Graceful Stories

January 6, 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

We gather here, among other reasons, to try and find life-giving stories. More than anything, we are made more whole, we are saved, through finding stories to live within that open us to better possibilities.

Sometimes we are fed even by small pictures, little parts of stories where we found that spark of light. Good stories aren’t about truth, even if they happen to be true. They are about possibilities. We seek stories that are about possibilities.

Let us open ourselves to the best pictures and stories we can find, and ask ourselves whether we can find in them that whisper of God, that spark of light, that can give us a glimpse of something fine, something noble and whole. And let us have faith that the fine and more whole vision we see may be, or may become, part of our own story.

Let us seek that light, by whatever name we know it. And when we find it, let us be open to it, that it might return the favor and open us.

Amen.

SERMON: Graceful Stories

You know those 500-piece jigsaw puzzles you can buy with a picture of the completed puzzle on the outside. This morning’s sermon is like one of those puzzles, but without the picture of what it’s supposed to look like when it’s assembled. In a way, it’s a response to last week’s sermon, where I talked about how we mistake being certain with being right and are almost incapable of telling the difference between the two.

That could be seen as saying we can never be sure that anything is true, and in some ways that’s right. But not many people live that way, and honest religion is still about trying to find what is most important, and living by its light. This morning, I’ve brought you twelve of those lights: stories that are like puzzle pieces. they’re a particular kind of story I think of as “graceful stories.” I’ll give you an example of one before I try to explain it.

1. A balloon salesman at the circus held a handful of strings tied to helium-filled balloons of every color. Every once in awhile, he’d pull out a string and let a balloon go, so it would rise up in the sky and kids might see it and come find the balloon man to buy one. After he had let go of red, blue and yellow balloons, a little black boy standing near him quietly asked, “Mister if you let the black balloon go, would it rise up too?” The balloon salesman took the string from a black balloon, released it, and of course the balloon rose as fast and as high as all the others. He gave another one to the young boy, and said, “It’s what’s inside that makes them rise.”

Now that story probably never happened literally, just like most religious stories never happened literally, but we don’t care because we know it could happen, and it shows us something that is both true and empowering, which is what we want from our best stories. But the other stories I’ve brought for you today all happen to be true, as well as graceful.

2. The first story of this kind that I remember, one I read over thirty years ago, was about Winston Churchill. There was a formal reception at Buckingham Palace. The Queen was there, as well as Sir Winston and many of the world’s top diplomats. At one point in the evening, Churchill saw something he couldn’t believe. A foreign ambassador actually stole a sterling silver pepper mill from the Queen’s table. While this is not worth publicly embarrassing an ambassador and his country over, it’s also not right to stand by and watch such petty theft. Churchill solved this in a way that almost takes your breath away. He sidled up to the table, took the matching salt shaker from it, and put it inside his coat. Then, when no one else was around to hear them, he went over to the thieving ambassador. He opened his coat, showing him the salt shaker, and said, “we’re going to have to put them back – they’re on to us.” Something creative and magical was added to this scene by Churchill that transformed it from clever to graceful.

When I was in graduate school, I read a lot of Christian thinkers writing about grace, and their writings weren’t very helpful because they were mostly trying to save face for grace by explaining that it all came from God. That didn’t help make any sense of it here in the real world, until finally I came up with a kind of mental equation that let me understand what they were talking about. I began translating “grace” as “grease”: the kind of lubricant that makes life slide by so much more smoothly. Sometimes we add the magical and graceful thing on our own, like Churchill did. Sometimes, it comes when we are awakened by an innocent or unexpected comment from another person. But it transcends us and our species. It is a part of life, and sometimes we can find it in stories of other animals. I shared a lot of these with you last spring in the long sermon series on “Animal Stories.” Here are just two of those graceful stories of other animals doing something extra they didn’t have to do, that added that graceful dimension.

3. One is the story of a bonobo ape named Kuni, who one day caught a starling who had landed on her island in the Twycross Zoo in England. The bird had flown into a plate glass window and fell to the ground stunned but otherwise ok, and the trainers tried to get the ape to hand the bird to them so she wouldn’t hurt it. Instead, Kuni held the starling in her left hand, and climbed up the tallest tree on the island. Then, holding on to the tree with her feet, she carefully took the bird’s wing tips in her hands, spread them out as though the bird were in flight, and tossed the starling high into the air. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 156) (The bird was still too stunned to fly away and fluttered to the ground, where Kuni stood guard over it until it flew away later.)

4. Another came from the newspapers over a decade ago, the extraordinary story of two stray dogs, a dachshund and an Australian cattle dog, who kept alive a mentally disabled boy when he became lost in the woods for three “bone-chilling” days. The boy’s mother called the dogs “angels from heaven” after ten-year-old Josh Carlisle, who has Down syndrome, was rescued from a dry creek in Montana by a searcher on horseback. In temperatures close to zero, the dogs had played with him and cuddled him to keep him warm at night. Josh hadn’t eaten while he was lost, but the dogs must have led him to water, for he was not fully dehydrated. The boy had mild frostbite on all ten toes, having spent his first night with a light snow dusting the ground. When Josh was carried to the ambulance, the dachshund followed and kept jumping up to see in the window. “I’ll never forget that dog’s face,” said one of the rescuers. Both dogs found a new home with the child’s family, and his mother told reporters, “They fell in love with my son during those three days.” Here, the grace crossed over species lines – both ways. (Jeffrey Maisson, Dogs Never Lie, pp. 97-98, from the front page of the St. Louis Post Dispatch in March 1996.)

5. For the fifth story, we can move back to stories of human animals with one from a real estate executive named Robert Ellis. When his son was nine years old, they wanted to get him into soccer, but all the teams were full. Being creative, his wife told those in charge that her husband was a coach. This opened a space for their son. The husband, however, really wasn’t a coach and knew absolutely nothing about soccer. So he dove into this new challenge as though he had been called to coach a professional team of world-class players rather than a group of nine-year-old kids. He read many books on soccer, went to clinics, met Juan Mazia, who had been the great Pele’s coach, and even met Pele, who many regard as the best professional soccer player ever.

Ellis writes, “One day after having practices three days a week, giving lectures to the team that would make [the greatest football coaches or Army generals proud], I asked, “Are there any questions?” One boy raised his hand and said, “My brother got a goldfish for his birthday.” It suddenly hit me that the kids had never been in organized sports before. They weren’t professionals. They wanted to have fun. To get them to a more skillful level, I had to take it slow and easy. I wanted to be the total opposite of the bullying coach who abuses the authority he’s given.

“Practices finally became fun – it wasn’t all soccer talk”. We went on to have five out of eight seasons with undefeated teams.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], pp. 31-32)

6. The actress Mary Steenburgen wrote about her childhood, and her father. He was a freight train conductor for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, but he developed heart problems and so wasn’t able to work for years at a time. During these times, he would do odd jobs – seldom very dignified. Once he was a traveling salesman for a shoe company, and the company gave him a sign to put in the back of his old car that said HANOVER SHOE SALESMAN. Mary writes:

“It was an old secondhand car, and between the sign and the condition of the car, I wasn’t too keen on driving around with my father. I was thirteen and suddenly aware of our lack of money compared to the wealth of the rich kids at school. I mostly walked home from school, but this one day my father came to pick me up. As we were driving away from the school I saw this boy, Charles Harrison, who was president of our class and the most popular guy in our grade. I didn’t want him to see me in our embarrassing car, so I ducked down and pretended to tie my shoes.

“There was silence for a moment and then my father softly said, “Mary, you don’t have to be ashamed of this old car.”

“That’s all he said.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], pp. 27-28)

Years later, she wrote, “I can still hear the sound of his sadness and feel my face burn with shame at my own snobbery. I think that this tiny little moment actually informed a lot about the way I have dealt with the many blessings that have come my way. I am deeply proud to be a trainman’s daughter from Arkansas, and I have been vigilant to remember what does and doesn’t matter in life.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], p. 28)

7. The seventh story is about sports broadcaster Suzyn Waldman, who worked for the New York Yankees twenty years ago, as she still does – one of the first women sportscasters – a fact that made her so nervous that she would seldom say a thing in the locker room after the game if there were any male sportscasters present. “One evening, Yankees outfielder Dave Winfield had a particularly great game,” she wrote. “I mustered up all my courage, and with my tape recorder going, I started to ask my question – and made a mistake with his statistics. Two things ran through my mind. Do I keep going, pretend I didn’t notice, and not be able to use the tape, or do I stop the tape and make it clear to everyone here that I made a mistake? Dave Winfield made the decision for me. He put his hand on the machine’s Stop button, knowing I had reversed the statistics, and said, “I don’t like the way I started to answer that. Can we do it again?” My mistake had led to an incredible act of kindness by a relative stranger.” (If I Only Knew Then, edited by Charles Grodin [2007], p. 36)

8. One of my favorite stories, and one that comes close to the brilliance and gentleness of the Churchill story, comes from a new book I was asked to read in manuscript form and write a cover blurb for. It’s a good book called Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, written by a man (Bruce E. Levine) who has been a psychotherapist for about thirty years. Here’s how he tells the story:

One day a telemarketer began her sales pitch by asking what I did for a living. I paused for a second, and then I told her that I was a telemarketer evangelist. At first she misunderstood, thinking I said a televangelist, and she believed I was being dishonest with her, as clearly many people told her outrageous lies. Then I explained that I was not a televangelist, that I did not evangelize on television, but that I was a telemarketer evangelist and that I ministered to telemarketers who called me. She stopped her pitch and let me continue. I told her that I believed that many telemarketers were in deep pain about what they were doing, and this was made worse by the anger they received from most people they spoke to. In a soft voice, almost sounding like she was going to cry, she agreed with me. I told her that I knew she would not stay on the phone too long, especially since I wasn’t going to buy anything from her, but that I could tell she was a good person and that I had faith she was going to get a more satisfying job. She said, “God bless you.” (Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, pp. 53-54)

9. A ninth graceful story comes from Rachel Naomi Remen, the wise San Francisco physician whose stories I use whenever I can. A 40-year-old very plain librarian came to see her, depressed and aware of her plainness – everyone else in her family was handsome. Life didn’t seem worth it any more. Sitting in Dr. Remen’s waiting room were terminal patients, some bald from chemotherapy, some dying of AIDS. Eventually this woman, Janet, began talking with an AIDS patient, and got to know him. She’d volunteer to help him shop, bring groceries, etc. His name was Will. He was devastatingly handsome, 32, and dying of AIDS. She was devastatingly shy, and deeply convinced that she was too plain to matter. She began to help him, and became closer to him. Several months later, Will died. Rachel called Janet, found she was out of state. Worried about the powerful effect Will’s death would have, she kept calling. Finally Janet came in. She had been with Will’s family in another state, meeting them, attending his funeral. She looked different. She was, for the first time, wearing lipstick. She told the story of Will’s final days. He was very weak, mostly bedridden. On this day he was not doing well, she worried about him all day. Coming home, she ran up the stairs, her arms full of groceries. She opened the door, called his name loudly so he could hear her from his upstairs bedroom.

But Will was not in his bedroom. Fully dressed in a jacket, shirt, and tie, he was sitting in the living room waiting for her. His clothes, still elegant, looked as if they had been bought for a much, much larger man, but his hair was carefully combed and he had shaved. Janet could hardly imagine the effort it had taken for him to do this.

Stunned, she asked him why he had gotten dressed. He had looked at her for a long moment. Then he eased off the couch, and, getting down on one knee, he asked her to marry him. She helped him up, and hugged him for the first time. He died a few days later.

Rachel looked at her in silence. Still blushing (over the lipstick), she met Rachel’s eye. “In my heart I did marry him, you know,” she said. “He will be here with me always.” (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 296)

10. The tenth story is one I just read two weeks ago, about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish theologian and wise man who died in 1972. (from Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972 by Edward K. Kaplan (Yale).In 1965, after walking in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil-rights march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Heschel was at the Montgomery, Ala., airport, trying to find something to eat. A surly woman behind the snack-bar counter glared at him – his yarmulke and white beard making him look like an ancient Hebrew prophet – and mockingly proclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.” She told Heschel they didn’t have any food.

In response, Heschel simply smiled. He gently asked, “Is it possible that in the kitchen there might be some water?” Yes, she acknowledged. “Is it possible that in the refrigerator you might find a couple of eggs?” Perhaps, she admitted. “Well, then,” Heschel said, “if you boiled the eggs in the water, “that would be just fine.”

She shot back, “And why should I?”

“Why should you?” Heschel said. “Well, after all, I did you a favor.”

“What favor did you ever do me?”

“I proved,” he said, “there was a Santa Claus.” She burst out laughing – and brought him food. (From Connections in the NY Times, 24 December 2007, “A Rabbi of His Time, With a Charisma that Transcends It,” by Edward Rothstein.) 11. And then, my own favorite Unitarian minister story, written by Robert Walsh, now retired. (“A Baptism” from Noisy Stones by Robert Walsh). It’s a story with which all religious liberals and radicals can probably identify. Here’s how he tells it:

She called to ask if I would baptize her infant son. I said, “What we do is like a baptism, but not exactly. And we normally do it only for people who are part of the congregation. The next one we have scheduled is in May.”

She said, “Could I come to talk to you about it anyway”?

They came to see me, the very young woman and her child and the child’s very young father. She explained that the child had been born with a heart defect. He had to have a risky heart operation soon. She had asked the minister of her own church if he would baptize her son, and he had refused because she was not married to the baby’s father.

I told them that their not being married would not be an impediment to anything we might do, but that our child dedication ceremony still might not be what they were looking for. I explained that our ceremony does not wash away any sin, it does not guarantee the child a place in heaven, it doesn’t even make the child a member of the church. In fact, I said, it doesn’t change the child at all. What we expect is that it will change the rest of us in our relationship with the child, and with all children. She listened patiently.

When I was through she said, “All I want is to know that God blesses my baby.” In my mind I gasped at the sudden clarity in the room. I said, with a catch in my throat, “I think I can do that.”

And I did.

12. The twelfth story is another one from the psychologist who was the telemarketer evangelist, and I’ve added it because it’s the only one that would be easy for every one of us to do. Some of these stories seem to show a kind of brilliance that can make us admire them, but doubt that we’re going to match their quick thinking. This one doesn’t involve any quick creativity or profound wisdom, but it has a magic to offer anyone who tries it, I suspect.

Bruce Levine said he knew a minister who occasionally got completely drained by his profession – but you know this can happen to anyone in any profession, any home, any family. He would be so completely drained of that “grease” that he almost ground to a halt, and had trouble getting through Sunday morning services.

So when he felt completely drained on Saturday night, he would set the alarm for a little earlier on Sunday morning, and go to breakfast at a real dive of a restaurant. He would treat everyone there like royalty, and compliment his server on whatever he could legitimately compliment them on: their hair, how nice they looked in that shirt, the color of their eyes, anything. He would order a big breakfast, then leave a one hundred percent tip. After leaving the restaurant, he felt so completely filled with grace that he could sail joyfully through both his Sunday services.

Twelve graceful stories. These are the puzzle pieces that you can put together to form your own best picture.

According to the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, there is a spark of light – a spark of God – within everything in life. When you hear the symbol “God” used like this, you know it is referring to a potential, not a potentate. It’s a potential within each of us, as well as in stray dogs that keep a boy alive, and a bonobo ape who returned a starling to the sky. These sparks of light are hidden, but they’re there, and our job is to find and release them, so that like God, we too can say “Let there be light!” and help save our world from darkness.

And so on this first Sunday of the new year, let there be light – and let there be grace.