Rev. Barbara H. Gadon
First Unitarian Church of Chicago
September 25, 2011

Reading from All the Strange Hours:  Excavations of a Life by Loren Eiseley

When my aunt died, I found among her effects a beautiful silver-backed Victorian hand mirror.  It had been one of a twin pair my maternal grandfather had given to his girls.  The last time I had seen my mother’s mirror it had been scarred by petulant violence and the handle had been snapped off.  It had marked the difference between the two girls – their care of things, perhaps their lives.  I had looked into the mirror as a child, admiring the scrollwork on the silver.  Mostly things like that did not exist in our house.  Finally it disappeared.  The face of a child vanished with it, my own face.  Without the mirror I was unaware when it departed.  

Make no mistake.  Everything in the mind is in rat’s country.  It doesn’t die.  They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental pack rats.  Nothing perishes, it is merely lost till a surgeon’s electrode starts the music of an old player piano whose scrolls are dust.  Or you yourself do it, tossing in the restless nights, or even in the day on a strange street when a hurdy-gurdy plays.  Nothing is lost.

Sermon

You have to picture this.  There are four or five of us kids out in a rowboat with my dad.  It’s on Loon Lake, just south of Superior, Wisconson, and let’s say the year is 1968.  Maybe it’s a day like today.   The water is a grey-blue. We’re wearing those grungy, musty, orange life preservers, several sizes too big for us.  Every child – me, some assorted cousins, maybe my teenaged sister along to be a sport – every one of us has a fishing pole.  There’s a contest going, as there always was with my dad, with fabulous cash prizes. The first child to catch a fish gets a dime; then there’s a dime for the biggest fish, a dime for the smallest, prettiest, ugliest, and last fish.  When every child gets a dime, we go back in.  Maybe we keep our sunnies or crappies, or pumpkin seeds or bluegills, maybe we don’t.  That’s beside the point.

The kids in the boat could change.  It could be my three older siblings in the boat – they are 10, 15 and 18 years older than me, and were a little family long before I arrived.  It could be any of his eleven grandchildren in the boat.  If his health held out, I’m sure it would have been his great-grandchildren.  But the basic ingredients would be the same, and they are some of the best things about my dad:  teaching kids how to do things, teasing us, making us laugh, sharing his love of the outdoors, and this man who was not known for his patience, managing a boatload of kids with worms, hooks, bobbers and sinkers, fending off the inevitable bullhead, and taking us out for pizza or Dairy Queen after. And giving us some of our favorite memories of summer.  

So began the eulogy I gave for my father, just a few weeks ago.  I enjoyed writing it.  I enjoyed soliciting and hearing family stories in preparation for it.  My father gave us many things, including great material.  People think I am a little strange when I tell them this, but I really like preparing for funerals.  As opposed to most weddings, when I feel like kind of a frill, assisting a family with a funeral is the opportunity to be of real use.  It involves the telling of memories which, helps people in grief move forward with hope.  Just yesterday, Vishnu Espinel, our Meadville intern, and I met with members of the family of Zdenek Hruban in preparation for the service he will have with immediate family around Christmas time.  The stories they told about him were funny, charming, noble and deep.  And telling the stories, even ones that everyone knows, somehow helps you feel whole again.  

The week I was in Minnesota in the week leading up to Labor Day, I was aware of feeling whole.  It was a miracle that I was there at all, let alone volunteering to deliver the eulogy at my father’s funeral.  There were years, several years, that he and I did not speak to each other at all.  He was, for much of my life with him, a difficult person to be around.  It took a lot of work for me to change myself.  I needed good help.  And sometimes you are lucky.  Sometimes you see other people change.  My father was certainly a kinder, softer man in his later years than the father I grew up with.  I could appreciate his intelligence, his quick wit, his memory of family stories. He was so funny – up to the last few days he was alive.  The work was so worthwhile.  We had several good years together.  I got back my good memories of him.  I got my dad back.  

Memory is powerful.  It has a powerful impact on how we view the world, and the hope with which we look at the future.  Any therapist will tell you that how a child sees his or her parents has a dramatic impact on the present and the future.  And yet it’s been in recent years only that some therapists are discovering that repeating the same stories over and over, while it may feel good, doesn’t help their patients.  It only gives you the same story that you carry around in your head.  To make a change, the story about your past has to change.  

Dr. Jerome Groopman, in a short, helpful book, “The Anatomy of Hope”, talks about this from a medical perspective.  He discusses, among other things, how our memories give us hope for a cure for their illnesses.  He’s not talking about some airy-fairy “think yourself well”, fix your car with crystals New Age stuff, but real hope, which gives you the strength to do everything necessary to assist in the fight for your own life.  

Memory is powerful.  How we look at the past definitely shapes our future.  How, then should we look at the past?  To start with, I would say, we should look at the past with some considerable humility.  Memory is powerful.  But it is also a lot less accurate and a lot less complete than we think it is.  In the age of google and the internet, where you can find out any bit of information virtually in seconds, I wonder if we haven’t created that sort of model and that sort of expectation of our brains.  It has changed the way we retrieve information, and I’m suggesting, our expectations of memory.  It used to be that when you were talking about a movie with your friends, you would say, It starred that actress, you know, she was in that other one about Los Angeles, and there was that one where she plays a librarian… You go on giving yourself useless hints and you can see her face, you can see it – and nobody can remember.  Sometime in the middle of the night, you would wake up with it, in triumph. Now, you just type in the name of the movie into your google search window, and poof.  There she is.  We can do this sort of thing now, so we forget.  Our brains don’t do this.  

Our human memories are more limited than we know.  Psychologist Daniel Gilbert, in his book, Stumbling onto Happiness, describes online experiments he does with people in remembering cards.  He would display six cards on the screen, all face cards, and have you choose one to “remove”.  Just mentally choose it, don’t actually click on it or in any way indicate your choice.  He would then distract you with some other questions, and come back to the card experiment.  Now there were five cards up on the screen – minus the card you picked.  People were astonished.  People with doctorates played this game, and created elaborate theories as to how he did it, that he somehow rigged the software to detect minute movements of the mouse to give away the subjects’ choices.  He had to redo the experiment with them, taking their hands completely off the keyboard or mouse.  No one guessed until he told them, that his trick was so successful because NONE of the original six cards they saw were up on the screen.  So OF COURSE theirs wouldn’t be, either.  The experiment wasn’t meant to make people feel stupid, though I’m sure it did.  It was designed to point out how sure we are of what we remember and how wrong we can be.  I love what Mark Twain once said, “It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things I can’t remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.”  

One reason for this is, says Daniel Gilbert, our memory for things are actually a form of shorthand for the whole experience.  Whole experiences, he says, are long, detailed, rich, and layered.  If you think of the brain as “rat’s country”, in Eiseley’s terminology, they take up a lot of “room”.  We need to create a shorthand version.  Go back to the movie you were telling your friends about.  There are some exciting scenes, and your favorite actress is terrific.  But the film is a bit long, and the ending is kind of strange, and you’re left slightly disappointed.  It was too long, you tell your friends, and the ending was stupid.  If you tell a lot of friends this, it starts to become your memory of the film.  Gilbert would say that our shorthand, especially as we verbally describe something to people, has a way of “over-writing” the actual experience.  You forget any parts of the experience that were positive.  

So the first way to use our memory, I would say, would be with great humility.  And a sense of curiosity for what might be missing.  The second way to use our memory, I would suggest, is in the company of others.  This is why it is so healing to tell stories of a loved one after they have died.  They remind you that the person you loved didn’t just belong to you, but to many other people, to the rest of the world.  You share him or her with them.  

Memories belong to more than just you alone, you share them with other people.  Especially those that occur in a community like a church.  

I share a memory with some of you from 1994 when this church voted to become a welcoming congregation.  For anyone who is new to us, being a welcoming congregation means that you vote to explicitly become welcoming to gays and lesbians.  It involves a fair amount of education on gay issues and self-examination.  You were among the first UU congregations in the country to do this.  I spoke to Keith Kron recently, who was director of our department of LBGT affairs, so he remembers the numbers.  In 1994, he said, there were only about 15.  Today, nearly half of our 1,000 congregations are officially “welcoming”.  Think of that – not that long ago, and how different things are now.  At that point, it felt a lot more risky.  People feared that spotlighting gays and lesbians in our welcome would mean that other oppressed groups would get short shrift.  Others thought it would make us appear to be, or actually become a “gay church”.  I remember long, heated conversations that I found difficult and worrisome.  I had several gay and lesbian friends, and I felt passionately that the church should vote to become a welcoming congregation.  I was nervous and excited at the meeting for the vote.  I remember a moment of panic when I felt around for my yellow voting card, couldn’t find it, and had to run back to the table before they called the question.  That is my memory.  

I have spoken to some of you who also remember this time.  One person told me that he was on the other side of that issue.  And what he remembers most keenly was the fairness of the whole process.  That people who were against it for whatever reason were not made to feel like bad people.  And he stayed in this church.  That is his memory.  Together it makes a bigger picture than either of us had before.  Remember with others.  

The final use of memory I can recommend to you is to remember with courage.  It can take a lot of courage to look at the past fully and honestly.  People need to do this with their families, as I did with my dad.  As I am sure many of you have needed to do in your families, too.  

People in congregations share memories of people they care about in common.  They share memories of their ministers and the eras they represent.  In one congregation I know, some mourned the loss of the minister because they loved his sermons which were quite wonderful.  They were angry about the way they felt he was treated.  Others found his leadership wanting, saying that he did not do enough work for social justice.  They were bitter in their sense of disappointment and resentment; it made some of them cynical about ministers in general.  It was hard for both groups of people to see each others’ points of view.  The bitter ones forgot the wonderful sermons; the mourning ones forgot or didn’t really care much about his shortcomings.  

Both of these memories were only shorthand, both were what they told themselves about a much fuller experience of their minister.  The people in that church who could move forward with hope were the ones who were finally able to let go of the notion that their memories of him were the only ones.  Looking fully at their shared experience, remembering their minister together took courage.  

There is a famous story that is told about this church.  It’s so famous, it has spread beyond these walls, and the people who were part of its making.  It concerns a congregational vote in 1947, and a board meeting that led up to it.  The women’s alliance, it seemed, had proposed that the congregation intentionally invite their friends who belonged to minority races to become members of the church.  There was one young woman, a Polly McCoo, who was teaching Sunday School at the time.  She wanted to join the church, but there was actually a by-law that prevented people from “the negro race” from joining this church.  The women’s alliance wanted the by-law to be changed.  Leslie Pennington, your minister, threatened to resign if the by-law was not changed.  And there were people, I am sad to say, who opposed this change, including two board members.  Late into the night, the board wrestled with what to do.  There was a very famous exchange at this point.  Exasperated, someone said to one of them, “Well, what do you think the church is for, then?”  And the board member said, “To change the minds of damn fools like me.”  But this turned the vote of the board, which in turn encouraged the congregation to vote yes.  This is a famous story, and certainly a pivotal moment in your history.  Seminary students are taught this story when we learn about the power of the democratic process in congregational life.  And it leaves something out.  

In Mark Morrison Reed’s recent memoir, he gives this additional fact.  When the congregation voted to abolish the by-law excluding black people from membership, the two board members who opposed it left the congregation.  Now, you might wonder, what’s the point of telling this?  Why bring something like that up now?  If memory is supposed to inspire hope, perhaps we had better leave it out.  

But remember that nothing that happens is lost.  It’s all rat’s country, says Loren Eiseley.  It’s in there somewhere.  And here’s where I think it shows up.  Every time a congregation gets ready to make a difficult decision, someone will mention the fear that people will leave.  I have never been in a congregation that didn’t do this.  And we back away from taking important stands, we dither and dicker and try to avoid deciding anything because of it.  If we told this story in full, including the sad part about people leaving, perhaps – perhaps we would know that there are some decisions that are worth the risk.  Notice that I don’t say there are decisions that are more important than individual members, or that the departure of any member over a disagreement isn’t a deep loss.  But think if this church backed away from that vote because they were afraid of the risks.  Look around you, and you can see how different things would be.

You will need both these memories as you make any important decisions, for example the decision about whether or not to sell Fenn House.  (Fenn House is an adjacent property owned by the church.)  I know that this has been a long and difficult discussion for this church already, and many of you are really tired of it.  It has eased considerably in the past few months, but there is still some discussion left.  This is your decision, not mine – it wouldn’t be, even if I were your settled minister.  Since I don’t believe in pulling punches, and I believe you should know where your minister stands on important issues, I will tell you:  I favor selling Fenn House.  I do.  I also have great respect for those who wish to keep it.  

And it is not my decision but yours.  I suggest you use your shared memories of these two historic votes to help you in making your decision.  Both of these moments in your history tell you to make sure you do not demonize anyone on either side of the issue, that you operate as fairly as possible.  Both tell you that you may keep people who might otherwise leave angry, but you may not.  And with any significant decision, you must put your integrity first, and this means having the courage to risk.  

You are living proof that such courage is important.  Remember the courage of the congregation in 1994.  Remember the courage of that board in 1947, and the congregation who voted to welcome people of color.  And remember the sadness of losing those members.  Both.  I am – you are – living proof that love can be stronger than anger.  It takes work, it takes help, it takes courage and forgiveness.  But love is stronger than we think it is.  Always.  May we go forward into a future of love and courage, memory and hope.  Amen.