A Sermon by David C. Pohl

Delivered on Sunday, March 11, 2001

At First Parish in Bedford

I want to thank John for inviting me to be your guest preacher today. With one notable exception, this is my first return in nearly forty-four years to the parish that ordained and installed me as minister in 1954. My sole visit since leaving Bedford in 1957 was to take part in your ordination and installation of Bill Schulz in 1975, bringing the greetings of the UUA and formally welcoming Bill into our ministerial fellowship.

I have known John since he entered our ministry over twenty years ago. He is regarded as one of our finest preachers, is widely respected and admired by his colleagues, embodies moral courage in witnessing for social justice, and brings vigorous leadership to the Partner Church movement linking North American congregations with our sister churches in Transylvania.

He has suggested several times in recent years that I return here to share with you some memories and stories about Bedford in the 1950s. They are threads, however frayed, in the fabric of this parish’s history and even if most of the weavers are no longer here, they helped to shape the culture and identity of this place.

I have always been fascinated with history. Without some understanding of those who went before us, we lack a context for our own time. And without a sense of time as an ever-flowing stream that connects all things, mingling the currents of memory and hope, we risk losing our identity, not to mention our humility. The Service of the Living Tradition, held annually at our General Assemblies, is an institutional expression of the truth that heritage and tradition can be vital rather than stifling. It is no accident that this service which memorializes those ministers who have died in the past year, honors those who have retired, and welcomes those new to our ministry, has become, over time, the high point of every General Assembly. Several congregations now hold their own “living tradition” services that remember and celebrate the lives of deceased and newly-born members in the past year. Such services help to rescue us from the tunnel-vision of a market-driven society that sees only the surface of things. Such services help us recapture an awareness of our lives as players in a drama much grander and more mysterious than we can either fathom or imagine.

In one of the readings this morning, we heard Nebraska writer Emily Uzondoski’s story about a prairie duststorm as a metaphor for those forces causing “the disappearance and breakdown” of “the rituals and values that have always held rural small-town and agrarian society together.” Her essay urges us “to preserve our memories of the values and beliefs and customs that are vanishing before us, becoming dust.” There is, it seems to me, something universal, not limited to the Nebraska prairie, in her choice of the wind as a metaphor for those social forces threatening “to blow it all away”—the simple civility being destroyed by smashmouth talkshows, the sense of civic responsibility retreating behind gated communities (an oxymoron if I ever heard one), a solitary walk beneath a sky full of stars losing out to the lure of shopping malls. Emily Uzondoski knows that the old days are gone and that, in any event, they were not all that they were made out to be. She is not in the nostalgia business. But like those of us who treasure memories of family and friends no longer with us, she is unwilling to let the winds of social change and our own forgetfulness blow away what is priceless in our past. And as Barbara Brown Taylor noted in the other reading this morning, if we take our own heritage for granted, our parish buildings may, like the ancient churches of eastern Turkey she visited, someday become relics of a past that no one recalls.

Which brings me to the story of how I came to be the thirty-fourth minister of the First Parish in Bedford. When I candidated for this pulpit in the spring of 1954, and was subsequently extended a call, the circumstances were described by the then-Director of the Department of Ministry as “very unusual” because I had done so “without any application for ministerial fellowship or acceptance by the denomination.” About to graduate from the Theological School of St. Lawrence University and be ordained in the Methodist ministry in upstate New York, I was put in touch with Bedford not by Unitarian headquarters at 25 Beacon Street but through the well-intentioned machinations of the minister in nearby Chelmsford, a former classmate who had graduated from St. Lawrence a year earlier. I received a letter from the Director of Ministry expressing his displeasure at my apparent end-run around him, but graciously extending the olive branch, writing that he would do the best he could “to bring the matter into some semblance of orderly procedure.” I subsequently met with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee in Boston and received its belated blessing. This story reveals my own naivete at the time, but points as well to the independence of this parish which bordered on disdain for the Association. Ironically, it was this same independence, expressing itself in poor financial support for the Association many years later—where one of my major tasks was to help strengthen, interpret and enforce the rules and procedures of ministerial fellowship and settlement which I had circumvented in coming here.

The 1950s were not all about peace and prosperity, despite a booming economy and the rapid growth of suburbia, no more so than in Bedford. A recent letter-to-the-editor from a Globe reader in Ipswich admonishes those whose re-creation of the past is selective, if not downright fictitious. Responding to those disciples of morality czar William Bennett who hark back to the 1950s as a lost paradise and claim that the moral decay of America started in the 60s, she writes: “I have a different view. As a girl, I was told I didn’t have to excel in school. I just needed to be pretty and sweet and my husband would support me. As a girl, the closest I could get to sports was to be a cheerleader for the boys. When I was raped by my date, our family doctor discreetly came to the house. Of course, no charges would be made, only the girl went on trial.

“When I held an entry-level job and my boss asked me out, the company asked me to leave. Sexual discrimination was rampant. I did not even have the language to express my indignation. Meanwhile, our government was testing bombs and polluting the atmosphere, large companies were polluting our water supplies, those 1950s tailfin cars were polluting the air with leaded gasoline. Black citizens had to ride at the back of the bus, and gays were still in closets. Senator McCarthy was ruining lives with his witch hunt for Communists, and my father (a federal employee) was asked to spy on his fellow workers.

“I thank God for the 1960s! My daughters have freedom I didn’t even dream about. This is not utopia, but we have made great strides for the quality of the sexes and races. Our air, water, and land are slowly being cleaned up.”

Bedford in the Fifties remained a small town in many ways: the street lights went out every night at 11:00, the Domine Manse was an inn serving fine New England food (whose owner then, Ken Blake, was a member of this parish who generously offered me meals there at half-price), and this Unitarian minister was asked to give invocations before commencements and town meetings. But the town was growing rapidly: The Great Road saw the development of new shopping centers and commercial buildings, Hanscom Field became not only an active Air Force base but also a center for expanding research and development, and new housing stock arose wherever there was vacant land. The VA Hospital was a major medical center—and also the first place where I witnessed the realities of mental illness and its treatment while serving as a part-time chaplain. In 1954 the membership of this parish stood at 70; when I left three years later, it had grown by 50% to 105. Some were longtime Bedford residents, but a growing number were from outside New England. There were longtime members like the Webbers: Hazel and Cynthia, Alice and Bernie and their children, and the Dick Webbers who moved to Cleveland—where we ourselves moved in 1957. There were the Martins—Harry, who ran the public welfare office in Concord, Velma, who was a psychiatrist at the VA. There were the Joslins—Frank and Peggy; the Pfeiffers—Douglas and Donald, their parents, spouses, and children. There were the Dodges—Dick, who owned Bedford Motor Sales and served on the Parish Committee, and his wife and two sons and their families, one of whom, John, was recently featured in a Boston Sunday Globe article about collecting antiques. And others come to mind: Larry Mansur, an astrophysicist who would turn the pages of the hymnal during my sermons but remained one of my strongest supporters, and his wife Ina, who authored a history of this parish long after I had left and was kind enough to send us a copy during my ministry in Ottawa. There were the Andersons, the only African American family in this parish and the first blacks I was privileged to count as friends. And there were others, both oldtimers and newcomers: John and Dorothy Awtry (who gave us our first TV set), the Kimballs, Sands, Runkles, Balfours and Pollocks. These were all good people who had the patience to bear with a minister freshly out of school and making the predictable mistakes of a twenty-something.

In revisiting the newsletters and orders of service of my ministry here, I hardly recognize myself. Did I really say that? Was I that conservative? Satchel Paige looked back on his own life as one of baseball’s greatest pitchers and concluded that “the past is a long and twisty road.” It is a road with potholes, detours and the occasional fork. (I think it was Yogi Berra who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”) The many changes we experience on the road we travel are obviously more interior than exterior. They have to do with our emerging sense of self and wrestling with inner demons. In my case, I was conflicted theologically, struggling to gain self-confidence, and feeling my way as a first-church minister in a culture that was different from what I had known. While here, I was leaving behind the Methodism of my youth to embrace a liberal faith that increasingly spoke to my mind and heart. But it didn’t happen overnight—though the night of my ordination and installation here was a big step in that direction.

It was quite an occasion. My parents drove down from northern New York, former classmates and now fellow ministers came from Long Island and South Carolina, and the preacher was Bill Rice of Wellesley Hills, one of the most highly-respected and beloved ministers of that time. Our church organist was Adelaide Newcomb, whose selection for the processional was, appropriately, Mendelsohn’s “War March of the Priests.”

The most momentous event of that October evening was not the service as such, but the reception afterwards in the Alliance Room upstairs; for that is where I first met my wife and best friend for over forty-five years, Martha. It was not an entirely accidental event since her minister in Chelmsford, the same one who had earlier urged Bedford to call me, also thought that Martha and I should meet. And so, on that enchanted evening, across a very crowded room, I went over to introduce myself and ask her, as we put it then, “for a date.” Today “the long and twisty road” alluded to by Satchel Paige has brought us back to Chelmsford where we now live just eight miles north of here on land that has been in Martha’s family for over 300 years.

One of the first steps I took in my new ministry was to publish a monthly newsletter, one that not only contained news of upcoming events but also provided me the opportunity to share reflections on our faith, our lives and community. I observed in October 1954, for example, that “the tempo of our time is so rapid that it has become stylish to be busy all the time.” I have no idea what prompted such a comment, given that cell phones, e-mail and longer work-weeks were still a generation away. In my first summer here, we were hit by two successive hurricanes, one of which caused an old tree to crush my parked car. I offered this comfort in a newsletter: “How busy you must be in the aftermath of the hurricane, cleaning up your yards, counting losses, and meeting the many problems caused by a lack of electricity.” When autumn came to Bedford, I wrote: “Many of us sense a certain religious quality to this season, but few of us can put into words just what it is.”

During this time, we organized a growing church school of some sixty children, initiated a Couples Club with twenty-plus members, had a Women’s Alliance with monthly programs, and developed a youth group then known as Liberal Religious Youth or LRY. Every Sunday night fifteen or more young people met for programs and refreshments. Once a month we traveled to North Middlesex Federation rallies in nearby towns such as Westford, Littleton, Groton, Chelmsford and Nashua. More often than not, the Bedford LRY came home with the attendance award. Our weekly programs ran the gamut from teenage manners to the Hebrew prophets. One night we had a panel discussion on “The Meaning of Freedom.” LRYers were asked to “come prepared to discuss the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, and United Nations Charter.” On another occasion, our group entered a Federation drama contest, put on a play about the life and martyrdom of Michael Servetus (whose role was played by a girl), and came home from Nashua with the grand prize. Martha will never forget the Saturday when we took our youth group on a hike up Mount Monadnock. Near the summit, one of our members suffered a frightening asthma attack and I was grateful that Martha, a registered nurse then, was with us to cope with what could have been a serious incident.

I cannot close without conceding that much more could be said about those days: the parsonage at 1 Old Billerica Road purchased in 1956 for $16,000; the adult discussion groups that focused on Unitarian history, the United Nations, world religions, and a criminal justice debate at the time on punishment versus rehabilitation; and the five ministers who followed me here: Robert Holmes, David Weissbard, Bill Schulz, Jack Mendelsohn, and now John Gibbons. They have their stories, too, as do you. Together they constitute the living heritage of the First Parish. As you remember and share those stories, know that like the precious topsoil of the prairies, your heritage may outlast the winds that would otherwise blow it away, continuing to stand on the Bedford Common as a steadfast witness for religious liberty, the tolerance of the open mind, and a sense of justice that seeks for others what we claim for ourselves.