Sermons by Reverend Don Beaudreault
SIXTY YEARS OF TRYING TO GET IT RIGHT
Rev. Don Beaudreault
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
February 20, 2005
OPENING READING: "i thank You God"
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)e. e. cummings
MEDITATION READING: "since feeling is first"
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the worldmy blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which sayswe are for each other: then
laugh leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraphAnd death i think is no parenthesis
e. e. cummings
SERMON: "Sixty Years of Trying to Get It Right"
A week from today I shall become sixty years of age. In comparison to the latest human skulls discovered in Ethiopia and dating back 195,000 years ago, turning sixty doesn't seem so old at all!
Certainly most of you are older than I am and for you "sixty" is no big deal. Still it is a big deal for me, considering the fact that the odds were against my ever having existed. Being born for me was a triumph. So turning sixty is a lot more icing on my particular cake.
Like Jesus, I had a most curious if not miraculous conception. In brief, I am the end result of a tubal ligation - meaning that my mother's fallopian "tubes" were tied after my brother was born, thereby supposedly preventing further pregnancies. Surprise! My egg snuck through. In effect, the tubal ligation should have become a tubal litigation. Blame fickle old nature for this - or, if you will, divine intervention, or the cocktails my parents drank. Some - mostly Fundamentalist Christians - even blame the devil, referring to me to the "spawn of Satan" although I don't think I am really all that special.
However, back in those days (World War II was winding down and so was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the arms of his mistress), middle-class folk such as my parents did not routinely sue the medical profession the way they do today.
Now, as if such a conception were not enough of a shock, my actual birth was traumatic as well.
For one thing, I was nearly born in a taxi cab in front of the White House. A rather short labor - something like 45 minutes. (No wonder I became my mother's favorite child. Her labor with my brother lasted two days. His persnicketiness on this matter was to later replicate itself in his becoming an Internal Revenue Agent.)
Still, I at least waited until we reached the hospital to be born. Said building is no longer in existence. Nor are any of the people who could give the actual details. So I could be lying to you, but how would you know?
Let me continue. I can tell you that even though mine was a speedy entrance onto the stage of life beyond the "temple of womb," - or "temple of doom" as one might think of it - I nevertheless was one of those forceps babies, refusing to make my grand entrance the ordinary way: head first. I still have the thigh marks to prove it. (Mercifully, we shall forgo a show and tell.)
The more amazing thing about my appearance at birth was the fact that part of my brain was peaking through my skull. I have a photo of myself when I was a couple months old with what little hair I had even back then, combed into a peak to hide my cranial abnormality. This hairstyle resembled a dunce cap.
One could imagine that my initial appearance occurred because of an excess amount of brain - or not. At any rate, it took a number of months for my head to become somewhat normal in shape.
Such normalcy lasted until I was six years old when within three months I had two brain concussions due to accidents - the details of which are even more boring than this sermon so far.
What is the point I am trying to make? That even from conception, I personally have been trying to get "it" right - whatever "it" might be at the moment. But the reality for me so far has been that I always come up short in the "rightness" category - usually somewhere in the "B+" range.
This goes for personal relationships, accomplishments, job performance, my general way in the world.
You know, not bad, but not quite excellent. Never quite this or that or the other. Always with a hitch, a surprise, an insufficiency. No matter how hard I might try to get "it" right - exactly right.
Nor do I blame that nasty Virgo control mechanism that lurks in the crevices of my Piscean romanticism and ultra sensitivity to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - or something like that!
It's just the way it is. Not brilliant, but not dumb. Nor handsome, but not ugly. Not clever, but not stupid. And so it goes!
So I have given up caring about getting it right - although I have not stopped trying to get it right.
It is a major lesson that I have learned during these last 6 decades - and heaven knows (if such there be), if I have learned anything from any possible past life of mine. I don't even know if I have had past lives, although there have been quite a few people who have assured me that I have had such and that they have somehow interacted with me even way back when. If this is in fact, a fact, I don't have the evidence. If any of you do, please inform me.
Also please give me God's email address, will you?
In other words, having experiences of just missing getting it right - even when I followed the rules - the little dogmas set up by others - I have become a relativist about life. Absolutes - at least about a consideration of ethics - don't make a lot of sense to me (unless someone is hurting someone else).
For me, that refers to "truth" as well. What is "truth" after all? Is there such a thing? Or is it more sensible to refer to "truths?" - or perhaps to "glimpses" of such?
That is where Unitarian Universalism comes into my understanding of trying to get it right. I love being in such a category - because, in effect, it is a non-category, since it is such an inclusive, eclectic way of being in the world. Unitarian Universalism is far beyond any kind of organized or institutional religion, although it is that, still. It has a history. It has certain principles. It has an office in Boston. But it is deeper, more profound, more universal than any of those things; it is a way of existing for me and others (a way I discovered now 43 years ago when I was merely 17) that precludes dictum, preferring to champion choice. It is a way of getting on in life that peers at the world through a kaleidoscope with an attitude of discovery rather than one of foregone conclusion.
Ergo: jazz. Meaning, a way of existing that is spontaneous - with lots of ad libbing (that is, to do whatever you need to do to try to get it right); and syncopation (meaning to be off-beat sometimes just for the novelty of it all). At the same time such an approach toward life does have a structure. There is a framework of knowledge that allows for this very spontaneity, ad libbing, and syncopation.
I wrote a poem about Pablo Picasso years ago that gets to what I am attempting to say. Consider the fact that he was classically trained as an artist before he went wildly creative with his Cubism, etc. - that is to say, he had a framework of knowledge before he began to get jazzy with his art. And in my poem I have the great artist defending his creative process. Say I, through Picasso:
Don't stick me with butterfly pins
Or ether my sensibilities so!
In other words, do not attempt to categorize Picasso or me or yourself or other people - although it is often comforting to do so. But I would prefer knowing that I have the freedom to move beyond a current classification in order to discover a new one - something that will be even more titillating, intriguing, meaningful, or perhaps playful!
Not to have such freedom - especially after 60 years of life is such a bore and is such a dreadful thing!
At least living life as if it were a novelty rather than a jail sentence, allows for zest for life. Of course such enthusiasm takes various forms.
e. e. cummings has helped me understand this, starting back in high school when I first read his poetry, continuing through college when I wrote a thesis on his more esoteric work, and now as I bring him back into yet another sermon.
What wonder, joy and gratitude he shows in that opening reading:
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
And as I approach this significant milestone birthday in my own life, I feel the same way as cummings. Each birthday - not just this sixtieth one - is a milestone, not a millstone.
And how I love his mediation reading as well:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
Here he is telling us that zest for life comes when we do, in fact, find the freedom within ourself to move away from the formula - whatever that might be - away from the expected order - the "syntax of things" - and begin to feel deeply within our bones, so that we might wholly kiss; to actually feel, not to merely think about feeling. To live with more jazz.
By the way, my little honors thesis was brilliant, although my professors didn't think so and gave me a "B+" - I told you I was that kind of person. Never quite getting "it" right - although I did graduate with honors. Who cares? I don't even care anymore! Ah, the joys of getting older - you don't care about your past, even if you do remember some things (but mercifully, not all things!)
At any rate, to heck with "syntax" - in relationship to the expected order of words or the "expected order" of life. Who needs it? You're not getting any younger. Nor am I!
Let me tell you a little more about having choice, about having freedom, in order to discover zest in life - in order to follow your bliss. Here is a story about a friend of mine:
When I visited Mrs. Bills a number of years ago, she was 96-years-old.
"Good old May," my grandmother used to say of her. "She always has such a cheerful attitude."
My solitary trip was a nostalgic one, required of my distressed soul. It was a comforting voyage back to my Appalachian ancestral roots. I think about it now as I approach 60.
I parked my car in front of the house that had once belonged to my grandparents, both long dead; the house where my mother and her six siblings had been born and raised and now are dead; the house where I spent many childhood summers and holidays. But I didn't knock on the door because strangers lived there now. I just stopped for awhile and looked at the old place, letting the memories flood over me. And when my heart told me that it was time to depart, I started the car.
I got only a little way down the street when I saw her: white-haired Mrs. Bills, frailer than I remembered, but still swinging on that old porch swing of hers - like she had been the last time I saw her decades before.
I stopped in front of her house. She didn't remember me at first. After all, I was no longer a little boy.
"Clara's grandson; Pauline's boy," I shouted, although she told me that she really wasn't that hard of hearing. Her eyes twinkled - really, they twinkled!
I joined her on the swing. Our talk was brief, a bit about the old days, about how my grandmother had been her best friend. It wasn't a painful sadness for her to remember these things, but a kind of joyful one.
I noticed that she swung that old porch swing with gusto belying her years. We talked of her secret in living long: moderation of food, walking daily, not taking things too seriously (indeed she still had that wonderful laugh - I can hear it now.) The gerontologists would undoubtedly add the fact that she had lived all her life in a small, rural town and knew everybody by their first name.
Bit I think that Mrs. Bills would have had such a long life, with or without these things in her favor - because of her indomitable will. Such an optimistic person! Truly, my grandmother had been right about her "cheerful attitude," one that shone forth in the last thing Mrs. Bills said to me.
I told her that when I was a kid, I had loved those apple pies of hers, and she smiled broadly and assured me that the next time I visited her, she would have one waiting for me. But she wanted me to give her a couple hours notice because she would have to climb the old apple tree in her backyard in order to get the best fruits in the neighborhood.
And I thought to myself as I drove away: Almost a hundred years old and she has no doubt about seeing me again - even if the last time was 30 years before!
Would that the rest of us be so positive about our lives to believe that we'll still be climbing apple trees when we're a hundred.
Check with me in forty years to see if I am, will you?
CLOSING WORDS: "who knows if the moon's"
who knows if the moon's
a balloon, coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i shouldget into it, if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty peoplethan houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited, wherealways
it's
Spring) and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselvese. e. cummings