Sermons by Reverend Don Beaudreault
METAPHORICAL THEOLOGY, PRACTICAL ETHICS: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HESTER PRYNNE AND THE SCARLET LETTER AND YOUR GRANDMA
AND HER POTATO PANCAKES (PART TWO)
Rev. Don Beaudreault
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
March 6, 2005
OPENING READING
He that does good to another, does good also to himself, not only in the consequences, but in the very act; for the consciousness of well doing is, in itself, ample reward.
We should give as we would receive: cheerfully, quickly and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.
Seneca
MEDITATION READING: Range of Motion
In this passage, a wife pays tribute to a nurse's care of her sick husband:
Nurses are good at this kind of thing, using one hand for things that normally require two. And if you get one like Wanda, you can see the caring along with the skill. She rubs Jay's back with strong, circular strokes, and I watch, spellbound. There is a mesmerizing quality to watching someone do almost anything with care: tailors in their dry-cleaner windows, hunched over sewing machines. Bakers making art out of frosting. Children with a new pack of crayons and fierce intent. We are meant to use what we have, whatever it is. We are meant to be less mindful of our insides, more outwardly directed. That's what I think, as I watch Wanda rub Jay down, as the minty smell of the lotion makes its way over to me. There is incredible value in being in service to others.
Elizabeth Berg
MEDITATION READING: Prayer
Each activity of daily life in which we stretch ourselves on behalf of others is a prayer of action - the times when we scrimp and save in order to get the children something special; the times when we share our car with others on rainy mornings, leaving early to get them to work on time; the times when we keep up correspondence with friends or answer one last telephone call when we are dead tired at night. These times and many more like them are lived prayer.
Richard J. Foster
SERMON: "Metaphorical Theology, Practical Ethics: The Difference Between Hester Prynne and the Scarlet Letter and Your Grandma and Her Potato Pancakes (Part Two)"
Although the descendant of Scotch-Irish Christians of the sterner variety, my maternal Appalachian grandmother Clara knew how to smile. There she is in that 1902 family photograph of some 25 members of my familial forbears - from my great great grandparents on down to my grandmother's generation. All are dressed in black, with the women wearing plain bonnets and the men sporting very long beards. Twenty-four of them look as if the fear of the Great Jehovah is in them. There is not a suggestion of a smile on any of their faces; there's not an inkling of a twinkling in any of their eyes. They are looking dead ahead for all eternity. They might as well have been cardboard cutouts instead of flesh and blood. The twenty-fifth member of the family, Clara, is holding the first of what would be her seven children, and she has a huge grin!
I shall never know what the rest of the family thought of that grin when they saw the photograph. But for me, seeing it for the first time 35 years after my grandmother's death, was a confirmation of the personality of the woman that I had known, a woman who was about my current age when I was born and whose hand I would hold when she died some 16 years later.
For Clara had great joy, despite the tragedies that she experienced. Oh, and she was religious - just happier about it than the rest of her family. She read the Bible every day, and had a glass of beer every night. I don't know which made her happier. Perhaps one was a compensation for the other, or a complimentary gesture.
At any rate, I trace my initial interest in wanting to study for the ministry from her, as well as my desire to play the piano (the old upright player piano in her parlor was the first piano I ever pounded). And yes, I do like beer.
Truly, she had a different perspective on religion than did her family, or most of the others in her tiny, rural town of Western Maryland. The whole town - all three streets of it - seemed to go into mourning on Sunday, the Lord's Day. All but Clara. That is when her spirit beamed the brightest! That is when she sang those old evangelical hymns in church as loudly and as lustily as she possibly could muster. That is when that grin of hers got bigger and bigger the longer and longer the preacher went on about eternal salvation.
She loved religion. But this was no simple woman. She was a consummate psychologist even if she had had only the bare essentials of a formal education. She knew, for instance, that people could use religion for all kinds of less than "happifying" reasons. That they could go through the motions of being "holier than thou," say the right prayers, and then go about their business of being as nasty as they wanted to be to each other.
I shall never forget one Wednesday night prayer meeting in the social hall of our ancestral church when I was around 9 years old. The time came for people to express themselves in individual prayer - but at the same time. We were seated on chairs when suddenly the preacher gave the cue and everyone except Clara and I jumped up and took various odd positions around the room, assuming the most outlandish facial expressions, and vocalizing the most bizarre sounds. Some people were kneeling at their chairs, others standing on them; some of the worshippers were turning around in circles, others appeared to be dancing; some were grunting or howling or breathing hard, others had their eyes wide open as if they had seen old Beelzebub himself. Many were speaking a very strange language that I later learned was called "speaking in tongues." Fortunately, our Evangelical United Brethren Church did not believe in snake handling - or I would have been a goner - way gone out the door never to return to any church thereafter.
Still, I was scared to death! I thought the bowels of Hell were about to open and I would be the first to be taken into its innards. I also was curious (as hell) why I didn't have the urge to do as my fellow worshippers - and why Grandma seemed not to want to, either. Looking at her I saw that she had the largest grin I had ever seen on her face - which totally amazed me! And I remember an instantaneous sense that no harm would come to me - as long as she kept smiling.
And she whispered to me:
It's okay, Donnie, you don't have to do what the others are doing - not if you don't feel it and mean it!
And I realized that she, herself, neither felt it or that going through the motions of "prayer" or any other aspect of "religion" simply because everyone else was doing so, would cause her to mean it as something indicative of her religion.
You see, here was the first indication in my life that acting upon religious beliefs might very well supercede merely stating those beliefs; that doing good and noble deeds for others might very well be more indicative of religion's intent than merely reciting creeds or practicing prescribed acts of worship.
Clara's religion was based on action rather than recitation. She was a good woman who practiced the simple but totally profound dictates of Christian ethics that called her to love God and her neighbor. An indication for me of her joy in practicing this activist aspect of Christianity was the fact that one of her favorite hymns was "Blessed Assurance" - meaning that she knew that God loved her, had blessed her and would some day, take her to heaven.
Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of heaven divine.
There is a poem by the contemporary American poet Elizabeth Barrette titled "Origami Emotion" that reminds me of my grandmother's spirit - that speaks of her strong faith; a faith that was real rather than abstract; that was practical, rather than merely metaphorical; that would sustain her and give her hope, no matter what hardships might befall her. Barrette writes:
Hope is
folding paper cranes
even when your hands get cramped
and your eyes tired,
working past blisters and
paper cuts,
simply because something in you
insists on
opening its wings.
Well, I know that my grandmother's concept of practical ethics is really mine, too, and is also the Unitarian Universalist way - and frankly, the foundation upon which any spiritual movement is based, although the symbolism, the language, and the worship practices differ. Still, basic to any perspective on living a spiritual life, is one that posits a life that speaks its beliefs through noble action.
Sadly, from my perspective, religious abstractions - let me call them "metaphors" get in the way of practicing these basic ethics of decency. Abstractions like assumed knowledge of what a deity has in mind for us mortals; abstractions like ritualized acts of worship that usurp time better spent in effecting practical acts to heal our planet; abstractions that keep us in the pre-scientific age of fancy rather than ushering us into the post-modern age of applied science.
I have written a poem expressing such concern - one that began its gestation (although I didn't know it at the time) when I watched the actions at that Wednesday night prayer meeting in that little Appalachian church.
Excuse my passion, but this is how I feel about religions that concentrate on abstractions - either beliefs or means of worship - when what today's world really needs are very real acts of kindness, that is to say, bread not roses:
How Some People Know God's Will
While Others Don'tFrom "pulpiteers,"
pedagogues,
and political pontificatorsSCREAM!
a pulchritude
of platitudinous
pronouncements -vague,
vacuous,
and voluminous.ABSTRACTIONS!
aesthetically assumed;
mellifluously manipulated.BEATIFIC DECLAMATIONS/DEMONIC DENUNCIATIONS!
deftly decreed.
A HUMAN NECESSITY!
to fashion out of ignorance:
systematic theologies,
abstract philosophies,
and assumed ethical codes;to take our bipedal fears
and mould them into:placating dogmas,
spoon-fed declarations,
and pacifying doctrines;to pit eternally "bad"
against eternally "good,"
"them"
against "us,"
the "damned"
against the "saved."Systematically, through:
NICE
metaphors,
SWEET
images,
ASSURING
aphorisms;systematically,
coercively
create
CONTENTED
adherents,
FAITHFUL
followers,
UNBLINKING
converts,who,
systematically,
coercively,
self-righteously
INGRATIATE
INFILTRATE
"INCENDIATE"their will of abstraction;
their meandering metaphors
their secret knowledgeON THE REST OF US!
who,
either accept
or deny
such:RULES!
(of the spiritual road)
.depending on which side of the bed
our bifurcating brains woke up on this morning.
Well, the point of my little poem is to show that there seems to be this ongoing dance between those who are sure they know a lot about God - even his gender - and who spend much of their time discussing his will and then trying to foist it upon others. Those with such secret knowledge of the cosmos might very well have the highest of intentions. They might very well be sincere about their beliefs and practices. But I believe that each human being of relatively "sound mind" should be left to decide for one's self such matters.
The fact is that science has taught us a few things about ourselves - and left scores of questions about who we are and why we are here - and not to take science into consideration when anyone assumes the role of a god's special emissary to the rest of us - seems rather limited to say the least, and just plain dumb to say about the most.
Science has taught us that we are not the kings and queens of the universe; we are not in charge. Science has also taught us that we are not even in charge of ourselves - not to any large degree.
Still historically and almost urgently today, there are those who think we still are the center of the universe, that not only does our sun and all the planets and all the stars revolve around us, but also the suns and planets and stars of all those "mega-verses" out there - in short, all that is and might be now and forever, the Alpha and the Omega, so be it, Amen and Amen!
It was no less a genius named Sigmund Freud (with whom you don't have to agree on all counts), who opined about us bits of star stuff called "human" that:
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its self-love.
The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe..
The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to descent from the animal world, implying an irradicable animal nature in him..
But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present day psychological research, which is endeavoring to prove to the ego in each one of us that he is not even master in his own house..
And yet there are our fellow planetary citizens who will have nothing of Freud's - or science's evidence. They are the self-appointed masters and mistresses of the universe, believing the rest of us should kneel before them in subjugation.
Not my Grandmaw! She never got up off her chair at that prayer meeting; she never spoke in tongues; she never danced around as if she had received the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. She just sat there and smiled that wide grin of hers.
It's okay, Donnie, you don't have to do what the others are doing - not if you don't feel it and mean it!
Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine!
But no need to carry on about it! No need for the pomp and circumstance, the bells and whistles, the statues, or the candles. No need for great theological tomes, robes, vestments, papal bulls, church councils, or dramatic personal testimonies.
Spirituality for her was, as it is for me, very simple really. And that has been true of the Unitarian Universalist faith, as well. That is because God if such there be (my grandmother was sure about that, I am not), is an ACTIVE VERB not a STATIC NOUN. Religion is best when it is on the move; when the proclaimed ethics are put into practice; when a person walks the talk and tries not to step on those who are decently trying to walk their own talk, too.
And that is where my grandmother's potato pancakes come into the picture. As I said in the first of this two-part sermon about "Metaphorical Theology, Practical Ethics," Hester Prynne, the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, stands as a metaphor for someone who is sincerely seeking the divine meaning behind human existence - in counter distinction to those who seek such meaning via theological formula. More simply expressed, Hawthorne wages a great abstract battle between the so-called forces of "good" and "evil," couching his story in Christian assumptions about how things are supposed to be.
My grandmother was no Hester Prynne. She never would have fought such a battle. She just had a simple faith - like the poet making the origami cranes - that everything would be okay; that divine purposes were in her life to take care of her and that she didn't have to make such a big fuss about it. That all she needed to do was to follow the basic teachings of Jesus; that she didn't have to be a scholar or a preacher (the two are not always intertwined) to do that. That she needed to put her ethics into practice. And for her, that meant that she should, according to the biblical prophet Micah:
Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God.
And her potato pancakes? They were so satisfying - of body and spirit. More "divinely" satisfying for me than any Communion wine with its symbolic, metaphorical meaning. For those potato pancakes were symbolic of humanity's basic goodness and love evidenced by a woman of the Appalachian hills whose blood I carry within my veins.
CLOSING READING:
In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
Henry Ward Beecher
He only does not live in vain, who employs his wealth, his thought, his speech to advance the good of others.
Hindu Scriptures