Yesterday's Tomorrow

A Minnesota humorist once created a motto for the Future Historians of America: "Planning Today for the Yesterday of Tomorrow." I thought of that as I visited my father. He was living in a nursing home in Clearfield, Utah, about as far from our West Virginia hometown as he could imagine. He inhabited a tomorrow he never dreamed of yesterday. 

My Dad had been a Methodist lay preacher. After I moved north to attend Princeton Seminary, he took over a little church in Wardensville that I had served.  “Like son, like father,” he liked to say. One summer evening he gave a sermon in our hometown church. It happened to be taped. That particular homily was about the Good Samaritan.

“Never waste an audience,” someone told him. Well, he didn’t. His plain speech, earthy humor and common sense are abundantly apparent on that tape. Since Dad himself was always going the extra mile for folks who needed help, the integrity in that speech must touched the hearts of his listeners. He loved the Bible. He loved a good story. He loved charming people into faithfulness.

After a routine dental appointment he suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed, speechless, and with limited comprehension. We had to transport him and my mother to Utah where my sister lived. No one else could provide the quality of care and advocacy that they needed.

I felt all the conflicting emotions one would expect when I flew out from Minnesota to visit: tenderness, fear, helplessness, love, guilt, anger, appreciation. Once so energetic in his caring for others, now he lay in his bed or sat in his wheel chair for hours. Once so spontaneous and playful, now his daily life was organized by the routines of institutional care. Yet even here there was so much more to him than disability and confinement. The many “disciplines” of his previous life continued to serve him well: his enjoyment of simple things like colored glass, his friendly way with others, his patient disposition. And, almost certainly, his faith.

Dad listened frequently to that recorded sermon. Because of the damage the stroke inflicted to his brain, he heard it for the “first” time every time it was played. A kind of "beginner’s mind" perhaps. The voice on the tape, his own voice, came from twenty years earlier and two thousand miles away. With nary a thought of Utah, strokes or nursing homes, that voice spoke of a life well lived, a life lived for others. It spoke with the conviction of one who knew that we cannot know what the future holds, but who believed that God is good.

Each time he heard it, my father smiled. He nodded his approval of yesterday’s father’s words. Never an erudite historian, nevertheless Dad excelled at “planning today for the yesterday of tomorrow”. 

Homily or Sermon

In recent months I have found myself wanting to substitute the word “homily” for “sermon” in our Sunday orders of worship. “This is curious,” I said to myself. “What is this about?” 

At first I suspected my desire to appear more southern than I have a right to claim to be. Homily. Hominy. Homily. Hominy. Homily. Hominy. This word association evokes all things truly southern. The very sound of it suggests a languid, non-pretentious, warm-morning southern repast. Perhaps I will even develop a drawl.

 “Hominy” derives from the Algonquin term for grain; it never occurs alone. What is its partner? “Grits.” True grits. Real Southerners spot us interlopers a mile away:

“What would you like for breakfast, sir?”

“I’ll have a grit.”

“A grit? I’m sorry, sir. They never come alone.”

I think a good sermon ought to be a little “gritty,” don’t you? Grits on your plate keep you humble. The best upscale sermons ever savored still have some down home common sense about them.

But I don’t think this is it. My Catholic friends point out that they “do” homilies while Protestants “do” sermons. So maybe there’s a wanna-be priest lurking in my robe. But while I confess to being an ecu-maniac, and believe with every fiber of my being that we should work that “all may be one,” I have no desire to exchange the riotous freedoms of our tradition for the particular restrictions of another.

I asked my erudite colleagues to tell me the difference between a homily and a sermon. No one seems to know. I asked you who sit through them. “Homilies are shorter,” you say. With all do respect, I think you beg the question. Certainly my homilies are not shorter. (“Pastor,” pleaded one member, “your words don’t have to be eternal in order for them to be immortal.”)

Finally I looked in the dictionary. “Homily” is rooted in the Greek homiletikos, meaning “conversation.” “Sermon” comes directly from medieval Latin for “speech”, and that probably derives from serere, “to link together or string together” like beads on a necklace. While both words carry the meaning of “a religious discourse before a congregation,” the nuance of homily is “an informal exposition usually of Scripture.” “Sermon” carries the additional shade of “an annoying harangue”.

I am allergic, by temperament, to harangues. I cherish dialogue. I like the thought that what I say from the pulpit is one piece of a much longer conversation that has been going on for centuries.

So as I prepare for our worship, perhaps I am asking myself this question: “What shall it be this Sunday? An informal exposition, or an annoying harangue? A speech, or a searching conversation?”

Beauty

I listened intently. An Orthodox nun was responding to a question about which I care deeply: how to nurture spirituality in children. As parent and pastor, I often ponder this question but Mother Rafaela’s answer took me by surprise. “The question really is,” she said, “how to put beauty into a child’s life.”

Both beauty and ugliness have the power to shape and transform our lives and our communities. Mother Rafaela’s point seems as relevant to stopping violence and curbing teen age pregnancy as to spiritual formation. How can we put beauty into a child’s life? Or, as Plato observed about the purpose of education, “How can we teach our children to take pleasure in the right things?”

Beauty occurs as readily in unadorned nature as in our most elegant gardens. It is not always “pretty.’ It is not merely decorative. It may be -- should be -- cultivated, but beauty must not to be confused with art. It is both less and more than art. The artistic function in our culture encompasses all manner of expressions, only some of which are beautiful.

When we experience beauty, we enter a dimension of life too deep for words, a dimension which transcends much of the ugliness, pain and fear that is our daily bread. We are touched by a gracious order. We are enabled to reach a new level of spiritual integration. We encounter a “lightness of being” (Tolstoy) that frees our spirit. Perspective, balance and catharsis are among the gifts that beauty bestows. The divine in us resonates with the divine in all creation.

The beauty I am able to perceive or create intimately shapes the meaning of my life. “Consider the lilies of the field,” said Jesus. The so-called “amenities” of our community (both natural and cultural) feed my spirit and shape my soul. The pursuit of beauty in worship, conversation and a life lived well is among my most important motivations. Why should it be otherwise for children?

The composer Ottorino Respighi surely was one of the great joy-bearers of the modern world. According to critic Geoffrey Crankshaw, “Beauty of expression was his perpetual aim. He hated ugliness, and eschewed any tendency toward the brutal.” One could do worse than leave such a legacy to the world.

It is said that, when Adonis arrived in the Underworld after his death, only one question was put to him by the shades: “What was the most beautiful thing you left behind?” If this were the standard to which all of us were held. I wonder how our children’s world would change.