First Parish Bedford UU

“Enigmatology”

The Rev. John Gibbons

The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

Unitarian Universalist

20 September 2009

I know of a minister who often missed the deadline for submitting his sermon title to the church newsletter and thus his secretary would regularly insert “This Sunday Dr. Barr will preach on the topic, ‘The Great Mystery’”! That isn’t quite the reason this sermon is titled “Enigmatology,” but it’s close.

I must tell you that writing a sermon after a summer of not writing sermons is a lot like turning on a faucet after not using the water for a couple of months. Air has gotten into the pipes and the water burbles and jerks, and out comes rust and sediment; and you have to let the water run for a while before it comes out steady and clean. So I’ve accumulated eight or nine sermon fragments swirling in my head and, well, if you let me run on for a while, maybe I’ll come clean in the end.

Enigmatology is a word I learned this summer when I was reading something about Will Shortz, the NY Times crossword puzzle editor. He is an enigmatologist, a student of puzzles. I, by the way, am not. Most mornings I get up reasonably early but, by then, my wife Sue has been up for hours: She’s read a few books and finished The New Yorker; she’s lifted weights; she’s won the Nobel Prize; and she’s finished the crosswords in both the Times and the Globe. I respect and may even love some enigmatologists but I’m not one of them.

There are also people who view life as an enigma, a puzzle to be solved, an elusive riddle. Their religion, thus, is a kind of solution, an answer (a right answer!), a key that unlocks the great mysteries. I see, by the way, that The Da Vinci Code author has a new book, The Lost Symbol , that sold a million copies on its first day. There are those who look at life and religion like codebreaking detectives in search of clues – the right rituals, the right words, the right beliefs that will crack the divine secrets and reveal the holy of holies.

Homer Simpson must have had that notion of religion when he once worried, “What if I pick the wrong religion and just make God mad?” Like I say, I respect enigmatologists; I’m just not one of them.

So, you ask, if religion for me is not a puzzle to be solved then what for me is a religious experience? Well, thank you for asking as I’d love to tell you. The very peak religious experiences of my summer have been the one and a half hours I’ve been on my bicycle nearly every day since July 1^st. About 20 miles. You ask where do I ride? Again thank you, I’d love to tell you.

Most mornings I go out our driveway onto Lido and Ledgewood and Wilson Road, then dodge cars merging onto 62 (Burlington Road), to Page where I pass the Southard’s house and Judy McCabe’s and Judi and Diana’s and Knox and Fleishmann’s. Sometimes I’ll see Peter King coming the other way in his old yellow VW bus and we’ll salute. I turn at that busy 4-way intersection at Springs Road where last week there was a veteran with a placard protesting something at the VA. And then I zig-zag over a few streets, past some more parishioners’ homes where on Wednesdays I get to see what everyone puts in their trash and recycling bins.

You see a lot from a bicycle: the nips and beer bottles, the Tupperware food containers that have spilled open because, I’m sure, someone with their hands full put their lunch on the roof of their car, then absent-mindedly drove off. You find some good things in the road, too: clothing and towels and tools and coins. Actually, Sue finds really good stuff. Last week she found an odd double-barreled aluminum cigar case humidor. And when she reached down to retrieve what she thought was a dollar bill…it turned out to be a 100-dollar bill! I suggested she ask if one of you might have dropped it, but she declined. Last Friday, I found a plastic shark!

Well, from Fletcher I get onto The Great Road, then head for Carlisle and I see Riff’s old steam engine by Karen’s garage and, once while she was walking I nearly ran down Merc Kane, and then last week when I passed the Anne and Tom Larkin’s there was an exterminator’s truck in their driveway. Bugs, do you suppose? Rodents?

When I pass Old Causeway I wonder if you still can look down into those old Nike missile silos and does Harvard still keep llamas there? One of you will surely tell me. Crossing the Concord River often there are people fishing from its bank. Then there are the gardens at Foss Farm. And, at Kimball’s in Carlisle on Saturdays, I stop at the Farmers Market.

And the steepest part of my ride is going uphill to the Carlisle rotary, then I get onto Lowell Road. The Clark Farm is on the left and I recall our old undertaker Bill Clark, one of the first men I knew to die of AIDS. And the landscape is rolling and beautiful and some of the houses are really big.

There are meadows where I hear the crickets, and my mind drifts to the end of that long day of Ted Kennedy’s funeral and, watching on TV the burial as the sun set, Arlington National Cemetery too was loud with crickets.

Then I pass Middlesex School where it was quiet over the summer but now kids are out playing soccer and rugby and sometimes I hear – is it the chapel bell? A little piece of rural England over there.

In my head as I ride, I get a few bright ideas, and I think things over. I think about my family and Obama and Joe Wilson and I think about all of you. I don’t much think of it as such, but I suppose what goes on in my head is pretty much like prayer, not concentrated thought but a watchful listening open-ended kind of thinking things over.

Except for my fellow cyclists (for whom this is a popular route and who regularly pass me) car traffic was minimal until Labor Day but thereafter there has been nearly a mile of stopped cars leading up to the stop sign at Barrett’s Mill Road in Concord. I gleefully pass them all and to the cars that encroach on the bike lane I yell, “Share the road!”

So pretty soon there’s the Concord River and Concord Center, where on Fridays a peace group walks in silence, and I then take a close look at the 4 million dollar accessibility project that is nearly completed at their First Parish. Soon there’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home off to the right. I read Richardson’s superb biography over the summer and I recall that, on the 4^th of July, Emerson’s wife Lydian would drape their house in black bunting, mourning on that day of freedom the hypocrisy and insult of slavery.

I read too that, when he came home, Waldo would tuck his half-smoked cigars in the slats of the front fence, ready for his next walk about town. I bet he could’ve used that aluminum cigar holder thing. As I pass I say thanks to Waldo, for I wouldn’t be in this line of work and I most definitely would not be preaching this sort of sermon were it not for Emerson’s “mind on fire.”

Continuing through the Concord Unitarian theme park, on the left there’s the Alcott Family’s Orchard House and Hawthorne’s home, The Wayside. Then I take a left at Merriam’s Corner where Bedford’s Captain John Wilson – your fellow parishioner - fell on the 19^th of April in 1775 at the Battle of the Bloody Angle. There too a boulder marks the grave of an unknown British soldier.

There are cornfields on the right and I’ve watched the corn grow from nothing to now when it’s as high as an elephant’s eye.

A short ways up Old Bedford Road there’s a stone monument and, wondering what it was, one day I stopped and it’s a monument to all of Concord’s working farmers.

Soon I’m in the home stretch on Concord Road, past Scimone’s, and Julie Turner’s sculpture garden (when will she get rid of that pile of dirt in her driveway?) and Wendell and Luisa’s, and Rachel Field’s, and, hey, there’s John Wiedey out running the other way.

And then I go past the house to which a number of years ago Bedford’s police called me early one cold winter morning and there was poor old Larry Mansur, our Town Historian, frozen stiff on his front walk, his heart having stopped when the night before he went out to fill the bird feeder.

And at the corner where Ten Acre and Caesar Jones meet Concord Road my thoughts and prayers turn to Adam Richichi and his three friends who while driving missed the stop sign and went straight into the highway and were hit broadside full-speed by a van…and everybody was wearing their seatbelts and everybody lived. Amen.

Then I wave and bless our friends the Baptists and take a right on McMahon where I get out of the saddle to climb the hill; and, in one of those yards, I was amazed at how many trees were cut a few weeks ago: big, big trees and lots of them – and everywhere I notice how thick a canopy of trees we enjoy. So thick that lately in the breeze I’ve been pelted by acorns that bounce like marbles off my helmet.

Now past the middle school, it’s parking lot no longer empty, and the Bedford football team was all in a huddle the other day, yelling their testosterone-fueled war cries. Then the tennis courts and Ken Larson’s “red and rotten” buildings on Railroad Ave. (in the 19^th century, I’m told, hops used to be stored there) and the bike path and the Budd car, past Elm Brook Place where people with mental illnesses find hope and, often, they’re on the bench out front, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the 62 bus.

Then there’s Carla Baer waiting for the school bus with Juliana and other moms and dads and kids. Seeing parents and kids on corners and waving has been one of the sweetest sights of September.

Rejoining the Great Road, I try not to get my tires stuck in the storm drains and I make the harrowing left onto Brooksbie, back to Page and onto Old Billerica and it was somewhere in there that Joel Parks just recently got knocked off his bike when he got clipped by a landscaping truck and, years ago, our son Eric also got knocked down. And, just by the way, though it’s great to have fresh paving, the new granite curbing there is sharp and unforgiving and wrong.

Now past Art and Marietta Ellis’s house and soap factory and once more out of the saddle for the last hill and onto Old Burlington and Wilson to Ledgewood, and there on the last curve one day, so near to home, my concentration lapsed and I just avoided a head-on collision with a UPS truck. And then into the parsonage driveway and I’m home. Boy does that shower feel good.

A wonderful UU minister named Harry Meserve once wrote, “It is not the purpose of religion to lift us up out of the ordinary world into some supernatural world of special revelation. Its task is to show us the divine in the midst of the human, the eternally significant as it appears within the framework of the commonplace, day-to-day events. The problem for most of us is to find religious meaning in the place where we are, among the people with whom we live and work, in the jobs we have to do, and the events we experience. We expect religious experience to be something strange, when it is actually to be found in the way we understand and live through what happens to us day by day.”

You don’t have to be an enigmatologist. And you certainly don’t have to be a bicyclist.

Pretty much all of religion, as far as I can tell, is about paying attention and noticing stuff, not averting our eyes or wasting our intellect or hardening our hearts. Noticing stuff about ourselves, one another, and our world.

I still have a long way to go with this. There’s too much I fail or don’t want to notice.

Do you remember Alice Walker writing in The Color Purple, “I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it.” That is what makes God mad and atheists know it as well as believers.

That’s why, when I read the daily newspaper, I may not read every word about what’s happening in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in those little black-bordered boxes, I do read the names of the dead, and their ages, and their home towns. I think it pisses God off if I don’t.

That’s why, near and far, I hope we see the sick and the uninsured, the soldier and the civilian, the hotel housekeepers, the immigrants, the unseen, the defenseless, the fearful, the forgotten and the fallen.

Each year when we honor our minister emeritus and the spirit of democracy, we read the words of his hero Jane Addams, “We are learning (she said) that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another’s burdens.”

We gather here to see the size of one anothers’ – and others’ – burdens.

In today’s Globe, speaking of some other offense to humanity, someone said, “Once you see something, you cannot un-see it.”

At the end of his book Giving, Bill Clinton writes “Believer or nonbeliever, we all live in an interdependent world in which our survival depends upon an understanding that our common humanity is more important than our interesting and inevitable differences and that everyone matters.  In Africa, where the first human stood up o the savannah 150,000 years ago, some tribes have a remarkable way of greeting each other.  When one person says hello, the response is ‘I see you.’”

We gather here in this congregation, I believe, to encourage one another to notice and to see one another.

When you say to Nancy Daugherty, you know, “Nice to see you” her usual response is “Nice to be seen.” But it is more than nice to see and be seen; it’s a holy thing and it is what we are called to do.

In his novel Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike writes, “What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early and cared, like your own little grandstand.”

Here at First Parish, in a lonely world, we gather to notice, to see one another, to witness, to watch from early and to care, to be for one another our own little grandstand.

Finally, you may have noticed that just a week or so ago Garrison Keillor had a stroke that turned out to be not too serious. Of course, he then wrote a lyrical piece about it in the Times, how all of a sudden he was described in his doctor’s notes as a “nice 67 y.o. male, flat affect, awake, alert and appropriate.” He titled the piece, “Touched by Mortality,” and he writes in appreciation of the care he received and, especially, the nurses. I’ll read you the last paragraphs:

“Nurses are smart and brisk and utterly capable. They bring some humor to the situation. (“Care for some jewelry?” she says as she puts the wristband on me.) And women have the caring gene that most men don’t. Men push you down the hall in a gurney as if you’re a cadaver, but whenever I was in contact with a woman, I felt that she knew me as a brother. The women who draw blood samples at Mayo do it gently with a whole litany of small talk to ease the little blip of puncture, and “here it comes” and the needle goes in, and “Sorry about that,” and I feel some human tenderness there, as if she thought, “I could be the last woman to hold that dude’s hand.” A brief sweet moment of common humanity.

And that is a gift to the man who has been struck by a stroke: Our common humanity. It’s powerful in a hospital. Instead of a nice linen jacket and cool jeans and black T, you are shuffling around in a shabby cotton gown like Granma in “Grapes of Wrath,” and you pee into a plastic container under the supervision of a young woman who makes sure you don’t get dizzy and bang your noggin.

Two weeks ago, you were waltzing around feeling young and attractive, and now you are the object of Get Well cards. Rich or poor, young or old, we all face the injustice of life — it ends too soon, and statistical probability is no comfort. We are all in the same boat, you and me and ex-Governor Palin and Congressman Joe Wilson, and wealth and social status do not prevail against disease and injury. And now we Americans must reform our health insurance system so that it reflects our common humanity. It is not decent that people avoid seeking help for want of insurance. It is not decent that people go broke trying to get well. You know it and I know it. Time to fix it.”

When you notice stuff in this world, when you see others, when you become aware of our common humanity, when you know that we are all touched by mortality, well then also, a keen sense arises of that which is decent and that which is not, of that which is perfect and that which must be fixed. We gather, yet again, to savor and to save this world.

In the seasons to come, whatever we do, I am hopeful that we will attune our senses, notice, savor, save, be seen and see. Let us not be an enigma to one another. This beautiful morning, I see you. It is so good to see you. I hope to see you again.