"The Courage in All That"
by Max Gaebler, Minister Emeritus
November 2, 2003
Over the past eighteen months or so Carolyn and I have been involved in a process very familiar to many of you in our generation. It began with the decision to sell the house which had been our home for twenty-five years, followed by what turned out to be the protracted process of actually selling it, and finally, just over a year ago, moving into an apartment at Oakwood Village. Along the way came the inescapable problems of reducing our household baggage by a very large proportion and trying to envision what we could actually keep and use in our new, and at that stage still hypothetical, home.
Of all the things we had to deal with nothing has been more difficult than books. For us, at least for me, this was especially hard because I am descended from a long line of bibliophiles who never parted with anything. I really should not put this in the past tense, since I still have an enormous number of books in a storage facility where from time to time I work at trying to decide which additional few I can add to the hundreds we now have in our apartment and where I should try to dispose of the others in a satisfactory way.
I speak of this because the process of going through my parents’, my grandfather’s and a great uncle’s libraries as well as our own has unearthed things I had either forgotten or had never known we had. Many of these books have very personal associations; gifts from authors who were members of this congregation, books given to me by friends who had found them important, others acquired in the pursuit of inquiries that I remember having taken very seriously at the time but the substance of which I have completely forgotten.
There are two books given me by our architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a very significant member of this congregation when we arrived in 1952. Indeed, he was one of only two members descended from founders of the Society. The other was Theo Pickford Owen, later the principal donor of our organ.
There are several books, too, by another then eminent member of our Society, Prof. Max Otto, who delivered the very first sermon ever given in this Meeting House. Among the long-standing members when we arrived here in 1952, none had greater stature either in the congregation or in the wider community than Mr. Otto. He was a philosopher who stood firmly in the great tradition of American pragmatism, a worthy successor of Charles Pierce, William James and John Dewey. Over the years I have encountered literally scores of University of Wisconsin alumnae and alumni from coast to coast who have attributed their own intellectual awakening to Max Otto’s courses. He was so gifted a teacher, one who truly embodied William Ellery Channing’s dictum that the true role of the teacher is not to implant his mind on the young but to stir up their own, that few of these former students had any idea that he was an active member of any religious congregation.
There were, of course, many other interesting people among those who constituted the body of this congregation in those days half a century ago. A small handful remain; a few are here this morning, so I must be careful not to allow my memory to become overly creative. But our ranks, though modest in number compared with the many who have filled this Meeting House — indeed, filled it times over in the course of more than half a century — those ranks included many loyal, devoted and fascinating people. I think, for example, of Carrie Baker King, who celebrated her hundredth birthday in 1954, still living in a house just behind Babcock Hall which had long been the official residence of the Dean of the University’s College of Agriculture, a position which her husband had filled for many years. And there was Mabel Griswold, a prominent member of Governor Philip LaFollette’s administration. She was the first woman to have served as President of this Society. It was to these two women — Madam King and Miss Griswold — that Prof. Merle Curti, himself then a new member of the church, dedicated his lecture on the occasion of our 75th anniversary celebration in 1954.
But back to those books! Several volumes of my mother’s contain a bookplate identifying them as having once belonged to a woman named Florence Lyon. And there was a small pamphlet from the University of Chicago identifying Florence Lyon as a member of the class of 1905 and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. I found all this particularly interesting because I knew that this woman had been an English teacher in the Kankakee, Ill., high school from which my mother had graduated. And I knew that Miss Lyon had been a strong and wonderful influence in my mother’s life. It was she, clearly, who had not only kindled my mother’s eagerness to go to college but had specifically urged her to seek scholarship assistance at the University of Chicago. Their friendship lasted to the end of Florence Lyon’s life, a life which ended all too soon.
How many people enter our lives for a time, people we remember with deep affection and appreciation, people who sometimes after only a few short years (or even months) — are melded into the fabric of our lives. Their names and their gifts are remembered so long as we, their beneficiaries, remain. Eventually — often all too soon — they disappear from living memory, merging into the vast and anonymous mass of those who have lived out their time upon the earth, their gifts an undifferentiated part of the human experience upon this lesser planet of a minor star in this particular corner of the universe.
I remember being deeply moved by such thoughts many years ago when we were taken by our English host to visit Stonehenge. There it stands, some of the stones still in place rising more than twenty feet above the plain and weighing more than thirty tons. Who were the people, these gifted engineers, who built Stonehenge? One must go back before the Norman conquest, back beyond the invasions of the Angles and the Saxons, back beyond the Roman era, back beyond the Celts with their Druid priests, back even beyond the Bronze Age prehistoric occupiers of this oft-invaded island. Who they were we do not know with any certainty, not even whether they were indigenous to the land or one more in the long line of invading peoples who have stormed these shores through the centuries. One must go back at least four thousand years, perhaps even farther, to seek the origins of this structure which yet stands there on the Salisbury Plain.
How commonly is this the case, that the works of our hands outlive us who made them. All of us have such objects. I have, for example, my grandfather’s sketch book. He died before I was born. I have letters written by my great-great-grandparents. We all have such objects, things remaining many years after those who made and used them have vanished from sight.
If that is true for us as individuals, how much more impressive are those great remains like Stonehenge, bearing their silent witness to people not only long since dead, but whose very identity has itself been lost. Not only do we know no names or particulars of the individual workmen who planned and built this great structure; we know not even the people that produced them or whence they came, or what their purpose in erecting this structure which has survived so many millennia of human neglect and nature’s buffeting.
Yet the evidence is irrefutable. Those people really lived. They toiled and suffered, dreamed and loved and worshipped, ate and slept and wondered, even as men and women have always done since our earliest ancestors stood erect and took the measure of the world about them. Their stories are forgotten, their names are lost to human memory, the record of their struggles and their triumphs, their aspirations and frustrations is buried in the debris of their culture, reabsorbed — like their very bones — into the loam that provides rootage for the ever fresh plantings of human energy and initiative.
What can be said to remain of all that? Surely that magnificent and imposing monument to their creative talent and their perseverance — perhaps their cruelty in exploiting the labor of thousands of hapless slaves. Who knows? At any rate, imposing testimony to their having lived — having lived, one may be sure, lives flawed and imperfect as all human lives must somehow be, yet also strong in imagination and courage. So one must suppose. Ordinary men and women, great leaders of the people, sage counselors and sturdy warriors, bards and huntsmen and water carriers — all were there among that vanished host. All were once young, knowing the fears and hoping the hopes of childhood, even as we. All died in their time, some early and some late, even as we must too, each of us in our own time.
They lived, most of them, the “Life Cycle of Common Man”, as described
by the poet Howard Nemerov. His images, of course, reflect the throw-away culture
of the twentieth century. But aside from the fact that our trash heaps may
survive longer, yielding more clues to investigators of the sixth or seventh
millennia than we have found in the subsoil of Stonehenge, — aside from this,
they lived their equivalent of the life that Nemerov describes.
Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,
This average consumer of the
middle class,
Consumed in the course of his average life span...
Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee,
And counting his parents’ share
it cost
Something like half a million dollars
To put him through life. How many beasts
Died to provide him with meat, belt
and shoes
Cannot be certainly said.
But anyhow,
It is in this way that a man travels through time,
Leaving behind him a lengthening trail
Of empty bottles and bones, of broken shoes,
Frayed collars and worn out or outgrown
Diapers and dinner jackets, silk ties and slickers.
Given the energy and security thus achieved,
He did...? What? The usual things, of course,
The eating, dreaming, drinking and begetting,
And he worked for the money which was to pay
For the eating, et cetera, which were necessary
If he were to go on working for the money, et cetera,
But chiefly he talked. As the bottles and bones
Accumulated behind him, the words proceeded
Steadily from the front of his face as he
Advanced into the silence and made it verbal.
Who can tally the tale of his words? A lifetime
Would barely suffice for their repetition;
If you merely printed all his commas the result
Would be a very large volume, and the number of times
He said “thank you” or “very little sugar, please”
Would stagger the imagination. There were also
Witticisms, platitudes, and statements beginning
“It seems to me” or “As I always say.”
Consider the courage in all that, and behold the man
Walking into deep silence, with the ectoplastic
Cartoon’s balloon of speech proceeding
Steadily out of the front of his face, the words
Borne along on the breath which is his spirit
Telling the numberless tale
Which makes the word his apple, and forces him to eat.
When I first read this poem, I suspected Mr. Nemerov might have been using the word “courage” with more than a touch of irony. Making the silence verbal could have been meant as a put-down to the aspirations and pretensions of ordinary people. But then I thought, no, one need not take it that way. To make the silence verbal is indeed a uniquely human accomplishment. And to walk forever into the deep silence spewing words before us is to create meaning out of the void; that is no mean or unworthy effort. Consider indeed the “courage in all that!”
The courage in ordinary, every-day living, the kind of living that builds on the love of parents and children, of husbands and wives, love that empowers people to do all sorts of dreary and unpleasant and sometimes difficult things and to do them with a cheerful and buoyant spirit because they provide food for the hungry mouths and spirits of those one loves. The courage to build fires against the encompassing darkness, the courage to hurl words into the unanswering void, the courage to build for a future one will never see oneself. Perhaps it doesn’t seem like courage at all to those who live it. It is merely prudence, simply doing what is necessary to protect oneself against the cold, just plain common sense. But it takes courage nevertheless. It takes courage really to live, to face the threat of meaninglessness that stalks us all the days of our living.
I am not talking about the extraordinary courage of the great heroes, of those who risked all for the sake of an ideal, who took upon themselves the burdens of the many and in their self-sacrifice earned the undying honor of their fellows. Those are the saints and martyrs, those we celebrate on All Saints. No, I am talking about the ordinary, every-day courage of ordinary, every-day people. I am talking about the simple, undramatic courage of those who accept the cruel tricks life sometimes plays on them, who accept without complaining the little burdens that come their way even though it means giving up at least a part of their hopes and dreams. Such people there always are, such there have always been, those who in the midst of their “eating, dreaming, drinking and begetting” have their eyes on something beyond their own enjoyment and satisfaction.
It is such courage as this of which Paul Tillich wrote in his book entitled The Courage To Be. That book ends with these sentences: “The courage to take the anxiety of meaninglessness upon oneself is the boundary line up to which the courage to be can go. Beyond it is mere non-being. Within it all forms of courage are re-established in the power of the God above the God of theism. The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”
That is, of course, an elegant way of describing the simple courage of simple people. Yet it is such courage that lies at the heart of the human enterprise, and it is appropriate that we acknowledge it and honor it.
In this season of the year’s dying, when we turn our thoughts to the remembering of our own dead, we are all of us the representatives of that all-embracing love which encompasses our human ways. In this feast of All Souls there is at the very center a great democracy, which leaves none out. We call first to mind our own dead, those whom we have loved and lost, but who still live in the twin immensities of our own hearts, our Love and our Memory. But we reach out to others as well, to all whose names live within our memories, whose lives formed the world of our childhood and who have preceded us on life’s last journey. Finally we welcome into our loving remembrance those countless men and women and little children who have walked the earth and breathed its air, who have enjoyed the gift of life and known its anxieties, all on every continent and in every time whose individuality has like that of the builders of Stonehenge — long since disappeared, gathered up in the vast treasury of human life upon this planet. For all — all have their places on the silent roll of the dead. From this our celebration of All Souls let none be excluded, none forgotten. For every death is in truth a death in the family, in our family, in the great human family in which we are all irrevocably bound up with one another.
Death in this past year has taken many whose faces still rejoice our memory’s eye, who live still through us who loved them, has bound them indeed more closely to us. So has it always been in every year. So will it be next year and in the next — 'till finally it visits us too.
But life itself will remain. As we reflect, in these days of the year’s dying, on our own beloved dead, so will others remember us in days to come, on to the last days of humankind upon the earth. And even when memory ceases, the substance of our living will still remain, an ineradicable part of what has happened in this corner of the Milky Way.