© Davidson Loehr
10 June 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
PUPPET SHOW:
By Julie Irwin, Davidson Loehr, and the creative spirits of the No-Strings Puppetteers.
Characters – Whiney and Eeyore, Ted and Jessie. It’s a wide stage, the hand-puppets appear on center stage (Stage A) or the sides (Stage B).
SCENE I, STAGE A
(Whiney and Eeyore enter together. Whiny talks in a very high and whiny voice, and Eeyore talks very slowly and negatively like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.)
Whiney: People are so STUPID!
Eeyore: Yes, tell me about it. Just like you’d expect in this stupid world.
Whiney: And most people just aren’t that cool, do you know what I mean? We never get to meet any cool people!
Eeyore: Yeah, it just figures.
Whiney: Where are the other cool people? People who are in a good mood and everything and fun.
Eeyore: Maybe they all just DIED. That’s just what you’d expect with all this air pollution and crime and everything.
(Ted and Jessie enter separately, one at each side of the stage. They’re happy, seem friendly. Very different body language than the first two. Looser, more fun somehow. Whiney and Eeyore are together in the center of the stage. One at a time, in turns, they see and approach Whiney and Eeyore)
Ted: Hi! Who are you? What are you doing?
Whiny: I’m just sitting here waiting for some cool people. There are no cool people around here or anything. This place is BORING!
Ted: Well, I don’t know if I’m cool or anything, but do you want to play this game with me? It’s the new Playstation 3.
Whiny: No. I don’t want to just play with anyone who just comes along and asks me. Do you know any cooler people to play with? We never get those here.
Ted: There is that guy way over there, sitting on the Harley Davidson and singing a rap song. I think that’s Jennifer Lopez on the back of his bike. He looks cool.
Whiny: Yeah, but he hates me. He’s never nice to me.
Ted (aside, to the audience): I wonder why!
(long pause while Whiny looks out longingly toward the phantom cool guy, maybe in the church audience)
Whiny: I wish he would want to play with me, instead of you. (pause)
Ted: Ok, well, sorry to bother you. (leaves)
SCENE II, Stage B
Jessie: Hi! What are you doing?
Eeyore: What do you think I’m doing? Sitting here by myself, alone, lonely in the dark.
Jessie: Well, seems pretty bright to me. But do you want me to turn on the light?
Eeyore: What would be the point of that? Just wastes electricity (sigh).
Jessie: Well, we could talk and stuff, or maybe I could tell you a story.
Eeyore: I doubt it would be a funny story. What’s the point?
Jessie: You haven’t even heard it! Let me tell you: Once upon a time, there was a
Eeyore: You know, I need to leave my time free in case anything really fun comes along, even though it’s probably not going to.
(pause while Eeyore mopes)
Jessie: Ok, I guess I’ll go then. (leaves)
Eeyore: I knew it. Everyone always leaves. Why do I even bother?
SCENE III, STAGE A
Ted. Are you with THEM? (pointing down to where Whiny and Eeyore exited)
Jessie. Heck no! Who ARE they?
Ted. I don’t know. I think they moved into the green house last week.
Jessie. Oh. We were on vacation, we just got back last night. I’m Jessie. (extends his hand)
Ted: (Extends his hand) Hi Jessie, it’s nice to finally MEET somebody! I’m Ted, we just moved here from New Jersey. Listen Jessie, I have this new Play Station, and the snowboarder game is for two people. Would you like to play it with me?
Jessie. Cool! I’ve heard about the game, but I’ve never played it. Afterwards, would you like to come over to our house? I just got a copy of the movie Spy Puppets (Ted’gasp, Spy puppets) that I wanted to watch with somebody. I haven’t seen it yet, maybe we could watch it and microwave some popcorn?
Ted: That’s so great! I never saw Spy Puppets when it was in the theaters.
Jessie: It would be so neat if we could be friends, Ted!
Ted. It sure would, Jessie! I miss my friends from New Jersey, and I really want to make some new friends. I’ll show you how to play the game.
Jessie: Then let’s go watch Spy Puppets.
Ted: Great let’s go!
They exit together.
SCENE IV
Eeyore and Whiny enter again, slowly and still in a bad mood.
Whiny: We still don’t have any friends to hang out with!
Eeyore: Yeah, no one ever comes around here.
Shaking their heads, they exit.
SERMON: Walking on Water
What is the power behind miracles? Is it weird science? supernatural deities with nothing better to do than poke around in our lives? Or is the power where Jesus said the Kingdom of God is: within and among us? And even if this mysterious power is within and among us, what on earth does that mean, and what kind of “miracles” are we talking about?
This isn’t a scientific question. It’s more of a poetic or biographical question. It’s about how our attitudes and our courage create our world, whether friendly or unfriendly, and our possibilities, whether pinched or expansive, as in the puppet show.
There must be a hundred different ways to preach on this, and some of the challenge is finding one you haven’t thought of before. So I’ll weave together two stories, one factual and one mythical.
For those of you who don’t know the story of walking on water, it is a Christian story about Jesus walking across the water to his disciples, who are in a boat. The only minister I’ve ever discussed this with was my friend Todd Driskill, about fifteen years ago. Todd was a minister in the Disciples of Christ church – which is much more liberal up north than it is here in Texas. It made him crazy when his parishioners took biblical stories literally, whether it was walking on water or rising from the dead. For Todd, Jesus “rose from the dead” only in the minds of his disciples; and “walking on water” was an imaginative way of saying that Jesus could go places and do things his disciples couldn’t, because he had a faith that they lacked.
A century ago, there was an Austrian writer named Karl Kraus who is among my favorites, and one of his aphorisms reminds me of this kind of power. “I hear noises which others do not hear,” he wrote, “and they reveal to me the music of the spheres – which others don’t hear either.” Something in that is true, I think: “I hear noises which reveal to me the music of the spheres.” Jesus used to tell his parables, then complain that his disciples didn’t have “the eyes to see or the ears to hear” what they were really about. Jesus heard noises others didn’t hear, and he heard a harmony in life that others seldom hear either. So did the Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, and so many others. They walked on water. They went places few others go because they were sustained by a kind of faith in the basic goodness and the positive possibilities of life.
In the stories about these and other great sages, you almost always read that they went through hard personal tests and struggles to gain that faith, to be able to hear those noises. Fifteen years ago one of the hottest religion scholars in this country was Joseph Campbell. His six-part television series with Bill Moyers on “The Power of Myth” was seen by hundreds of millions of people. Over 2,000 study groups sprang up spontaneously in this country alone, for people to meet and discuss Campbell’s ideas.
And Campbell’s central idea was that one of the most transformative opportunities in life is the chance to go on what he called the Hero’s Quest. This is the three-step process by which both mythic heroes and exceptional people gained the authenticity, the personal power, that let them become the kind of people we want to keep telling stories about.
But back to my friend Todd.
He was a good minister and a good preacher, but biblical literalism really drove him nuts. His Christianity was too important to him to become something radical like a Unitarian, but he had been a minister about twelve years, and he wasn’t happy. He felt, as many ministers do, that his people wanted him to say he believed these stories literally, and – again like most ministers – he didn’t. Todd didn’t think he could tell the truth and keep his job, and if he couldn’t say what he believed, he thought he would lose his integrity. I can still hear him saying that if only people would read the Bible intelligently, it had enough in it to ground and guide a good life. But now, Todd needed to leave the only world he had ever really lived in – the world of orthodox Christianity – and find some place that could be a home for his spirit. Joseph Campbell used to call this the quest for “the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul,” and it’s certainly what Todd yearned for.
In the Hero’s Quest, this is the first stage, known as The Call. You are called to be something or somewhere else, and it feels like your identity, your authenticity, is at stake. If you answer the call, you will have to leave the comfort of the familiar and risk a great deal.
But this is scary. Most of us can probably remember at least one time that we took a risk, spoke up when we had been afraid to, and did something we’re still proud of. We all have heroic quests, small and large. The great myths explode these experiences into grand stories of heroes slaying dragons or wrestling with God, of Buddha sitting under the Bo Tree and resisting irresistible temptations, Jesus resisting temptations of the Devil.
In the Middle Ages, when most of the world had not yet been explored by Europeans, sailors were afraid if you went too far you’d sail off the edge of the world. And mapmakers would mark unexplored waters with the warning “There be monsters here!” Psychologically, that’s still true. There be monsters in unexplored areas. There are dangers leaving the familiar, even when it doesn’t feel like a home any more. And it takes a lot of energy! Thirty years ago, when we were sending men to the moon, I remember reading that it took more fuel to get the space ship out of the earth’s gravitational pull than it took to go the half million miles from there to the moon and back. It takes a lot of energy to escape the gravitational pull of the familiar.
In 1991, Todd finally sailed into the waters where monsters lived. He resigned from his church and he, Marsha and their son Tyler moved to Summit, New Jersey, where he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Drew University. He studied the bible, theology and philosophy. We had a lot of long and intense conversations about these things, by telephone and e-mail. He really wanted to teach churches, and ministers, how to read the bible in more intelligent ways. But he knew there wasn’t a paying job with that description anywhere, so he hoped to go into teaching at a seminary.
His faith was challenged in graduate school. He lost the rest of his naivete, and six years later his beliefs were much deeper, better informed, and far less orthodox. He came alive in a way I had never seen him. Marsha said he had found faith and hope again, and life had become an exciting possibility.
This is the second stage of the Hero’s Quest: leaving your familiar world, trading security for adventure and risk. This is the stage when storytellers say the hero slays dragons. The dragons, of course, are not really big scaly lizards; they are internal demons, ancient and primitive fire-breathing voices inside us that shout “No!” and want to scare us back into our old ways. Marsha could allow Todd to grow far beyond the boundaries of any kind of Christianity she had ever known. But they both came from big families, and Todd lost big parts of both families when his beliefs no longer seemed to overlap with theirs. Dragons. Monsters. Forces begging you, threatening you, to go back where you were before. These are hard struggles, as many of you know from your own lives.
The final stage of the Hero’s Quest is what Joseph Campbell called The Return. It isn’t just about going off to school or meditating in a cave and getting a private revelation, feeling groovy and being finished. The full spiritual quest can not be played out only within the stage of your mind. It must open out to the world, and find its own gifted way to play there, where it counts for more. There is a necessity, a command, to bring it back to the world and share it. Campbell used to say that “an authentic person rejuvenates the world.” I think it is true. And what the Hero’s Quest is about is gaining a deeper kind of authenticity, and confidence, and power.
Few people would claim, as Karl Kraus did, to be able to hear “the music of the spheres.” But you do hear some new noises, and you do hear some music. The music is the sense of a kind of harmony about life, a kind of safety, a feeling that there really weren’t monsters there, that the dragons can be slain, and a feeling that this news must be shared with others. I felt this way after graduate school. I still do. And so did Todd.
He was teaching in small colleges as an adjunct professor, sorry that the perfect job didn’t exist. I was sorry he couldn’t be in the ministry, because he was so good at it. Then in November of 1997, he got a phone call. It was from the Society for Biblical Literacy, a worldwide organization run by the Disciples of Christ churches. Their longtime director had died, and they had been advertising for a new one. One of Todd’s former district supervisors saw the ad and called them to say he knew the man for whom this job was created. They were already at the third interview stage with two candidates, but they phoned Todd to say they would be willing to fly him to Atlanta for an interview. At the end of that interview, they offered him the job and he accepted.
If this story were being written in a Bible, it would be called a miracle. And perhaps it was. Todd called me with the news, more excited than I had ever heard him. It was the job he had been born to do, but he would never have found it if he hadn’t taken the risks he took six years earlier, because the job required a Ph.D. in theology with a solid grounding in biblical studies.
I was both happy for him and proud of him. “How does it feel?” I asked. And my friend said “It feels like I’m walking on water – and it really is a miracle!” Ten years ago, Todd wasn’t happy. The world didn’t seem friendly, he couldn’t find a home in it, his spirit was starved. He was staying within the boundaries of his family and his friends, and he was losing his soul. Four years ago, the world was a friendly place. Todd was in love with life; he saw a world filled with possibilities and felt empowered in it. Now he heard noises that most others did not hear, and those noises told him of some of the music of the spheres, which most others didn’t hear either.
How can you write about transformations like this without resorting to mythical, magical language? If you leave out the feeling of miracle, you leave out the point of the story. Knowing people who have gone on the Hero’s Quest, having done some bits of it myself, makes it much easier to read the stories in the bible or in fairy tales or other myths and understand the kind of thing the writer was struggling to express. It’s also called being “born again,” being “born of the Holy Spirit.” It happens. I’ve seen it.
I need to tell you the end of Todd’s story. In December 1997, he was preparing to move with Marsha to Atlanta. Tyler was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, so just the two of them were moving, leaving the next day. Todd lifted an air conditioner into the rented truck, fell forward and died of a heart attack. He was 46. Three days later, I delivered the eulogy at his funeral, in the church he had grown up in. He died at the same age his father had died, and is buried next to him.
It wasn’t fair. But I wonder if any of you are tempted to think that Todd lost, after all. Don’t be. He didn’t lose, and he would have been the first to say so. We all die. We win by living with integrity and courage while we’re here. He spent the last six years of his life doing what he needed to do to become authentic the way he needed to. Marsha is remarried, Tyler begins law school this fall, and they both remember Todd as a brave man who took the road less traveled, and for whom taking that road really did make all the difference – both for him and for them. Tyler isn’t afraid of life, of taking chances, or of going on his own Hero’s Quest when the time comes. He knows it must be done, and he knows it can be done, because he saw his father do it. And Marsha also gained confidence and courage, and remembers those six years as transformative for her too. Todd’s life ended in the midst of a miracle that he didn’t live to see through. Maybe Marsha will. Maybe Tyler will. Maybe you will – for Todd’s story is in you too now, and it’s not one you’re likely to forget soon. So some miracle seeds have been planted here today. Perhaps they will sprout.
We’re born into a world of both fear and hope, refusal and possibility, and are asked which we shall serve. Most of the time, we stay on the paths with everyone else. Once in awhile we hear a call, offering us – if we are willing to work at it – the chance to walk on water. One path is safe and commonplace. The other is risky and uncertain. It’s a call from something that seems to know our true name. If we never answer the call, our story may not be either heroic or even very authentic. It may be like the story of Rip Van Winkle, who just went to sleep for twenty years and had nothing to show for the time but a beard. Sometimes in our lives, we come to a place where two roads diverge in the woods. We can follow the crowd, or we can take the road less traveled. It really does make all the difference.
