Sunday Service
August 12: “I Am What I Am” - led by Rev. Jill Bowden
A Wisconsin farm kid quickly learns to be very quiet during the radio-reported noon “Corn Report.” The noon news was important to my parents during those pre-transistor, pre-Walkman (if you remember the pre-cursors of today’s personal sound systems,) pre-iPod, pre-MP-3 days. There were no cell phones, and parents were not plugged in to their Blackberrys and their PDAs, and so the noon news was our contact with the outside world. The Corn Report, followed by the Hog Report – all news from the Chicago Corn Exchange – followed faithfully by farmers everywhere, decided the family’s financial standing for the year. If corn was up, did you sell it and then have to sell off the hogs because you had sold off the feed, or did you feed it to the hogs, hoping the price of hogs would go up? Farming is always a gamble like that.
Living on a farm in the summer was pretty isolating, when I think back on it. We worked, or our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles did, while my brothers and my cousins and I climbed trees and built tree houses. We chopped thistles (two for a penny) or weeded the garden or picked strawberries or sneaked off to the old dam to put our feet in the water and squish the mud between our toes. We helped with the hay and helped milk the cows and played with the dogs and ran down to the cellar for jars of tomatoes or watermelon pickles.
We didn’t go swimming much, because of the polio scare, and our vegetables, although from our own garden, were boiled within an inch of their lives for the same reason. Except for spinach. Spinach came in a green can from the grocery store – no supermarket then, just Joyce and Dick Eisle behind the counter of their own grocery store on Main Street. Spinach was good for you, the grownups said, and when the corn report was over – or probbly I am confabulating years and years of summers here – we could watch Popeye cartoons before being booted out of the house again for the afternoon – “you kids shut off that TV and go outside” was a familiar refrain.
It was great fun to eat spinach while Popeye sang, “I’m strong to the finish ‘cause I eats me spinach,” and my brothers squirmed, because they didn’t like spinach and tried to get away with hiding it under their potato skins. I claimed to love it – there are a lot of reasons to unpack there, a whole sermon’s worth by themselves – and ate with gusto as I kept up with Popeye. The funny thing is that I really did come to love spinach, and liver and a whole lot of other things that my brothers and cousins shunned. Life is like that – and it took years of growth and therapy and moving halfway across the country and finding my spiritual family to sort out the why of it all.
Singing along with Popeye – “I yam what I am and that’s all what I am,” didn’t feel like theology in those days, but today I recognize that is just what it was. The theology of Popeye the Sailor Man came along with lessons in good old American self-reliance in those post-WWII days in the mid-1950s when General Eisenhower was President Eisenhower and we all wore “Mamie bangs” to church along with our white gloves and hankies with the nickels tied up in the corner.
A friend of mine calls it the “Popeye the Sailor Principle.” He says it is a foundational principle of his personal theology – he does the best he can do according to his own ethical and moral principles, he is open and clear with everyone he knows about his stance on life, he asks others to accept him as who he is, and he tries to do the same. I call it one more pathway to the Holy, that which is greater than the sum of all our parts, one more place to stand, as Copernicus asked for, to move the world.
Do you remember that principle – the principle of the lever? Copernicus, Polish mathematician and astronomer, carried the principle to the nth degree to prove a point – and he proved a much larger point than he at first imagined, and got himself into major trouble with the large-C “Church” in the process. It seems a simple thing, the statement of a principle of mathematics, but in Nicholas Copernicus’ day it was heresy. The cost of speaking his mind, of speaking truth to power, as we say in seminary, was high – he nearly lost his life. Galileo Galilei was another who came under scrutiny, house arrest, and papal censure. It took nearly four hundred years before the Church saw the light, pun intended. The cost of speaking one’s own considered truth can be so very high.
Popeye had Bluto to battle against, and that was another lesson of the fifties – fight for what you want, be willing to stand toe to toe and battle it out, that is the way to become a winner. And yet there is another way. Sergio Fajardo, mayor of Medellin, Columbia, son of an architect, educated in the United States, is taking his particular political philosophy to the streets of Medellin, filling the poorest areas of his city with libraries and other public buildings, bringing art to the streets. If you have seen the gigantic bronze male and female statues in the Time-Warner Center you have seen an example of the art of Fernando Botero that fills the plazas of Medellin. Fajardo is not without his detractors, who say that he is paving over the city and ruining the open spaces. It is also said, by Hector Faciolence, Columbian novelist and political commentator, that Fajardo is “carrying out a redistribution of wealth without recourse to rage.” And it is this phrase, this concept to which I draw your attention. How, in an age when poverty is rampant, when the rich are immensely richer, and the poor are grindingly poorer, is this possible?
Mayor Fajardo has brought wealth into the poorest areas of his city, he has put beauty, time, effort – his time and his talent and his treasure – his personal belief that if libraries and cable cars and public buildings are placed in the poorest parts of town, then the people who live there will develop skills to compete for the jobs that come with the construction and with the business brought into the area. Mr. Fajardo has also increased the city’s spending for education to 40% of the city budget! In a world in which unrest and anger have been the preferred catalysts for change, the mayor of the city of Medellin is working from a forward-looking position of “what could be.” He is not different from any other revolutionary, except that the position in which he stands moves the world by enlisting hope in the service of progress over rage. There are many things wrong in Medellin – the drug trafficking and the conflict between paramilitary warlords that afflict Columbia are still present, but hope is also present that it can be another way. Mr. Fajardo lives his principles by looking forward, by thinking about that which has never been and saying, “why not?” as Robert Kennedy famously told us.
It is hope that is the catalyst that can move mountains of despair. Hope is a spiritual covenant that empowers in the midst of anger and poverty and misery. The poet who wrote the Biblical book of Lamentations tells us about despair:
He has made my teeth grind on gravel,
And made me cower in ashes;
My soul is bereft of peace,
I have forgotten what happiness is;
So I say, ‘Gone is my pleasure in life,
Any anything I might hope for…
Unitarian Universalist minister Jan Carlson-Bull quotes poet Ann Sill when she writes – hopefully – that despair does not unravel love; she posits that hope begins in the juxtaposition of the two – in the very collision of despair and love. Sill says, “The swirling confusion, indeed the grace, is that neither one is diminished in the presence of the other.” Carlson-Bull muses on the hope that lies at the improbable intersection of despair and love. Without denial, without forced and false cheer, without hypocrisy, we can stand in the midst of hardship, of great poverty of body or of spirit, and still hold out the promise of healing. We can stand with those who cannot feel their own way through, we can also stand with Copernicus, with Fajardo, and, yes, with Popeye the Sailor Man and hold the hope for those who cannot yet find their own until they find their own hope amidst their despair, and the will and the resources to hold their own.
There is no easy way through. There is a dark side to Theodore Parker’s maxim, “Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere.” For in the great shadow that is always present whenever there is great light, we see despair and hardship and pain. There is no cheap grace here – and Parker’s aphorism comes accompanied with hard work. Then, when you have done it once, you have to do it again, and again, and yet again. We have to practice; we don’t just sing our song once and then have it at our fingertips forever – we keep singing! You know the way to Carnegie Hall, right? Practice, practice, practice. You become your unique self in the same way – do it over and over and over again until eventually the groove, the ‘you’ groove gets so deeply worn that you know right where it is and you do it even when you are exhausted and can’t think – your song is part of your deepest internal fabric.
Gary Dorrien, liberal theologian and professor at Union Theological Seminary said in his inaugural address that we must all, every one of us, “discern the underlying moral unity…and through inductive study, the movements to correct them. Learn scientifically,” he said, “what is, and advocate ethically for what should be. In the academy, social ethics is seen as the successor to moral philosophy.” Ahhh – Popeye with a PhD.
Eileen Collins, first woman to pilot and command the space shuttle recently spoke at the Air and Space Museum. She was asked about ‘the woman issue,’ about those who would have kept her from achieving the personal successes she has gained. Colonel Collins replied, “Why fight, just go do it.” Just go do it, no energy wasted standing toe to toe and slugging it out, just go do it. No entitlement issues, no headlines in opposition to the status quo, like Fajardo, like Mother Theresa, just go do it.
As we used to sing back in the sixties, “You have to make your own kind of music, sing your own special song. Make your own kind of music even if nobody else sings along.” And then, then, you have to do something else. It isn’t enough to learn your own song and groove on it, it isn’t enough just to do for yourself – you have to support others in their doing, you have to pave the way for the next generation. I close with a story that may illustrate this point, I don’t remember where I first heard it, but it is a great truth:
A family settled down for dinner at a restaurant. The waitress first took the order of the adults, then turned to the seven-year-old.
“What will you have?” she asked.
The boy looked around the table timidly and said, “I would like to have a hot dog.”
Before the waitress could write down the order, the mother interrupted. “No hot dogs,” she said. “Get him a steak with mashed potatoes and carrots.”
The waitress ignored her. “Do you want ketchup or mustard on your hot dog?” she asked the boy.
“Ketchup.”
“Coming up in a minute,” said the waitress as she started for the kitchen.
There was a stunned silence when she left. Finally the boy looked at everyone present and said, “Know what? She thinks I’m real!”
I invite you to join me in a spirit of prayer and meditation:
Prayers come from funny places, if we are lucky they come straight from our own personal song, they speak the core of what we most deeply believe. They give voice, as David Blanchard says, to the great mystery that carries each of us in and out of this world. Our pastoral prayer this morning was most famously sung by “Mama” Cass Elliot on her 1969 album Bubblegum, Lemonade and Something for Mama:
Nobody can tell ya;
There’s only one song worth singin’.
They may try and sell ya,
’cause it hangs them up
to see someone like you.
You’re gonna be knowing
the loneliest kind of lonely.
It may be rough goin’,
just to do your thing’s
the hardest thing to do.
But you’ve gotta make your own kind of music
sing your own special song,
make your own kind of music even if nobody
else sings along.
Amen and Blessed Be!
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