Playing the Hand You're Dealt

Sermon by Steve Edington
October 19, 2003

Reading

"There is nothing more I can do for you." The urologist closes my file grimly.
"I'm sending you to Dr. Hausdorff, an oncologist"
Another way of saying: "Go home and get you affairs in order, bird brain."
I become a card carrying member of a local prostate cancer support group,
Although to my untutored ear
All that medical jargon made it seem that my fellow survivors were talking in tongues.

During this period I also went on-line to see what could be found out
About the deadly adversary I was facing.
One day, because of dumb luck and a benevolent "search engine"
I stumble upon the PCRI site - Prostate Cancer Research Institute.
But on-screen printed matter is impossible for me to decipher
And as I was preparing to surf away I noticed that PCRI had a "Helpline" phone number.

I dialed it, fully expecting a recorded message
To inform me about what books to read and what web-sites to visit.
But surprisingly a live human voice responded.
For an hour and a half this anonymous Good Samaritan calmly talked me down...
Slowed me down until my own philosophy of life could catch up
And begin to see me through.

Once again, I remembered that the height of my highest high is in direct proportion
To the depth of my lowest low.
And looking at it this way, there are wonder-full times ahead.
It has always been in crisis where we find the opportunity to change and grow.
The human presence on the other end of the line kept me talking until
I remembered everything I know.

As Black Elk says:
"Where the easy way is crossed by the Path of Difficulty,
Mark a Holy Place."

From: Parallel Journeys by Ric Masten

Song

The Class of '57 by Don and Harold Reid (The Statler Brothers), Sung by Dan Murphy

Sermon

I got this little red hard-cover book, with a picture of a dragon on the front of it, in the mail a couple of weeks ago. If any of you were to peruse it you would not, I feel quite safe in saying, find it to be exactly scintillating reading. It is something of a glorified phone directory really: Names, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers; as well as a listing of spouses, occupations, and things like that. Some of the entries in it are more complete than others. In some instances there is just a name standing all by itself. But I've been pouring over this thing ever since I got it. And when my sister, who is two years younger than I am, was visiting here last weekend she and I both spent an evening going through it.

Okay, so what is this riveting (for me anyway) text? Well, it is a Directory of the graduates of the high school I attended, and from which I graduated in 1963. St. Albans High School - St. Albans, West Virginia. It starts sometime back in the 1940s and runs through the late 1990s. So I've spent a few evenings doing some of these "Gee, I wonder what ever happened to so-and-so..." types of explorations. When my sister Rose - who graduated from the same high school in the Class of '65 - was here she brought her Directory along as well, and we spent an evening doing a kind of tag team exercise with it, one of us calling out a name and the other looking it up, thereby cutting our respective spouses right out of the conversation.

The Class of 1963. I got invited to our 40th anniversary gathering which was held one weekend back around the middle of last month. I missed it. But the old high school friend who called me up about it, and from whom I'd not heard in over 30 years - well, he and I agreed to get together next time I'm in Charleston, West Virginia where he's now a psychiatrist. So some of us, like my high school friend Dave Walker - make that Dr. David Walker, MD, PhD - stayed home. Others of us are here and there all over the country. Some married-and remain married to - their high school sweethearts. A few members of my class are listed as retired already (so how have they managed that?); a few others have passed away.

The most intriguing entry I've found so far is that of the guy who was both our Class President and Valedictorian. He's living in a small town not too far from St. Albans and lists his two occupations as "Dentist" and "Evangelist." Well, having dual careers is fine - in this case it's saving teeth and saving souls. I just hope my one time friend Eugene is able to distinguish when it is he's supposed to be doing which.

I asked Dan about singing "Class of '57" at this service back near the end of last summer, well before I knew when I'd be getting my little red book; and looking through it was like hearing any one of the verses:

"Helen is a hostess; Frank works at the mill.
Janet teaches grade school and prob'ly always will.
Bob works for the City, and Jack's in lab research,
And Peggy plays the organ at the Presbyterian Church."

I'll come back to this song a little later. I doubt that any of us in my high school class fully knew the kind of world we were standing on the verge of in the spring of 1963, especially in our somewhat isolated part of the world. When historians of modern American history make reference to "The Sixties," they are actually referring to a confluence of social, political, and cultural happenings that began around 1962 and '63, and all that spun off from there. Three months after we got our diplomas Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream Speech" at the March on Washington. Three months after that President Kennedy was assassinated. The following spring the Beatles made their first American appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. And about a year after that pop-cultural breakthrough President Johnson called for the first of many major US troop escalations in Vietnam. And so it went.

I know that my life was significantly shaped and altered by these, and other similar type of events. I wonder if that was, and is, the case with others in my class. We had little idea of the social, political, and cultural hand that was about to be dealt us. I'm curious as to how others in my class were affected by that hand, or if they were affected at all. I really make no value judgments here. I just wonder. Did they live the kinds of lives they more or less would have lived anyway, even without the tumultuousness of the years that followed our graduation, or did these kinds of events deal for them a hand they felt, in some way, the need, or calling, to play out? Well, I've got a lot of their phone numbers now, but I don't think I'll be calling them up to ask. I'll just let the question remain a question. I just know that for me the societal age in which I came of age shaped my life in more ways that I could have anticipated.

There is, however, a more philosophical issue - and maybe it's a religious and spiritual matter as well - behind the question I've just raised. I know you're not hearing it for the first time here today, but I raise it anyway as it is worth re-visiting from time to time: How much of our lives are shaped by events that are visited upon us; and, conversely, to what extent do we choose our own destinies and directions? But putting it that way is something of a false dichotomy. The question does not break nearly as neatly and cleanly along such either/or lines. Our lives are an ongoing process of our acting and being acted upon, and the two often over-lap and spill into one another.

Maybe a better, and more realistic, way to frame the question, then, is to ask how do we respond to life in ways that also allow us to be the shapers of our lives. I still recall a piece of wisdom that came my way from a gentleman in the first Unitarian Univeralist congregation I ever served up in great State of Maine. He suddenly - suddenly for him anyway - found his marriage coming apart. After trying to make some sense of it all, and in trying to determine where he went from there, he finally said (in a Maine accent that I will not attempt to imitate), "Well, sometimes life deals the hand, but you still gotta play the cards." Whatever help I thought I was maybe going to offer him, he gave me a perspective, and a metaphor, that has stayed with me ever since.

It's a perspective which, like many, comes and develops over time. It is one that is gained, in large measure, as a part of the aging, and hopefully, maturing process. At around, say, age 18 you figure you're holding most of your life cards, and that you have the choice as to how you're going to play them. And in many ways you do. This is hardly a false perspective at all. If a young person did not feel that way, in fact, as she or he moved into the beginnings of adulthood, then they would not be able to make any of the life shaping decisions we do make at that point in our lives. If you did not feel you held a good number of the cards as you emerged from adolescence then you wouldn't even bother to play them, and your life would be diminished for it. And yet life is anything but static, or fixed in any one place. The perspective shifts; you find that you're not the only one or only thing that's doing the dealing, and at some point, in one way or another, you just might find yourself singing along with the Statler Brothers - or with Brother Murphy here - "But we all thought we'd change the world with our great works and deeds; Or maybe we just thought the world would change to fit our needs." And you discover the truth that "livin' life from day to day is never like it seems. Things get complicated with you get past eighteen... But the class of '57 (or any other year you may wish to name) had its dreams." Whatever the year in which we actually got out of high school, we are all, in one way or another, members of this class.

As a side bar here I have to throw in the novelist and essayist Kurt Vonnegut's take on this song. In a collection of his writings called Palm Sunday he recounts his meeting with Don and Harold Reid, who wrote the words to "Class of '57" under the name of The Statler Brothers, which is really a combination country and gospel quartet. I'm not sure that they're even still together. But Vonnegut was so taken with their song that he wrote this about it: "I would actually like to have the 'Class of '57' become our national anthem for a little while. Everybody knows that 'The Star Spangled Banner' is a bust as music and poetry, and is as representative of the American spirit as the Taj Mahal. I can see Americans singing in a grandstand at the Olympics somewhere, while one of our athletes wins a medal - for the decathlon, say. I can see tears streaming down the singers' cheeks when they get to these lines: 'Where Mavis fin'ly wound up is anybody's bet.'" It is commentary like this that makes me delighted to know that Kurt Vonnegut is a fellow Unitarian Universalist. Mr. Vonnegut, who is now in his mid-80s, goes on to say that this song could be the anthem of his generation. It could actually be the anthem of most any generation in recent times in America when you think about it. Because it is about the various hands we're dealt even as we attempt to dream our dreams and chart our life journeys.

As I noted earlier, it is an ongoing question and debate as to how much of our lives we really choose anyway. One of the more obvious, and yet still insightful statements along this line was made by the late Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, one of the true theological giants of the 20th century. He observed that we are creatures of what he called "finite freedom." It is this finite freedom that really defines our lives. We are born with certain definitions, and their attendant boundaries, attached to us. We're born to certain parents, and at a certain point in time, and into a particular geographical, social, economic, educational, and cultural setting. We're given a race, a gender, a sexual orientation. We're given a certain arrangement of chromosomes and DNA - and how determinative that arrangement is of who and what we become is still being explored and much debated. These are all aspects of the finitude into which we're each and all born - part of the hand we're dealt even before we take our first breath of life.

Still another of these givens, however, ironic as it may be, is a mind that allows us to see any number of possibilities and dreams for ourselves beyond the cards we're dealt. And with this mind is an accompanying sense of freedom that we can pursue these dreams and possibilities. Our lives, then, are an ongoing interplay between our finitude, our boundaries, our givens - and the freedom we do possess to operate in tandem with, as well as beyond, those boundaries. Life really is a dance between our finite boundaries and our freedom - and sometimes the freedom leads and sometimes the boundaries lead; and sometimes the lead changes so quickly we don't know which one it is that is leading.

It was another major 20th century theologian, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr (and not the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous) who penned the well-know Serenity Prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference." Dr. Niebuhr, as the story goes, wrote this when he was a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1932, as the concluding line of a prayer for a chapel service he was leading there. One account even has it that he just jotted it down before the service he was leading began, somewhat in the same manner as Abraham Lincoln writing his best known speech on the back on a envelope while on the train to where he gave the Gettysburg Address.

When AA was founded just a few years later in 1936, the founders discovered and adopted Niebuhr's prayer as their mantra. Whatever one's theology (or lack thereof) may be, and whether one is dealing with an addiction or not, I still find these rather simple words to be one of the best guideposts for dealing with the dance we all do with the life we're given, and the life we dream about and attempt to choose. I also find something of an irony in that for all of the weighty volumes of theology that Rienhold Niebuhr wrote and published during his lifetime, a couple of which I had to struggle through while in theological school, that one simple sentence is far and away his best known work and most lasting legacy. There's another lesson right there: For all of our efforts, our worthy efforts to be sure, to make something of our lives, it could just as easily be the simple deed or the words we offer on a whim for which we'll best be remembered.

Sometimes in the course of this dance, as I'm calling it, a pretty heavy, or sobering, or even devastating card or two or three gets thrown down at us. On this note let's move to another work by another song writer and poet from whom we also heard earlier, and who is especially fond of the "life as a dance" metaphor, Ric Masten. The poem of his that I read was one he wrote in the wake of his being diagnosed with prostate cancer. I told you about our meeting this past summer in a sermon I did a little over about a month ago. Ric and I have some e-mail correspondences since then and I'm pleased to learn that while his cancer is now to the point where it cannot be fully removed, it is also treatable enough that he can still live a pretty engaged and productive life. He's even planning a brief tour in and around the New York City area this coming spring. That last line of Ric's poem, where he cites Black Elk by saying: "Where the easy way crosses the Path of Difficulty, mark a Holy Place" is one I find to be especially striking. "Where the easy way crosses the Path of Difficulty, mark a Holy Place."

Why a "Holy Place" where this Path of Difficulty intersects with the road we're taking? I think the answer is found in the lines just before the Black Elk quote where Mr. Masten is telling about being on the phone with someone he calls an "anonymous Good Samaritan" after he'd dialed up a help-line for persons recently diagnosed with cancer. He writes: "The human presence on the other end of the line kept me talking until I remembered everything I know." What he's saying is that when it comes to playing even the most difficult or even devastating of hands, somewhere within us we have what we need to do it. He does not mean this, I'm quite sure, as a Pollyanna-ish or smiley-face kind of statement. Ric is not a Pollyanna or smiley-face kind of guy. He's saying instead that we do not completely know the kinds of personal resources we possess until we are pushed to the point where we have to use them.

Whether our strength comes from within us or from beyond us, or - as I believe - from both locales, we reach a Holy Place when the nature of that strength is more fully revealed to us. Recall some more of Masten's words: "Once again I remembered that my highest high is in direct proportion to my lowest low, and looking at it this way there are wonder-full [in the sense of full of wonder] times ahead. It has always been in crisis where we find the opportunity to change and grow." Still another irony: Sometimes it is the hand that's dealt us that allows us to discover in return just how much in charge of our lives we really are.

Finally, whatever hands we're dealt we are the ones who choose and decide how much love we will hold, share, and let be our guide; how much hope we will still carry while remaining full-of-wonder; and how much peace we will maintain in our hearts. Let's sing that together. "Love Will Guide Us."

Stephen D. Edington
October 19, 2003

 

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