This is a special day at All Souls. We have welcomed thirty wonderful new members to our congregation. Summer is virtually here. And All Souls has completed one of the most exciting church years in memory. To celebrate last year's capital improvements, following the service we will go downstairs and dedicate Jack and Alice Reidy Friendship Hall, made possible by the remarkable generosity of their son, All Souls past President, John Reidy. Thank you John, so very much. Thank you for all of us.
And this is just the beginning. Next week construction starts on phase two of our building program. The kitchen will be expanded and refurbished, the bathrooms, both downstairs and in the mezzanine, made handicapped accessible, and both a new entrance to Reidy Hall on the kitchen side, and a new grand staircase from the mezzanine will be built. In addition, we shall establish a Friendship and Memory Wall in the Garden. Over the summer, we will be asking you to consider contributing for one panel on this wall, an opportunity to commemorate a family member or friend. And we will invite others of you to do what John did, either on your own or in a group, to name our other rooms.
The Fall here is going to be wonderful, especially because of our new Lifelines Center. The first six programs - and you will hear much more about this - we will devote to the subject of children and society on the verge of a new millennium. Speakers such as Marion Wright Edelman, and others among the group of Cornell West, Sylvia Ann Hewlett of the American Parenting Association, Geoffrey Canada, Robert Coles and we hope, Bill Moyers, will help to frame our ongoing discussions, which will take place both in small groups here at All Souls and over the Internet. In all, it should be a very exciting fall, a wonderful new beginning for our congregation and a promising extension of our mission and ministries.
Since Nancy King Bernstein will be our Lifelines Center executive director, and since Bob and Nancy's child Matthew was dedicated here this morning, in the spirit of our Lifelines fall topic, and in celebration of Matthew's life, let me talk to you this morning about growing up. By the way, though all children are miracles, Matthew is especially so. He was born four months premature at 1.7 pounds. Through the wonders of modern medical care, he is now a strapping soon to be toddler. I can't tell you how many prayers have been answered.
As a gift to Matthew, which his parents can file away somewhere for when he is older, my text for this morning is a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling, the poem If --. I shall take it one stanza at a time, remembering that each "if" is finally answered with the words: "you will be a man my son."
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise: . . .
(You will be a man my son)
Beginning at the end - being lied about, don't deal in lies, or being hated, don't give way to hating -- my first thoughts about this rivet on an adage from history summed up by my Harvard professor, the historian George Huntston Williams: "Choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like him." For instance, in fighting the KGB, the CIA used like tactics and became morally interchangeable with their chosen enemies. In our own lives, the same thing happens more often than we would wish. It happens sometimes to me; in fact, it happens to all of us. Whenever we get involved in an ends justifies the means struggle with a chosen enemy, we are too often tempted to employ their own tactics, and thus demean ourselves in a way that they alone would lack the power to accomplish. As my father once put it, when we imitate our enemies, when we fight fire with fire, we fight hatred with hate, and delinquency by becoming delinquents. For instance, more than once in my own life, I have countered passive aggression with passive aggression of my own. But only for I time, because it begins to build up an intolerable accretion on my soul. To reverse this, I muster up the courage to speak directly, to get my feelings - however uncomfortable to express - out in the open. This is painful and difficult to do, but it breaks a vicious cycle. Even if the other person continues in his or her passive aggressive behavior toward me, I am liberated from the curse of responding in kind, and my own soul is unburdened.
In a sense, the same principle holds when you keep your head even if everyone about you is losing theirs, or when you trust yourself even if others doubt you (so long as you don't completely discount their doubts.) Each is a matter of self-esteem. Not blowing with every wind. Knowing your ground and holding it, so long as it is firm. Growing up has a great deal to do with not letting others, from enemies to the madding crowd, determine the nature of your own actions. We have little control over what other people do to us or would have us do, but we do have almost complete power over how we choose to react.
The second stanza:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you've given your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools.
As for meeting with triumph and disaster, St. Paul once said, writing from prison to a group of Christians who were concerned about his well being. "In life I have learned both how to be abased, and how to abound. Both to temper triumph and suffer need." Especially with respect to hard times, the opposite of this, as suggested both here and in the other lines of Kipling's second stanza, is wishful thinking. Wishing to become who you will never be, to have what you will not have, to do what you cannot do. The opposite of this I call thoughtful wishing: thinking to wish for whom you can be, for what you do have and things that you can do. Unlike wishful thoughts, thoughtful wishes tend to come true.
The third stanza:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on."
Every life is filled with many little deaths and births. Some people, when they fail or falter, throw in the towel. They give up. They lack not only the courage and strength to rise like Phoenix from their own ashes, but also the imagination and perspective to recognize that, with a little effort, sometimes a great deal of effort, they can rebuild their lives, turn them completely around. The truth is, almost every person who has accomplished great things in this life has also experienced great failure, sometimes even crushing loss. In my book Lifelines I suggest that suffering is not determinative of our lives' outcomes in and of itself, but that our response to suffering often can be. Suffering can estrange us from others, isolate us, lead us to despair. Or it can unite us with others. We can recognize our own tears in their eyes. We can reach out for help and to help. In fact suffering can be an elixir for the development of compassion. At such times, what begins as a disaster can lead to the triumph of the human spirit.
Finally, the last stanza:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
First, we get to the crux here, humility. Beware of those who boast of their humility, that is pride. And pride is the number one sin. Humility is the opposite of pride. Walk with kings and don't get puffed up. Get lost in a crowd, identify with it, and don't lose your soul. You are one of them - the king, the crowd - and they are one of you.
As for not taking yourself too seriously. As G. K. Chesterton said, "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly." To which I have added, by the same token the devil fell on account of his gravity.
Take this very sermon. My son came home from college last night with one paper to finish before he could go to Williamstown, where he will be spending the summer as an intern in the Williamstown Theater Festival. He spent the entire night writing. Secretly I was judging him, appalled that he hadn't finished his paper before the absolute final minute. Literally about two hours ago, he finished. I went over it with him. With a little more effort it would have been a great paper, but it was only good. And then I realized that I hadn't finished this morning's sermon. As all my children say, like a mantra, because, unfortunately they heard me say it in a sermon, "There is nothing more corrosive than hypocrisy." What I was doing with my son was throwing stones at mirrors. So I forgave him, accepted myself, and rushed over to church to finish my own sermon before the sand ran out of my glass. There is nothing more corrosive than hypocrisy. And therefore, there is nothing more redemptive than humility.
Humility and awe. That's the whole shebang. And as for us, ideally humble and filled with awe, we run the race. We win two, we break our leg on the third, we hope we live, but we are already saved. Saved by saved by courage, saved by empathy, saved by having run the distance during unforgiving minutes and therefore winning even the races we lose.
If we do this, Matthew, if you do it, the earth is yours, and you will help us to recognize that it is ours as well. However foolish we may sometimes be. And that you will sometimes be. However tempted toward judgement, towards cowardice, toward self-pity, even self-despite sometimes when we fail to rise to obvious occasions and fall on level ground.
Over time, if we are paying attention, we learn to take our successes and our failures lightly. Move from wishful thinking to thoughtful wishing. Choose your enemies carefully and but please do not become like them. Trust yourself, but don't believe in yourself. When you are suffering, reach out to another who is suffering. Both of you will feel better. Risk at pitch and toss. Hold on.
Let me close with this, dear Matthew. You have already accomplished more than almost any of us have during our entire lives. That won't make your life any easier. But it will, if you are lucky and receive all the love I know that you will receive, give you the edge I pray for myself. As the Beatles said, "Love is all there is."
In fact, love is really all there is. Amen. Copyright AllSouls 1999.