Rev. Steve EdingtonA Road--No Simple Highway

Sermon by Steve Edington
January 30, 2011

Two weeks ago we observed the birthday of Martin Luther King here with a very moving presentation by Harvey Keye--and some wonderful music from our choir. I was glad to have the opportunity to sit in the pews for part of that service, while Harvey spoke, instead of being behind the pulpit. I need to do that now and then just to see what it looks like up here to you out there.

I want to revisit one single piece of Dr. King's life this morning as a way of introducing this topic of "A Road--No Simple Highway." One of the many "what ifs" of American history is that of what if Martin Luther King had not chosen the road he did--the road of ministry in the African American church, out of which he emerged into the leader of the civil rights movement from the mid-1950s on through the 1960s until his death at age 39 in 1968. Perhaps another leader would have emerged, as the times were right for Dr. King's ministry and message and actions. We'll never really know; nor at this point do we need to. But I find the question intriguing nonetheless.

According to his biographers, the ministry was not Dr. King's first career choice. He grew up in the large shadow cast by his father, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Senior; who as the minister of Atlanta, Georgia's Ebenezer Baptist Church was the one of the most prominent and highly respected members of Atlanta's African American community, and was well regarded by many whites in that still segregated city in the 1940s and 50s. For all the love and respect he had for his father, young Martin needed to move out of his shadow and establish an identity of his own. Initially he considered a career in law. But in the end he chose the study of religion, and that eventually took him all the way to a PhD from Boston University in 1955.

Think of the position young Dr. King was in at that point: Twenty-six years old, a Doctorate from a prominent northeastern university, and the woman he'd recently married, Coretta Scott, was pursuing a career in voice while attending the New England Conservatory of Music--also in Boston. Dr. King's roots were in the African American South, but he'd been living in the North for over seven years. He and his wife were both primed for careers in academia and the arts, albeit in a still largely racially segregated society.

The career path, the career track, the career highway were there. Granted, for Dr. King a career in academia would not have been a simple highway. It would have had its challenges, and its mountains to climb; but it most likely would have been safer than the road he chose. Instead, however, he chose to return to the South and take up the ministry. In the Black Church of that time, young Martin saw opportunities to work in and through that institution for the greater cause of racial justice. I doubt, at the outset, even he saw where that choice and that road would lead; but our nation was transformed as a result of the road Dr. King chose.

The song Ripple wasn't written until after Dr. King's death, so he obviously never heard it. Whether or not he would have even related to it is unknown - he didn't exactly seem like the Dead-Head type. Neither was I for that matter. But I still like this song of theirs, written by Robert Hunter. Like many such metaphorically rich songs or poems this one can be heard and interpreted on a number of levels. And its line, "There is a road, no simple highway," is one I take as a reference to the choices we make that guide and direct the courses of our lives. It's about seeing a script for yourself and then deciding if that script, that simple highway, is the one you really want to follow, or do you choose some other road instead. That was the choice Martin Luther King faced at age 26 - and he opted for the road, with all of its perils. It was a road of 13 years and cost him his life at the age of 39; and we're a better nation for his having taken it.

With this as backdrop, I'd like to offer a meditation, if you will, on this very enigmatic song for which I've developed a certain fondness. Frankly, I'd never paid it much attention until a few years ago when, on one of my Bay Area trips I had lunch with a gentleman named Dennis McNally. He's written what I consider to be the best biography on Jack Kerouac that is out there.

In addition to sharing this common interest our other point of commonality is that his now deceased father was a Unitarian Universalist minister; and served the UU Church in Haverhill, MA for a time, which was where Dennis grew up. He's lived most of his adult life in San Francisco. After writing his Kerouac bio, for much of the 1980s and 90s, Mr. McNally was the publicist and advance man for The Grateful Dead. He's also written an outstanding book about the history of that group and its place in American culture called - not surprisingly A Long Strange Trip. It actually made the NYT Best Seller list for a few weeks.

I brought that book along with me for him to sign when we first met and began what has become a good friendship. After inscribing a few personal words to me, Dennis wrote the line: "There is a road, no simple highway..." and then signed his name. I don't know if he was trying to give me a specific message then, or if he just liked the passage. The whole sentence goes: "There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night."

As already noted, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Dead Head - although that was, or is, an OK thing to be for those who were into it. For all of my interest in the Beat Generation era I never quite followed through to the Hippie scene. It's probably an accident of age; I was too young to be a Beat and too old to be a Hippie. In fact, until I'd read Mr. McNally's book I don't believe I could have named even five Grateful Dead songs. But, like I said, I found myself quite taken with this one. It is full of metaphors that seem to double back on themselves. Like Don MacLean's American Pie, I'll bet there have been Masters Theses written about "what this song really means," which must give Robert Hunter a good laugh. He'd probably even get a chuckle out of where I go with it today. But go I will.

In its broadest interpretation I see the passage as a metaphor for the life journey: Birth and death - the dawn and the dark of night. The "road" and the "highway" refer the choices we're given after our personal dawn, or morning, has broken: We can make our own road, deliberately seeking purpose, and intention, and meaningful engagement with the life that is all around us. Or one can take the "simple highway" and cruise along in a largely unreflective manner, living in accordance with the general societal assumptions of one's day and seeking to live up to whatever standards of "success" one's culture may dictate.

As we saw at the outset, it is usually those who choose the road over the simple highway who change the course of history, and even the direction of the highway itself. To go back to the time and place with which I opened for just a moment, Rosa Parks could have chosen the simple highway when she got on the bus in Birmingham, Alabama on that first day of December in 1955. She could have acquiesced to the general societal assumptions of her day about the "proper place" of persons of color. But by the simple act of sitting in the front of the bus she opted instead for the hard road, and the road to racial justice in the nation ended up taking a decisive turn as a result. That road, of course, is still ongoing.

To give these words yet another angle and bring them close to home here, I believe the reason people seek out religious communities is because they are looking for the road, and not the simple highway. They are looking for a place of meaning and hope and human engagement. They are looking for a communion of people and ideals and values, that expects and demands something of them, and to which they can freely give something of themselves. They are looking for a place where they choose, with both joy and serious deliberation the spiritual road they wish to take rather that a prescribed simply highway of what the founder of American Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing, called a "second hand faith." We are called to offer and to be one such community.

There are a couple of other lines from Hunter's song that I think demonstrate well the yin and the yang, or the dual truths, if you will, of how we approach the liberal religious journey here as Unitarian Universalists. I won't be so presumptuous or chauvinistic to suggest that other faith communities are inimical to this approach, but I am speaking here to a UU congregation.

One line says: "(The) path is for your steps alone" while the other says, "Reach out your hand if your cup be empty." However at odds with each other these two lines may seem at first, we affirm both. Yes, we do believe that each person ultimately has to seek and find his or her truth, but we do not send you on that search empty handed or with an empty cup. Reach out your hand if you are feeling empty or confused or questioning, for there are other hands here that will join with you on our common way.

Then there's the line: "If you should stand then who's to guide you? If I knew the way I would take you home." That, I believe, is the implicit message of the covenant in which we share. We offer our guidance to one another in our homeward journeys of the mind and spirit, however sure or unsure we may be of the way itself. And while I know that my own words do not always "glow with the gold of sunshine," and may in fact often times sound more like a tune "played on the harp unstrung," I, too, am someone on this road seeking my own way to wherever home may be; a fellow traveler with you.

I want to say a little, then, about the road that I believe calls us. Indeed, it is no simple highway. I find for myself right now, and it may well be the case with many of you, that there is so much to life that I want to feel good about, want to celebrate, and want to be joyful over. And there is, and I do. Yet right on the razor edge of that thirst for joy is a feeling of frustration, and at times despair, at the human folly we humans are so often prone to. There is so much still unfinished when it comes to our living in a sane, just, and peaceful land and world--perhaps it will always be so. And yet part of the road we choose is one of attempting to move what Theodore Parker called the "moral arc of the universe" even just a few more degrees towards a reconciled world. That is the nature of the road, and not a simple highway that says, "Well, that's just the way things are and we can't change it."

In looking to travel a road, then, where ones "yes" to life can still be said - even in the face of a chorus of no's - I find myself turning to poetry more than to theology. Back in the mid-1950s, during the Era to which I just referred, Lawrence Ferlinghetti - who, for my money is, at age 92, America's premier living poet - wrote a poem I want to share. It appeared in one of his first collections of writings, published in 1958, called A Coney Island of the Mind. It is whimsical and fun and caustically sobering all at the same time. It speaks to what it means to travel that razor edge of finding joy in living while being aware of so much that is less than joyful and life-denying. Give a listen:

The world is a beautiful place to be born into
If you don't mind happiness no always being so much fun
If you don't mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine
Because even in heaven they don't sing all the time.

The world is a beautiful place to be born into
If you don't mind some people dying all the time
Or maybe only starving some of the time
Which isn't half so bad if it isn't you.

Oh, the world is a beautiful place to be born into
If you don't mind a few dead minds in the higher places
Or a bomb or two now and then in your upturned faces
Or other such improprieties as our Name Brand society is prey to
With its men of distinction and its men of extinction...
And its various segregations and congressional investigations
And other constipations that our fool flesh is heir to.

Yes, the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things, as
Making the fun scene, and making the love scene and making the sad scene
And singing low songs and having inspirations
And walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers and goosing statues
And kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing
And going swimming in rivers on picnics in the middle of the summer
And just generally 'living it up'

Yes, but then right in the middle of it
Comes the smiling mortician.

We're called to be joyously alive even in the face of the various deaths that also confront us. That is not an easy road to take - but it still beats the simple highway. The life-stance that Ferlinghetti calls for here has a parallel to the late Rev. Forrest Church's definition of religion. Forrest, prior to his untimely death of about a year ago, was certainly one of the more prolific thinkers and writers within our Unitarian Universalist movement in the late 20th century. His most oft-quoted passage, I would say, is the one that holds that "Religion is our dual response to the human reality of being alive and knowing that we will die."

Rev. Church would have been the first to admit, I'm sure, that his words don't quite have the poetic ring and zing to them as do Ferlinghetti's, but he's saying as a theologian and minister what Lawrence is saying as a poet: "That the world indeed is a beautiful place to be born into" even as we also know that "yes, and right in the middle of it all comes the smiling mortician."

Religion is how we find meaning and purpose and hope and value and joy in life, in the face of the transience of life, and often times in the face of the tragedy and pain of living. We, here, are a religious community seeking to live on that edge.

I ask you to indulge me in a Ferlinghetti story before we leave him. Back when I was working on my Beat Face of God book I was able to arrange an appointment interview with him at the office he still keeps at San Francisco's City Lights Books--which he founded in 1951. The day before our scheduled meet-up I attended a reading he gave at a bookstore in Berkeley, California while doing one of my sojourns at the Pacific School of Religion. Mr. Ferlinghetti, who was 85 at the time, had published yet another volume of poetry called Americus. Some of the poem in this collection were very poignant; others were quite pungent and biting. I'd met him on one other occasion, and I spoke with him briefly after his reading, keeping it very short since I was supposed to see him the next day.

It's too long of a story to tell, but due to a really bone-headed blunder on my part--having to do with locking the keys to the rental car I had in the trunk of said car, I got to the bookstore an hour or so later than I was supposed to have been there. When I finally got over to City Lights I found Mr. Ferlinghetti had left, but also left me a nice note saying he was sorry we didn't get a chance to meet, and that he had to go home to take care of a cold he felt coming on because he still wanted to feel well enough that night to go to a San Francisco Giants baseball game. As bad as I felt about blowing our meeting, there was something that sounded right and good to me about a man who can one night give a very beautiful - and occasionally caustic - poetry reading and then go to a major league baseball game the next night. That's my kind of poet!

This is the road that calls to us now: One in which we rejoice in the goodness and the blessings of life, and savor the joy of living - which also facing down all those forces, principalities, and powers that would deny or diminish that goodness and that joy; whether those forces be in the world around us, or within the recesses of our own hearts and souls. As we begin another year together, this theme or idea will be the undercurrent of much of what I will have to say and live out with you.

I want to hold up one more verse from Hunter and Garcia's "Ripple" that will hold us for today. The verse (a line of which I've used already) goes:

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again.
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hand of man.

If Mr. Hunter were writing the song today he might say the fountain "is not made by human hands," but it's still the same idea. Sometimes you're going to come here with your cup empty - at other times it will be so full that you'll come here having plenty to share with others - at still other times it will be either half-full or half-empty depending upon how you choose to view it. But whatever the state of your cup I do believe that ultimately we draw from a fountain not made by human hands. It is that Ultimate Source of All Life that is both within and beyond each of us.

However we each envision and name the Source or the Ground of All Life, the Blessed and Holy Spirit of Life about which we sing every Sunday, we come here to partake of it in order that we may walk well on our chosen roads - the ones we walk as individuals and the ones we walk as a part of this covenanted religious community. We UUs have spent more time than we need to, I feel, contending over what the right and proper name of this fountain should be - sometimes to the point that we never get around to actually drinking from it. I think we have a deep and rich fountain here to refresh and nurture each and all of us on our life journeys. I hope we can each and all partake well of it. As for its precise name, well, once again I'm with Robert Hunter:

I don't know, don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air.

Stephen Edington
January 30, 2011