“Assisted Living”
A Sermon by the Rev. John Gibbons
delivered at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts, Unitarian Universalist
on May 14, 2005
If you look in the yellow pages under the heading “Assisted Living Communities,” you see such places as Carleton-Willard Village; Country Club Heights; Sunrise of Arlington, Wayland and Weston; The Falls at Cordingly Dam, and many others. Without a doubt these places provide some assistance in living, but the frame I want to put around this sermon, the religious frame and perhaps the most important religious concept of any sort that I know is that all living is assisted living.
There is no such thing as unassisted living. No matter who you are, no matter your age or race or sex or class, all of us are recipients of assistance from others, known and unknown, far and near, alive and dead, remembered and forgotten.
Beginning with our mothers, but encompassing all those who have nurtured us, shaped us, taught us, admonished us, encouraged us, clothed us, fed us, paid us and paid for us, forgiven us, loved us, befriended us, and all those who time and again up with us have put…all living is assisted living and every human community is an assisted living community.
Our separation one from another is an illusion. Our independence is a self-deception. Our neighbor (mother, father, sister, brother, son, and daughter) is our self. We are Unitarian Universalists because we would be one and because we know there are unities and universals that bind us one to another in spite of time and death and the space between the stars.
We all live in a condition of assisted living and yet often we deny it. You want assisted living: dial 275-8700 (that’s the front desk at Carleton-Willard). They, those people, them. We speak of my needs, my accomplishments, my life and yet the truth is that those things are but a small subset of our common interdependent and mutually-assisted living.
There is an old poem titled
“Pronouns,” by Karle Wilson Baker
The Lord said,
“Say ‘We’”;
But I shook my head,
Hid my hands tight behind my back and said
Stubbornly,
“I.”
The Lord said,
“Say ‘We’”;
But I looked upon them, grimy and all awry.
Myself in all those twisted shapes? Ah, no!
Distastefully I turned my head away,
Persisting,
“They.”
The Lord said,
“Say ‘We’”;
And I,
At last,
Richer by a hoard
Of years
And tears,
Looked into their eyes and found the heavy word
That bent my neck and bowed my head:’
Like a shamed school-boy then I mumbled low,
“We,
Lord.”
You and I might not engage in conversation with the Lord in quite those words, but we really do know the truth of that poem: we persist in saying “I” when the reality is indeed “We.”
That all our living is assisted living is the heart of this sermon and I could stop now…but we won’t.
This sermon was generated by a lot of conversation about that new mall that is being built down the road – the one that will feature Starbucks, Quiznos (a sandwich franchise), Supercuts (a hair salon franchise) and, just what Bedford needs, another bank. I know we cannot get all lachrymose and nostalgic for country stores and pickle barrels which we may or may not be able to recall, but I am nonetheless convinced that there is a difference between an environment of neighbors and an environment of corporate entities. That’s why I asked you to recall the streets, stores and store-keepers of your growing-up.
There’s a lot to be said about that new development and it’s complicated, but I have two basic points.
The first is that our built environment is a thing of the spirit. How we relate to nature and to other people, the buildings we build and the communities we create give us a sense of space. They define our relationships and provide us with cues to our place in the world.
Exhibit A, of course, is this meetinghouse: that we are situated in the center of Bedford, on the town common, suggests that we must have a vital relationship to all that we hold in common, to the commonweal. We are not a private club. That we have a steeple and a spire means that we aspire to something taller and more encompassing.
We may occasionally feel the need for retreat at more sea-level places such as Ferry Beach but, from this privileged place on the Town Common, we must advance an agenda for the common good. With this privileged place go commensurate responsibilities to shape our most important public conversations. The church is a bridge from our private to our public lives. We are stewards of a future larger than ourselves.
Before I took the plunge into ministry, I thought I might become an urban planner. I’ve loved towns and cities, the utopian and the pedestrian, and I’ve been curious about their relationship ever since my mother took me out in the street and taught me to hitchhike (because she didn’t want to have to be the one to drive me everyplace I wanted to go) and it was my mother as well who taught me how to take public transportation. My thumb, she taught me, could take me to the bus and the bus could take me to the elevated train which in Chicago is called the “el.” I knew well the streets and alleys and parks and lawns of the suburb where I lived, but then if I could get from the suburb into the city, well then, the world was my oyster: libraries, museums, Lake Michigan, blues music, politics, beer, bookstores, friends, girlfriends, and, of course, churches! All these, of course, are what make life worth living.
The second point is that everything we do ought to promote the truth of things, that is, our interdependence and the essentially assisted nature of our common life. Any development that gives priority to automobiles over pedestrians, autonomy over community, anonymity over interaction with one’s neighbors, and which disregards the relationship to nature – well, these things are not good for the human spirit – in Bedford or anywhere.
Last week I had a conversation
with Ken Larson – a Bedford resident, a self-effacing decent human being, good
Episcopalian
Ken said that his family has a house on a small island somewhere on the St. Lawrence River. On Sundays, they take their boat around the island to a dock where they climb the stairs and go to some sort of non-denominational church. At this church, they have a tradition they call “Joys and Concerns” – Ken says his family is somewhat appalled and absolutely unfamiliar with this ritual because, after all, they are Episcopalians. But one after another, people stand up and someone has this going on, and someone else that, and someone needs some help with their whatever, and someone needs that. And Ken says that everyone pays close attention to these joys and concerns – whether they come from the multi-millionaire from one end of the island or from the indigent unemployable at the other – because, after all, they all live on an island and, sooner or later, everyone – absolutely everyone – will be in need of something. They all live, you see, in what is very clearly and evidently an assisted living community.
And then – sitting on the rickety former theatre seats that pass for customer seating at the Country Store – Ken preached on to say that the trouble with chain-based, franchised, automobile-dependent franchises is that you pick up your $3.75 venti double-latte mocha latté whoknowswhatitmeansipadda in a paper cup and, well, you may have the illusion of community but the truth is that it really is ephemeral…We don’t know who owns the place, we don’t know who is accountable. The people behind the counter may be our own teenager working entry-level jobs, but there’s not really anyone whom we could call a store-keeper or someone whom we’re likely to see in some other context at the library or school or town meeting. Instead they are (dare-I-say?) cogs in the gear-works of corporate America.
Now, before you declare me a relic of irrelevant radicalism, let me acknowledge that – with fewer and fewer exceptions – the chain stores are very nearly the only economically viable businesses in a place like Bedford. They are better run, have better support systems and deliver a product that at least seems superior to many people, and often (Starbucks being a prime example) with the added veneer of being a cheerful community drop-in center.
I have been interested, lately, to note that Nantucket has banned chain stores. Chains are hardly evident next door to us in Concord. And yet, were we in Bedford to ban the chains, we’d likely shut the door on all retail commerce. We are not the kind of tourist attraction that allows high-priced independent boutiques. With a touch of mixed feelings, my colleague Gary Smith in Concord says, “I am the minister in a town that is a theme park!” Bedford, praise be mostly, is not a theme park.
And yet I fear that we will become to chain stores what some towns have become to factory outlets. How is it that whenever Bedford residents are asked what they want their town to be, we invariably speak – lachrymosely – of preserving our small town atmosphere? When the primary things seen by a visitor to Bedford are the same plasticized national or international logos that are hung on cloned stores from here to Beijing, one has to ask, “what can we be smoking?”
I said in promoting this sermon that I would include some thoughts about what we can do about these trends, and – much as I might like to lead us to the barricades – the real answer has everything to do with our town by-laws and the work of our Planning Board. Business interests, among others, have insisted on giving priority to automobiles so that parking is right off the street and walking is minimized. How ironic it is that when Bedford people want to take a long walk these days, going to the Burlington mall is a favored destination; but when going shopping we want to walk the minimum distance. In the present economy of Bedford, I lament that the most we can hope for is to influence exterior appearances, pedestrian friendliness, safety and green space. However, given our track record, even that is ambitious and a lot to hope for.
It is telling that when the Planning Board held hearings on the new strip mall – which I must again say was built “by-right” and within the legal strictures which we the citizens have determined to be appropriate – those numerous people who expressed concern for appearances, and pedestrian friendliness, safety and green space were overwhelmingly, maybe even exclusively…women, mothers who push strollers, parents concerned for their children. This is, indeed, a Mother’s Day sermon.
In conclusion, I want to recall
the life of Jane Jacobs
Human communities, Jacobs said, are “engines of growth whose vitality stems from the variety of activities humans engage in there. They should be lively, mixed-used places where people live, work, shop, raise families, and join their creative energies in myriad ways. (They) should be allowed to grow organically; carving them up into single-use sections (as many of the professionals had recommended) is like thrusting a dagger into their hearts.
She railed against sterile planning, particularly in American suburbs: “Never before have normal human beings been consigned to such poverty of imagination and disrespect for function,” she lamented. The suburbs were essentially created, she said, by “selling out the country for cheap parking.”
She believed that humans (unlike automobiles) thrive in a kind of organic messiness and friction but that the corporations want everything neat and tidy. She told the old joke about the preacher who warns children, ‘In Hell there will be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ ‘What if you don’t have teeth?’ one of the children asks. The preacher responds, ‘Then teeth will be provided.’ That’s it – the spirit of the designed (corporatized) community: “Teeth Will Be Provided for You.” Whether or not you want Starbucks, Quiznos, Supercuts, another bank – fear not! – When we’re done, these things will be provided and you will want them!
Jane Jacobs was skeptical about what should go up in the place of the Trade Center towers in New York. “I was at a school in Connecticut where the architects watched paths that the children made in the snow all winter and then when spring came they made those the gravel paths across the green. Why not do the same thing here?” she asked.
Reading that I recall that it is said that the diagonal path across our Town Common was made into a sidewalk, not because it was designed that way but because Mr. Blinn used to walk that way as he went from home to the train.
From it’s the time of Julia Ward Howe
May we this Mother’s Day, yet again start back and return to an awareness that all our living is assisted, that we are members of one another and that mutuality is our only reality.
And now, we’ll sing Shenandoah
Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear
you
Look away, you rollin’ river
Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you
Look away. We’re bound away
Across the wide Missouri
Now the Missouri is a mighty river
Look away, you rollin’ river.
Indians camp along her border
Look away. We’re bound away
Across the wide Missouri
Well a white man loved an Indian maiden
Look away, you rollin’ river
With notions his canoe was laden
Look away, we’re bound away
Across the wide Missouri
Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter
Look away, you rollin’ river
It was for her Id cross the water.
Look away, we’re bound away
Across the wide Missouri
For seven long years I courted sally
Look away, you rollin’ river
Seven more years I longed to have her
Look away, we’re bound away
Across the wide Missouri
Well, its fare-thee-well, my dear,
I’m bound to leave you
Look away you rollin’ river
Shenandoah, I will not deceive you
Look away, we’re bound away
Across the wide Missouri