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The Return of the Native

Forrest Church • November 10, 2002

In the march of days, twice a year the tempo quickens. Unlike winter and summer, which abide, fall and spring are transitory seasons. In every other respect, from color to tone, they could not be more different. Fall is ephemeral, spring effervescent. November’s ochre palette darkens daily. Not everyone rejoices at spring. To a pessimist like T. S. Eliot, who shaded his eyes with an accountant’s visor, "April is the cruelest month. " For me, by nature an optimist and dreamer, no month is cruel, but of all months November is by far the most wistful. Even as time’s passage broods in the branches, gusts of wind hurry it along.

Mindful of time’s passing, I look back over the twenty-five years I have served as your minister. The sermons I’ve preached from this pulpit come in various guises and are of differing quality. Sometimes I get to the nub of the matter, sometimes I don’t. But the matter itself never changes, not really. I preach the same sermon over and over again and will continue to preach it, not until I get it right (for I will never get it right), but as long as I can hold up my end of our ongoing conversation. Under many titles, that sermon, which I preach again this morning, might best be called, simply, "Love and Death." To distinguish this Sunday’s version from the seven hundred others, I shall call it instead, "The Return of the Native."

Where I have returned from is a fall speaking tour. In coining myself as a native, to those of you who are by birth native New Yorkers my first disclaimer must be that, unlike my four children, I was not born in New York City. Fortunately, New York is the one city in this nation where one does not need to be born in order to earn full native privileges. Almost immediately upon arriving here from Boston, I discovered something really quite wonderful about New York. As long as you love this place a lot and hate it a little, you win instant acceptance as a full stakeholder. This is not true of Boston, by the way, at least in my experience. I began my ministry in Boston, on the staff—as historian not pastor—of Boston’s historic First and Second Church. One of my first American ancestors, Richard Church, came to America in 1630. Richard was both a founding citizen of Boston and a founding member of First Church. There I was, three and a half centuries later, sitting in the modern equivalent of his very pew. As far as I could tell, the few remaining Brahmins were not impressed. Not having been born in Boston myself, even had I remained in that post, to this very day I would not hold title being a proper Bostonian.

One stop on my tour was Boise, Idaho, where I did happen to be born. I visited my mother and brother, who still live in Boise. I spoke at Boise State University at a public affairs conference dedicated to the memory of my father. My return to Idaho should have been the return of the native. It was not. I am wholly dysfunctional as an Idahoan. Why? Because I am a New Yorker, that’s why.

In any event, the native has returned to his city and his pulpit. Actually, I have had the signal pleasure of returning home five times over the past month, my plane banking through the clouds on its approach, revealing the miracle of Manhattan’s skyline. My heart catches as I look down on this teeming metropolis, by night or day as beautiful a sight as I can imagine seeing anywhere, an epiphany of dreams and energy and power. I can’t even pretend to be objective about this city, I love it so much. Above all other human sensations, awe and humility are the broadest gateways to religious experience. It is almost impossible to witness the dreamscape of Manhattan from above without being awe-struck and humbled.

Looking down on the city I always search for All Souls. Twice I thought I saw our steeple from my window, a tiny pin in a cushion of needles. On the clearest day with the most perfect angle, you have to know exactly where to look and then believe, not know, believe that you have seen it, one of twenty thousand towers composing the most spectacular skyline in the world.

Now I also look for the World Trade Center, knowing I will never find it again. I try to remember exactly where it was, giving ballast to lower Manhattan, far more imposing than any steeple. The true temple of this commercial metropolis, its ghost remains to haunt our reflections. The Twin Towers are as humbling in their absence as they were awesome when present, as eloquent a symbol of transience today as they once were of permanence and power.

Three weeks ago I was in Minnesota. Almost every yard boasted an election placard. By holding to his principles on Iraq, Senator Paul Wellstone had surged ahead in the polls. One week later he was dead, killed in a plane crash at the age of 57. The most telling chapter of last Tuesday’s election was written during Senator Wellstone’s memorial service. In a grief-struck misplacement of priorities, the tragic death of a truly fine man was exploited for political gain. If the shadow of that blasphemy lingers, deeper meaning was recaptured, if somewhat ironically, in the acceptance speech of the man who benefited most when Senator Wellstone’s funeral was cheapened into a political rally. In his acceptance speech, Senator-elect Norm Coleman recalled the breaking of a glass at a Jewish wedding, a symbol reminding the celebrants at their time of greatest joy of all the brokenness and sadness in the world. I would have voted for both Mayor Coleman’s first and his second opponent, but I was as grateful for the gift of his religious perspective at a political rally as I had been troubled a week earlier by the political usurpation of a religious ceremony. Humility tempers human vanity, even as hubris shadows pride with fate.

Vanity and nemesis are the themes of Thomas Hardy’s greatest novel. The Return of the Native is a tale of doomed love where fate and chance conspire to drive an Orestyan plot. Its native returns to the moors of Egdon Heath in Wessex, England. The plot matters less than its setting. As they say of our city, Egdon Heath was the heath that never sleeps. In Hardy’s description, it was "full of a watchful intentness . . .; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awaken and listen." Hardy’s heath heard what our city hears and saw what it sees, both muffled sobs and the fancies of hope flickering in darkened bedrooms late at night. "It was at present a place perfectly accordant with [human] nature," Hardy writes, "neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but . . . withal singularly colossal and mysterious. . . . It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities."

Like T. S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy was a pessimist. His melancholy was autumnal even in springtime, when lovers conspire to stop the clocks. Such sadness imbues almost all his finest poems. "Ah, no: the years, the years," he writes, "Down their chiseled names the raindrop plows." Hardy here reminds us, in tune with the old hymn, that "like an ever-rolling stream, [time] bears us all away; we fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day." Hymn and poem both are November songs.

However surely the fates may conspire to dash all earthly dreams, unlike Hardy I find such songs quite beautiful. If winter, which doesn’t stammer on the subject, speaks of mortality with eloquent assurance, autumn does so with more affection and thus with greater poignancy. When winter preaches its sermon, the coffin is closed; autumn’s ode is to life in face of death, illustrating fragility and impermanence with emblems of transient beauty. Life carries death in its glorious train.

In Hardy’s most famous poem, "The Darkling Thrush," the poet laments being unable to hear what the songbird hears.

What the Darkling Thrush may know that Hardy doesn’t is that life is not compromised by death. Flesh may be grass, but grass is beautiful. Besides, how unrelenting our lives would be if we never stopped to pause and reflect on transience, if the raindrops didn’t plow our chiseled names. On a gravestone, every life is contained on the little dash between two dates. That is humbling. It puts our passions and disappointments in perspective. It reminds us to trust in a power more abiding than our own.

In the Return of the Native, as fate wreaks its havoc, Thomas Hardy muses about God. "Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of a lower moral quality than their own," he observes. This, in part, testifies to the genius of the Christian belief in original sin. God cannot be blamed for our actions. Hardy believed that we ourselves invented this blameless God. I agree. Where we differ is that he views the creation as a heath of sorrows, challenged but essentially unchanged by human illusion. I see it as a city of hopes, tempered but essentially uncompromised by fate and chance. Hardy’s native is born bound to death, wed only to the illusion of freedom. Mine is born free to bond to life till death do us part. Death will sever our bonds with life and one another, but it cannot diminish either their intrinsic value or our own responsibility to make them strong.

The First Cause that my own hypothesis constructs is creation itself more than a creator, but this creative energy is no less divine, no less miraculous and redemptive for being a process in which I participate as well as the object of my veneration. In my generous endeavor, I honor all that unites us. Bowing my head to life’s creative power, I worship a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. I accept the brevity but not the futility of our lyric. I bless my ability to mourn and be comforted. I hymn in each new dawn.

This attitude puzzles Thomas Hardy.

Yet another November song. For our poet—whose music is so sadly sweet—it is a song of futility, for me, a song of hope. As the year darkens and the trees grow bare—each a reminder of time passing as we too march away—I am grateful that within us a faith and fire do burn, tempering the chill of fate. November in the city that must mourn but never sleeps cannot help but suggest "tragical possibilities" like Hardy’s heath, but it also reveals "a place perfectly accordant with [human] nature, . . . neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but . . . withal singularly colossal and mysterious."

On our ministerial chatline, I am told, an argument is raging over whether or not Paul Wellstone was murdered. People who must have a rational explanation for everything that goes wrong are ever on the lookout for conspiracies to explain the twisted course of human destiny. To answer such speculation is to pay it a respect it does not deserve. I will say this, however. We can keep alive the faith and fire that burned within that good man’s heart. Beyond this, his death should place our strivings in perspective. Over-arching all our contests, every human life is on loan to the world. In this we are kin. We are one people, alike born unto the miracle of consciousness with death our birthright. More alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge, our lives are alike framed by mystery and meet the selfsame fate. No partisan who forgets this can truly serve the commonweal—no combatant in war, no advocate of peace, no champion of nation or party or faith.

We need not think alike to love alike, but we must love alike for the secular city to become a City of God. God may not be love, but love is divine, as immortal as we ourselves are ephemeral and thus, "so great a cause for carolings."

November’s is the song of the Darkling Thrush, not the song of a summer bluebird. The hope that trembles through its air is tempered, not only by the chill of the season but by the chill of the times. Bad things do happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. This is but a reminder that we—each an admixture of both qualities—may but rarely do deserve what happens to us, both the good things and the bad. If life were truly fair—the odds so long against us—we wouldn’t be here to ponder life’s unfairness. We wouldn’t know November’s song, its spare, bitter-sweet and wistful harmonies. How much sadder this would be than any song we sing, however wistful.

Our lives may be riddled by the very fate and chance at which Hardy so despaired. But we need not despair. Creation’s urgings, against all odds, have brought us to this spired house, each soul a native of God’s City, each returning to that deeper dwelling place that rests within our very lives. In the home of our hope, rekindling the source of our faith and fire, we gather in this November of our lifetime to listen as we sing creation’s song.

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