Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 23rd of February, 2003
Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
after a week of snow, white and icy and melting,
to worship, to latch on to transforming hopes,
to explore the deeper dimensions of our lives;
and to set down our burdens for a time.
Existing in the twilight between light and dark,
we come here, not to cling to some final answer,
but replenish our love.And so we pray (together)
May our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves,
true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become.
Sequence [Next] [back to top]
Stars of twilight,
the gray clouds only hide you.
They do not steal you away.
You still burn there
on the dark mantle of infinity,
regardless of how anything obscures you.
You are neither impatient nor resentful.
You just are there, burning bright and steady.
Dreams of my mind,
nothing can take you away.
Dreams of children at play,
dreams of lovers holding hands in the streets, dreams of friends embracing warmly,
dreams of families round the world
laughing at supper,
and dreams of a good day's work
and peaceful rest,
you continue to warm me
even when the nightmare of gathering war
chills my heart.
You are there, oh dreams,
shining, warming,
regardless of how anything obscures you.
You are neither invalidated nor discountable. You are just there, burning bright,
and warming my reality-chilled hands.Silence in my soul.
You too are always there,
hidden behind a thousand sighs
and a thousand clamoring headlines.
You often hide yourself under piles of snow,
you string yourself between bare branches,
you hover over the stars of twilight
and the dreams of my mind.
But, now, come out into the open, O Silence,
into this place and this hour, amid these people,
that we might be comforted & set free for a time.(Silence)
We set aside time to also recall our larger lives, and to bring into this place the whole family of our heart, all who hold us close to our dreams and comfort us in the dimmer light of twilight. We name them aloud or in the silence within us, as we so choose.
(Naming)
Come now Music, you who are also always there behind the jarring noises of the world. Wed your pleasures to our silence and offer us hints of redemption and balance we had forgotten. Help us to smile, and to take pleasure, not in the nightmares of this world, but in our wiser attitudes toward them.
First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the eulogy that Dr. Jack Hayward, former minister of this congregation, offered to the family of Rod Serling during his Memorial in Ithaca of 1975.
Given the world he saw and felt and caused us to see and feel, we may well ask why the world has held together so long. Why hasn't this wonderful, terrible, beautiful, humorous experiment in reality we call earth long ago blown itself into a drift of dust in empty space?Rod knew why and, has told us why. Some of you heard his words first hand at his commencement address in Ithaca College three years ago this May when he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. He said:
"There is an apocryphal story that when the German philosopher Goethe lay dying, he was supposed to have opened his eyes and said 'Light. Please God, let me have light. I must have light.' And a hundred years later, the Spanish philosopher Unamuno, upon hearing Goethe's final statement, responded 'No, impossible. Goethe would not have asked for light. Not light. He would have asked for warmth. He would have said 'Please, God, let me have warmth. I must have warmth. We do not die of darkness. We die of the cold. It is the frost that kills. And this warmth I talk of, this is the warmth of love.'"Rod went on to make his own commentary on these two giant commentators, saying:
"And this I submit to you is the greatest thing you take away with you. It is that moment of thoughtful reflection that has to do with the person next door, or down the street, or across the tracks, or on the other side of the earth. Every one's death does diminish us. And it follows that everyone's poverty, everyone's indignity, everyone's frustration and hope-lessness---they are part of us too. So, along with your acquired knowledge, your sophistication and maturity, carry with you also this capacity to love."
Second Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the writings of United States educator, Agnes E. Benedict. She wrote these amazing words in 1940. She uses the now rarely heard word Negroes, which was then commonly used of black men and women by both black and white and other North American populations. This reading really cuts to the core of the structure of prejudice.
Whenever someone speaks with prejudice against a group-Catholics, Jews, Italians, Negroes-someone else usually comes up with a classic line of defense: "Look at Einstein!" "Look at Carver!" "Look at Toscanini." So, of course, Catholics (or Jews or Italians or Negroes) must be all right. But their approach is wrong. It is even bad. What a minority group wants is not the right to have geniuses among them, but the right to have fools and scoundrels, without being condemned as a group.
Sermon: The Most Famous and Influential Member of this Congregation in Sixty-Three Years [Next][back to top]
This last week, my friend Harlan Limpert called me just to catch up. Harlan and I were roommates in seminary, and have been friends for decades. He is one of the finest human beings I am privileged to know. Some years ago, I had the pleasure of officiating at Harlan's marriage to his wife Chris down in San Diego, and I was thrilled recently when the Unitarian Universalist Association chose him to serve as the new Director of Lay Leadership Development.Naturally, Harlan asked sympathetically about last weekend's gigantic snowstorm, even though it left his own Minneapolis quite untouched. He told me that his wife Chris, however, had flown to New York for business last weekend. She called him up to report an amazing sight…Manhattan completely buried. "I walked out of my hotel, and there was nothing. Not a cab, not a blaring horn, not a single pedestrian, not a policeman on a horse, no one and nothing. Just twenty-six drifting inches of white snow. It was so eerie, like an episode of the Twilight Zone."
"Do do do duh. Do do do duh" I sung over the phone. "Guess what I'm preaching about on Sunday, Harlan?" I said. I told him. "Yikes," he said. "That's pretty strange."
Well, maybe it's not really all that strange. Coincidences like that happen all the time. The laws of statistics support me on this. Such things do not necessarily "mean" anything.
On the other hand, such synchronicities add intriguing spice to such a topic. They help to oil the hinges of that famous door that I used to see during the opening credits of that old television show I loved so much as a kid, the Twilight Zone. It was a door to a deeper, more wonderful reality. And how to open that door? With the key of "the imagination," as Rod Serling would have said, as he began his show.
Rod Serling and his wife Carol were members of this congregation back in the late '40s and early '50s. They did not live in the Columbus area per se, but in Yellow Springs, about 45 minutes away by car. But they were here quite a bit, despite the distance. There are still a few hardy folks around here, believe it or not, who were members of this congregation back then. Some of them clearly remember Rod and Carol.
When the Serlings moved to California, they continued membership in one of our congregations. They were quite active in the Santa Monica congregation, where my good colleague Ernie Pipes served for over thirty-five years. And the Serlings were quite generous to the Unitarian Universalist Association with their financial gifts as well.
Now of course, things were different around here back then. This lovely building around you certainly was not here. Neither was the worship center we now call the Fellowship Hall, where we gather to socialize after the service. Nor was the so-called "Sanctified Garage" built down near the campus, the small cinder-block sanctuary attached to a house which held our services for a few years. No, when the Serlings attended this church, folks met in a house on Indianola. Average attendance on Sunday? About 30. That's right, about 30. Sometimes, when the snow hit hard, as few as fifteen.
This was long before Myra delighted us on her piano, and she's been our musician for 35 years. This was before Les revved up our magnificent choir.
This was before the chalice we use was created. This was even before the chalice was used liturgically in any services anywhere in North America.
And this was even before merger, because there was still a beautiful old Universalist Church made of stone, standing down the street.
This congregation had called ministers almost from the very beginning. While the Serlings were here in Ohio, this congregation called John Hayward, mostly known as Jack, to be their minister. Jack was a recent graduate of Chicago Divinity school, where he earned a PhD. He served here only three years, but through Louise Caldwell, a pillar of this church and Carol Serling's grandmother, the Serlings connected deeply with the Haywards. They continued to keep in active communication with each other over the years, especially at holiday times. Rod liked Jack's richly textured sermons. And he was clearly influenced by them, as there were few Twilight Zone episodes penned by Rod which didn't reflect the liberal religious values embedded in those sermons. It was Jack, as you learned from the first reading, who wrote the beautiful eulogy for Rod when he died near their home in the Finger Lakes, a mere 50 years old.
Ernie Pipes did a service around the same time for all of Rod's many friends on the West Coast.
But Rod was most assuredly not a Californian. Nor even an Ohioan, though he lived here a number of years. No, Rod was an Upstate New Yorker, through and through. He was from a town not far from where he died, namely Binghamton, New York. He had grown up there in a Reformed Jewish home. Thus he knew the status of being part of a minority in Binghamton as he grew up. Nonetheless, many of the quaint small towns which used to be featured on his most famous television show, The Twilight Zone, towns with band shells and gazeboes and wide greens and quaint houses, were entirely autobiographical in expression. Those charming, if odd, places, were all Binghamton.
Or Yellow Springs. It was at Antioch College in the charming Yellow Springs that Rod first thrived as a young genius with the English language. He had gone to school there after his harrowing Para-trooping adventures and deeply traumatic war experiences during the Second World War. He also dabbled in boxing for a while, and intramural football. His sheer energy and fierceness were legendary, and women flocked around him just for the sheer electricity of his presence, both on and off the playing field.
By his Antioch years, Rod had grown into a compact young man, good looking, about five foot four and wiry. All of his life he remained sensitive about his height, and refused to be photographed where his height was obvious by comparison. Sadly, he aggravated his body a lot. He developed severe addictions to both caffeine and nicotine around this time. A four-pack-a- day habit and eight cups of coffee or coca cola per day surely contributed to his rather early demise.
While in Yellow Springs he met Carol Kramer. Carol had been raised in a Protestant household, and Rod in a Jewish household. When their romance moved toward marriage, both of them learned about prejudice. Married at an interfaith service in Yellow Springs, both Rod and Carol experienced initial disapproval from their parents. Rod's parents eventually relented, but Carol's parents never really came around. Her father was vehemently anti-Semitic. And even her sister never spoke to her again. And so it was her Unitarian grandmother who convinced both of them that this religious organization and its stated principles against prejudice and for equality would be a good spiritual home for them. They joined this congregation and grandmother Caldwell's prediction proved to be true. Carol's grandmother, by the way, was more a surrogate mother than a grandmother; she herself was of the Ohio Taft family, which gave us a US president and which was then staunchly Unitarian. And she was the daughter of Dr. Orton, the first President of Ohio State University. A plaque commemorating Dr. Orton, Carol Serling's great grandfather, can be found in Slowter Lounge.
Rod went on to work in Cincinnati for a while, radio work. But eventually he moved to Hollywood to join the burgeoning television industry. Here he became well known for his teleplays, including the much touted Requiem for a Heavyweight and the less well known Patterns.
But it was the classic and much praised television show Twilight Zone which earned Rod, not just a wheelbarrow full of Emmys, but enduring fame both nationally and around the world. Even today, over 40 years later, you can turn on the television and see old black and white Twilight Zone episodes. There's Rod, in his ineffable dark suit, hands always crossed in front of him, uttering his opening set-up for the story of the evening. There he is with his famous voice, so often picked on by impressionists in the comedy clubs.
Rod's monologue always ends with the two word phrase "Twilight Zone" (except, that is, for one episode, in which he added a whole phrase as sort of a memorial to the Holocaust. The Adolf Eichmann trial was going on at that time, and he wanted to lift the importance of this up as clearly as possible.)
The phrase Twilight Zone itself has entered the English language and several others languages as well. Marius Constant's famous metronome-like theme music, which Myra played for us earlier, is known to people on every continent on the globe. It signifies a spooky, nightmarish event or idea, or some unlikely dream-like coincidence that boggles the mind.
But Rod was not interested in spooky things for their own sake. The medium was not the message. The message was deeper than the often twisted endings Serling would pen for his tales. Rod's stories always had "a moral." And that moral always expressed liberal values. His biographer, Gordon Sander, suggests that the television show Twilight Zone, was the liberal "conscience" of that era.
But not just liberal messages. Liberal religious messages. You see, Rod meditated on the questions raised by his own life, and posited religious responses. He knew prejudice in his own life. He knew the terrors of war and combat first hand. He was deeply scarred in his soul by his experience of both the atrocities of war and the pain of prejudice. It was inexcusable that Carol had to give up her family for him, everyone save her Unitarian grandmother. It was inexcusable that bigger and bigger bombs were being built by our nation, bombs that could wipe every last living thing off the earth. Remember, this was back in the days when folks put shelters in their back yard, like in our days folks buy duct tape for their windows. So, in response to his very real and traumatic experiences, Rod decided to offer a hopeful, poetic, just, and yes, religious, response. His Twilight Zone stories were just that. Sometimes they were re-workings of the short stories of other authors, but mostly they were his own creations, meditations on events from his own life. He spread the liberal religious message, which had first centered him at this church here in Columbus, across the world's airwaves. It is for this reason that I call him the most famous, and influential member this congregation has ever known.
I don't have time to go through his works one by one, but I have arranged Serling's liberal religious messages into the following twelve affirmations. Each of these is based on a story or some part of a story, Rod wrote for his series.
- Think things through to the end. Remember, take truth for authority, never authority for truth.
- Don't imagine you personally have all the answers. Other people's lives teach them different things, different truths. Listen carefully.
- Prejudice, which is when you pre-judge people based on categories you find to your personal liking, kills and maims. It is neither innocent nor easy to fight. But if you don't fight it, you are, by definition, killing and maiming.
- Share your abundance with others; when you hoard, you cut yourself off, not just from other human beings, but from your own humanity.
- Don't believe every shining, seductive, wonderful thing out there is good for you. You can be fooled too, and not just by Madison Ave. You can even "sell your soul to the devil" if you are not on your guard.
- There are fools everywhere. Don't think that whatever group you belong to exempts you. And wisdom is as much to be found in common people,who have never known any school but the school of hard knocks, as it can be found in those of learned mind. Same thing for folly.
- Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So be very careful of what adoration you offer to power, in whatever form it takes, be it a political leader or an omnipotent child.
- That which you call alien may prove to be very familiar one day. That which you call familiar, may actually prove to be quite alien. Don't live your life making assumptions.
- Nobody wants to be saved, so much as they want to be loved.
- If you don't claim your freedom, you don't have it. A gift that is never opened, after all, is never received.
- Never deny what terrible things we can do to each other by refusing to question ourselves.
- in Serling's exact language from the reading…Every one's death does diminish us. (This is a reference to John Donne's famous poem No Man is an Island.) And it follows that everyone's poverty, everyone's indignity, everyone's frustration and hopelessness---they are part of us too.
And I'll add a final doxology to sum up these 12 affirmations, a doxology based on his paean to love in his graduation address. For love is the center, the edge, the motion and the stillness of the whole universe. Without it, we lose ourselves, no matter whether you define yourself as a body, a soul, a spirit, a child of God, or a mystery. Those definitions are, in the end, not finally important. Only love is.
This last idea is made especially vibrant in the graduation address which Rev. Jack Hayward quotes from in his eulogy of Rod. Rod muses that it's love, not light, which will keep us warm in cold times. And he is clearly not talking about the kind of cold winter we have been having this year, with snows that bury Manhattan, and quilt Columbus.
But clearly, Rod was talking about the chilling kinds of worries and deep cold realities of his era, realities that echo today in our own. Rod's television parables are as applicable today as they were back in 1960.
Rod turned to the world and saw the beginnings of the turmoil in South East Asia, and bomb-shelters in people's back yards. I turn to the world, and I see duct tape as the new bomb shelter, and I see seeds being planted in the Middle East for a whole new and bitter harvest that we will reap for generations.
Rod turned to the world and saw children, like his own daughters, Nan and Jody, whom he dearly loved, being threatened with obliteration by the massing nuclear arsenals of the so-called "cold war." I look at the world and see that, when we bomb Iraq, we ourselves will be obliterating lots of children, since fifty percent of the population of Iraq consists of kids, that is, people 15 years of age or younger. How am I supposed to wrap my heart around a war against children, no matter how devious and undeniably monstrous their national father may be?
I am sorry, but on most days I personally find it hard to understand how anyone thinks that blowing up human bodies will fix difficult problems. I find it hard to understand how strafing or chemical poisons carry a moral message. I have been thinking about this for months now, and I still don't get it. The whole world has become a Twilight Zone episode for me, with the twist of an ending yet to be written.
What was it that other great Jewish teacher once said in the Galilee?
"That which you sow, so shall you reap."
Seems logical to me. Seems logical to say that when you plant a fig tree you can't honestly expect to harvest tomatoes, and when you plant wheat, you can't honestly expect to harvest eggplant. Seems logical to me that when you plant explosives or germs, you can't expect to harvest peace, abundance and children playing in the market place. Is it really true that we twenty-first century human beings can think of no other solutions, no other practices, nothing worthy of our dignity? Maybe we can't. But I for one am not giving up yet.
I am convinced there are fools and scoundrels in every population, as Agnes Benedict makes perfectly clear in our second reading. Prejudice which suggests otherwise, is simply foolish, all the way down to the bottom. In a good world, we would all recognize the self-serving futility of prejudice, stop our pre-judging of others based on their race, color, religion, class or capital city and get on with life. Benedict states clearer than almost any other author I know how simply wrong it is to point fingers at particular groups and then exempt ourselves.
Knowing this very well from his own experience, Rod Serling prophesized that the time is ripe in our own days to struggle to see ourselves as one, single human community. Sure, sure, with our wars, religious fanaticism and smarmy politics, we don't look like that yet. But Serling asks us, if we don't use the key of our moral imagination, and see ourselves right now as one human community that shares a planet, do we really expect that the door to a more peaceful world will just unlock itself and swing open by magic?
In this understanding, Rod Serling was way ahead of his time. He understood in his own person the bitter realities of war and prejudice, but he understood just as much the equal reality of the imagination. He fought in a war without apology, but he preached the rest of his life against the degradations of war. And knowing prejudice, he denounced the perversity of prejudice whenever he put pen to paper. He was, after all, a religious liberal who struggled to put his faith into practice. He understood that the twilight zone of this world is not necessarily spooky, nor doomed to be a nightmare; it could also open itself up into a beautiful dream. It all depends on how we respond to the strange things we find all about us. Are we ethical? Are we loving? Fair? Kind? Patient? Thoughtful? Caring? Tender? Sensitive? Compassionate? No matter what?
If we are, or at least struggle to be so, then the strangeness of the world won't frighten us. Our imagination will turn the key right there in the middle of all the strangeness and open a door for us onto a world that is far more a beautiful dream than a terrible nightmare. Think, if you wish, of the pearly world you imagined during the lovely story about Grandfather Twilight you heard this morning, a dreamy place of peace, far from any nightmare.
But in any case, I'm a realist of sorts. I suppose the snow will start falling soon again, and will continue to fall. It will blanket everything by and by, Manhattan and Columbus, and yes, steaming Bagdhad. The cold will still come and chill us to the bones.
But this realist reality does not exempt any one of us from pushing past the door jambs and moving on the hopeful and magnificent journey Rod Serling was taking in his life. A journey from despair to hope. From fear to love. From the brittle answers of night and noon to the more tender and flexible answers found only in the silvery gray light of the twilight where we live.
Having said that, I think it fitting to close this sermon with the very words that Serling used to begin his famous television show.
"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sound and sight, but of mind. A journey to a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of the imagination. That's the signpost up ahead! Next stop…the Twilight Zone!"
Offering [Next][back to top]
In thanksgiving for the earth and our lives,|
In thanksgiving for this house of truth and love,
In thanksgiving for the living tradition of men and women and children of which we are a part,
we both give and receive the offering
and celebrate the realities of this place….
Prayer [back to top]
Twinkling stars over us, flashing in the sky,
the constellations tumbling, laughing,
like bear cubs rolling
in the dark leaves of the forest
the earth solid beneath our feet,
arching over the deep dark core,
keeping us grounded and safe.
We live between the far stars
and the center of the earth,
we live our days in the twilight
between up and down,
yes and no, love and longing,
joy and sorrow, word and silence.
Oh Thou who art most like the twilight,
reveal thy brightest stars that we might follow.
Hold at bay the glare of the day,
and let our shadows flee far from us.
Blest is thy name, oh Love upon the earth. Amen.
First UU Church Home |
Church Newsletters |
First UU Staff |
Sermons | Elected
Officers
Email Mark |
Email the Church
Office | Email
the Webmaster
Last update: 03/01/2003