The Naked Guy, The Old Maid,
and the Danger of Presentism

A sermon by the Rev. John Gibbons

The First Parish, Unitarian Universalist, in Bedford, Massachusetts

January 7, 2007

The poet Rilke advises:

Let us befriend time;
say yes to that still, small voice –
say yes to a life which is happy, peaceful, and free;
live with vision;
ask, Why not?;
“believe in the New Year that is given us –
new, untouched, full of things that have never been.

The New Year, indeed, bestirs in us newness, fresh hope, resolutions. As the band Green Day says, it’s “another turning point. A fork stuck in the road.”

Friday was sermon-writing day and this big bold Globe headline was taken from Governor Patrick’s inaugural address: “We are that change.” Patrick’s rise to the corner office has largely been fueled on hope. The election of a fresh smart liberal African-American is, in my view, is one of the brightest harbingers of this new year.

And yet, it is also true that our new governor has thus far given us very few specifics. His campaign slogan was “Together we can” – which inspired the Globe to sponsor a contest to finish that sentence. The Globe even has a website that posts reader suggestions: Together we can…(and readers fill in the blanks). “Together we can…convince my wife that three kids are enough.” “Together we can…turn the state around and put the Berkshires on the ocean.” “Together we can…help Manny stop being Manny.” “Together we can…learn to use turn signals.” “Together we can…avoid clichés.”

The newness of the New Year does fade fast and, indeed, a little deeper into Friday’s Globe was another headline in a different section, somewhat smaller: It says, “There go the resolutions.” The accompanying article announces that Girl Scout cookies have now gone on sale.

But I want you to know that I’m not a cynic. I, too, believe that together we can! I’m not always an optimist but I am usually hopeful. Despair, you know, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins; and that is because we never know enough to say that the game is over and that our efforts matter not. Time and again you’ve heard me recite the poem by Bonaro Overstreet that says “our little efforts may not tip the hovering scale where justice hangs in balance…but we must be prejudiced beyond debate which side shall feel the stubborn ounces of our weight.”

In the traditional church calendar, today is Epiphany – the day that Jesus was revealed to humanity – humanity had not yet caught on to him, today is when the Three Kings visited the stable. I’m not sure why Joseph, Mary and the shepherd boy don’t count when it comes to revelation – though I suppose that we all do know that it is likely those outside the family who are apt to see what mothers and fathers do not.

And so what I want to do this morning is to share a couple of stories of newness and epiphany, stories that have recently swirled in my mind…and you know one of the ways I unburden myself of these swirlings is by passing such stories on to you so that they may swirl in your head, too, and not only mine; and perhaps together we can discern their meaning!

My theme this morning is newness and it is a theme that seems especially suited to a Unitarian Universalist approach to life because central to our approach is the conviction that the most useful epiphany is not the one that happened more than 2000 years ago but the epiphany that is present in this moment now. And there is more I need to say about this but I’ll do so in my conclusion because what I want to do now is to tell you two stories – both of which you will likely dismiss as absurd but which I hope will swirl into your subconscious.

The first story is the true story of the Naked Guy. Maybe you’ve heard of him. The Naked Guy died last May and last Sunday the New York Times ran retrospective, mini-biographies, of a number of lesser-known celebrities who died in 2006.

This was the first paragraph in the Times: “Andrew Martinez wanted to be called the Militant Nudist, but the nickname never stuck. He was simply too gentle, too agreeable for it. In the summer of 1990, when he was 17 and had fallen under the nonconformist spell of Henry David Thoreau, Martinez took off his clothes in public for the first time. But before he did, he went door to door, fully clothed, in his hometown, Cupertino, California, to ask his neighbors if they would mind. Soon he was walking down Highway 9 wearing nothing but a backpack and a sign that read, “I was born naked and so were you.” He made it about a mile and a half before the police stopped him and asked him to put on some clothes, which he obligingly did.”

Well the story goes on to tell how as a student at the University of California at Berkeley, the legend of the Naked Guy grew. He ate meals nude. He went to parties nude. He attended class nude. He was considerate of others: he carried a bandanna or briefs as fit the occasion and, in class, he always put a sweatshirt on his chair before sitting down.

It was more, somehow, than a silly stunt. He was naïve, we’d have to say, but he was also an idealist. “Our purpose is to prove that people define normalcy in their own terms” he said at a nude-in.

He was hailed by feminists for “making himself more vulnerable to the eye than women were.” He appeared on TV and in Playgirl Magazine (he was a good-lookin’ Naked Guy) where he was made fun of but where he sheepishly explained himself. “He came off,” the Times said, “not as a freak but as a sweet kid.”

I actually remember seeing the Naked Guy once when I sometimes visited Berkeley. He was just one of the accepted regulars on the street. My friends said, “Hey, there’s the Naked Guy.” And there he was.

Well, eventually, the media tired of the Naked Guy. The university instituted a dress code and pretty soon he was expelled. And…his friends noticed that he was becoming angry – angry to be expelled, angry that the media lost interest in him, angry that no rich nudist would pay for the lawsuit he wanted to file against the university. And he became a bit paranoid: he thought the CIA was checking up on him (that’s something, by the way, that the Naked Guy apparently had in common with the last chief justice of the United States Supreme Court).

In an unpublished manuscript, the Naked Guy wrote, “I merely need to take off a four-ounce piece of cotton and reveal something that I have, everyone knows I have, half of the population has as well, to change from an average 20-year-old guy to a sex-offending criminal.”

His behavior became stranger. On Telegraph Avenue, he pushed a shopping cart filled with rocks which he then would pile at intersections. The rocks would provide ammunition for the coming revolution, he said. He got into altercations with police and he was arrested – more than once.

Eventually, the Naked Guy left the city and moved in with his mother and step-father. He stopped going naked in public but his behavior was increasingly erratic and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. For the last ten years, he was often in jail or in psychiatric institutions. Last January, a year ago, he was charged with assault and battery and he went to the maximum security section of the Santa Clara jail. In May (last spring), the Naked Guy put a plastic bag over his head. He suffocated and died.

The Times article concludes with this paragraph and this is really what’s been swirling in my head: “Until his death, Martinez (remember, that was his other name)…Martinez’s family and friends did their best to keep his mental illness a secret. This was at his request. ‘Andrew did not want people to know about his illness,’ his mother said, because then they would think he was crazy the whole time.’ In his moments of lucidity, there was one thing he desperately wanted to convey: ‘When he was the Naked Guy…he was completely sane.’”

He was under the nonconformist spell of Henry David Thoreau And so at this point in my sermon-writing I went back and read a bit of Thoreau. Here: you want to hear some subversive stuff? Get a load of what this Unitarian had to say. Honor the memory of the Naked Guy and just let some of these words swirl…

“Things do not change. We change.”

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

“It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.” (Maybe those are the very words that sealed the fate of Andrew Martinez?)

“To regret deeply is to live afresh.”

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.”

“But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.”

“When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.”

“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined.”

“I stand in awe of my body.” All of us should say that to ourselves more often, no matter how many Girl Scout cookies you eat.

Yes, we can get into a lot of trouble reading Thoreau: what might it be like if we actually believed what he said? Thoreau understood that newness is ever present and that together (often even singly and in solitude)… we can.

But the other thing that swirls for me in the Naked Guy’s story is its conclusion: Going around naked was not symptomatic of his ultimate mental illness. Conformity is what seems to have done him in. Those who knew him best were convinced that he really was quite sane when he was the Naked Guy.

Thus…conformity is not merely “a social norm” – but to continue doing those things which have already proven themselves to be unproductive or unsatisfactory or desperate…conformity can be destructive of sanity.

Isn’t it said that one definition of insanity is “to continue doing that which is proven not to work in the expectation of achieving a different result”?

In our personal lives or even in our national life, to continue doing unsatisfactory things…(even if we add a certain surge to our continued practice of unsatisfactory things)…a surge of conformity does not produce the ends we so desperately seek. To be a human being, one must be a non-conformist.

Well, here comes my other story of newness. This is really a reading that I learned from my friend and colleague Kim Crawford Harvie. It was written by a radio personality from New York, someone named Clayelle Dalferes, and this is called The Old Maid’s Clock:

“The clock (the old, round, wind-up kind) sailed out of the second-story window into the formal rose garden, already tormented by a Christmas freeze. It fell in an arc like those accompanied by a whistle in cartoon films, and gave up a protesting ‘bink’ as it hit the hard ground. Ellen R., a spinster and seventy, had thrown out her clock; had grabbed it, pushed open a casement, and let the timepiece go, like one of the Babe’s home runs. Feeling much better and never before so much herself, she went downstairs and made a pot of tea, and then she threw her teacups out her kitchen door.

Only a fly on her screened porch could have seen this extraordinary behavior coming. ‘Miss Ellen,’ famous in her small Virginia town as a proper little lady thinking proper little thoughts, had, for some time, in the privacy of her screened porch, wanted to throw things. She didn’t know why; maybe something was in the air. And she didn’t know how, but she knew, she just knew: there were other thoughts to be had for the asking in the wisdom inside the blackness far behind her eyes when she closed them, in the stillness where she heard, ‘Listen, I am God.’

But what brought her to the uncharacteristic violence of that December day of the clock and the teacups was Miss Ellen’s annual review of possible New Year’s resolutions. She sat, small, thin, and the last of her line, in the second-floor parlor of her ancestral Victorian, and considered how to better her character. Any local resident intercepting her thoughts would have laughed aloud at her wish to improve what the whole town knew as the exemplary gentility, unimpeachable, unimprovable, a sweet icon of a quaint and fondly-remembered culture. But Miss Ellen, goaded by wisdom, took stock of her lot and found something lacking. What new strengths would she need to greet the New Year? What would she do with the future? The future. And here her old clock interrupted her:

“'The future! What future?,’ it laughed. ‘Tempus has fugited for you, silly. Certainly you admit that.’ It leered toothlessly at her, but all of a sudden, in a bolt of grace fired by years of prayer, gently Miss Ellen got mad. ‘Says who?,’ she fumed. ‘Says everybody,’ the clock said, ‘Ev-e-ry-bo-dy. Just ask.’ And now Miss Ellen knew that in the thoughts behind her eyes she had found the strength to throw things. Her head bobbled on a pine-straight backbone and her ears turned red as she heard the clock tick on, accusing her of collaboration in an unused life, tapping out the seconds of her remaining uselessness, counting out her waiting, waiting, and clicking its tongue at her ultimate defeat: ‘Time is passing, time has passed, passed, past. You lose.” ‘Ha! Says you!,’ Miss Ellen stood and proclaimed, but the clock sassed her back, and that was its downfall. Literally.

And that was when Miss Ellen began to throw away anything in her house which spoke someone else’s opinion of her. Clothes, beliefs, books, habits, traditions (it took a while to identify those as opinions, for they go around disguised as ‘the way it is’), all went out her doors or windows into a clutter of things not her own, even though some were quite serviceable and even comfortable.

She stopped short of disposing of her old cat, Amy; Amy could stay even though everyone said old ladies had to have a cat. But several people, even friends, chose to go, for they preferred to speak like the clock of time’s passing, of accomplishments over, hopes broken, and dreams lost. So they went outside with stuff like rocking chairs, long grey dresses, cheap lace, intolerance, meekness, whatnots and their shelves, pity, self-pity, condescension, self-condescension, every clock in the house, reclusion, apology, and those damn still-life prints. She hired a starving artist to paint the words Life Is NOT Still where the prints had hung. . . .

By the time her final time arrived, Miss Ellen had emptied her house of unwanted things and refilled it with her own, and with people who had called or been called by her not to be comforting but to be loved. And one quiet afternoon, she remembered her old clock, forgave it, thanked it—and, with time itself a thing of the past and someone else’s opinion at that, she let her spirit sail out her open window, unbounded, unarched, but whistling.”

Well, in this New Year sermon I certainly want you to get the idea that newness is possible – whether you’re a teenager under the subversive influence of Thoreau or an old maid…make that a senior citizen, one of the chronologically challenged…insulted by the ticking of the clock. Yes, I want us to know that together we can. Religiously we are a movement that, with George Bernard Shaw (and Robert Kennedy) says, "Some men see things as they are and ask 'Why?' (We) dream things that never were and ask 'Why not?'"

Why not live lives that satisfy?

Why not end this war? Why not end war?

Why not narrow the disparity of rich and poor?

Why not treat every human being with dignity?

There is a bit more, however…and perhaps I’m repeating what I said before that conformity is actually dangerous…but I want to find some way that you might actually hear and believe what I’m saying:

A common miscalculation is called “presentism,” the belief that we will be in the future much as we are today, that we will feel in the future the way we feel today.

In the most elementary of ways to the most profound, human beings have a hard time projecting from the way things are now to the way things might be then.

“I try to shop for what I will want to eat next Wednesday,” says Daniel Gilbert the author of the book Stumbling on Happiness. “Then Wednesday comes, and I ask myself, ‘Why did I buy jalapeno pockets?’”