Sermons

  

See Other Side

By the Rev. Jeffrey Merkel

Given at Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fairbanks, April 8, 2007.

 

My title, “See Other Side,” comes from a story in the New Yorker (March 12, 2007) the other week.  It was an odd coincidence.  I always skip the New Yorker stories.  But as I was distractedly skimming a John McPhee writeup on the geology of European chalk, I turned a couple pages and found myself in Ravenna, Italy. Suddenly, the tone of the piece gripped me.  I slowed down. I read to the end, more and more puzzled, before I realized I had left John McPhee in the dust.

I had entered a different world, a story world of loss, longing and spiritual vision.  A middle-aged Russian woman finds herself missing her beloved father who had died.  She has undertaken a kind of pilgrimage, traveling to some of the places he had visited when he was younger.  In fact, she holds in her hand, on this uncomfortably hot spring day in dusty Ravenna, a postcard he had sent to her some forty years earlier. 

Ravenna is famous for its 5th century mosaics;  hordes of tourists move from one church to another, craning their necks to glimpse the dim luster of tiny multicolored glass stones high up under dusky vaults.  “It is possible to make out something in those vaults,” she writes, “but not very much.”  In fact, the cheap postcards give a better view.  

On the back of her postcard, in hurriedly scribbled pencil, her father had written:
“Sweetheart!  I have never seen anything so sublime (see other side) in my life!  Makes you want to cry!  Oh, if only you were here!  Your Father.”

The woman imagines her father, as a youth, excited, maybe even drunk, writing to her from a dimly lit café, using all exclamation points.  The mosaic on the “other side” of the card shows a lovely Byzantine vision of heaven: Jesus sits in a brilliant green paradise of eternal spring, with blazing white sheep grazing all around.  It causes the woman to muse on whether heaven exists, and whether her father is there now. 

But then she realizes that the real story for her, honestly, is that he is not here, in this world, to write to her, to call her sweetheart, to share his exhilaration from afar with her.  On this hot day, in the dry, narrow, tourist jammed streets, she cannot recapture what he must have felt, how he must have seen the place.

She informs the reader how, in every Italian church, there’s a donation-box on the wall.  In Ravenna, these boxes have an additional feature: if you put in 300 lira, something like 25 cents, for a brief moment, spotlights are turned on near the ceiling, bathing the stones of the ancient mosaic in fresh white light.  The colors brighten.  You can see details. 

Whenever the lights go on, the crowd gets excited, its hum grows louder.  But though it’s only 25 cents, many visitors begrudge the cost.  “They’re annoyed,” she tells us, “they weren’t forewarned.” She adds, sardonically, “They want to see heaven for free.”

For a moment, too short for the human eye to adjust to, paradise is greener, the sheep more innocent, Jesus – kinder.  And then the light goes off.  Once again, everything is immersed in gloom. 

She wanders from church to church along with the crowd,  squeezing through the narrow doors, pushing past her neighbors, trying, like everyone else, to get a better view, trying not to become irritated.  She considers for a moment that if heaven does exist, it is likely that she’ll enter it with just such a flock of sheepish people – old, not all that smart, a bit greedy.  This image of plodding across the green meadows of eternity with a herd of American tourists, many of them disgruntled that everything is so ancient and small, strikes her as awful and boring – exactly wrong for heaven.  Heaven, by definition, should be utterly sublime.

Finally she gets to the Chapel which features a brilliant starry ceiling, and, on one of its walls the mosaic of the Good Shepherd among the sheep – the very one that her postcard depicts.  But there’s a problem.  It’s that the crowd, dense and stubborn, elbow to elbow, needs to put some coins into the light box, but everyone is waiting for someone else to do it.  The narrator feels the same way – she’s put her share of coins in. The darkness presses on their heads.  The smells of mice, of mold, and something very old.  And the human smells, aging flesh, perfume, breath mints, sweat, tobacco.  Yet, her father had written, “I have never seen anything so sublime (see other side) in my life!  Makes you want to cry!” 

* * * * *

What a difference there is between telling a story and having an opinion. If this Russian woman were to offer us only her opinion about Ravenna, she would revert into an American tourist.  Instead, she tells us her story, her love for her father, the postcard of Paradise, his pencilled ecstasy, and her difficult pilgrimage.  Indeed, what does it all mean?  Clearly, she is enthralled. We are also entranced. Authentic human narratives touch us deeply, and elicit deep responses.

As a person who is gripped by that human experience and tradition often called “religion,” I struggle and agonize over how lovely and open a community can be which holds to a deeply true story, and how dark and destructive a community can be which mines its stories for mere opinions. 

That said, I think again about this past week, which used to be the busiest week of my life for 25 years.  Christians launched into their Easter story beginning with Lent seven weeks ago, and during Holy Week many traditions try to make the story present tense by means of a day-by-day “walk with Jesus” as he gets legally entangled and executed, and then is seen alive  again by some of his followers.  Jews this week have an arguably even more compelling story to follow, Passover, in which Moses cajoles the garrulous “chosen people” to leave slavery in Egypt, marches them through the Red Sea on dry land, and leads them through the desert. 

These stories have been told for aeons, and they have had a huge impact on our civilization and our lives.  They are greatly loved by many, but they also are the foundation for opinions and laws that have rent the human family over the years:  Holocausts, inquisitions, crusades, lynchings. 

I am beginning to read these biblical stories like the Russian woman in Ravenna reads the exclamations of her father’s postcard. Both of us are tired, lonely, dusty, and hot, surrounded by kvetching tourists in a dimly lit ancient tomb, wondering at those words:  “I have never seen anything so sublime (see other side) in my life!”  With her, I sense the alienation of trying to capture the wonder in these latter times. Should we even allow ourselves to long for the ecstasy other religious sojourners have so obviously experienced here?

But in these latter days, there doesn’t even seem to be time to think about these things.  A swarm of people who call themselves God’s people are staking their claim to the so called “holy places” of our common humanity.  Together, we’re roaming narrow streets, elbowing into darkened chapels, and grumbling that no one is putting their coins into the slot. The “officially religious,” be they Baptist or Shiite,  want to assure that a nation’s social and political order follows a biblical mandate, but not the mandate of the great scriptural stories, which talk about forgiveness, hope, life from death, and freedom. Their mandate is opinion masquerading as interpretation, colored by fear, and laid down as divine law.

The difference between a picture of heaven based on narratives of the western religious tradition, and one based on mining that same religious tradition for opinions about things came home to me in the recent debate over the advisory vote on benefits for unmarried partners.

Some people writing letters to the editor had stories to go on, stories of their blended families, stories of beloved gay and lesbian friends and relatives, stories of the state constitution and of what kind of people we are called to be by our founders.  Even the story of the good Samaritan told by Jesus appeared in a letter, and the story of Jesus’ struggle with the religiously self-righteous Pharisees.

Some other people writing letters based their arguments on opinion and God’s law: these were almost never stories, always abstractions.  There were generalizations that marriage is ordained by God between a man and a woman, there were the misapplications of the legend of the Garden of Eden from Genesis, there were fearful fantasies that health benefits was the first step of a gay/ lesbian plan to proselytize their so-called lifestyle.  As if it would bring down Christendom. 

But this all simply begs the question: Can authentic cultural and personal narratives or a vision of paradise – see other side – have any traction in this fractured world of raised voices, scriptural malfeasance, and opinion projected into divine law?

To answer that, I’d like to take a quick look at James Fowler’s 1981 book, Stages of Faith, The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. In this book, Fowler postulates different stages in human spiritual development: 

After a baby learns trust, or mistrust; and after a toddler learns to talk, to tell stories, to interpret her world through the eyes of her family, comes a stage Fowler calls the mythic/ literal stage.  It’s when kids between six and 12 years old explore the world of bugs rocks and stories, and codify things.  They demand order to things, and they require clear lines between right and wrong, good and evil.  They even hold parents to the rules that parents laid down and then forgot about 

It’s in this stage, Fowler states, that many fundamentalist types get stuck.  They remain eight years old in the presence of a volatile, angry God, their whole lives. 

The next stage, when early adolescence kicks in, also plays a role in conservative religion – it’s the stage of wanting to fit into your peer group,  wanting to know what everyone else in the group is doing so you can hold yourself in safe conformity, As a young teen you need your friends around you,  you can’t afford to stand out. 

This conformity may shatter by age 20, Fowler’s (potential – you can get stuck at any stage) fourth stage, when some people have a clearer sense of what they themselves want, and begin to choose it.  This is the freedom stage, people pick and choose among lifestyles, religions, life-goals.  People in this stage explore, they wander, even transgress. 

Fowler has a mid-life stage he calls the “conjunctive” stage, when people temper their freedom to be anything they want, with a desire to be something they care about, and the world needs. Religious- or community-oriented people become more humble, more open, more compassionate, more generous, and more fierce about taking risks to right wrongs.  It’s rarely found before age 30.And it’s rarely seen in societies which put a premium on stimulation and distraction. 

Fowler’s seventh and final stage, more theoretical than actual, unfortunately, is the stage of a Mohandas Gandhi or a Susan B. Anthony, the selfless, saintly person who is so energized by their vision that they are both transformed, and also transform others.

In Fowler’s purview, you can live your whole life as a spiritual ten-year-old, gripped by the interpretations your parents or priest told you about life’s meaning. 

Or you can move around.  For example, you can spend some years as a “conjunctive” social activist, helping others, inspiring others, and eventually collapse back into the easier-to-manage stage of the freedom-and-personal-lifestyle focus of the 20-year-old.

The way people in different stages would deal with narrative is also telling.  A spiritual ten-year-old would see an entirely different point in a story than a spiritually transformed 40-year-old.  The story of Jesus’ resurrection may lead a black-and-white thinker to make sure others know how crucial it is to believe in a bodily resurrection in order personally to be saved. The same story, seen from a more developed spiritual maturity, could lead to a conversation about the women on the way to visiting Jesus’ tomb, about significant personal loss and how – or whether people recover from deep losses.

Stories have this sort of valence, unlike opinions, laws, and ideology.  You can work with stories to bring out the spirit, the best in a person or community.  Stories leave room for discussion, for different perspectives, for a whole which is larger than the sum of its parts.  Opinions, ideology, and laws are much less adaptive, and from a community point of view, they exclude rather than include, they are subtractive. 

Alas, I know this too well: when you’re working with a community of spiritually immature believers, you’re swimming against a fierce downstream current.  They want certitude, clarity, black and white.  Not getting a steady diet of cultural or religious dogma can make people insecure, and eventually, angry. 

But there is another important point that Fowler’s work on stages of faith development makes: there are always people who are swimming out of one stage and flopping into another, like salmon heading upstream.  And it’s exhilarating, but also disturbing, discomfiting.

When I think about resurrection today, on what the world calls “Easter Sunday,” it is precisely these people I am thinking about.  They are people struggling to stay spiritually alive in deadening and even abusive churches.  They are people who gave up years ago on religious communities, because the only community they knew used religion to make them feel desperate, lonely, wrong, or sad.  They are people who still believe the dominant male religious ruling authority’s interpretation of their tradition, and so remain in spiritual exile in order to stay well.  These are our co-workers, friends, and neighbors. 

That’s one reason why we UU’s are here.  Think about it!  We are so different from the typical church.  How we gather is telling: we share worship leadership each week, we share making sense of our world together through our Sunday talks.  Everyone has a chance to tell their ongoing story Sunday mornings when we light candles.  What we care about is revealing – there wasn’t a day that passed in March 2007 when one of us wasn’t taking a risky public stand in the advisory vote for public employee benefits.  We’re working on small-group chalice circles where a sub-community of our fellowship can tell stories, support one another, and grow in courage and insight.

If you look at our fellowship with the eyes of James Fowler’s stages, you see a community that strives to be, by definition, conjunctive.  That means we have come into spiritual adulthood through choice, not chance.  Many of us are willing and eager to move beyond the personal freedom to be anything we want, in order to embrace the discipline of becoming a community we care about, and which Fairbanks needs. It happens all the time: someone walks in off the street, gets a sense of our community here, hears our welcome, tells their story, and then writes home, in effect: “I have never seen anything so sublime (see other side) in my life!  Makes you want to cry!” 

* * * * *

The crowd continues to be restless in the Vault of the Good Shepherd in Ravenna.  Finally, the familiar click resounds – someone has taken the plunge and put their 300 lire in.  For a moment, the dull hot darkness overhead becomes a starry sky, stars hanging startlingly close.  “Ahhhh” comes the sound from below, then the light goes out, and again there’s darkness, darker than before.  And again the click, and again the multicolored stars like spinning Ferris wheels, followed by the click, and the blow of darkness.  Everything disappears, but again and again the lights flash on, a path is opened, in the darkness, a promise made. 

The Russian woman squeezes through the crowd to get a look at the insatiable being who is feeding the donation box and granting light to the people. 

He sits in a wheelchair, his face lowered.  There’s a box of coins in his lap.  His hand gropes for one and sticks it into the slot, and while the blue is tinted with the fire of light, a female guide hurriedly whispers in his ear words that can’t be overheard. 

The man is blind.  He listens to the woman and occasionally nods his head: yes, yes.  He wants to hear more, he puts in coin after coin.  He listens his fill, nods, and smiles.  Then the woman – maybe a daughter, a wife, or a hired guide – deftly wheels his chair through the crowd and out of the mausoleum.  “See other side.”  Her father wrote forty years before.  “Makes you want to cry!”

– Jeffrey Merkel