First Parish Bedford UU

“If You Have a Hungarian for a Friend,
You’ll Never Need an Enema”
A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons
delivered on Sunday, September 19, 2010
at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

A Thought to Ponder at the Beginning:
With each step, we have found ourselves smaller, less central, less important in the grand scheme of things.  And, perhaps, in need of a little more humility.  That has been perhaps the central lesson of a half-millennium of scientific discovery.  It’s a very big universe in every way imaginable, and what we see of it is limited only by our small and constrained viewpoint.  Which, with diligent work, can be enlarged.
    —Alan MacRobert,
    Star Watch column, Boston Globe

OPENING WORDS
from Willa Cather, My Antonia

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land – slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.


READINGS
Katherine Russell Rich, Dreaming in Hindi, Coming Alive in Another Language

I love a lot of things about language study – the way it can make you feel like a spy, the covert glimpses it provides into worlds that were previously off-limits, even the confounding difficulties, the tests it puts you to. For the purposes of this book, I interviewed a former Fulbright scholar, a linguist named A. L. Becker, who knows Burmese, Thai, Old Javanese, and Malay well enough to teach them. “I sometimes think I study these things,” he said, “because I have such a hard time with it,” and I nodded emphatically. Also for this book, I interviewed a number of neurolinguists and people who study the science of language acquisition, for at the same time that I developed a passion for Hindi, a corresponding obsession kicked in: to understand what learning a second language does to the brain. The process, for me, was frustrating and exhilarating and at times transcendent, all in a way that felt deeply corporeal; I could only believe it was scrambling my brains. What I learned was that to some extent, a second language does. It makes you not quite yourself, your old one.

This might explain the pattern I observed when I first began taking Hindi lessons. People would exclaim, “My daughter’s doing that! She was having trouble at Smith and had to drop out for a semester, and so she’s decided to study Mandarin!” Someone had retired and was learning Basque in a chatroom. Another, recovering from a breakup, was hot in pursuit of Greek. Conjugants, I began to think of us as. I’m sorry to have to report to the modern Language Association that in monolingual America, no one much past school age seems to take up a language when their lives are going gangbusters, that it’s a preoccupation of the disoriented. I’ve a feeling the same principle might apply to any pursuit that demands you start over as a beginner, given all the other stories I’ve heard – of the divorces and dislocations that resulted in people learning, finally, how to swim, or play chess, or play the piano. Mandarin, mandolin – in a way, same thing. You embrace pursuits like these as an adult, I think, as a transfer of focus when your life has shifted you into another place, when you’ve had to begin again in some way. By immersing yourself as a neophyte in a realm that’s more controllable than your now unwieldy and sorry whole existence, you keep yourself in one piece, at least in this one area. The impulse is probably a perverted survival mechanism, but so what?

I no longer had the language to describe my own life. So I decided I’d borrow someone else’s.


Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

When I was a boy I liked to write. It was the only thing I wanted to do with my life. I invented imaginary people and filled notebooks with their stories. I wrote about a boy who grew up and got so hairy people hunted him for his fur. He had to hide in the trees, and he fell in love with a bird who thought she was a three-hundred-pound gorilla. I wrote about Siamese twins, one of which was in love with me. I thought the sex scenes were purely original. And yet. When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. I wrote three books before I was twenty-one, who knows what happened to them. The first as about Slonim, the town where I lived which was sometimes Poland and sometimes Russia. I drew a map of it for the frontispiece, labeling the houses and shops, here was Kipnis the butcher, and here Grodzenski the tailor, and here lived Fishl Shapiro who was either a great tzaddik or an idiot, no one could decide, and here the square and the field where we played, and here was where the river got wide and here narrow, and here the forest began, and here stood the tree from which Beyla Asch hanged herself, and here and here. And yet. When I gave it to the only person in Slonim whose opinion I cared about, she just shrugged and said she liked it better when I made things up. So I wrote a second book, and I made up everything. I filled it with men who grew wings, and trees with their roots growing into the sky, people who forgot their own names and people who couldn’t forget anything; I even made up words. When it was finished I ran all the way to her house. I raced through the door, up the stairs, and handed it to the only person in Slonim whose opinion I cared about. I leaned against he wall and watched her face as she read. It grew dark out, but she kept reading. Hours went by. I slid to the floor. She read and read. When she finished she looked up. For a long time she didn’t speak. Then she said maybe I shouldn’t make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything.


SERMON

You know the Pope has been visiting Britain and there was a small news story in yesterday’s London Times that reported that he was in his limousine leaving Heathrow when the Pope said to his chauffeur, “They never let me drive at the Vatican, and I'd really like to drive today.”
”I’m sorry but I can’t let you do that,” the driver responded, “What if something happened? I’d lose my job!”

“There might be something extra in it for you,” says the Pope.

The driver (who wished he’d never gone to work that day) reluctantly got in the back and the Pope climbed in behind the wheel.

And so the Supreme Pontiff floors it on the M1, accelerating the limo to 105 mph. “Please slow down, Your Holiness!!!,” pleads the worried driver, but the Pope keeps hotfooting it until they hear sirens.

“Oh, my God, I’m gonna lose my license,” moans the driver. The Pope pulls over and rolls down the window, but the cop takes one look at him, goes back to his motorcycle, and gets on the radio.

“I need to talk to the Chief,” he says to the dispatcher. The Chief gets on the radio and the cop tells him that he’s stopped a limo going 105. “So bust him,” says the Chief.

“I think the guy’s a big shot,” says the cop. “All the more reason.” “No, I mean really a big shot,” says the cop. “What d’ya got there, an MP?” “No!” “The Mayor?” “Bigger.” “The Prime Minister?” “Bigger.” “Well,” says the Chief, “Who is it?” “I don’t know,” says the cop, “but whoever it is, he’s got the Pope driving for him!”

Whatever the metaphor and this morning I’ve got more than a few of them, this sermon is about trading places, about seeing things from another’s perspective, about seeing reality as it is (it is what it is) but also about imagination (it is what it could be); this sermon is about transformation and how when we change seats we ourselves are changed.

These things get close to the heart of what religion is about – at least the way we try to practice it:  changing the world but also changing ourselves.

Learning another language is my way into this topic because one of the things I do over the summer and whenever I go to Transylvania is to try to learn Hungarian.  Well, I could just as easily try to master quantum physics or brain surgery or come up with the ultimate end-every-argument proof or refutation of God because I ain’t never gonna be fluent in Hungarian, but I try.

There is something about the adventure that is challenging, maddening, discouraging and also perversely transporting, even meditative, an out-of-body/out-of-mind satisfying experience.

For example, how satisfying it was for me to learn that melegem van means, “I’m hot.”  This satisfies me because, initially, I learned that meleg means “hot” and vagyok means “I am” but out in the sweltering sun when I said “meleg vagyok” I got very odd looks.  Eventually, I was taken aside and told that “meleg vagyok” does not mean, “I’m hot.”  It means, “I’m gay.”  It is satisfying that now in proper Hungarian I can say,  “I’m hot” and I can also say, should the occasion arise, “I’m gay.”

Studying Hungarian has also taught me the eternal truth that all wisdom is not to be found on Google.  A few years ago I was to perform a wedding and I had a few poems in Hungarian but when I learned that there is a saying that “If you have a Hungarian for a friend, you’ll never need an enemy” I figured that too could be worked into the wedding and so I consulted an internet translating program that spit out the Hungarian translation.  Fortunately, just before the wedding I showed my text to a fluent friend who told me that I was about to say something unwedding-like: “If you have a Hungarian for a friend, you’ll never need an enema.”  Enemy and enema were too close for the Internet.

This is, as long as we’re in the Absurd Portion of this sermon, also the explanation of today’s order of service cover.  It’s too long and too nutty for me to fully explain but it derives from a Monty Python sketch where an English clerk interacts with a non-English speaking tourist who reads from a Hungarian Phrasebook and says a lot of silly things, including “My Hovercraft is Full of Eels.”  Thank you to 7-year old Tim Bennett who, with Legos, gummy worms and his parents loving encouragement, has constructed a very nice hovercraft full of eels.

Language study is, however, a means of self-discovery and it was Flannery O’Connor who paraphrased the words of Jesus and said, “the truth shall make you odd.”

There are many analogues between language study and religion.

I read to you from Katherine Russell Rich’s memoir, Dreaming in Hindi.  Isn’t it interesting that people take up a language, not when their lives are going gangbusters but when they feel disoriented.  After losing her job and her marriage, “I no longer had the language to describe my own life.  So I decided I’d borrow someone else’s.”

That’s exactly when people embark on a spiritual quest.  People come to church for the first time, not when everything is in perfect equilibrium, but when something is in flux or disequilibrium: a loss, a gain, a birth, a death, the realization that something is missing or something’s been found, a wound, an itch, a hunger, a thirst, a fear, a hope, a pang.

Falling in love is probably the most intense of disequilibria, and Katherine Rich makes the familiar observation that “a lover who speaks the language is a faster route to fluency than any tapes or courses, but” – she adds slyly – “perhaps more expensive.”

She says, “…people learn languages from one of two broad motivations: ether they’re doing it to make a living, or they have some compelling desire to slip into another community.  Sometimes this…stems from the fact that they feel masked in their own. ‘Why do people want to adopt another culture? Because there’s something in their own they don’t like, that doesn’t name them.’”

I suppose some people get into religion to make a living, not present company, but most get into religion because there’s something in one’s own culture or self that doesn’t name them.

Our First Parish community is sustained by our desire to live lives of meaning and joy, lives of respect and fairness and justice and inclusivity and interdependence – values too often missing elsewhere and the flame of which we try to carry into the rest of our lives and world.

The motivation to learn another language, Rich again writes, “consists of the desire to reduce the discrepancy between your actual self and your ideal…self…. Lose your future self (the self you yet may become), you lose all motivation with it. It’s a truth that applies in every area.”

She says, “If language is arguably what makes us human, then learning one has to be, by definition, messy, frustrating, glorious, cause for despair, unnerving in how it obscures itself and also for what it reveals.”  Just substitute the word “religion”: If religion makes us human, then being religious has to be messy, frustrating, glorious, cause for despair, unnerving in how it obscures and what it reveals.”

A linguistics professor says, “If you speak English, you have one world. If you speak Navajo, you have another world. Rich wonders, “And if you are able to have two worlds, does that mean your original one has doubled?”

A Slovakian proverb goes, “With each new language, you acquire a new soul.”

There’s evidence that, when you learn another language, your first language is changed: perhaps your syntax and even your thinking.  “Hindi pollutes my English and vice versa,” Rich says.

I often have an odd way of constructing sentences and ordering subjects, verbs, objects and sundry clauses. Because Hungarian allows different orderings, I start saying things like, “Throw Papa down the stairs his hat.”

But it’s not just words or grammar; it’s culture:  When I mentioned this to Lisa Rubin, she said, “Yes! When learning American Sign Language, one necessarily learns something of deaf culture” – a distinctive and different culture as you may know.

And it’s personality:
A Temple University researcher polled bilingual people if they felt they had different personalities in their different tongues: 65% answered yes, a quarter said no, and the rest were ambivalent.

There’s even evidence that language learning changes your appearance!  Different languages have different central vowels: the schwa sound in English; in French it’s Uu.  It’s a central recurrent place that shapes your face and changes your cheeks and the way your mouth looks.

To learn another language requires a kind of reorientation. Some languages, like Hungarian, have no gender pronouns. Others bestow a gender on every inanimate object. Some differ in spatial orientation: some say the book is to the left of the door; others as easily say it is west of the door. Muslims will always know the direction of Mecca.

Here in this religious community, within and beyond these walls, we aspire to enlarge and enrich your experience of life, to become multilingual and to affect your perceptions, your personality, maybe the shape of your cheeks and possibly your orientation. If JFK could say, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” you never know when you may want proudly to say, “Meleg vagyok!”

It is a religious insight that we – alone and by ourselves – do not have sufficient language to describe our own lives and, thus, it behooves us to trade places, borrow others’ languages, walk in others’ shoes, see as others see.

“To learn a second language, you have to be willing to give your self up,” Rich again says, “the self encoded in your first one. You are no longer a person who speaks with facility and authority. You are less than what you were as a child: You cannot transact a phone all without help, discuss matters more complex than the color of fruits and vegetables. You cannot signal who you are. Most of us, by the time we’re adults, speak in so many words. We convey information through tone. I am sad, or I am displeased, or Is it not clear? I am important. Our speech acquires layers so that directness, when employed, has power through force and rarity: “I don’t like what you did.” But at the beginning in learning a language, you can only be direct. You can say, “Tea is required here,” not “Can I get a cup? “– a vast difference in terms of your popularity.”

In a different book, it is written: "Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” To find our selves, sometimes we must lose our selves.

Now as I begin to wrap this fish (this hovercraft of eels) up, I want to return to that other reading I could not resist including, the one from the Nicole Krauss novel, The History of Love.

As I say, I give the novel a mixed review: some of it was lovely and lyrical and perfect and sparkling and very funny, and other parts confused and frustrated me. I couldn’t always keep characters and chronologies straight. Really, there were times I wondered if my brain was up to the challenge. Even when I finished the book, I wasn’t sure that I got it.

And, yet again, this reminded me of what it’s like to learn a second language and what it’s like to be religious.

In that reading, remember, the boy liked to write and, at first, he only wanted to write about imaginary people and their stories, the “boy who grew up and got so hairy people hunted him for his fur. He had to hide in the trees and he fell in love with a bird who thought she was a 300-pound gorilla,” etc.

And then when he got older he only wanted to write about real things, but to that he was told he “shouldn’t make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything.”

In everything important, there’s a tension between what is imaginary and what is real. Yesterday I read a quotation from Mark Twain, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.”

We need truth and we need fiction; reality and imagination.

If you’re going to learn another language you’re in for some real work, but you probably won’t succeed unless you imagine yourself succeeding. Motivation, remember consists of the desire to reduce the discrepancy between your actual self and the self you imagine yourself to be.

The most important thing we do here together is to live in the creative interchange of the real and the imagined, the vibration and the vibrancy.

This, by the way, is what has been at the heart of Jack Mendelsohn’s ministry. Maybe some of you remember Jack quoting Wallace Stevens’ poem, The Man With The Blue Guitar. You think I repeat things? He repeated that poem until everyone knew it!

“They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.’
And they said then, ‘But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves….’”

Our approach to religion is here-and-now, really real, reasoned (something in short supply these days), reasonable, human, humble, humus…down and dirty.

Our approach to religion is open to new possibilities (revelation is not sealed), imaginative, you may say that I’m a dreamer, hopeful, making it up as we go, extemporaneous. A tune beyond us, yet ourselves.

To learn another language requires a kind of transformation and transcendence; and we are here in this old meetinghouse to learn another language because the language we have now is not adequate to describe our experience.

And I am going to conclude with two examples, the first quite remote and old and awful and the second close and redeeming. Both evoke the real and the imagined.

In last Sunday’s Review of Books, I happened on a children’s book history of the First World War, the waste and futility of which ought chasten every call to war, ever. One German recruit wrote to his fiancée: “Every day the fighting gets fiercer. All around me, the most gruesome devastation. Dead and wounded soldiers, dead and dying animals, horse cadavers, burnt-out houses, dug-up fields, cars clothes, weaponry….I didn’t think war would be like this.”

A British trooper remembered trying to help an injured man light his pipe: “But when I’d lit it I suddenly realized he had nowhere to put it, as he’d had his lower jaw blown away. So I smoked the pipe and he smelt the tobacco, that was all the poor chap could have.”

When we contemplate that reality and when we imagine being the one to smoke that pipe or smell that tobacco, we are learning another language.

I hope when we think about Iraq or Afghanistan, or Pakistan or Sudan or the Roma expelled from France or the 44 million Americans (14.3% of the population) who now live in poverty that the reality of those lives sink in and that we are stirred to imagine a different world.

And, finally (really), last Thursday at dawn – 6:30 a.m. – I stood at the edge of Fawn Lake with two young adults who wanted to renew their wedding vows. I’m not telling you anything that they and a whole lot of the world know only too well (and I have their permission to say so) but in recent years this particular couple have put themselves and those who love them through many many varieties of mostly self-inflicted hell and torment. I won’t go into details, but use your multi-lingual imagination and extrapolate from your own experience how lost and broken human beings can become and how life can seem not worth living.

And so also imagine and extrapolate how human beings can heal, be found and be renewed, despite it all. We are, after all, the promise-making, promise-breaking, and promise-making species. And so there, with the mist rising from Fawn Lake, they again pledged their love, kissed, sealed their vow and imagined their future together.

It was a privilege to stand with them, amidst the dissonance and the harmony, the vibration and vibrancy, the creative interchange of the so rough and real and the so imagined and hopeful. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

It is a privilege to stand with you now, learning a language of living that that at once is absurd and confounding gibberish, so grounded in what is real and which, as well, takes us to worlds beyond. The religious impulse is probably a perverted survival mechanism, but so what?

After Willa Cather, if there is a road, we cannot make it out in the faint starlight. We have left the world behind. We are carried we know not whither, yet we are not homesick. This is the complete dome of heaven, all there is of it. If we never arrive, it does not matter. We need not say our prayers tonight: here, may we feel, what will be will be. Amen.