matter enough to us that we bring them here.
But that's only where a community such as this one begins. We come here because we matter to one another. The lay Catholic theologian Michael Novak has written that that two basic religious questions are "Who am I?" and "Who are we; we under these stars?" Mr. Novak and I don't share much in common politically these days, as he's become one of the leading lights of the neo-conservative movement. But he did get it right about 35 years ago when he wrote a book called Ascent of the Mountain; Flight of the Dove. We're here because this question of "Who are we" matters to us. How we attend to the joys and the concerns, the celebrations and the devastations, the hopes and the lost hopes, the promises and the pains that are visited upon all of us-is another of the things that make of us a religious community and a spiritual home. We matter to one another as we are all a part of that Larger Life whose blessing we seek. And I want to urge upon you, and upon myself as well, to be ever mindful that the "we" in this "who are we?" matter includes those for whom this has been a home and a haven for much of their lives, and it includes the person who has walked through our doors for the first time this morning. We're here because we matter to one another.
We are also here because our world of people and events and nature matters deeply to us as well. The question, Who are We? begins here; and then it takes us as far from here as we each and all will allow it to. Here's the thing that has struck me the most about all that's happened and that has been brought to light following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina: I know I'm not the first to figure this out since you don't have to be a... well... rocket scientist to do so. The paradox here is that we have witnessed amazing generosity and amazing good-heartedness on the part of so many who are so affected by the plight of human suffering and loss. And in the midst of all that kindness we've also had exposed before us the great divides we still face in this nation when it comes to matters of class and race and to how we attend to the needs and well-being of those who still find themselves on the outer fringes of the wealth and prosperity that so much of the rest of the world sees us as having.
Our second UU principle says that we covenant to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. I would suggest that this is a covenant that needs to be binding upon this nation as well. In the past couple of weeks we've seen how that covenant has been lived out even as we have seen the many ways in which it remains unfulfilled and even broken.
We are here because there is a world that matters to us. And it is here that we may discover how we are called-from, for the most part, our places of privilege-to the understanding that to ask "Who are we?" means "we" in the most wide-ranging and deepest sense of the term imaginable. Our human folly and our human failings-from which none of us in this room are immune-have given us a horribly un-healed world in which needless wars are fought, in which children needlessly die; and in which ignorance too often trumps the light of reason and understanding. And there's a Blessed and Holy Human Spirit of Life-from which none of us in this room are immune-that can give us the courage and the wisdom and the love and the kindness that all those un-healed places call out for.
So I can answer the question I originally posed in this sermon title in a rather simple and straightforward way it seems. If we will attend to and be faithful to the things that matter the most to us as members of this liberal religious community, then the question of how much we matter beyond this community will take care of itself.
You're going to have to hear another summer travel story before you get out of here. Another of my meanderings happened some 2500 miles or so to the west of Coalwood at a place called Bixby Beach and Bixby Canyon. It is in the Big Sur area of the California coast. It is the place featured in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical novel Big Sur in which he describes with amazing honesty and accuracy the alcoholic breakdown he experienced there that foreshadowed his tragic demise several years later. In the summer of 1960 Kerouac sought a respite from the demons of literary fame by spending what was supposed to be a retreat of several weeks at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Bixby Canyon, which is just a short walk to Bixby Beach.
As was the case with Coalwood, I have this thing for visiting places I've read about in a book when the book has especially touched me. So I've long wanted to visit Bixby Canyon/Beach. But Bixby Canyon and Beach are not very accessible. A huge engineering-marvel of a bridge spans the Canyon on Highway One with the Beach way, way down below. The only way to get to it, other than scaling down a cliff, is to drive inland down a long dirt road to a turn-off that leads into the summer homes of Bixby Canyon. But there just happens to be a very high gate with a very big padlock on it across the road that leads into the Canyon. I have a hunch it's there to keep out Kerouac pilgrims like me.
Knowing that we'd most likely be stopped by this gate, two companions and I drove down the dirt road nonetheless. One of those companions, John, is the son of the late Neal Cassady who is one of the featured characters in Big Sur. John is also in the novel as the nine year old kid he was in 1960. The other fellow was Jerry, who owns and operates an establishment in Monterey called The Beat Museum.
So John, Jerry, and I drove to the floor of Bixby Canyon; and lo and behold the gate was open! Somebody had come and opened it up and then-as we found out-went back to his home to get his pick-up truck and drive out. I decided it was time to seize the time. I parked the car I was driving and said to Jerry and John "We're going in." They didn't argue with me. We figured that if someone asked us to leave we'd do so, and if not we'd keep walking through the Canyon and onto the Beach.
A little ways past Ferlinghetti's cabin a guy in the aforementioned pick-up truck drove up and stopped to say hello. He asked us where we were from-which was his way of asking what we were doing there. Jerry said we were from Monterey and that we were friends of Ferlinghetti. That wasn't exactly the truth, but was close enough for the guy in the pick-up who told us to enjoy our day and kept driving.
I can't really describe here what the experience was like. It was a beautiful day; and our walk took on something of an air of a holy pilgrimage. Because of the way the book Big Sur had touched us, and because it was John's first time back there since he was nine years old, the whole place had a sacred aura about it. It was an exhilarating journey for each of us. For the next few days that we were together we kept coming back to that trip and remarking about how if the gate hadn't been open, and if we hadn't chosen to go through it, we would never have gone there. We even developed a motto from that experience: When the gate is open, go through it!
I've decided to take that on as my motto and metaphor for this year-not just for me but for us. Let's look for the open gate in our life as a liberal religious congregation. Let's look for those places where we can bring our values and principles to bear; and when that gate opens go through it. Let's look for, and invite into, those whose lives we feel would be blessed by being a part of this congregation. Whatever opportunities for growth present themselves, take hold of them and go through the gate. And let us create whatever open gates we can for ourselves as we come together once again for another year in our life together.
Let us focus, then, on the things that truly matter to us-so that in turn we may matter to the larger world and the larger life that enfolds us all.
Stephen D. Edington
September 18, 2005
