A Road, No Simple Highway
Sermon by Steve Edington
September 19, 2004
If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine,
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung,
Would you hear my voice come through the music,
Would you hold it near as if it were your own?
It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken.
Perhaps they're better left unsung.
I don't know, don't really care,
Let there be songs to fill the air.
Chorus: Ripple in still water
Where there is not a pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow
Reach out your hand if you cup be empty.
If you cup is full, may it be again.
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hand of man.
There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night,
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone.
Chorus: Ripple in still water...
You who choose to lead must follow.
But if you fall you fall alone.
But if you should stand then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home.
Ripple. Words by Robert Hunter. Music by Jerry Garcia.
The last leg of my sabbatical journey at the end last March was an overnight stopover in Rochester, New York. In the fall of 1967 I entered theological school in Rochester and graduated four years later, and began my career in the ministry. The seminary I attended has a rather pastoral location, sitting on top of a hill looking south towards the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. After finding myself a motel I drove up to the campus. For late March in Rochester the weather was surprisingly mild. I sat on the long patio that runs the length of the front of the school and looked out over what had been very familiar scenery to me in the late 1960s. I thought about some of the term papers and exams I'd sweated out while looking at that very same scene. I don't know where it came from - not that it matters, I guess - but from somewhere I heard a question put to me as I sat there: "Okay, so what have you got to say for yourself now some 35 years later?"
That was a little unsettling. Just who, or what, is it that is demanding I make some account of my life? Or maybe these kinds of things just happen when you reach a certain age. The experience did provide me an opportunity to do some personal reflection and meditation on the changes I'd experienced in my own life, and those I'd witnessed in the world around me. The content of those reflections, however, is not where I'm going today.
For what also came to mind in that moment were some words a gentleman I'd had lunch with a couple of weeks earlier had written in a book of his that he autographed for me. The man's name is 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. After writing his Kerouac bio, and 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. It even made the New York Times best seller list for a couple of weeks.
I brought this book along with me for him to sign. After a few personal words to me, Dennis wrote the line: "There is a road, no simple highway..." and then signed his name. The line is from the song Ripple, by Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, which we just heard Dan and Geoff do for us. It was also the line I found I was humming to myself as a sat on the patio of my old seminary: "There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night." According to Dennis's book Jerry Garcia once said of Ripple: "When(ever) I sing that song there's a moment when I say to myself, 'Am I really a ... minister?'" Given Garcia's comment perhaps it was appropriate of me to invoke some of the words to this song in the place where I prepared for the ministry right around the time it was written.
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. Its probably an accident of age; I'm 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 I found myself quite taken with this one. It is full of metaphors that seem to double back on themselves; but it is not my purpose this morning to try to dissect it. Like Don MacLean's American Pie, I'll bet there have been Masters Theses written about "what this song really means," which I'm sure gives Robert Hunter a good laugh.
I will, however, pull in a few of its lines this morning, and I want to use the one to which I've been referring to launch us into this church year. What lies before us, as persons of a liberal faith tradition, as members of a congregation, and as citizens of a community, nation, and world is a road which is anything but a simple highway.
In its broadest interpretation my passage for this morning is a metaphor for the life journey itself: 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.
It is usually those who choose the road over the simple highway that change the course of history, and even the nature of the highway itself. Rosa Parks, for example, 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, I believe the reason people seek out religious communities is because they are looking for the road, and not the simple highway; looking for a place of meaning and hope and human engagement - 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. 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. One 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 now entering another year of ministry with this wonderful congregation.
I want to say a little, then, about the road that I see calling 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 despair and frustration over the sheer human folly being shown by those who purport to lead us right now. In the Thursday, September 9th issue of the New York Times - ten days ago - were the pictures of some 1000 young American men and women soldiers who have now been killed in the Iraqi War. I will readily grant, as a human being and as an American citizen, that there are certain values and ideals worth fighting and dying for, and that are worth defending with one's very life; but I have yet to hear any kind of coherent and rational reason given by those who sent these people to their deaths as to why their lives had to be yielded up.
I also find I am developing an increasingly disturbing fear of fear. I'll be offering a sermon on this subject a few weeks from now and will not, therefore, belabor it here. My memories of the McCarthy Era of the early 1950s are extremely vague since I was a kid at the time, but I cannot personally recall a time in this nation when our foreign and domestic policies - to say nothing of just general political posturings - have been more fear driven than is the case right now. I do not dispute at all that we live in a dangerous world; but I believe it is possible to effectively deal with danger without succumbing to the irrational and ugly side of fear. I'll say more on this on a Sunday in October.
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 85, America's premier living poet - wrote a poem I want to share. It appeared in one of his first collections of writings 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.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti. A Coney Island of the Mind
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 Rev. Forrest Church's definition of religion. Forrest is certainly one of the more prolific thinkers and writers within our Unitarian Universalist movement today. In one of his earlier books he wrote that "Religion is our dual response to the human reality of being alive and knowing that we will die." Rev. Church would be 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: 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 have to get in one more bit about Mr. Ferlinghetti before leaving him. I attended a reading he gave at a bookstore in Berkeley last July in the wake of the publication of his latest work called Americus. These poems deal mostly with the post-9/11 atmosphere in our land. Some of them are very poignant; others are quite pungent and biting. I got to speak with him briefly after his reading, but kept it very short since I actually had an appointment with him the following day at his office at the City Lights Bookstore. It's too long of a story to tell now, but due to a really bone-headed blunder on my part I got to the bookstore an hour or so later than I was supposed to have been there. The co-manager of City Lights, a very delightful woman with whom I also had an appointment, told me when I finally arrived that Mr. Ferlinghetti had been there for awhile but had a bit of a cold and had gone home to take care of it - 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 - while at the same time quite caustic-poetry reading about our country's current state of affairs, 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. A common affliction among many of us ministers in our "gear up for the year" sermon is that we feel we have to say a whole year's worth of stuff in that one sermon. I'm just supposed to set a tone of this Sunday - we'll deal with the details as we go along. Anyway the verse (a line of which I've used already) is:
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 write 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 D. Edington
September 19, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
