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bronze_ribbons[As usual, the actual sermon was somewhat different than what's posted below, what with ad-libbing and on-the-fly tweaking, but the general gist is here.]
"The Poetry of Inconvenience"
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville
Earth Day sermon
Today, April 22nd, 2007, is Earth Day -- the 37th year it’s been observed. It is also the day before the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, which is also the day the anniversary of his birth is traditionally celebrated, which is also the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England. And today is also the 22nd day of National Poetry Month.
The words of our opening hymn this morning, “Calm Soul of All Things,” are taken from Matthew Arnold’s Lines Written In Kensington Gardens. The words of the hymn we just sang ("May Nothing Evil Cross This Door") are by Louis Untermeyer, another poet popular during the mid-20th century. The majority of our readings today are also from poets -- Annie Dillard, Denise Levertov, Maura Stanton, and May Sarton, and I'll be quoting several more to you as part of this homily. I'm sure some of you recognized, however, that my title -- "The Poetry of Inconvenience" -- alludes not to a poem, but to Mr. Albert Gore Jr.'s documentary on global warming.
I've been thinking a lot the past couple of days about the nature of warnings -- who we're willing to hear them from; who gets taken seriously; who gets ignored; who gets blamed if they turn out to be true, and who gets needlessly harassed if they turn out to be false alarms, or if they're propagated out of malice or ignorance. It's an issue that humans have struggled with since time immemorial, of course, and it's a dilemma that's been chronicled by poets again and again over the centuries. Homer, Chaucer, and Shakespeare others wrote about Cassandra, given the gift of prophecy by an amorous god and then cursed by the same god, after she jilted him, to be disbelieved by the people she desperately wanted to save. Al Gore's been sounding the alarm on climate change for nearly twenty years, and while he's managed to impress a number of people with the urgency of the situation, there are plenty who remain unconvinced or actively hostile. It seems to be a favorite straw man of conservative pundits. For instance, when Rush Limbaugh commented on the Virginia Tech massacre, he chose to ask, "Was everybody so concerned with the trumped-up global warming scare they didn't notice a real threat?" (New York Times, 4/20/2007).
Now, I generally find it difficult to take Rush Limbaugh seriously, but the fact remains that he's broadcast on more than six hundred radio stations. There's many people ready to agree with him, so it made me cringe when I read his insinuations that the symptoms of Seung-Hui Cho's mental psychosis were ignored as a result of political correctness, and Wednesday morning I was stuck in traffic behind a Jeep that had the bumper sticker, "Ban Illegal Aliens, Not Guns." Never mind that Mr. Cho was a legal resident of this country. Never mind that Columbine, Jonesboro, West Nickel Mines, and other such tragedies were perpetrated by Caucasian United States citizens.
However, there are also plenty of moderate, logic-governed people wondering if and how disaster could have been averted -- if there was a point where the people in contact with Mr. Cho should have intensified their efforts either to integrate him into normal society or to remove him to a medical setting. I've read some of these reports, and they remind me of the times I've interacted with mentally troubled individuals -- and, more painfully, of the times I've personally failed to connect or stay connected with such people sometimes deliberately so. The line between eccentricity and psychosis can be terribly blurry, and the distinction between minding one's own business and saving lives isn't as clearcut as the demagogues would have you believe. I can tell you that I've experienced firsthand that sense of terrible, unmanageable wrongness -- both the moment of realizing someone's gone around the proverbial bend, and dilemma of who to tell and what to tell, and which promises to break. I've repeatedly skittered away from extended contact with people who strike me as emotional vampires; on my good days, I see this as sheer self-preservation, and on my not-so-good days, I wonder what it would take to make me less cowardly and more generous. Sometimes I do realize it's not all up to me -- I can't force my friends to come to terms with everyone who's ever hurt them, nor can I make them take their medications or see their therapists or work out three times a week -- not when I don't even do these things for myself. There are nights, though, when I can't sleep and I can't stop agonizing over whether my choices are acceptable in the eyes of God -- particularly if the humans in my life aren't agreeing on whether I'm being realistic, selfish, or both.
And I do this agonizing not only when it comes to social relationships, but also with regard to my consumption of resources. One of the challenges in my marriage has been figuring out which battles are worth fighting. My husband's a wonderful, wonderful man, but he's also not the type to pinch pennies or reuse his underwear as rags to wash the kitchen floor, and we've sniped at each other for years over his habit of leaving lights on and my equally irritating compulsion to turn them off. That said, I'm the one who takes extra-long, extra-hot baths and stays up more than half the night far too often. Our gasoline budget could probably be trimmed if I were to manage my time wisely enough to make carpooling possible, but any such savings are unlikely to make up for the fact that my husband's passionate about cars and motorcycles. Most of the time, I don't have a problem with his obsession at all -- I'm highly amused by how much of a geek he is about it, and I've enjoyed riding on the back of those motorcycles to Maine and Arizona and other faraway climes -- and living to brag about it. But sometimes, when I try to take in the bigger picture, I can't help wondering to what extent future generations will curse us for our hobbies and our traveling habits. I can't help wondering if they'll deplore our expectation of routine, frequently scheduled plane flights, regardless of whether the planes are full or empty. I wonder how they'll judge our dependence on prepackaged meat and non-reusable CDs -- whether they'll see our lives as the embodiment of convenience triumphant over conservation. I wonder if their textbooks will describe our generation with the same exasperated condescension so often currently employed to detail the fate of the passenger pigeon and other such irreversible miscalculations.
And when I wonder such things, my efforts look small and puny and superficial indeed, and I wonder how much I'm disappointing God by not stepping out of my comfort zone and pushing myself and those around me to be far more mindful now rather than later, even though it's a terribly fine line between inspiring people to think and being the shrill, self-righteous pain in the tuchis no one wants to be stuck with at cocktail parties. I've been teaching a class on the Harry Potter and Lord Peter Wimsey books over the past month and a half, and one of the points where I saw students nodding in recognition was when we talked about that type of character in novels. For example, Sayers features an academic female pushing for prison reform who, quote, "is a splendid person, but hasn't very much sense of humour. She can't bear anything to be done except from the very loftiest motives," and as such, the Dean of her college sighs in relief when she departs from a social gathering. Likewise, in the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling's characterisation of Hermione Granger's campaign for house elf rights is brilliantly true to life, in my opinion. You've got a girl whose heart and brains are more or less in the right place -- Rowling signals pretty strongly that the wizards are overdue for a reckoning from the races of nonhuman creatures they've collectively mistreated, and Hermione is one of the few people who gets it, but she doesn't know how to talk to her peers without them rolling their eyes and mocking her efforts, and Rowling also points out that some of the elves aren't actually interested in the rights Hermione's trying so hard to win for them.
In a series of essays written between 1989 and 1998 [published in Pig Notes and Dumb Music],, poet and professor William Heyen exhorted his students, colleagues, and readers to make the leap of imagination necessary to educate themselves and others about the impending demise of our species. He writes about how fear cripples imagination -- that humans have trouble realistically addressing our ecological woes because the prospect of our extinction is so dire and so dreadful we don't want to be held responsible for coping with it.
Heyen put this in an open letter to his university community, in 1988, and he writes about some of the cynical responses he received:
You can hear the logic of convenience resounding through this, and it's a false logic: as humans, we do so many unnatural things as a matter of course. Take, for instance, our holidays, which are based on calendars that change depending on Popes and moons and governments. It is hardly "natural" which days we choose to declare as our holy-days, and at times I'm hard pressed not to point out that every day should be a holy day, not just the ones collectively deemed special. (I'm reminded of the "Curtis" cartoon where his friend from Flyspeck Island reacts to the concept of "Black history month" with disbelief: "Shouldn't every month be Black history month?" Shouldn't every month be "poetry month"?)
But it is hard to remember holiness under the pressure of daily minutiae, and living constantly in a state of celebration or of crisis is not within the scope of most of our lives. Holidays are our reminders to step back and love the world -- and to coax others to love it just as much. Holidays offer us opportunities to go beyond our usual boundaries.
We sometimes use the word "poetic" as a synonym for "coincidence" or "synchronicity." "That's poetic," we say, when something seems oddly fitting, whether the fit truly contains any meaning outside the associations we can't resist assigning to it. There was a heartbreaking example of this last week at Virginia Tech, where one of the professors who died had survived the Holocaust -- only to be killed on Yom Ha'Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
My friend Mary Alexandra Agner has been observing National Poetry Month by drafting a poem a day, and last week she wrote about Professor Librescu:
In spite of the hymn, we cannot stop evil from crossing or piercing our doors. But we still have choices. As Unitarian Universalists, part of our collective burden and joy is both to teach others about the dangers of this world -- to sound the alarm against easy judgments and contagious cynicism -- and to also show that there are many doors, many wonderful doors, and to help make it possible to keep opening those doors. Amen and alleluia.
Miscellany:
* A voicepost of me reading Mary's poem is here.
* Listened to part of The Splendid Table during the drive home, which included a clip of Jonathan Gold talking about his twelve-year-old daughter's love of Italian squid feasts and about other food writers he admires. He sounds very cool and his "triumph of the proofreader" wisecrack makes me even more inclined to like him.
* However, catching up with Gold's writing is going to have to wait. The immediate plan: cook lunch (something with mushrooms and chicken), bake dog biscuits, and work on essays until my brain is goo.
* It's 78 F and sunny here. Here's the start of the Maura Stanton poem ("God's Ode to Creation") that was the meditation text for this morning's service:
"The Poetry of Inconvenience"
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville
Earth Day sermon
Today, April 22nd, 2007, is Earth Day -- the 37th year it’s been observed. It is also the day before the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, which is also the day the anniversary of his birth is traditionally celebrated, which is also the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England. And today is also the 22nd day of National Poetry Month.
The words of our opening hymn this morning, “Calm Soul of All Things,” are taken from Matthew Arnold’s Lines Written In Kensington Gardens. The words of the hymn we just sang ("May Nothing Evil Cross This Door") are by Louis Untermeyer, another poet popular during the mid-20th century. The majority of our readings today are also from poets -- Annie Dillard, Denise Levertov, Maura Stanton, and May Sarton, and I'll be quoting several more to you as part of this homily. I'm sure some of you recognized, however, that my title -- "The Poetry of Inconvenience" -- alludes not to a poem, but to Mr. Albert Gore Jr.'s documentary on global warming.
I've been thinking a lot the past couple of days about the nature of warnings -- who we're willing to hear them from; who gets taken seriously; who gets ignored; who gets blamed if they turn out to be true, and who gets needlessly harassed if they turn out to be false alarms, or if they're propagated out of malice or ignorance. It's an issue that humans have struggled with since time immemorial, of course, and it's a dilemma that's been chronicled by poets again and again over the centuries. Homer, Chaucer, and Shakespeare others wrote about Cassandra, given the gift of prophecy by an amorous god and then cursed by the same god, after she jilted him, to be disbelieved by the people she desperately wanted to save. Al Gore's been sounding the alarm on climate change for nearly twenty years, and while he's managed to impress a number of people with the urgency of the situation, there are plenty who remain unconvinced or actively hostile. It seems to be a favorite straw man of conservative pundits. For instance, when Rush Limbaugh commented on the Virginia Tech massacre, he chose to ask, "Was everybody so concerned with the trumped-up global warming scare they didn't notice a real threat?" (New York Times, 4/20/2007).
Now, I generally find it difficult to take Rush Limbaugh seriously, but the fact remains that he's broadcast on more than six hundred radio stations. There's many people ready to agree with him, so it made me cringe when I read his insinuations that the symptoms of Seung-Hui Cho's mental psychosis were ignored as a result of political correctness, and Wednesday morning I was stuck in traffic behind a Jeep that had the bumper sticker, "Ban Illegal Aliens, Not Guns." Never mind that Mr. Cho was a legal resident of this country. Never mind that Columbine, Jonesboro, West Nickel Mines, and other such tragedies were perpetrated by Caucasian United States citizens.
However, there are also plenty of moderate, logic-governed people wondering if and how disaster could have been averted -- if there was a point where the people in contact with Mr. Cho should have intensified their efforts either to integrate him into normal society or to remove him to a medical setting. I've read some of these reports, and they remind me of the times I've interacted with mentally troubled individuals -- and, more painfully, of the times I've personally failed to connect or stay connected with such people sometimes deliberately so. The line between eccentricity and psychosis can be terribly blurry, and the distinction between minding one's own business and saving lives isn't as clearcut as the demagogues would have you believe. I can tell you that I've experienced firsthand that sense of terrible, unmanageable wrongness -- both the moment of realizing someone's gone around the proverbial bend, and dilemma of who to tell and what to tell, and which promises to break. I've repeatedly skittered away from extended contact with people who strike me as emotional vampires; on my good days, I see this as sheer self-preservation, and on my not-so-good days, I wonder what it would take to make me less cowardly and more generous. Sometimes I do realize it's not all up to me -- I can't force my friends to come to terms with everyone who's ever hurt them, nor can I make them take their medications or see their therapists or work out three times a week -- not when I don't even do these things for myself. There are nights, though, when I can't sleep and I can't stop agonizing over whether my choices are acceptable in the eyes of God -- particularly if the humans in my life aren't agreeing on whether I'm being realistic, selfish, or both.
And I do this agonizing not only when it comes to social relationships, but also with regard to my consumption of resources. One of the challenges in my marriage has been figuring out which battles are worth fighting. My husband's a wonderful, wonderful man, but he's also not the type to pinch pennies or reuse his underwear as rags to wash the kitchen floor, and we've sniped at each other for years over his habit of leaving lights on and my equally irritating compulsion to turn them off. That said, I'm the one who takes extra-long, extra-hot baths and stays up more than half the night far too often. Our gasoline budget could probably be trimmed if I were to manage my time wisely enough to make carpooling possible, but any such savings are unlikely to make up for the fact that my husband's passionate about cars and motorcycles. Most of the time, I don't have a problem with his obsession at all -- I'm highly amused by how much of a geek he is about it, and I've enjoyed riding on the back of those motorcycles to Maine and Arizona and other faraway climes -- and living to brag about it. But sometimes, when I try to take in the bigger picture, I can't help wondering to what extent future generations will curse us for our hobbies and our traveling habits. I can't help wondering if they'll deplore our expectation of routine, frequently scheduled plane flights, regardless of whether the planes are full or empty. I wonder how they'll judge our dependence on prepackaged meat and non-reusable CDs -- whether they'll see our lives as the embodiment of convenience triumphant over conservation. I wonder if their textbooks will describe our generation with the same exasperated condescension so often currently employed to detail the fate of the passenger pigeon and other such irreversible miscalculations.
And when I wonder such things, my efforts look small and puny and superficial indeed, and I wonder how much I'm disappointing God by not stepping out of my comfort zone and pushing myself and those around me to be far more mindful now rather than later, even though it's a terribly fine line between inspiring people to think and being the shrill, self-righteous pain in the tuchis no one wants to be stuck with at cocktail parties. I've been teaching a class on the Harry Potter and Lord Peter Wimsey books over the past month and a half, and one of the points where I saw students nodding in recognition was when we talked about that type of character in novels. For example, Sayers features an academic female pushing for prison reform who, quote, "is a splendid person, but hasn't very much sense of humour. She can't bear anything to be done except from the very loftiest motives," and as such, the Dean of her college sighs in relief when she departs from a social gathering. Likewise, in the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling's characterisation of Hermione Granger's campaign for house elf rights is brilliantly true to life, in my opinion. You've got a girl whose heart and brains are more or less in the right place -- Rowling signals pretty strongly that the wizards are overdue for a reckoning from the races of nonhuman creatures they've collectively mistreated, and Hermione is one of the few people who gets it, but she doesn't know how to talk to her peers without them rolling their eyes and mocking her efforts, and Rowling also points out that some of the elves aren't actually interested in the rights Hermione's trying so hard to win for them.
In a series of essays written between 1989 and 1998 [published in Pig Notes and Dumb Music],, poet and professor William Heyen exhorted his students, colleagues, and readers to make the leap of imagination necessary to educate themselves and others about the impending demise of our species. He writes about how fear cripples imagination -- that humans have trouble realistically addressing our ecological woes because the prospect of our extinction is so dire and so dreadful we don't want to be held responsible for coping with it.
...given our current direction, it's hard for me to conceive that human life will exist on this planet a hundred years from now.
...I've become convinced that this very real possibility is the one thing that we cannot, no matter how hard we try, concentrate on, much less imagine. In one of his poems James Dickey says, "Lord, let me die, / but not die / out." I find myself, usually, at ease about growing old and about dying. I've already had, at forty-seven, a rich and lucky life. But to dwell on the possibility that we could "die out," that our grandchildren and theirs for countless generations would not people this planet, would not smell grass, fall in love with one another, watch leaves ramify, see clouds or waves sail and crest -- this is something that makes us more than heartsick. It threatens our sanity. If it is true that within a hundred years we will all die out... But, no, we can't concentrate on this possibility, can't imagine our beloved earth within a silence devoid of human presence. "Faith is the antiseptic of the soul," Whitman says. "It pervades the common people...and preserves them...they never give up believe and expecting and trusting."
Heyen put this in an open letter to his university community, in 1988, and he writes about some of the cynical responses he received:
One person responded anonymously to the letter, scrawling at the bottom of it in purple ink, "no one person can break up a whirlwind by jumping off a cliff into the middle of it. Relax, perhaps we will be replaced by a wiser species. At least we were given a chance. Let's celebrate opportunity." What to make of this, this resignation to give up the world so easily? Even if the writer is sure of another one (as I sometimes am), do we not love this world of rabbits and black-capped chickadees, of sunflowers and cabbages and spring hyacinths, of one another?... (Maybe not -- maybe the dire truth is that we don't, and that because we don't we cherish a deathwish. If this is true, we must recognize and exorcise this, too, during our educations.)
Another person responded to my letter by writing, "We are natural creatures. Therefore what we do is natural. If we tear down a forest and pave the place where once it stood, that is natural."
You can hear the logic of convenience resounding through this, and it's a false logic: as humans, we do so many unnatural things as a matter of course. Take, for instance, our holidays, which are based on calendars that change depending on Popes and moons and governments. It is hardly "natural" which days we choose to declare as our holy-days, and at times I'm hard pressed not to point out that every day should be a holy day, not just the ones collectively deemed special. (I'm reminded of the "Curtis" cartoon where his friend from Flyspeck Island reacts to the concept of "Black history month" with disbelief: "Shouldn't every month be Black history month?" Shouldn't every month be "poetry month"?)
But it is hard to remember holiness under the pressure of daily minutiae, and living constantly in a state of celebration or of crisis is not within the scope of most of our lives. Holidays are our reminders to step back and love the world -- and to coax others to love it just as much. Holidays offer us opportunities to go beyond our usual boundaries.
We sometimes use the word "poetic" as a synonym for "coincidence" or "synchronicity." "That's poetic," we say, when something seems oddly fitting, whether the fit truly contains any meaning outside the associations we can't resist assigning to it. There was a heartbreaking example of this last week at Virginia Tech, where one of the professors who died had survived the Holocaust -- only to be killed on Yom Ha'Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
My friend Mary Alexandra Agner has been observing National Poetry Month by drafting a poem a day, and last week she wrote about Professor Librescu:
Hold the door---a common phrase.
Open doors, that's what teachers do.
Librescu held his closed,
so that his students, whom he held close,
could find themselves a window
when all other ways were barred.
Wood, without panes of glass,
jamb, sloping lintel, let us pass
without fear; you are the opening
into all the wide unknowns
and when we walk through, we do not go alone.
In spite of the hymn, we cannot stop evil from crossing or piercing our doors. But we still have choices. As Unitarian Universalists, part of our collective burden and joy is both to teach others about the dangers of this world -- to sound the alarm against easy judgments and contagious cynicism -- and to also show that there are many doors, many wonderful doors, and to help make it possible to keep opening those doors. Amen and alleluia.
Miscellany:
* A voicepost of me reading Mary's poem is here.
* Listened to part of The Splendid Table during the drive home, which included a clip of Jonathan Gold talking about his twelve-year-old daughter's love of Italian squid feasts and about other food writers he admires. He sounds very cool and his "triumph of the proofreader" wisecrack makes me even more inclined to like him.
* However, catching up with Gold's writing is going to have to wait. The immediate plan: cook lunch (something with mushrooms and chicken), bake dog biscuits, and work on essays until my brain is goo.
* It's 78 F and sunny here. Here's the start of the Maura Stanton poem ("God's Ode to Creation") that was the meditation text for this morning's service:
Today's the kind of day when I feel good
about that dazzling stuff I've made down there,
everything so mixed up that even lies
turn out to be the truth...
