"Ordinary Times" - the Reverend Alison Hyder

January 7, 2001 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown

Opening words: by Vaclav Havel, playwright, poet, and Czech president.

“It is I who must begin … Once I begin, once I try – here and now, right where I am, not excusing myself by saying that things would be easier elsewhere, without grand speeches and ostentatious gestures, but all the more persistently – to live in harmony with the "voice of being," as I understand it within myself – as soon as I begin that, I suddenly discover, to my surprise, that I am neither the only one, nor the first, nor the most important one to have set out upon that road … Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.”

Reading: Carl Dennis: “Thanksgiving”

Praising the farmer who took me in
The night my car died in the snow
May be too easy a way to test my skill
In praising what should be praised.
His good cheer may have been mere temperament,
His patience merely the outgrowth of his parents’ patience.
So maybe I’ll praise his parents too,
The gift of their best years to his playroom.

And if he didn’t choose his principles,
I can praise his principles for choosing him,
The first to elbow their way through the crowd
Milling outside his nursery,
How they pushed him to love the movie at the Tivoli
Where the hero walks off the boat from Europe
With a dog, eleven dollars
And a ticket to his uncle in the grain belt,
Where ten years later mayor of Altoona,
He won’t abandon the helpless to racketeers.

And if his will is too weak to manage his feelings,
I can praise his feelings for pulling him on
As gently as the horse he rode as a child
Jogged him beyond the barn and orchard
And back again before nightfall,
Before a storm blew in like the one
That stalled my car, stranding me among strangers.

That snowy night, awakened by a call from the road,
The farmer gropes for a light
And pulls his boots on without debating.

If he has no choice, if he can’t remember his options,
I can praise forgetfulness, the blessing of habit
That prods him to follow his fathers’ example,
Hard at first to manage without muttering,
Hard once for his father too.

Sermon: “Ordinary Times ” - Rev. Alison Hyder

There’s an old Chinese curse – I’m sure some of you have heard it – that goes “may you live in interesting times.” Of course, in ancient China there were no Arnold Schwarzenager movies or National Inquirer to make violence and catastrophe seem glamorous. The News didn’t happen to other people. It appeared up close and personal and meant famine and invading armies and plagues. A change of rulers could spell ruinous taxes or restrictive laws. The only people who benefited were the historians. For farmers and poets, a ripening field of grain and the sudden song of a cricket were drama enough.

This has been a quiet winter. We've had our share of bitter winds and the occasional sweet sunset. Compared to last New Year’s Eve, with all the hoopla over the Millennium, the Y2K scares and the doomsayers with their dire predictions of riots and apocalypse and all the frenzied fireworks and celebrations, the beginning of the 21st century this year has seemed somewhat flat and dull, confused rather than inspiring. The recent presidential elections induced more fatalism than rebellion.

Maybe we’re waiting for a true leader - someone (anyone) with a moral direction and a motivating vision that could fire and unite us as a country. Maybe the issues are just too many and complex to understand. Or perhaps you have planned well and are doing all right, benefiting by advancements in microchips or medicine. But one thing is clear. We are not revolutionaries.

Look, these are interesting times. The human genome has been mapped, food genetically altered. World economies are linked. You can access the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Koran in Arabic in the palm of your hand. People live in space. Corporations get bigger, technology more pervasive. And we go along, buying groceries, talking on the phone, working, reading novels. No dramatics, no sudden rally to action. Just a feeling, perhaps, of being a little more impotent and of less and less account.

Rev. Galen Guengerich, in the New York All Souls Unitarian Church newsletter, writes:
The recent dawn of a new century and a new millennium has led many to believe that we stand at a point of a fulcrum, a hinge of history, from which we are moving into a new world of the information age, propelled by the knowledge and skill with which we clone mammals and genetically engineer humans and map DNA. Looking at the evidence, it’s tempting to conclude that we are indeed special people living in a special place at a special time.
However, as Princeton astro-physicist J. Richard Gott explains, Copernicus’ proof that the earth is not the center of the universe confirms the opposite. Our location in space is not special. The more we learn about the universe, the more non-special our location looks. The earth is orbiting an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy. When this principle is applied to time, it becomes clear that we are probably not living at a special time either. In other words, chances are that these are ordinary times. Why does acknowledging that matter? So we can avoid making the same mistake as the ancients: looking for meaning only in the future, searching for grand themes and decisive changes to mark our passage on this earth, seeing ourselves as central to the unfolding of creation.
If we look in those places, chances are we will forever look in vain. These are ordinary times. We are ordinary people. To me, that’s the good news. It enables me to live my life as it unfolds, in ordinary ways on ordinary days. My everyday life is precisely that: the 95% of my life that makes up 95% of my life. Chances are I will spend most of that time in ordinary ways. And it’s how I spend most of my time that will mostly determine whether my life as a whole is satisfying.
That’s why All Souls [Church] is important to me: it’s a place where people invest ordinary time with special meaning. [All Souls newsletter, May 2000]

We are not the center of the Universe, no special star, not Madonna or Tiger Woods, not even Ricardo Montleban. No one is begging us for our opinion about the test ban treaty or chronicling our latest affair, trumpeting when we start smoking or lose our tempers, and interpreting the psychological implications of our new haircut.

There is a strange liberty in this powerlessness, in being unimportant and obscure. We are free to make mistakes without unleashing destruction or widespread furor. Our lives have the meaning that we ourselves create for it, slowly: a deed there, a decision; small achievements in courage and zest and reconciliation and grace. One principle built upon another until they are a force of habit, whether we like it or not, like the farmer in Carl Dennis’ poem, waking up one snowy night to help a driver stranded nearby. And why? Dennis asks. Was the farmer raised that way? Did his parents teach him to be helpful or was he just naturally cheerful and easy-going? Who or what in the man should Dennis praise for this act of generosity and selflessness? Whatever it was, training or example or some deeply held principle, it worked. “That snowy night,” Dennis says, “awakened by a call from the road, the farmer gropes for a light and pulls his boots on without debating…. Hard at first to manage without muttering. Hard once for his father too.”

Dennis implies that our good actions are often the result of our upbringing, of parents or mentors who chose to teach us about kindness or thrift or duty, who led us by their daily examples or engaged us in conversations about the effects of our behavior on others. So perhaps who we are is thanks to the care and attention of other people, a chain of relationships stretching back through generations, becoming family traits. This is what we do – we Smiths or Greenbergs or Mbitis or Corlettis. We take care of family, we give to charity, we stop and help people with flat tires. Hey, what if that was your sister out there?

And what if you’ve got an appointment or it’s pouring down rain and you’re wearing your good shoes? Do you still stop? Some habits are not easily come by. Helpfulness must be practiced and rehearsed like the violin, the bow awkwardly scraping back and forth, your body stiff and uncomfortable, through sheer force of will until slowly the motions become second nature. You have to be reminded to say please, learn to observe others’ discomfort and to discover the line between being caring and being controlling or rude. And even then, you have to decide, to choose for generosity or honor every time, over comfort or convenience, and often over happiness. You have to tell yourself, over and over: this is who I am: considerate, responsible, strong, good. Maybe not last Tuesday - but usually.

Some people, Dennis observes, are just naturally cheerful or easy-going, rather than, say, nervous or austere. That helps. However, though temperament may indicate how we’ll appear to others, it doesn’t determine what we choose to do. In other words, we can cook meals for the PASG because we just like being with other people, or because we have high standards of duty, or because we want to look good in the eyes of others and ourselves, a sort of Noblesse Oblige generosity that is no less a valid or real component of self-respect. The work still gets done. George Bernard Shaw said, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” However it is motivated, we still have to decide on our actions, consciously and conscientiously. We have to choose how we spend that 95% of our daily lives, whether for ourselves or for others. It is a matter of will. We find values and principles that we can believe in, and we make them guide us in our actions.

Fifteen years ago, we Unitarian Universalists did just that. We formulated some ethical principles that would help define us as a people and give us a common direction. We wanted ideals that we could measure ourselves against, knowing that we would often fall short. And these Principles and Purposes have served as our collective conscience and a constant spur to action.

If we wait for some grand struggle or heroic cause we will stagnate and all our best gifts will wither, and then we’ll be unprepared to act. Some night we’ll hear that driver calling from the snow bank and we’ll roll over and go back to sleep - telling ourselves that he probably deserves to be stuck, he was drunk or cheats his employees or hates gays. Maybe so. But our principles, our virtues must be exercised daily, habitually, without fanfare or even justification.

“It is I who must begin” … playwright Vaclav Havel wrote to his wife.
Once I begin, once I try – here and now, right where I am, [and he was in a Soviet prison, jailed for his writing] not excusing myself by saying that things would be easier elsewhere [after all, one never knows], without grand speeches and ostentatious gestures, but all the more persistently – to live in harmony with the "voice of being," as I understand it within myself – as soon as I begin that, I suddenly discover, to my surprise, that I am neither the only one, nor the first, nor the most important one to have set out upon that road … Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost …

…Lost to ourselves, Havel means: lost to our conscience, to that “voice of being” within that prods us and guides our actions and ruins our sleep when we slip and fall short of our ideals. Havel had to choose to live with integrity, to decide what that meant in his life, as so many of us must do each day until it becomes engrained, habitual.

Martin Marty, the theologian, scanned some obituaries to illustrate the ordinary goodness of people. Like Lillian A. Brummel, a farm wife in Aurora Illinois, who died at age 79 last February. A member of her Catholic church for 50 years, she joined the Altar and Rosary Sodality, her obituary said, so she could help her neighbors get through difficult times. She cooked meals for bereaved families and served food to those gathered after burials. “She always gave more than her share, but she didn’t neglect home…” said her daughter… Ruth Cunningham, 84, had volunteered for Gray Ladies and spent years serving at veterans hospitals and helping mentally disabled women. Then she helped raise funds to found a hospital. A daughter tells about this provincial: “She literally had friends all over the world. She never hesitated to open her heart and her home to someone in need.” Or Dr. Humberto Velasco, whose widow said, “whatever his hospital needed, he did. They could always count on him.” She added, ”He was not a casual dresser. He used to say that if you are going to be a physician you have to be a proper one. He said you don’t go to work in your play clothes.” Then there was Service Station owner and semi-pro balladeer Robert Preston Woolet, who died at 84. Doris Slouber, his pianist these last eight years, said he would [work on] your car while singing bouncy songs like “Walking My Baby Back Home.” He “was said never to have had a short conversation in his life.” He kept singing right up to the moment they wheeled him into the emergency room. People heard him warble, “It’s a Most Unusual Day.” And so it was.

“What these four preach to me,” Marty says, is the importance of community. They neither lived nor died alone.” [Christian Century March 15, 2000]. Like our own David Asher, who died suddenly last year of a brain aneurysm at 49. A waiter at the Lobster Pot, he was always upbeat and friendly. He counseled kids a the High School, He was a regular cheerleader at the Swim for Life, helping swimmers out of the water, and he coordinated the senior citizens’ dinner at the Provincetown VFW every year. “That’s just the kind of person he was,” people might say, but that hardly explains what was it that made David reach out to others, to decide that feeding and serving 75 or so elderly people was worthwhile or fulfilling. It sounds like an awful lot of work to me! But it was just part of his everyday expression of love for this community.

Everywhere on earth there is bloodshed, wars and persecution and hostility, and there always has been, stunning in its indifferent brutality. The violence in Jerusalem, which seems so primal and inevitable, is not a matter of fate or a sign of some coming Armageddon, but the actions of ordinary people fired by frustration, by zeal, by bitterness and vengeance. It happens all the time. It will take strength of will and determination to change. Every person, even the most insignificant, parents and their children, tourists, scholars, soldiers, must decide to cooperate and to work hard every day to grant forgiveness and compassion, when anger and hatred are ready to hand, like pebbles in the dirt. No less must we decide what we stand for, and will be.

We are not the center of the Universe, not the biggest or the best. Our sun is but one of many in a vast Cosmos. The earth is four and a half billion years old (give or take a few hundred million). Homo sapiens have existed for the last quarter of a million of those years and we’re still learning to love.

“Look at the night sky,” Leon Weiseltier writes in Kaddish.
You are not seeing only the light of the stars, You are also seeing the journey of the light of the stars toward you. Admire space and you admire time. In this way, immensity conducts you to history. Yet that history is nothing like our history. A few years ago I read a book about the mass-extinction debates among geologists. I learned that the history of life on earth, as it is told by rocks, is marked by a series of global catastrophes. “However,” one of the contributors to the volume concluded, “study of the tempo of the extinction episodes reveals that they took place over extended periods of time ranging from about 1 to 10 million years or more. The deliberate pace of the extinctions was, in fact, the antithesis of catastrophic. They took place over evolutionary, not contemporary time.” This helped me to understand the difference between natural history and human history. It was humans who devised mass-extinctions in “contemporary’ time, who accelerated the pace of disaster so that it outstripped the pace of evolution, who invented catastrophes that could be experienced as catastrophes. We are the most experienced catastrophists in the history of life. [Leon Weiseltier Kaddish, p. 73].

But if we are capable of great destruction, we can also choose courage and compassion, the everyday virtues of kindness and sympathy, and hospitality, principles of justice and acceptance. We can invest our everyday time together with special meaning, sharing in the joys of community. Cooking dinners, fixing a flat tire, or singing a bouncy tune may seem pretty ordinary. But then, so are we.

Closing Words: by Vaclav Havel -

“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously leading to success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.”

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