A Time To Remember
When we were children, Memorial Day was a very special time. It was not the beginning of the vacation season--that
began only with the end of the school year. It was not an occasion for a great shopping spree--we had little money
for shopping in those days. Nor, in our experience, was it primarily a time for honoring men who had fought and
died in the many, many wars which have punctuated this nation's history. It was a family time, a community time,
a time for remembering all those people--flawed, imperfect, unremarkable people--who, in their living and in their
dying, touched our lives and changed them for good or for ill.
On that day, we visited graveyards and placed flowers on the graves of dead relatives and friends--not bought flowers,
or plastic flowers, but flowers cut from the yards of neighbors and friends. And we talked a bit about those people--the
people from whom we sprang--and what they meant to us, about their meanness and pettiness, about their greatness
and generosity, about their achievements and their failures. Memorial Day was a day for celebrating our rootedness
in the human family and the on-going nature of the human venture.
Nor was this true only in our community. When we left home for college in Ohio, we discovered that on Memorial
Day small town America was using the holiday for a broader celebration of rootedness. Some of those towns held
home-coming observances on Memorial Day--a time when people who had moved away long before, came back, to visit
family graves, to meet old friends, to re-establish continuity and community, to celebrate the human family across
time and across the generations.
Thinking about this custom which has now all but disappeared, we find ourselves engaged in a private "home-coming,"
a personal memorial day. We find ourselves thinking of three people we encountered in one year, late in the 1950's,
people who touched us and changed us in profound ways. This morning, we would like to share those memories with
you, partly to honor the memory of those three people, and partly to invite you, in the midst of all the hype and
hoopla of this holiday, to take a moment to visit your own private pantheon of significant people.
* * *
Mary was a third grade teacher. She looked like a third grade teacher. She was solidly built, neatly dressed,
her hair precisely combed. There was something about the way she walked into a room, or stood in a group which
told you immediately this woman would brook no nonsense; you had better have your homework done, and behave quietly
and respectfully in her presence.
Mary was also a member of the tiny first congregation I served. She was a ready and willing participant in the
work of that ailing parish. Somehow she managed to remain aloof from the petty squabbles and quarrels that characterized
the life of that congregation as it groped its way to its ultimate demise. I can still see her working in the church
kitchen, and participating in meetings, bringing competence, skill and calm, reasoned judgment to every situation.
Mary was personally responsible for our little church school. That is, she supplied the student body. They
were not her children, but they were two youngsters she knew from school, youngsters for whom she had a special
affinity. She invited them to church, and they came, week after week, two little girls who, at the beginning, were
our entire church school.
We were never sure whether Mary was unmarried, widowed or divorced. The children called her Mrs. Shank.
But in those days, all older women who taught school were given the title "Mrs." We did know that she
lived alone, in a large house at the edge of town--out where the farmers' fields abutted the line of settlement.
One day, Mary called and asked us to drive out to her house for a visit. She cautioned us, however, that her driveway
was blocked and we should park on the side of the road near her home. As we approached her house, I noticed that
her own car was also parked on the side of the road, and her driveway was blocked by a make-shift barricade of
old kitchen chairs and a broom stick. We knocked on the door, and Mary ushered us into her well-kept parlor. After
a bit of small talk, she called us over to a window, pulled aside the curtain, and said, "This is what I wanted
you to see," and pointed toward the driveway.
It looked like a driveway to me; an unpaved driveway of dusty dirt and stones. Seeing the puzzled look
on my face, she pointed again. I stared, and eventually thought I saw something moving. Looking more intently,
I saw a small, neat bird, sitting among the stones of the driveway.
"It's a killdeer," said Mary. "They make their nests in open places. This one has decided
to make her nest in my driveway. When I get too close to her, she drops one wing and limps off, as if she were
injured, in an effort to lure me away from the nest. That's how the killdeer protects its eggs. I just wanted you
to see my tenant."
We watched the bird for a while, talked a little and then left. It was a small moment, quite unremarkable. Except.
Except that this experience was unique in my life to that point. I had grown up in a third floor apartment, in
a small industrial city in Maryland. For the most part, in our household non-human life was an enemy to be overcome.
My aunt spent a great deal of energy trying to kill mice and rats and cockroaches and other vermin. In her mind,
birds were a nuisance, always threatening the clean clothes she had just hung out to dry. While we had a dog, he
quickly learned that his well-being depended upon staying out of her way. Even when we moved out of the apartment
and into the country-side, animals were valued for what they could provide. Any bird improvident enough to build
a nest in our driveway would have paid dearly for such a rash decision.
Here, on the other hand was Mary, a woman whose judgment and insight I respected, who was prepared to inconvenience
herself for several weeks while a killdeer incubated the future in the middle of her driveway. I was astounded.
For the first time in my life I began to glimpse the possibility that human beings have an opportunity for relationships
beyond domination, that other living things may have rights which we have a moral obligation to respect, that we
share this beautiful planet with life forms which, though different from us, are related to us.
I had joined bird-watching hikes in the early mornings during my freshman year in college--traipsing along
with a few other students and the professor who was a favorite of mine, stopping to focus the field glasses, trying
to identify the varieties of birds stirring in the treetops of a woodland area near the college. But this was different--we
were now in the real world. I doubt that Mary ever knew what a precious gift she offered that summer afternoon,
when she called and invited us to her home. Even we did not know, until long after we had moved from that town,
how rich a world she opened for us.
I never had an opportunity to thank her. But I do so now. One summer afternoon, she opened my eyes, helped me to
see a killdeer amid the stones in her driveway, helped me see myself as part of an interdependent and inter-related
world and I have never been the same again. One summer afternoon, she touched my life with a touch as gentle as
a butterfly's wing, and I have never been the same since.
* * *
The second person we remember from that same town and those same years, was a crusty old curmudgeon named
Jim. As a young man he had contracted polio, which left him crippled: although he was able to get around with the
aid of two sturdy canes which he had fashioned for himself. By the time we met him he had also developed a tremor
in his hands. But these misfortunes had not made him bitter. Rather, over the years, he had developed a wicked,
delicious sense of humor. He had a reputation in town for playing practical jokes on his neighbors--nothing really
hurtful; just funny. For example, one day, noticing two of his neighbors chatting outside their homes, he moved
the speakers to his new hi-fi system to the window, and put on a recording of some Sousa marches. He played them
softly at first, then slowly increased the volume, all the while laughing to himself as the neighbors gathered
up their children and headed up the street to watch the parade.
We met Jim when he decided, at age sixty-seven, that it was time to learn to play the piano which was sitting in
his living room. I had been introducing the two little girls in the Suncay school to the joys of piano and he had
heard about it--it was a amall town, after all-- so he called me and asked if I would give him lessons. It was
a real challenge with crippled legs and the tremor in his hands, but he was determined to give it a try. So I agreed
to give him regular lessons. David went along, and soon we three became great friends. His commentary on the world--so
wry and humorous and appropriate--was a breath of fresh air in a small, insular, ingrown community. He also taught
us to play a mean game of pinochle. He shared stories of his adventures in the world: he had been in the Navy before
the polio, then he had rigged the photo sequencing for the A bomb explosions at Eneweetok just before he retired.
He also introduced us to a small group of young people whom he befriended and was helping through the difficulties
of growing into responsible adults.
Jim was a man of many parts. He made a small grandfather's clock cabinet from maple, installed a set of works he
had assembled from various sources, and gave it to us. After we moved from town, he visited us on a regular basis
for some years--I can still see him swinging through the airport on his canes, and then, at our house, settling
down to regulate the clock and get it running again. (It always ran for about two weeks after his visit, then stopped
and waited for him to return.) Then, one year, the visits stopped and the letters stopped. And we were left to
wonder what had happened to our friend, Jim. A mutual acquaintance finally told us that we had broken a taboo which
was stronger than our friendship.
After our second son was born, we adopted a third child. Stephen was a beautiful little boy with large, sad, dark
brown eyes, who was truly an African American. His mother had been a Euro-American graduate student; his father,
an exchange student from Kenya. We proudly announced his arrival in our family to all our friends. Jim, who had
celebrated the arrival of our first two sons, could not accept this breach of the color barrier. We never heard
from him directly again. We did not know whether to feel anger or sorrow or disappointment. In truth, we felt them
all.
With the passage of years, I now know that I have learned some vital things from our friend, Jim. Watching him
cope with his physical handicaps I learned a great deal about human courage and resilience, and our ability to
construct a rich and meaningful life within the limits which fate imposes upon us. Seeing him extend his friendship
to the lonely and the hurt and the discouraged, taught me something of the importance of responding to people where
they are, as they are. Experiencing his unique sense of humor, I learned not to take myself or the world too seriously.
And in the end, I learned that all of us, however rich our lives may be, however empathetic our response to the
world, all of us have in ourselves some unexpected handicaps, some hidden limits--barriers not responsive to the
suasions of reason or logic.
Jim could fashion canes which allowed him to function in the world despite his physical handicaps. The emotional
handicaps resulting from growing up in a racist society were not so easily overcome. And so, I learned from Jim
to watch for the limits which time and circumstance have built into my life, those irrational prejudices which
lie hidden within me, and which may lead me to foolish and hurtful decisions. Whenever I look at the Grandfather's
clock in our dining room (now powered by a battery driven mechanism), I remember him, and I am thankful for all
we shared, for all that he taught me, and I am saddened that there came a time when our paths diverged so profoundly
that we could no longer walk together.
* * *
The third person who entered our lives that year was a man we never met. Some acquaintances from the Universalist
Church in Cincinnati sent me a gift of several long-playing recordings of sermons delivered at All Souls Unitarian
Church in Washington, DC, by Dr. A. Powell Davies. Those sermons came at a crucial time in my life. I was attempting
to serve as minister to a small, dying, isolated Universalist Church. I was functioning without the benefit of
any seminary training. I had never before heard a Unitarian Universalist preach. My religious experience was rooted
in Bible centered, conservative Christian pietism. The sermons I had heard as a youngster had all been about personal
piety, about how to live in this world so as to receive a reward in the world to come. The churches, in my experience,
had given up on this world, offered no hope of improving society, and encouraged people to separate themselves
from the world and to live a life of acceptance and endurance, hoping for better things in the next life.
I encountered Davies' sermons at a time when I was attempting to find some path out of that thicket of religious
assumptions. And Powell Davies was a light in the darkness. I listened to his rich voice on those records and discovered
there sermons which were erudite and literate and reasonable, not Bible centered or specifically Christian. What
is more, those sermons combined a strong moral imperative, a clear religious vision and a profound concern for
the social condition in a way which suggested that the world, for all its sorrow and pain, is not beyond redemption,
that the task of religion is not to draw us away from the world but to engage us with the world, to dream dreams
and to make those dreams into reality. I listened to those sermons, and a new understanding of the church, of the
ministry, of religious possibilities began to form in my mind. For the first time I knew that truth was not dependent
upon Biblical sources, that Christianity was not to be accepted as normative, and that my growing concern for the
world was religious at its root.
A. Powell Davies was not responsible for my decision to become a minister; nor was he responsible for my choice
of Unitarian Universalism as a religious home, but in some ways he may have made it possible for me to hold to
my vocation, for he opened my eyes to a broader understanding of church, of faith, of ministry. Though I never
met Dr. Davies--he died the year I began my work in the ministry--I remain eternally grateful for his gift to my
life. It is one of the real satisfactions of my career to know that as minister of the Unitarian Church in Summit,
I occupy the pulpit which Powell Davies occupied from 1933 to 1944. It is also a source of satisfaction that some
years ago, when his young granddaughter died, Dr. Davies' widow, Muriel, asked me to conduct the memorial service.
I felt then that, in some way, I was making a small repayment of the gift I received from A. Powell Davies, all
those long years ago.
>From time to time, standing in this place, I hear in my head the rich cadences of his voice, the stirring and
powerful quality of his thought, and I am reminded again and again of how much my ministry, my preaching, my life
owes to this man whom I never met.
* * *
As we said at the outset, we share these memories with you as a way of expressing gratitude for three people who
touched our lives and changed us and enriched us beyond anything they could have known or intended.
We share these memories with you as a way of challenging you to find some quiet moment this weekend to
visit your personal pantheon of heros and heroines and give thanks for those who have touched and changed and enriched
your life. But there is one other motive as well. We share these memories as a reminder to all of us that our lives
are woven into the larger human community.
We touch the lives of others, often without knowing it, and in that touching, we change the lives of others and
the world we share in common; in that touching we have the opportunity to enrich the lives of others and the world
in ways past knowing.
We share these memories with you, this Memorial Day Weekend, as a challenge to remember, that in your
living, you mediate to another generation the gifts which have come to you from the past,
that the ripples from your lives will lap shorelines you cannot see and affect a future you can never visit
and that therefore, it behooves us all to live gently with each other and to walk with care through this
beautiful, fragile, fleeting existence.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
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