Reachin' Out...
Sermon by Steve Edington
September 25, 2005
A few weeks ago one of the sportswriters for the Nashua Telegraph, Alan Greenwood, devoted his column to a couple of practices at Fenway Park - which take place during Red Sox games - that he wanted to see gotten rid of. The first one was The Wave, which usually gets going in the late innings. I was with him on that one. The Wave has become kinda old, and it is annoying, especially if you happened to be focused on a crucial moment in the game only to have everybody in your section jump up all at once and throw their hands over their heads and yell. Realistically I can't think of how you'd ban such a practice, but I sure wouldn't miss it.
The next item on Mr. Greenwood's Fenway hit list, however, was the playing and singing of Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" between the top and bottom of the 8th inning; which was where I said "Wait a minute!" Whaddya mean get rid of "Sweet Caroline"! Ok, it's a hokey song but I still get a kick out of being in the midst of 35,000 widely diverse people, most of them strangers to one another, belting out "Reachin' out... Touchin' me... Touchin' you." And waving their hands in the air like they're at a revival meeting - which in a way we are.
I will now take a short time out for those of you who may not have the foggiest idea as to what I'm talking about - which is fine. This is a non-creedal church. You do not have to be a true believer in the Boston Red Sox in order to be a member of this congregation (I mean it helps - but not required.) So for those of you do not worship at the Shrine of Fenway, no matter how well or how poorly the game is going as the players change sides in the middle of the 8th inning a recording of Neil Diamond singing this song comes blasting out over the speakers and the entire, always-sold-out crowd sings along, with their own - in unison - improvisations in a couple of places. I've been there on a few nights when the music has stopped and everyone just keeps on singing while the first batter is standing in and trying to get his bearings. Like I said, it's hokey as anything but for a few minutes it does pull together a pretty disparate crowd.
In the movie Fever Pitch, which is based on last year's Sox season, there's a scene where the character played by Drew Barrymore, finally becomes a convert to the Red Sox religion during the singing of this song at a game; which leads to the after-the-game scene that probably earned the movie its PG-13 rating, but let's leave that one be. To show you how strange the workings of my mind can be - for those few of you who may not have figured that out yet - it was while taking in a "Sweet Caroline" moment one warm Fenway evening that I thought of some lines from a counter-point song, you might call it, that was written around the same time as this one. This one by the Beatles: "Eleanor Rigby." The lines: "Ah, look at all the lonely people; where do they all come from? Ah, look at all the lonely people, where do they all belong?"
I know I'm reaching a bit - or more than a bit - here but humor me anyway. I get a societal snapshot when I play those two songs off of one another: Lonely people, not quite knowing where we've come from or where we do belong - and occasionally finding moments of reaching out and touching in the midst of that loneliness. And I also continue to be haunted by something I heard the novelist and essayist, Kurt Vonnegut, say in a lecture presentation he gave some 25 years ago at the First Parish, Unitarian Universalist, Church down in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While Vonnegut takes a keen interest in religious matters and while much of his writing has religious overtones, he's remained an avowed atheist throughout his life; and that was the stance from which he raised his children. But in this talk he gave he told about how his daughter had become a born-again Christian, and had become strongly involved in an evangelical, born-again congregation. Vonnegut wasn't bemoaning that, or being snide, or pooh-poohing the whole thing. He was just reporting it in that often matter-of-fact, almost dead-pan way he has of expressing himself. And then he concluded that particular segment of his talk with these words: "In a lonely society the main thing is not to make sense. The main thing is to get rid of loneliness."
As I say, it was 25 years ago that I heard those words spoken. And I've no way of knowing if Mr. Vonnegut's daughter is still a born-again or if she's found other means for getting rid of her loneliness. But, as I guess you can tell, the words have stayed with me over the years. One of the reasons I don't spend a whole lot of time reading books about why evangelical churches are growing while the more mainline and liberal ones are remaining static is because, for me at least, Vonnegut already answered the question some time ago with those couple of lines: "In a lonely society the main thing is not to make sense. The main thing is to get rid of loneliness." Before I start sounding too terribly self-righteousness here I will stress that I'm not saying born-again Christians are senseless, because they're not. Their way of making sense of their world is clearly not the same as mine - but getting into a thing about which of us is being more sensible doesn't make, well, a whole lot of sense. And we need to be attending to our issues and not theirs, so let's get on with that.
Our religious tradition and story is one that has always put a lot of emphasis upon making sense. We're really big on that. Unitarianism in this country had its orgins, in fact, as a reaction against the emotionalism and the emotional excesses of the Great Awakening that swept through New England in the mid-18th century. There was something about all these otherwise staid 18th century New Englanders going to these mass meeting revivals and carrying on like a bunch of, well, crazed sports fans, that our Unitarian - and to some extent Universalist - ancestors found a little unsettling and quite unseeming. Ours was the counterpoint faith for "thinking" men and women, and we have steadfastly held to those origins. Which is fine by me. I value the life of the mind. I've tried to live that life - with varying degrees of success - for most of my life. I became a UU because I was looking for a faith that celebrated and affirmed the free mind.
Going back to Mr. Vonnegut's observation, however, I would offer that we've got the "making sense" part down pretty well; what we need to do is focus more on the "getting rid of loneliness" part. That's the part I feel our more evangelical communities have got down pretty well. They know how to get rid of loneliness. So, what about us? How do we be the church of the free and open mind as well as the church of the good and open heart? I'll offer a few observations and see where they may take us.
Ironic as it may sound at first, I think the first step in dealing with loneliness is being able to be OK with being alone. Let me offer you a short passage from Dr. Wayne Dyer's book Pulling Your Own Strings that speaks to this. Full disclosure: I'm not a great fan of Dyer as I find a lot of his pop psychology to be pretty shallow, but I think he get's it right on this one when her says: "In addtion to realizing that you are unique in this world, you must always accept that you are always alone. Yes, alone! No one can ever feel exactly what you are feeling, whether you are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people, or in an intimate relationship with one person, or by yourself in a closet. Your inevitable, existential aloneness simply means that your human existence (involves) being alone with your own inner feelings and thoughts." He goes on: "Your recognition of this can be either very freeing or highly enslaving, depending upon what you choose to do with it. But in either case you will not ever change it."
By saying that we, as a congregation, "covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person" we are saying that we affirm that unique self to which Dr. Dyer refers - the self that each of you alone can only fully know. In the more tradtional religious communities the way of stating this principle is to say that each person is a special Child of God. Maybe not the same language that a lot of us use, but the same idea. And Dyer is also right when he says that this unique aloneness we all have can be either freeing or enslaving. It's freeing if we're at peace with it and enslaving if we're not. A person who has not recognized, and at least to some extent come to terms with, his/her "existential aloneness" as Dyer calls it, is going to be reaching out from a very needy stance that will cause others to be very wary of that person - which just puts one further into his or her loneliness bind. Sad but true.
The thing about stating practically any truth is that there's nearly always a "yes, but.." to go with it or come after it. The "yes, but.." to our first liberal religious principle that I just spoke of (the inherent worth and dignity of the individual) is our seventh principle which affirms that we are each a part of an "interdependent web of life". Again, the more traditional way of putting this is to say that we're each a unique child of God and we're also a part of God's family. Put it however you like; we're a free church. But the crucial place where we part company with our more orthodox friends is not primarily over language, although we do tend to get hung up at that very place. We do not prescribe a particular doctrinal path in order to be admitted to this family or web. For us it's come as you are and move to where you need to be. How we provide the means for persons to move to where they need or want to be is the crucial challenge to our liberal religious congregations - like this one - at this time; a time when for all of the ultra-sophisticated technological ways we've devised for so-called human communication, we're still left with so little genuine human interaction and meeting.
I've got another Vonnegut observation for you along this line. I'm getting a lot of mileage out of the old boy this morning, but he says he's a Unitarian Universalist so this is family stuff. [Only time I ever met Vonnegut I thanked him for giving me a lot of good sermon material through his writings, and his reply to me was, "That stuff's copyrighted you know!"] Well, OK. I hope I'm not violating copyright law when I say, Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, "One human being is no human being." I guess you could quibble at that - quibbling being something we're pretty good at, seeing as how we, you know, like to make sense. But I suggest we also take it to heart because in order to build a human community the truth of those words must be recognized and lived out. One human being is no human being.
One of the ways we try to live out this particular human truth in this religious community is through our Covenant Group program. I want to use just a few minutes of my words for you this morning to call your attention to it as we begin a new year. It's one thing to say everyone should be able to pursue their own religious and spiritual journeys rather that adapting themselves to a one size fits all doctrine. But it's quite another to provide a means for doing that - a means for people to reach out and touch and share where their life journey's are taking them. And you can have a friendly conversation in coffee hour - which is fine; and you can get to know some good people through committee work - which is also fine.
But you still need settings where you can go deeper than that. A place for usually 6-8 people to share common interests around certain topics - and to do so in such a way that allows you to reveal as much, or as little, of yourself as you choose. There's a flyer/brochure in today's Order of Service that describes this program a little more, and has a tear-off sign up page as well. I'm hoping to expand this program this year beyond our existing groups; and I want to offer it as well to any newcomers we see here next Sunday as well. There'll be a box on the Involvement Table in the Dining Room you can put your tear off sheet in if you'd like to be a part of this, and I'll be in touch with you about getting into a group. I like to think of Covenant Groups as a place where you hopefully can make a little more sense of your life and experience a little less loneliness. Making sense and getting rid of loneliness need not be at odds with each other after all.
I started this semon off talkin' baseball, and I'm going to end it that way. This has to do with a long buried memory that came back to me a little over a month ago when I visited the neighborhood I lived in from the time I was ten until I went off to college. This was a working-class neighborhood with rows of pre-fab-on-a-slab duplexes running along several parallel streets. I had a paper route that covered a few of those blocks, and right in the middle of it was a little mom-and-pop grocery store called Preston's Grocery. Literally mom and pop - run by Mr. and Mrs. Jim Preston. In fact the more common name of the store was just "Jim's". As in "Honey, could you run over to Jim's and get us a quart of milk?"
And on summer nights about a half a dozen guys from the neighborhood would sit behind the counter at Jim's, drinking "pop" (we didn't call it soda), and listening to the radio broadcasts of Cincinnati Reds baseball games. The "Honey" who went to get the quart of milk sometimes didn't make it back home for a couple of hours if a close game was in progress - which took the edge off his "honey" status. In the summer of 1961 I turned 16. I was too small for my age. I had my friends, but didn't really fit in all that well anywhere. Going to church was fine, but I had real mixed feelings about being known as a "church kid." So I spent a lot of evenings by myself riding my bicycle around the neighborhood and trying to catch up to any of my paper route customers who were behind on their bill and owed me money. But I knew my baseball. And I knew the Cincinnati Reds. I knew who played where, and who was hot, and who was in a slump - the whole bit. And on some nights I'd stop in at Jim's to buy myself a pop - and I'd see the men sitting back there listening to the radio. Now Jim was a good guy but he didn't like teenagers hanging around his store for too long, even harmless dopey ones like me. You went in, bought what you needed, and went on your way. And then came the night when I was admitted into the tribe. The Reds manager that year was a man named Freddie Hutchison, and their ace reliever was a pitcher named Jim Brosnan. I went into Jim's on this one night for a pop and a candy bar and was able to hear enough of the game broadcast to figure out that the Reds' pitcher was in trouble and about to blow a lead. So I said to Jim - and just loudly enough for the guys huddled around the radio to hear me: "I think it's time for Hutchison to get out there and bring in Brosnan." Timing is everything. I swear the next thing the announcer said was, "Well, Freddie Hutchison is on his way to the mound, and he's waving down to the bullpen for Brosnan." About five or six heads all look up at me. I take this self-satisfied little swig on my pop bottle and start to leave; and then Jim said, "If your parents won't mind you can come back here and listen to the game with us." Whether my parents minded or not was the least of my concerns at that moment. I had been asked into the circle, and I knew I was going. I spent the rest of that summer with the tribal elders, as it were, listening to the Reds games behind the counter at Jim's. That fall, against all odds, the Reds won the National League pennant. They got creamed in the World Series by the New York Yankees who had a couple of guys on their team named Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. But that was OK. My quite lonely adolescent self had at least, for a time, found a place to be.
That neighborhood has been so reconfigured now that when I went back to it I had a heck of a time figuring out where Jim's store had even stood. But my coming of age summer there is as clear and current as ever.
I'll leave you with this: How about this year we here work on our own ways of framing Jim Preston's words to me: "...You can come back here and listen to the game with us." I'm very aware that our way of being a religious community doesn't work for everyone, and it doesn't have to. But I am convinced that there are still enough folk out there who are thinking they don't, or wouldn't, quite fit in when it comes to being a part of a community of faith - but who might like to anyway... if they're asked. We've got an Open House next Sunday. That's a good place to start.
And I also ask that you take this little story I just related not primarily as being about baseball or about something called male bonding or even about a coming-of-age experience. It touches on all those things, I know - but I like to see it as mostly being about widening a circle that brings those who are out, in.
We have a circle here of people who love life, even as we seek to extend the blessings of life to those in need of them. We have a circle here of people who savor the world even as we seek to save at least some small part of it. And while we do not want to see the spirit of that circle broken, neither do we wish it to be a closed circle. May it be one that, in the words of our closing hymn "embraces all the living."
May these words help to shape our calling as a liberal religious community in the weeks and months ahead.
Stephen Edington
September 25, 2005
