Through the Good Times and the Bad Times Too
Sermon by Steve Edington
November 12, 2006
It was just over a year ago that we had the poet, troubadour, and UU minister Ric Masten here in our service. He and I have become quite good friends over the past 6-7 years and are hoping to get a book out on his very unique kind of ministry, which began back in the late 1960s, within our UU movement. Ric has traveled far and wide amongst our Unitarian Universalist community over the past 40+ years, while maintaining the same home for almost all of his adult life in Carmel, California - where he has been named that community's Poet Laureate. His signature poem and song, as many of you know, is Let It Be A Dance. It's number 313 in our hymnal - but we're not ready to sing it just yet! (Well, you may be ready, but I've got a few things I'd like to say first.)
The story of how the Reverend Mr. Masten came to write this song - which he told during his time with us - is both very tragic and very touching. It also sets the stage for what I want to share with you this morning on the subject of "Through the Good Times and the Bad Times Too," as a line from the song itself put it. It goes back to the early 1970s when Ric's two daughters, Jerri and April, were in high school in Carmel. They were taking a class on Modern Dance, that was being taught by a young, brand new, and energetic teacher at their high school. During the Christmas vacation of that year this teacher noticed that a famous dance ensemble from New York City was performing in San Jose - about 80 miles away. She offered to drive, in her VW bus, any of her students who could make the trip to go see the show. Due to other holiday commitments neither Jerri nor April, could go to the performance in San Jose.
It was on the trip home that the horrible tragedy struck-just before Christmas. A drunk driver pulled out from the side of the road into the path of the VW bus. The young teacher was not able to stop in time, and she along with two of the students in the bus were killed in the crash. Among the survivors was a high-schooler named Barbara Brussell who was the best friend of one of Ric's daughters. When the Masten family went to visit her in the hospital they learned that her kneecap had been damaged so badly that she was being told that while she might be able to walk again with the help of a cane or crutches, she would not be able to dance anymore. So, as Ric tells it, he made a wager with her: He bet her that one year from the date of that hospital visit Barbara would dance up the dirt road that leads to the Masten home, and Ric would write a song for her to dance to.
I'll let Ric finish this story in his own words: "The following week, while working in my garden, the entire song arrived. I ran into the house and wrote the lyrics down as fast as I could type. Better still, the words came with a melody... Barbara Brussell, (who is) now a well known Cabaret singer in New York City, did come dancing up our country road exactly a year to the day after the accident, with me singing and playing Let It Be A Dance. Barbara was limping, it's true - but dancing!"
I have a picture here of Ms. Brussell as it appears on the cover of one of her CDs. I'm guessing she's in her early fifties by now; and she appears to have had, and continues to have, a successful singing and performing career. Admittedly, I know very little about her, other than the fact that she survived a horrible and deadly automobile accident as a teen-ager; and that she is the person for whom Ric Masten originally wrote his best known poem and song. This song is now sung in UU congregations and at UU gatherings around the country. It's even made in into the hymnals of a couple of the mainline Protestant denominations in this country as well.
As captivated as I am by this story - I do have a sentimental side - I can hardly regard it as one with an entirely happy ending; and neither, I'm sure, does Ric. Those three promising young lives remain as lost today as they were several decades ago. What those lives could have been, or might have been, will never be known. And I'm going to guess anyway, that on occasion Ms. Brussell wonders, as do most survivors of such situations, "Why did I get to live and not them?" There is no answer to such a question, but that doesn't prevent it's being asked.
What I do see in this story is one more example of how even the most inexplicable and horrible tragedies and losses can still open the way for outcomes that cannot be seen or even imagined at the time that the horror or the loss takes place. And those outcomes, however terrible their origins, can end up being a blessing for other lives. This kind of understanding or hope, in fact, is really all I find I have when it comes to coping with those times "When Bad Things Happen To Good People," to use the title of Rabbi Kushner's well known book. I also know that looking for hope somewhere beyond a painful loss cannot usually happen without first working one's way through a lot of grief and anger - as I'm sure the parents, families, and loved ones of those lost in the accident to which I've been referring had to do before a young woman survivor danced on a country road.
Okay, how about we take a step or two back now for a little bit of philosophical distance on what all I've been hitting you up close with so far here. That's why we have a place like this where we can gather - a place where we can both engage with life, and step back from it all at the same time. One of the unique features of this earthly creature called human being, which we are, is that we have evolved to develop certain ideas and concepts of fairness and justice and what's right and what's wrong. Without such ideas, in fact, and without our attempting to put them into practice, we would not be able to live with one another as a species. So when an inexplicable loss or tragedy occurs, in addition to the visceral kind of grief we experience, we also experience a deep-seated sense of betrayal; This is unfair! This is not how life is supposed to be! For some such an experience can precipitate a deep seated crises of faith: Why has God let such a terrible thing happen? To use some Biblical imagery, these are what I call "Job Moments."
There's a story, the Old Testament folk-tale of Job that I had to wrestle with for some time before actually finding some sense in it. Let's go in that direction for a few minutes. Biblical scholars tell us that there were many versions of this tale floating around in the Ancient Near East some 3000 years ago. It's a story that has retained its staying power, as demonstrated by the modern playwright Archibald McLeish offering his version of it in his Broadway play JB.
The Old Testament version goes like this: God and Satan (or "The Adversary" as the better translation puts it) make a wager as to whether a good, righteous and prosperous man like Job can be pushed to the point where he turns on God. So Job, inexplicably to him, since he's unaware that he's the unwitting party to a cosmic bet, loses all he has, including his children. He gets these hideous boils all over his body; and his life just basically goes to hell. He has these three friends who visit him and lay on poor Job these long discourses about why he's having to endure all he's enduring - none of which are much help.
So Job finally loses it; and who wouldn't? He rails at God about all the unfairness and injustice and just plain horrible stuff that have come down on him. And God answers Job through a whirlwind - which seemed to be the Almighty's main mode of communication in those days - and says, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the universe?"
At the time when I was moving from a less theistic - or God focused-view of things and in a more humanistic direction; and as I took an increasingly critical view of the Bible that had been central to my religious upbringing, I pretty much tossed that passage overboard along with a lot of other things that were getting the heave-ho. I decided it was a cruel, heartless, and foolish God being portrayed in this story. Here's poor Job crying out at his terrible and completely underserved plight and all he gets from God is basically, "Shut up and deal with it!" I decided this was not a God I was much interested in. But something kept bringing me back to that line, even as I rejected the simplistic theology of the story itself. Is there something I'm maybe missing in that question from a seemingly heartless God: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the universe?"
So I worked on that for awhile, and here's the "de-theologized" (if there is such a word) message I got: Who are you, Steve, to be demanding, much less expecting, that life always be fair and just? Where were you when the foundations of life and the universe were laid? Nowhere - and that's the point. Life can come to us in beauty and in fullness, and it can just as easily and capriciously bring us its cruelties and unexplained losses.
Yes, you can shape life... to some extent. You can choose and shape your destiny... to some extent; and you should celebrate the choices and the opportunities you have to do all that. But you don't control life. Its ways were set in motion long before you showed up. Life gives and Life takes away. The challenge of living is in having the resources - from wherever we get them - to be able to respond to what's given and what is taken. Like Joni Mitchell said, "Something's lost and something's gained in living every day." Wow, all that from one little verse! As you can see, when I read the Bible I give myself a pretty free rein of interpretation - which is the only way I can read it.
So, when I'm on the receiving end of any of life's deep tragedies and losses - be they due to an act of nature, like a tornado or a tsunami; or due to human folly, failure, or cruelty - I, and you, should be able to expect and receive the love and the care and the support and the healing and the empathy of those with whom we're close to and in community with. And we should be ready to give our love, care, support, healing energies and empathy when it is needed by others.
But, playing off the Job story once again, I do not feel I'm owed some cosmic explanation, nor should I seek one, even for the cruelest of hands dealt. I can only live, or dance if you will, for as long as I have to do it, within a greater process that was put in motion well before I arrived on the scene and that will go on when I'm no longer a part of it-or at least a part of it in the form I am right now.
So what, if anything, of God in all this? Well, I like to think I have more faith options than the hard-nosed, if not realistic, Deity of the Book of Job, even if I do find truth in the words the writer of this story puts in that particular God's mouth. In his book Lifecraft, Rev. Forrest Church writes, "The word 'God' is nothing more (or less) than a sign pointing to an ultimate reality that finally can be neither named nor known." Idolatry , in fact, is when we confuse the sign or symbol with that which it is trying to point us toward.
The signs I read at this point in my life point me to a Power or a Presence both within and beyond me that helps and enables me to respond to life. It is a Presence that has nothing to do with the workings of the natural world and universe, or with the oftentimes capriciousness of human beings. It is instead both my inner light and that outer hopeful beacon that I try to keep in touch with through the good times and the bad times too.
At the service when I was ordained to the ministry, I had a close friend - who remains a close friend to this day - sing Paul McCartney's Let It Be. I requested it purely for the sake of the one line in the song that goes, "And when the night is cloudy there is still a light that shines on me. Shine on 'till tomorrow. Let it be." That ceremony took place in a fairly liberal Baptist church - or at least liberal enough to get the Beatles into my ordination service. And even then, over 35 years ago, I knew on some level that the only idea, or signpost to use Forrest Church's language, that made sense to me when it came to any talk of God, was of the light referred to by Mr. McCartney. I should have seen then where all that would eventually lead - which is to here.
I'm bringing this back to Ric Masten and his song for one more round before wrapping up. I'm doing a jump from Let It Be to Let It Be A Dance. (Sometimes I'm just too clever for my own good!). I share a story/anecdote that Ric, by his own admission, has used probably around a thousand times himself. He even did it here last year, as those of you who were in attendance may remember. It has to do with how one is supposed to read and sing the line of this song that goes "hug the laughter, bare/bear the pain."
Shortly after composing the song, Mr. Masten sang it to conclude a performance he did at a mental health facility. A woman in the audience, he recalls, who gave every appearance of enjoying the show appeared put off by the concluding song/poem. She took Ric's work to mean "bear" the pain, as endure it in repressed silence-and, indeed, that was how he had it written. She told him it should be "bare" the pain; as in, don't keep it in. His Ric's words on the incident:
"As it turned out she was the director of the place... The instititution (where she was Director), in fact (a good portion) of the world is inhabited by people who do not know how to spell the word correctly. We must learn not to bear the pain - not to keep it bottled up inside. Rather we should bare it - share it, unburden ourselves of the sorrow and pain that comes along with life. Since then it has always been b-a-r-e."
But not quite. When our current hymnal was published nearly 15 years ago, Ric was sent a copy of the text of Let It Be A Dance to proofread and he noticed they'd had used the b-e-a-r spelling. Again, here's his version of the incident: "Well, they changed the spelling back from 'bare' to 'bear'... But I kept mum about it. Why? Well, that typo has given me a punch line for every concert or reading I've done since then." And he used that punch-line here; and in doing a random sampling of our hymnals in here yesterday, I noticed that in many of them the "bear" has been marked through and replaced with "bare." So he has a little fun with this play on words, but his reason is well taken: "We must learn not to bear the pain-not to keep it bottled up inside. Rather we should bare it-share it, unburden ourselves of the sorrow and pain that comes with life."
That's all we can ultimately do with the tragedies that will inevitably befall us in the course of living-grieve them and then find the means, the place, and the people with whom we can bare them and ease the burden they bring. Some burdens, of course, will never completely disappear, but they can be lightened-with the help of whatever light shines within and upon us-so that our life journeys may continue for as long as they are ours to have.
Rev. Greta Crosby, another of my UU ministerial colleagues, has observed that "loss makes artists of us all as we weave new patterns into the fabric of our lives." What we seek to offer here is a community where you may grow a life. There are times when such growth involves, as Rev. Crosby suggests, the weaving of new a pattern after one's life has been diminished. A song that Ric Masten wrote nearly 40 years ago helped one young woman weave a new pattern into her life. Whatever new patterns you may be needing to weave, I hope it is of help to you as well.
Stephen Edington
November 12, 2006
