First Parish Sermon Archive

“Metaphors, Moms, and Joseph Priestly,

Although Not in That Order”

 

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

On May 9, 2010

By the Rev Ken Sawyer

 

The church year nears its end, which comes with Flower Sunday on June 13.

 

Yes, there are five Sundays still to go, and exciting ones they will be, every one, really, for one reason or another.

 

Next week will be a chance to bring to mind Margaret Fuller, the amazing intellect in the feisty ferment hereabouts in the decades of The Newness, as it was called, basically the 1840s and ‘50s.

 

Two weeks later will be the service that many look forward to, though others may abstain and newcomers may be amazed at the ways that we honor (or in some cases dishonor) some of the brothers and sisters of ours – ours in the human family – who have died in the previous twelve months.

 

This includes makers of music and their works, so we will wait to see if the choir will lend their considerable skills to Leader of the Pack; Da Doo Ron Ron; River Deep, Mountain High; or See You Later, Alligator, written or sung by the recently departed. (Don’t worry, Tina Turner [who sand River Deep, Mountain High] did not die this year, or even slow down.)

 

Then in June, Erin Splaine, the other minister here for the last eight years, and before that once our ministerial intern and then our youth director, will lead the service on the 6^th before she leaves to take up the ministry of the UU congregation in West Newton; although she will be back the following week to be part of the team, along with Carol Yerby, me, and of course as always Polly Oliver, the choir, a lay minister, and a member of the Parish Committee, to close out the church year with Flower Sunday, a service followed by a cookout, which this year will provide an occasion to celebrate Erin’s time here in Wayland.

 

But as the person who composes and gives most of the services during the year, I am aware that our times together in this room before September 12, Water Sunday, are increasing few; although let me put in a plug here for the summer services that happen in the Sears Room in the parish house, still at 10:00, led by members of the congregation. The schedule will be in the June church newsletter, but every Sunday except the Fourth of July there will be a thoughtfully-prepared service and a community of fellow worshippers. After over a decade of arranging for these services, Larry Shafer has gone into semi-retirement, though he is still helping the new overseer, our Community Coordinator Kim Winnegge, who would be happy to hear of your interest in helping or even in leading a service – there are still a few openings, though only a few.

 

But I got to wondering, what do I want to say in my final minutes of pulpit control for a while? Don’t worry, I will not be thanking all the people whom I might – I will save that for our Annual Meeting on the evening of May 23. I will not imitate the winners at the Academy Awards, except maybe, given the day that it is, before indulging other late-church-year opinions, I might give thanks for my mother.

 

A colleague of mine told me this week of a weekend retreat he spent once with members of our UU congregation in San Diego, where there is a large men’s group. Members of that group gathered to ponder mother-son relations, and were impressed, once they thought about it, at how powerful an influence their mothers had been in their lives.

 

Which intrigued me, as of the four relationships between parents and their daughters and sons, the one that had seemed most obviously strong, judging from reactions after a death, was that between mothers and daughters. I would have put father-daughter relationships next in apparent importance. And having been a son myself, I have been aware of the writers and others who explore the power and complexity of father-son relations.

 

But maybe least considered among the four relationships is that between mother and son, beyond the stereotype of the momma’s boy, the sheltered, pampered male who may perpetuate the relationship well into adulthood.

 

But I want to put in a good word this Mother’s Day for mothers who neither overly sheltered nor pampered too much, but who accepted, valued, and praised, as well as challenged and encouraged their children, and those who do so still.

 

Of course, dads who did and who do that deserve the same appreciation, whether their children were female or male. Margaret Fuller emerged as a powerful force in her age in no small part because she – like some other girls of that era, like Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell – were nurtured by loving, doting fathers who aspired for the fulfillment of their promise.

 

But as a one-time boy myself, a few years ago, I am acutely aware of the power of the mother-son relationship in particular, and its under-appreciation, caught so stunningly by Billy Collins in his poem, “The Lanyard”:

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

My own mother died a few years ago. I hope – I believe – that she got more by way of appreciation from me than a lanyard, although she did get a few of those as well.

 

“My thoughts about her,” I began, and then paused in sermon preparation for a good long while. I eschew generalizing, but I bet most of us here would pause longly at completing that sentence.

 

“My thoughts about her,” well, in my case are altogether positive, and I am sorry that will not be so for some of you, though for others it will. Maybe that’s something good about Mother’s Day, that it gets us thinking about our mothers with some effort at appreciation, and understanding, and maybe forgiveness, when called for, and maybe acceptance.

 

 

In the time remaining, I want to move on to some thoughts about religion, the place in it of reason and imagination, which seems like a timely topic.

 

Reason took a hit this year in many places in our country, along with science and the study of history, as school boards and others decided children should be taught probable or provable nonsense, regarding for instance the role of religion in the lives and thinking of America’s earliest political leaders or alternatives to the theory of evolution.

 

I preached in praise of reason this year, and I’ll say it again: one of the principles our congregations unite to affirm is “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning” and it matters. All claims are not equally valid. Society is awash with sources of misinformation and ignorance being passed off as fact, awash in rampant anti-intellectualism. 

 

This is nothing new, I know, although enhanced by modern media and the compartmentalization of the population, where there are ever-fewer contexts for common, respectful consideration of what might be true, and what scientists may have to say, and other respected scholars.

 

But irrationality is not new, and I ought not to let a good word for science and knowledge go by unaccompanied by recognition of Joseph Priestley, the ground-breaking eighteenth-century scientist who discovered oxygen and carbonation. He was also a political agitator, an Englishman who moved to America after a mob burned his home and laboratory because of a party he threw to celebrate Bastille Day and the French Revolution.   

 

And he was also a Unitarian minister, both in England and in what became America.  He founded the first Unitarian church in America, in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, and then another in Philadelphia. And he became close with those now known as the founding fathers. He influenced their thinking. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson corresponded for 13 years following their terms as president. George Washington is mentioned thrice in their letters; Priestley’s name comes up 53 times.

 

This is worth special note in the midst of recent attempts to turn the founding fathers into evangelical, Trinitarian, theistic Christians. There have been several recent books about Priestley. When one, The Invention of Air, came out last year, Newsweek made the author’s case that Priestley’s contributions “extended into this nation’s guiding principles…. An expat, a champion of reason, an original progressive – Priestley’s ideas were central to the American experiment….” [Jesse Ellison, 1/12/09]

 

But in good Emersonian fashion, I also want to extol another part of religion – religion as I prefer it – the part that is different, that is evocative, non-scientific, poetic, mystical, even mythological. Charlie Anderson passed on to me a great quote from a Globe interview with the author and atheist Daniel Dennett. Dennett said, “I’m quite outspoken about my atheism, but I’m also outspoken about my belief that we don’t want to encourage the extinction of religion. We want to encourage its evolution into more benign forms [by which I mean] simply an opportunity to join with people in a morally meaningful activity. I think that we can take a lot of lessons from religions, which are brilliantly designed to bring people together in just that way, with art and music and ritual, a beautiful building, induction ceremonies.”

 

You may be thinking, “Hey, over here, that’s us.” But Dennett concludes the interview by saying, “I know and love the Unitarians, but I don’t like the words to their hymns. The words are so insipid I can’t stand them. I’d rather sing the good old ripsnortin’ words and then put a little flashing light over the pulpit that says ‘metaphor.’”

 

I almost preached about metaphor at the family Easter service, but I decided younger children would have trouble with the idea. So instead I talked about resurrection. (!) The metaphor part translated into “just as if,” as in “it was just as if he did not die, even though he did.”

 

Actually, many adults do not take easily to religious metaphors either. Some people prefer not to have their religion include what they take as the untrue and maybe ridiculous. If the point to be made is, life is really difficult and dangerous at times but mostly we survive, say so, they might say. Who needs stories like Jonah living inside a big fish, or Daniel in the lion’s den? And then there are others who say, those stories are not metaphors – those are historical accounts.

 

Priestly thought faith and reason need not be divided, even though faith includes things which can not be proven, like an afterlife or the nonexistence of same. Things which not only could not be proven, but which could be disproved or at least deemed highly unlikely — a virgin birth, for example, or some one dying and coming back to life – those we might make it our practice to discard.

 

But along with my own inclinations toward reason, science, and skepticism in religion, I feel some kinship with someone like the Church of England priest and poet R. S. Thomas, who wrote,

 

“The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Ressurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. The core of both as far as I am concerned….” [Thanks to Woody Widrick for passing along the quote, which is from The Misunderstood Jew by Amy-Jill Levine.]

 

I appreciate it that when I use a story in a metaphorical way, from the Bible or elsewhere, there are few objections; and that few seem to mind when I weigh in on the other, factual, scientific side of the balance. Not even all UU congregations are so broadly open-minded and accepting of the balancing.

 

But my sense is, the balance works wonders, freeing powers of imagination, science, mythology, skepticism, wonder, knowledge, mystery, and other healthy parts of our religion, the religion that I like to believe is one that helps, and inspires, and sustains us all here.

 

So may it be.