"To The Victor" - the Reverend Alison Hyder

November 4, 2000 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown

We are here,
To turn as the season turns, each leaf capturing fire,
And to look into the mirror of this day,
Seeing ourselves in the light of all that has come before
And all that yet shall be.
May we be more tender, more at one with each other
On this day than any previous day,
That the word peace may be spoken no more
Save that it is articulate in the living of our lives.

Reading: Jane Kenyon - “Potluck at the Wilmot Flat Baptist Church”

(Jane Kenyon moved with her husband, poet Donald Hall to his family farm in New Hampshire. The New England landscape and culture influenced much of her work. Kenyon became the New Hampshire poet laureate before her death of leukemia in 1995.)

We drive to the Flat on a clear November night. Stars and planets appear in the eastern sky, not yet in the west.

Voices rise from the social hall downstairs, the clink of silverware and plates, the smell of coffee.

As we walk into the room faces turn to us, friendly and curious. We are seated at the speakers’ table, next to the town historian, a retired schoolteacher who is lively and precise.

The table is decorated with red, white and blue streamers, and framed Time and Newsweek covers of the President, just elected. Someone has tied peanuts to small branches with red, white, and blue yearn, and set the branches upright in lumps of clay at the center of each table.

After the meal everyone clears food from the tables, and tables from the hall. Then we go up in the sanctuary, where my husband reads poems from the pulpit.

One woman looks out the window continually. I notice the altar cloth, tassled and embroidered in gold thread: Till I Come. There is applause after each poem.

On the way home we pass the white clapboard faces if the library and town hall, luminous in the moonlight, and I remember the first time I ever voted – in a township hall in Michigan.

That same wonderful smell of coffee was in the air, and I found myself among people trying to live ordered lives…. And again I am struck with love for the Republic.

Sermon: “To the Victor” - Rev. Alison Hyder

I don’t know about any of you, but I am more than a little scared these days. Hallowe’en may be over, but the real monsters are still with us. The same corporate powers, the same moneyed interests, the same political lobbies are telling us what to think and how to live, pulling the strings of our emotions, and overriding our concerns. It’s really no wonder that so many people fail to vote – there seems so little to choose between the two major candidates. And they themselves seem to have done little to set themselves apart, to differentiate themselves and say what they really stand for, despite some very significant differences.
It’s the politics of personality. We’re urged to vote for the person we like better, never mind their abilities or interests or how well they’d represent the country, or even how compassionate they really are. It’s all surface.
Why do we put up with it?
Well, for one thing, we’re used to it. From school days on, life is a series of popularity contests with class presidents and prom queens elected on image and personality. We live in a competitive culture. We’re continually asked to take sides, to choose our affiliation, our home team, and identify their interests with our own. We want to be winners, so we want the winners to be like us, people we can identify with, so that their victory is our victory. Yes, even in Provincetown, iconoclastic and offbeat as we think we are, we’re still swayed by image and packaging, identifying people - seeking them - by body type and attire. We know what it takes to fit in, or we learn fast.
We want to belong to something, somehow. After all, most of us know what it’s like to be an outsider. Whether for our beliefs, our sexual identities, our class, or that indefinable “something,” and despite all the privileges that most of us actually have, we’ve all felt marginalized at times, undervalued and misunderstood. So we may disdain the elite, but we want all the power and recognition we know we deserve. It’s all very well to be a victim when all else fails, but to the victor go the spoils. And we all want a part of them.
Increasingly, the ends are used to justify the means. “Winning isn’t everything – it’s the only thing,” football coach Vince Lombardi said. And his philosophy seems to be winning out. Kids’ sports aren’t about teamwork and cooperation, and you can forget being a good loser! Sports are becoming more competitive and hostile – at least for the parents. Fewer kids are taught values of honesty and respect and thank-you notes. Cheating in school is up, and easier than ever. And this reflects the adult culture. There are no company rewards for loyalty and honesty, not when jobs are sacrificed to market earnings and executive bonuses, and everything and everyone is another commodity.
This is inevitable in a country founded on utilitarian principles, on the notion of “the greatest good for the greatest number.” After all, who determines what the “greatest good” is, and for whom? It’s not as if we’re all part of the conversation or have the same needs. The system permits some individuals to be disadvantaged so that the collective good can be enhanced. That sounds reasonable at first, doesn’t it? Deprive the lucky few of some of their advantages and give everyone a share. But utilitarianism also says that the self-satisfaction some people feel in seeing others less wealthy or privileged is a good, which must be given equal weight with others’ right to livelihood or safety. In other words, Jerry Falwell’s self-righteousness balances your oppression and loss of civil rights. My comfort compensates for the plight of a homeless family or a child without adequate education. And there’s also nothing in this system to keep it from working the opposite way. Thus, we can measure the USA’s ”greatest good” by averaging the richest 10% of the population into the total per capita income. We’re still a wealthy nation. But fewer and fewer of us have a share. It is a system designed to enhance capitalism and promote competition at the expense of cooperation and reciprocity. In other words, it focuses on ends, and not means. It is not based on values such as justice, compassion, integrity, or even freedom.
May Sarton, with whom many of us may be able to identify on one ground or another - she was a white, immigrant, bisexual, New England, Unitarian Universalist gardener and writer (and do let us claim the famous whenever we can) said, “one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”
Not only is Sarton saying that it is hard to be human in this world – something we all understand on a daily basis – but also that we need to have ideals and values that are better and purer than we are. We need a potential to rise to, something to make us look up from the muck and irritation of everyday life and see the stars – and other people. We need to visualize ourselves as something finer so that maybe we can work toward that as a goal.
There’s a big difference between being a hero and a winner. Winners beat someone else, or achieve some fixed end – make the finish line, get more votes, have the most points or the least errors. Winning is definitive, measurable: first, second, third. You don’t “sort of” come in first. You win – or you don’t. That’s why there’s a consolation prize.
Heroes, by contrast, overcome difficulties. They are people who manage to rise to the occasion, who are faced with a tough situation and act anyway, with bravery or integrity or selflessness. Heroes are flawed by their very definition. After all, if they were perfect, there’d be nothing to overcome. But despite their own imperfections, their uncertainty and fear and failures, they persist. And in the end they achieve something more important than they are by their very living. ee cummings, another UU poet, said “To be yourself in a world that is doing its best, night and day, trying to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle any human being can ever fight and never stop fighting.”
In 1994, NY Governor Mario Cuomo lost his bid for re-election. He didn’t make excuses or deride his opponent. Instead, he talked about his very good fortune. Cuomo said that political campaigns

“…start with conjecture and hope, they are filled with unexpected gifts, undeserved rejections, inexplicable pain, incredible joy, confusion, vindication, everything. How do they end? I come from a religion where the whole symbol of the religion ended in condemnation and crucifixion. But it wasn’t the measure of the experience. That’s just the way it ended. And there’s significance to it –- I’m saying this is a metaphor for everybody’s life; that it is in the living, it is in the campaigning that you make your mark. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you win.” (NY Times, 11-13-94)

Cuomo lost his bid for re-election but not his self-respect or his purpose in life, because the race, for him, wasn’t about beating another person. Of course he wanted to win. But he needed most to do the best he could do and feel good about his own actions and motivation despite a system that feeds on controversy and blame.
Can we live our lives with enough honesty, with enough integrity, that they are a success - not as the world measures these things, but so that every action speaks for itself? As Unitarian Universalists, we do not look for some heavenly judgment to redeem our actions and reconcile our flaws. No minister has the power to absolve your sins. So we must each live every day as if it were the last, because at our death the end result will be the accumulation of just such days. Like Mario Cuomo, we do not base our ethics on Jesus’ crucifixion, but on his wisdom and compassion and the example that he set. We try to emulate him as much – or more – than we revere him.
There is, of course, a danger in heroes. Part of the American myth - which has its basis in Christianity - is that we will be saved by some heroic figure who comes from outside to save us – like the Lone Ranger or Rambo, even the Canadian Mountie in “Due South.” Since none of us is that perfect hero material we don’t feel that we qualify, and so these characters reinforce our passivity. They are essentially fascist. They promote the cult of personality and make us doubt that we can achieve anything by working together in mutual respect and dialogue. Instead of us solving our own problems, we are taught to look to someone else, to the government or Jesus or Martin Luther King or even a Hitler. We wait for a leader. And then, if they fail, it’s they who disappointed us and not our own weakness that we bemoan. So we win – except that we lose. We lose the chance to achieve something good, and difficult, and heartbreaking. We remain merely bystanders in our own lives.
Our heroes are toppling left and right. Martin Luther King was a womanizer, Jack Kennedy used drugs and kept us in the Vietnam War, Woodrow Wilson was an extreme racist, Amelia Earhart got lost, Susan B Anthony was unpleasant, Truman started the CIA, Bob Dylan is just too hard to pin down, Ben and Jerry sold out, the list goes on. And you can forget any current political figures. It seems that all our heroes have feet of clay.
So why not you? As a human being, you have all the major qualifications needed to be heroic. You are flawed, dissatisfied, and hopeful. You are searching for something better. You believe in yourself and your potential for growth. And you believe in community or you wouldn’t be sitting in this room today. Add to that a problem you want to fix, and that’s about all it takes to change the world for the better.
Dorothy Day, who helped to found the Catholic Worker remarked, “People say, what is the sense of our small effort. They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much work to do.” To think like a hero and be a merely decent human being is not a bad place to start.
Now, it may just be that we will lose this election - that one or another or even all of the candidates and issues we choose will fail, and we are stuck with the results. Our representatives may disappoint and betray us. But like Governor Cuomo, we need to live our lives so that either way, we win.
We need to make our mark on the world by living out our values with conscience and integrity and wholeness – no easy task. We have to find a way to fight for our issues, to change our country’s priorities to reflect humane values and personal needs, through gratitude for our blessings in this beleaguered and beloved Republic. We can do it, too. This is no time for indifference or complacency or despair. As Margaret Mead once commented, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
This Tuesday, without any threat to our safety, without any pressure from the military or literacy tests or fees, we may go and cast our votes for our government representatives. We are about to elect, each one of us equally, the person called “the Most Powerful Man in America,” the “Leader of the Free World.” This election is probably the world’s largest peaceful transfer of power on a planet defined by wars and hatred, fraud, ethnic cleansing and military coups.
Don’t take it for granted. Do your part and vote.
And then go out and change the world.

Closing Words: “Thanks” W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forest falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

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