Remembering what matters
November 3, 2024
I’d like to read you a couple of quotes. They came out of Washington, D.C. See if you can guess who said them.
There is too much hate, little hate and big hate; too much malice, both hot and cold; too much scorn; too much of everything that freezes natural kindness. There is not enough love…. People against people, fighting … against each other.
Or this:
The nearest parallel, I think, to the time in which we live is probably the Mediterranean world at the coming of Christianity. Then, too, there was confusion, emotional exhaustion, constant anxiety, an undercurrent of despair.
I’ll give you a hint: both quotes are from the same person.
Any guesses? Does it sound like an op ed columnist from The Washington Post? Or a book author? (They kind of sound like Barack Obama, don’t they?)
Or maybe a minister? Yes?
If you said minister, you’re spot on. But the tougher question is when these quotes appeared. Last week? Last year? In the 1960s, by Martin Luther King, Jr. perhaps?
Both of these quotes come from a Unitarian minister. They’re from sermons delivered by the Rev. A. Powell Davies, who served as minister of All Souls Church in Washington, D.C. … from 1944 to 1957.
The first quote was from 1947, at the dawn of the postwar boom years, from a sermon titled, “What Must We Do to Be Saved?” The second quote was from 1956 – a time of economic prosperity known as the Golden Age, after war veterans like my dad had gone through college on the GI bill and young families were saving up to buy their first homes. The period immortalized by the television series “Happy Days.” The good times. That quote came from a sermon titled, “The Hope of a New Age.”
And yet Reverend Davies in these sunny-time sermons was speaking of political division, the haters, anxiety, emotional exhaustion. Despair. Not unlike the emotions many of us are feeling right about now.
And he wasn’t speaking to just any group of Unitarians, either. Born in England, Davies was Welsh and had a great speaking voice, and he packed All Souls Church every Sunday. In the pews in addition to city residents and government workers were U.S. senators and Supreme Court justices. When Davies died in 1957, three Supreme Court justices came to his funeral. So Davies was addressing the despair felt by people occupying the top rung of the political ladder.
When I first discovered A. Powell Davies in seminary, I was struck by the clarity of his thought, the soundness of his theology – that of a universal love – and the beauty of his language. He is remembered as a powerful liberal voice in Washington, where he fought segregation in the city’s restaurants and challenged politicians to live up to the ideals of the Constitution.[1] But I was also struck by how Davies kept describing his times, which were the years under Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower – often thought of as a time of prosperity, yet he often characterized them as a time on the precipice of something cataclysmic.
Of course, as we know, not everyone was prospering back then during the Golden Age, and McCarthyism and the Cold War were well under way. Still, the words Davies used to describe his times sound eerily familiar, as if they were written yesterday. As I read Davies’ sermons in seminary, sometimes long into the night, it was as if the past were unfolding before my eyes to tell me that even though the times, they are a’ changin’ all the time, no matter when they occur the times are also always thought to be changin’ toward something, and it is perhaps inevitable that we are always teetering on the precipice of a new age. Or maybe it’s just that we think we are.
The election on Tuesday has been referred to as historic, that it will be the most consequential of our lifetime. However, I seem to recall the last presidential election in 2020 being called the same, and the one before that, and the one before that. And each time, there was a solid case for the label. Each time, I heard the rationale, “but this time it really, really will be a make-or-break election.”
Certainly the result from Tuesday’s election will be historic, for whoever wins, there will be firsts: first woman president and first woman of color to be president; or first convicted felon to be president and also first former president to be defeated and then come back and win a second nonconsecutive term. Other than Grover Cleveland.
Maybe it will be a make-or-break election. But maybe the point is that they all are. All are momentous because every election has resulted in things being broken and things being fixed. Now, I majored in political science back in the 1980s – a decade which, by the way, had some consequential elections – but I’m not going to bore you with a policy discussion here. My job as a minister is to listen, to observe, and to examine our lives, our world, and our times, from the big picture down to its countless individual pixels, and locate God.
Said another way: to locate goodness. To locate love. And especially here today, to locate some semblance of hope. What’s interesting is that whenever I go searching for the divine, whenever I peek behind the mighty curtain, whenever I peer through the heavenly veil, I find goodness, I find love, I find hope.
Because there, standing backstage with God, I suddenly see before me not just our times but all times. I see that the human journey is like a giant boat rolling down the river of time, sometimes rocked, sometimes capsized, sometimes smooth sailing, almost always taking on water. We are often weighed down, worried we will sink, grabbing buckets and bailing out, while in times of clarity we are enjoying the ride – the good times – where, if they last long enough, allow us to peer beyond the horizon against a clear blue sky where we are able to take the long view, and see our destiny.
The great liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) once spoke to the wisdom of taking the long view. Niebuhr said, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history.”
In other words, to make sense of our times – and to find hope – it helps to step back and consider all of time.
For underneath the river of time there are other rivers running. The vessels running on those rivers are the eternals, the things we look to for proof of a God or a divine presence or a higher power – a mighty current upon which all of time runs. Those rivers are the River of Love, the River of Goodness, and the River of Hope. And while humanity pilots the boat floating on the river of time, it is that higher power that pilots the pulsations of love, hope, and goodness that flow underneath and through our lives.
As we look back and back, through time we see the ship of humanity being tossed to and fro, but because underneath our existence run those three other rivers, we are always moving forward. We are held and carried. And the events that cause strife, the rocks and the white rapids that have caused our river in the most tragic times to transform into a cataclysmic torrent, such as during our Civil War or the Holocaust, events that surely did change our country and the world, those horrific events strangely throw us forward, too. But because of those three rivers running` underneath, gradually, over centuries and over millennia, the obstructions erode, because that is what flowing water does. That is what love and goodness and hope do. But it takes time. Lots of time. And with our modern world conditioning us to ponder the end times every four years, pulsated by a 24-hour news cycle, it is sometimes hard to remember that in the end, goodness gets the last word. Because those rivers flow endlessly. The only limits on love and hope and goodness are the ones we ourselves construct. Therefore it becomes incumbent on us to tear them down. And when we conquer our fears and vote for hope, we do.
Today happens to be a perfect day to deconstruct our fears and anxieties – and, with Tuesday looming, none too soon. I’m not sure, but maybe election day, a day which celebrates listening to the voice of the people, follows a day in which we listen for the voices of our people, All Souls’ Day. Today is one day after All Souls’ Day, or All Hallows, in the Christian church calendar, which followed All Saints’ Day on Friday and Hallowe’en on Thursday. As with some other Christian traditions, All Souls’ Day is loosely based on pagan traditions, in this case, Celtic. The ancient Celts believed the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was especially thin at this halfway point between the autumn equinox and winter’s solstice. A perfect time to pray for loved ones they had lost. Maybe even to have a visit.
I say perfect day because when we take the long view, when we look back at our family histories, no matter how and when our families first showed up here or if they’d always lived here, the mere fact that you and I are here is testament to the fact that you come from a line of survivors. We are all descended from people who experienced a rocky boat on the river of time, who no doubt at times were convinced that the end of the world was nigh. Yet here we are. All of us here today come from generations of ancestors who survived wars, famine, poverty, pogroms, racism, hate-ism, discrimination, economic threat and outright terrorism. Through it all, the power of love, the threat of goodness, and the audacity of hope, whether you believe they come from God or a higher power or a humanistic power within you, have been working in the background. I believe in luck, but I refuse to believe it is sheer luck that our ancestors survived long enough to unleash our beautiful selves upon the world. Luck and pluck? Maybe. I prefer to think our ancestors knew a thing or two about getting through.
So today, for a few moments, let’s take some time to remember those souls … the people whose memories we especially honor today, whether up here in a photograph or stone in the bowl, or those who are here today only in our hearts. Take a moment now and try to remember. Try closing your eyes so you might see better, and ask yourself:
Who loved you into being who you are today?
Who inspired you to never give up?
Who first told you you could dream?
Who let you know they were on your side?
Who let you see them in all their imperfection?
Let us also try to remember, or at least acknowledge, those who came before the loved ones we remember today. People you didn’t know, who lived long before you were born. The ancestors. The survivors. In your mind’s eye see the old photographs, the sepia-toned images of stern looking people decked out in hats and black dresses, and imagine them laughing. Dig out the old 35-millimeter slides or super-8 home movies and look at how young everyone is, their whole lives ahead of them so long ago. Find an old dress, a brooch, a pipe, a family Bible and imagine young hands handling them.
For these souls so long gone were once young and naïve, middle-aged and worried, old and insistent, anxious and hopeful and riding the current. They very likely lived through all manner of strife, immigration tides and yes, historic elections. But they lived, and now so do you.
Remember Reinhold Niebuhr’s words “Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history.” Nothing which occurs this coming week will make complete sense right away. But if not right away, and even if depending on your point of view the next four years will be hell on earth, there will be, somewhere down along the river, truth, beauty and goodness – and hope. Run, rivers, run. Carry us through.
Thirty-seven years after A. Powell Davies delivered his sermon, “The Hope of a New Age,” and less than three miles from where he stood when delivered it, the poet Maya Angelou stood before thousands on the National Mall at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton to read her poem, “On the Pulse of the Morning,” a poem, as it happens, of hope for a new age. With her public recitation, Angelou became the second poet in history to read a poem at a presidential inauguration – and the first African American and woman to do so.
That day, Angelou said,
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song. It says,
Come, rest here by my side.She said,
Each of you, descendant of some passed on
Traveller, has been paid for.…,
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours—your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
May it be so and blessed be.
[1] Crow, Jennifer. The theology of A. Powell Davies. Journal of Liberal Religion. Meadville Lombard Theological School. Summer 2002. Vol. 3. No. 2.