It's been quite a week....
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday July 28, 2002
***
For some inexplicable reason, I have this compelling urge to begin this morning’s sermon by saying “It’s been a quiet week here on Nantucket Island....” Even though in reality it’s been anything but. Maybe “quite a week” would be a little closer to the truth. As some of you may recall, last Sunday I mentioned how “out of synch” I was feeling with the rhythm of the Island right now; after so many years of college and in the ministry, my internal calendar tells me that this should be a time of reading and reflection, contemplation and preparation for the start of a new “church year” in September, but instead I find that my phone is ringing off the hook, and my Palm pilot is crowded with meetings and appointments and social invitations, and then there’s always this preaching-thing to worry about.
It’s not so much that I have too much to do, because I really don’t; it’s just that I can’t seem to find the appropriate pace, and so it feels as though I keep shifting gears all through the day, sometimes coasting along at breakneck speed, sometimes pedaling really hard and getting nowhere, sometimes stuck in the sand or dodging traffic or simply worried about keeping my balance, sometimes wondering whether I really wouldn’t be better off walking.
And then it occurred to me that the problem isn’t simply that I don’t seem to be moving at the same rhythm as the Island, but that the Island isn’t all moving in the same rhythm either. There are a lot of folks who have come here for rest and relaxation...for a day, a week, a month, the summer...and are busy doing so at a frenetic pace (I suppose in order to get their money’s worth); while others, who have come here to work or who live here year-round, are frantically scrambling to keep up with the workload, not to mention the traffic, and the crowds, and the endless check-out lines at the Stop and Shop. And since in my work I basically have one foot in both of these circles, it’s a little disconcerting when they are not only moving at different speeds, but often in different directions.
I think though that the one thing truly symbolic of the way that Nantucket changes in the summertime is the number of car alarms I hear going off at all hours of the day and night. This is not a sound that you hear too often in January. Not only don’t a lot of year-round residents even bother to lock their cars, but they often leave the keys right in the ignition, so that they won’t have to search for them when they’re ready to go somewhere. We live on an Island, after all; if someone does decide to take your car, there aren’t a whole lot of places they can take it.
But this time of year, not only do the cars seem to be...shall I say, a little more up-scale...than they are in the winter, but there also seems to be a lot more of them, and they all seem to have alarms, which seem to go off at the strangest times, often for no apparent reason. And someone told me this past week that professional car thieves will often set car alarms off intentionally, in order to cover the sound of breaking glass when they smash out your driver’s side window, since even in the city folks will generally call the cops when they hear the sound of breaking glass, while the rhythmic honking of a car alarm is a commonplace occurrence. In fact, I’m starting to wonder whether the real reason people even bother to set their car alarms in the first place is that they’ve gotten so used to to the sound that they just can’t sleep well at night unless they can hear one going off somewhere in the distance.
Still, I’m trying to keep it all in perspective, and I’m certainly finding plenty to keep me busy. Last Tuesday night I was over here at the church to hear a lecture by Linda Greenlaw, the author of *The Hungry Ocean* and now a new book *The Lobster Chronicles.* I haven’t read either of Linda’s books, but I was kind of curious about her and her life, and besides it’s always kind of nice for a preacher to be able to sit in the back row, and listen to what someone else has to say for a change.
Of course, practically the first words out of her mouth were “Holy Shit! I can’t believe I’m actually speaking in a church.” But she was a very entertaining speaker, and I was particularly impressed both by her obvious knowledge of the sea, and also the gracefulness with which she has adjusted to this dramatic change in her life, from deep-sea fishing boat captain to best-selling author. She said that the secret to her success as a fisherman was that she was lucky enough to discover something that she really loved to do, and that she just worked really hard to do it the best that she could.
And I was also kind of gratified to hear her say that writing a book was the hardest work she’s ever done.
But the most intriguing part of her presentation, at least for me, were the allusions she made to the ways that her home of Isle au Haut is changing, in part at least as a result of her celebrity as an author. Isle au Haut is an island about seven miles off the coast of Maine; there are only forty-seven year-round residents there, half of whom are Linda’s relatives. It’s a lobstering community (as you might have guessed from the title of her book), but it’s also becoming something of a tourist destination. There’s one bed & breakfast on the island, a refurbished historical lighthouse called “The Keeper’s House Inn,” with a total of five rooms ranging in price from $294 to $335 per night/double occupancy, all meals included, 7% state sales and lodging tax and a 15% gratuity additional. And I overheard Linda tell someone during the booksigning that you now need to make your reservations a year in advance.
Thursday night I went down to the Gaslight to see John Stanton’s documentary film “Last Call.” I coached against John at the Boys and Girls Club this past winter, and I always feel a little uncomfortable when I see him, because I feel guilty about beating him three times and eliminating his team from the playoffs, not because I’m a better coach (which I’m not), but because I had slightly better athletes. Still, it’s an awkward thing to come into a league as a rookie coach and show-up a long-time Island resident.
“Last Call” is nominally about the closing of The Bosun’s Locker, a kind of rowdy bar that used to be located down on Main Street across from the Hub, but it’s really about gentrification and the loss of community as symbolized in the demise of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg has called “the Third Place” -- public spaces outside of work or home where people gather socially to kick back with a cold one and catch up with their friends and neighbors. A Third Place is a “hang-out” -- a cafe, a diner, a saloon or “public house” -- where people get together informally and where community is formed. It’s not the sort of place you “go out” to; it’s a place you “drop by,” and where you can count on seeing people you know, and who know you. And they are increasingly rare in a society where we no longer live and work in the same neighborhood, but rather make our homes in suburban housing developments, and commute to our jobs by automobile.
I won’t try to review the whole film for you, although I do recommend it. I will say though how nice it was to see so many familiar faces in the audience, and to learn a little bit more about Nantucket’s most recent history.
The high point of my work week came on Wednesday morning, at the memorial service held here in the church for three members of the Willard family: Henry Augustus Willard II, and his wife Abby Hooker Willard, and his sister Sarah Willard Taylor. The Willard family have been prominent members of this congregation, and of the Nantucket community, for well over a century now; that’s their family pew over there, second from the front on the starboard side. It was gratifying for me to be able to get a little better acquainted with the surviving Willards, and to learn a little more of their story. I especially appreciated listening to Henry K. Willard’s eulogy for his parents, and there was one part in particular that caught my attention. He was talking about how when he was a child growing up in Washington DC, his family lived in a home with five servants, all but one of them African American, yet how despite his family’s great inherited wealth, his parents lived relatively simple lives.
And I was trying to get my mind around this notion, not only because it was so far removed from my own experience, but because he was obviously sincere in what he said, and I trusted the truth of his sincerity. And as he continued to talk I started to understand a little better this very special attitude toward wealth. His parents knew that they were fortunate, and they were grateful for their good fortune; they were literally stewards of an inherited trust, responsible for maintaining and preserving that trust, and putting it to good use in the world, not just for their own benefit, but for the benefit of others as well. And their servants were also part of their household; not family, per se, but trusted individuals who also had their specific roles and duties and obligations, as well as their own inherent worth and dignity and integrity, without which their services would have been worthless.
I started to get a new insight into the profound reciprocity of the relationship between the servant and the served, or in any “helping” relationship, really. Sure, it looks a little different from the servant’s point of view. But at the end of the day, intangible qualities like loyalty and reliability and trustworthiness can’t be bought, no matter how much you are willing or able to pay. You have to earn them by demonstrating your own loyalty and trustworthiness, in ways that transcend the privileges of wealth and class. It’s a simple truth, but one can be affluent without living ostentatiously, or assuming that wealth somehow makes you more worthwhile than those who work for you. Not that I know that much about what it’s like to be wealthy. But I do know a little bit about what it’s like to be generous, and also to be the beneficiary of someone else’s generosity. And I know a few things about gratitude as well, and what it means to be the steward of an inherited trust.
I also received a brief tutorial in philology from our resident linguist this past week. Last Sunday I mentioned that the word “hostility” and the word “hospitality” come from the same Latin root meaning “stranger” or “foreigner.” Well, this so intrigued Ted that he hauled out his Oxford English Dictionary and did some additional research on the subject, and then wrote me a brief report of his findings, some of which I now intend to share with all of you. Apparently, even in Latin there are two distinct words, both of which share this meaning of “stranger,” but one of which, hospes, refers specifically to a friendly foreigner, while the other, hostis, denotes an enemy. In order to find the common root one needs to look back even further, to the hypothetical Indo-European word *ghosti -s, meaning stranger, which has likewise descended down into English through the Germanic language family in the form of the word “guest.”
But the real puzzle is the source of this intrusive phoneme /p/ which distinguishes the word for a friendly stranger from that which describes a hostile one. And here the linguistics apparently suggests that the source of this additional sound (and the subsequent nuanced meaning) is the morpheme /pot/ -- as in potable -- meaning “to drink.” In other words, a friendly stranger -- a guest -- is somebody that you might like to sit down and have a drink with, while a hostile stranger is somebody that you might just as soon hit over the head with a club, before they do the same to you. In other words, it is only through our ability to overcome our own innate territoriality, and defensiveness, and suspiciousness of foreigners, as demonstrated by our willingness to first lift a glass before instinctively reaching for a weapon, that we are able to welcome strangers as our guests, rather than immediately assuming they are our enemies simply because they seem a little strange.
In his book *Bowling Alone* (which was one of the principal inspirations of “Last Call”) Harvard professor Robert Putnam writes about two distinct styles of social networking, which he labels “bridging” and “bonding.” The latter looks inward, and tends to reinforce the exclusive identities of homogeneous groups, while the former looks outward and encompasses people across diverse social cleavages. Both are important, and both have their place in civil society; both are based on similar principles of reciprocity and social “obligation” -- the implicit rules which bind us together, and create meaningful connections between autonomous individuals. We bond with those whom we perceive share our identity, while we bridge to others with whom we would hope to create a common interest, despite our mutual differences.
Bonding creates a sense of security; Bridging a sense of opportunity. People often bond around a shared sense of history, but bridge in order to embrace a new and more expansive vision of a future, one that is different from what has gone before. Both draw heavily upon one of humanity’s oldest and most universal religious principles: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
The Golden Rule may seem to you a simple thing, what is sometimes called a “no-brainer,” but in actual practice it can become quite a complicated matter, since it requires not only a high degree of empathy, but a profound and sophisticated level of self-understanding as well.
It requires us to look beyond the superficial features which both unite us and divide us, to set aside our own suspicious fears while acknowledging that others may be fearful and suspicious of us, and to act in such a way that we both bond and bridge in the same moment.
And in that instant, our “humanity” grows a little larger, and the Universe itself seems less strange, and more friendly
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday July 28, 2002
***
For some inexplicable reason, I have this compelling urge to begin this morning’s sermon by saying “It’s been a quiet week here on Nantucket Island....” Even though in reality it’s been anything but. Maybe “quite a week” would be a little closer to the truth. As some of you may recall, last Sunday I mentioned how “out of synch” I was feeling with the rhythm of the Island right now; after so many years of college and in the ministry, my internal calendar tells me that this should be a time of reading and reflection, contemplation and preparation for the start of a new “church year” in September, but instead I find that my phone is ringing off the hook, and my Palm pilot is crowded with meetings and appointments and social invitations, and then there’s always this preaching-thing to worry about.
It’s not so much that I have too much to do, because I really don’t; it’s just that I can’t seem to find the appropriate pace, and so it feels as though I keep shifting gears all through the day, sometimes coasting along at breakneck speed, sometimes pedaling really hard and getting nowhere, sometimes stuck in the sand or dodging traffic or simply worried about keeping my balance, sometimes wondering whether I really wouldn’t be better off walking.
And then it occurred to me that the problem isn’t simply that I don’t seem to be moving at the same rhythm as the Island, but that the Island isn’t all moving in the same rhythm either. There are a lot of folks who have come here for rest and relaxation...for a day, a week, a month, the summer...and are busy doing so at a frenetic pace (I suppose in order to get their money’s worth); while others, who have come here to work or who live here year-round, are frantically scrambling to keep up with the workload, not to mention the traffic, and the crowds, and the endless check-out lines at the Stop and Shop. And since in my work I basically have one foot in both of these circles, it’s a little disconcerting when they are not only moving at different speeds, but often in different directions.
I think though that the one thing truly symbolic of the way that Nantucket changes in the summertime is the number of car alarms I hear going off at all hours of the day and night. This is not a sound that you hear too often in January. Not only don’t a lot of year-round residents even bother to lock their cars, but they often leave the keys right in the ignition, so that they won’t have to search for them when they’re ready to go somewhere. We live on an Island, after all; if someone does decide to take your car, there aren’t a whole lot of places they can take it.
But this time of year, not only do the cars seem to be...shall I say, a little more up-scale...than they are in the winter, but there also seems to be a lot more of them, and they all seem to have alarms, which seem to go off at the strangest times, often for no apparent reason. And someone told me this past week that professional car thieves will often set car alarms off intentionally, in order to cover the sound of breaking glass when they smash out your driver’s side window, since even in the city folks will generally call the cops when they hear the sound of breaking glass, while the rhythmic honking of a car alarm is a commonplace occurrence. In fact, I’m starting to wonder whether the real reason people even bother to set their car alarms in the first place is that they’ve gotten so used to to the sound that they just can’t sleep well at night unless they can hear one going off somewhere in the distance.
Still, I’m trying to keep it all in perspective, and I’m certainly finding plenty to keep me busy. Last Tuesday night I was over here at the church to hear a lecture by Linda Greenlaw, the author of *The Hungry Ocean* and now a new book *The Lobster Chronicles.* I haven’t read either of Linda’s books, but I was kind of curious about her and her life, and besides it’s always kind of nice for a preacher to be able to sit in the back row, and listen to what someone else has to say for a change.
Of course, practically the first words out of her mouth were “Holy Shit! I can’t believe I’m actually speaking in a church.” But she was a very entertaining speaker, and I was particularly impressed both by her obvious knowledge of the sea, and also the gracefulness with which she has adjusted to this dramatic change in her life, from deep-sea fishing boat captain to best-selling author. She said that the secret to her success as a fisherman was that she was lucky enough to discover something that she really loved to do, and that she just worked really hard to do it the best that she could.
And I was also kind of gratified to hear her say that writing a book was the hardest work she’s ever done.
But the most intriguing part of her presentation, at least for me, were the allusions she made to the ways that her home of Isle au Haut is changing, in part at least as a result of her celebrity as an author. Isle au Haut is an island about seven miles off the coast of Maine; there are only forty-seven year-round residents there, half of whom are Linda’s relatives. It’s a lobstering community (as you might have guessed from the title of her book), but it’s also becoming something of a tourist destination. There’s one bed & breakfast on the island, a refurbished historical lighthouse called “The Keeper’s House Inn,” with a total of five rooms ranging in price from $294 to $335 per night/double occupancy, all meals included, 7% state sales and lodging tax and a 15% gratuity additional. And I overheard Linda tell someone during the booksigning that you now need to make your reservations a year in advance.
Thursday night I went down to the Gaslight to see John Stanton’s documentary film “Last Call.” I coached against John at the Boys and Girls Club this past winter, and I always feel a little uncomfortable when I see him, because I feel guilty about beating him three times and eliminating his team from the playoffs, not because I’m a better coach (which I’m not), but because I had slightly better athletes. Still, it’s an awkward thing to come into a league as a rookie coach and show-up a long-time Island resident.
“Last Call” is nominally about the closing of The Bosun’s Locker, a kind of rowdy bar that used to be located down on Main Street across from the Hub, but it’s really about gentrification and the loss of community as symbolized in the demise of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg has called “the Third Place” -- public spaces outside of work or home where people gather socially to kick back with a cold one and catch up with their friends and neighbors. A Third Place is a “hang-out” -- a cafe, a diner, a saloon or “public house” -- where people get together informally and where community is formed. It’s not the sort of place you “go out” to; it’s a place you “drop by,” and where you can count on seeing people you know, and who know you. And they are increasingly rare in a society where we no longer live and work in the same neighborhood, but rather make our homes in suburban housing developments, and commute to our jobs by automobile.
I won’t try to review the whole film for you, although I do recommend it. I will say though how nice it was to see so many familiar faces in the audience, and to learn a little bit more about Nantucket’s most recent history.
The high point of my work week came on Wednesday morning, at the memorial service held here in the church for three members of the Willard family: Henry Augustus Willard II, and his wife Abby Hooker Willard, and his sister Sarah Willard Taylor. The Willard family have been prominent members of this congregation, and of the Nantucket community, for well over a century now; that’s their family pew over there, second from the front on the starboard side. It was gratifying for me to be able to get a little better acquainted with the surviving Willards, and to learn a little more of their story. I especially appreciated listening to Henry K. Willard’s eulogy for his parents, and there was one part in particular that caught my attention. He was talking about how when he was a child growing up in Washington DC, his family lived in a home with five servants, all but one of them African American, yet how despite his family’s great inherited wealth, his parents lived relatively simple lives.
And I was trying to get my mind around this notion, not only because it was so far removed from my own experience, but because he was obviously sincere in what he said, and I trusted the truth of his sincerity. And as he continued to talk I started to understand a little better this very special attitude toward wealth. His parents knew that they were fortunate, and they were grateful for their good fortune; they were literally stewards of an inherited trust, responsible for maintaining and preserving that trust, and putting it to good use in the world, not just for their own benefit, but for the benefit of others as well. And their servants were also part of their household; not family, per se, but trusted individuals who also had their specific roles and duties and obligations, as well as their own inherent worth and dignity and integrity, without which their services would have been worthless.
I started to get a new insight into the profound reciprocity of the relationship between the servant and the served, or in any “helping” relationship, really. Sure, it looks a little different from the servant’s point of view. But at the end of the day, intangible qualities like loyalty and reliability and trustworthiness can’t be bought, no matter how much you are willing or able to pay. You have to earn them by demonstrating your own loyalty and trustworthiness, in ways that transcend the privileges of wealth and class. It’s a simple truth, but one can be affluent without living ostentatiously, or assuming that wealth somehow makes you more worthwhile than those who work for you. Not that I know that much about what it’s like to be wealthy. But I do know a little bit about what it’s like to be generous, and also to be the beneficiary of someone else’s generosity. And I know a few things about gratitude as well, and what it means to be the steward of an inherited trust.
I also received a brief tutorial in philology from our resident linguist this past week. Last Sunday I mentioned that the word “hostility” and the word “hospitality” come from the same Latin root meaning “stranger” or “foreigner.” Well, this so intrigued Ted that he hauled out his Oxford English Dictionary and did some additional research on the subject, and then wrote me a brief report of his findings, some of which I now intend to share with all of you. Apparently, even in Latin there are two distinct words, both of which share this meaning of “stranger,” but one of which, hospes, refers specifically to a friendly foreigner, while the other, hostis, denotes an enemy. In order to find the common root one needs to look back even further, to the hypothetical Indo-European word *ghosti -s, meaning stranger, which has likewise descended down into English through the Germanic language family in the form of the word “guest.”
But the real puzzle is the source of this intrusive phoneme /p/ which distinguishes the word for a friendly stranger from that which describes a hostile one. And here the linguistics apparently suggests that the source of this additional sound (and the subsequent nuanced meaning) is the morpheme /pot/ -- as in potable -- meaning “to drink.” In other words, a friendly stranger -- a guest -- is somebody that you might like to sit down and have a drink with, while a hostile stranger is somebody that you might just as soon hit over the head with a club, before they do the same to you. In other words, it is only through our ability to overcome our own innate territoriality, and defensiveness, and suspiciousness of foreigners, as demonstrated by our willingness to first lift a glass before instinctively reaching for a weapon, that we are able to welcome strangers as our guests, rather than immediately assuming they are our enemies simply because they seem a little strange.
In his book *Bowling Alone* (which was one of the principal inspirations of “Last Call”) Harvard professor Robert Putnam writes about two distinct styles of social networking, which he labels “bridging” and “bonding.” The latter looks inward, and tends to reinforce the exclusive identities of homogeneous groups, while the former looks outward and encompasses people across diverse social cleavages. Both are important, and both have their place in civil society; both are based on similar principles of reciprocity and social “obligation” -- the implicit rules which bind us together, and create meaningful connections between autonomous individuals. We bond with those whom we perceive share our identity, while we bridge to others with whom we would hope to create a common interest, despite our mutual differences.
Bonding creates a sense of security; Bridging a sense of opportunity. People often bond around a shared sense of history, but bridge in order to embrace a new and more expansive vision of a future, one that is different from what has gone before. Both draw heavily upon one of humanity’s oldest and most universal religious principles: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
The Golden Rule may seem to you a simple thing, what is sometimes called a “no-brainer,” but in actual practice it can become quite a complicated matter, since it requires not only a high degree of empathy, but a profound and sophisticated level of self-understanding as well.
It requires us to look beyond the superficial features which both unite us and divide us, to set aside our own suspicious fears while acknowledging that others may be fearful and suspicious of us, and to act in such a way that we both bond and bridge in the same moment.
And in that instant, our “humanity” grows a little larger, and the Universe itself seems less strange, and more friendly
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:14 PM
