Gray Days on the Grey Lady
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island,
Sunday June 1, 2003
***
I heard something interesting on the radio this past week, and when I heard it, it made me feel so good, I thought I’d share it with all of you as well. But apparently all of this gray, dreary weather we’ve been experiencing this spring is due to something called a “great eddy,” which (as I understand it) is a persistent circular flow of cold, wet air around a stationary low pressure system just off the Eastern Seaboard, and furthermore, as a result of this unusual weather pattern, there are also apparently millions of Americans who’ve been experiencing extended symptoms of “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” or “Winter Blues” this past month.
And the reason this made me feel good is that all this time I thought I was the only one who was feeling S.A.D. and depressed and couldn’t figure out why; and now I find out that there are millions of others who’ve been feeling exactly the same way I have, and that it’s all because of the weather. So I guess it’s true: Misery loves Company; and I guess it’s also true that sometimes just being able to identify and name the source of a problem is a major step forward toward arriving at a solution.
Of course, it probably didn’t hurt any that the sun finally decided to come out again this past week as well, which I kinda like to think of as God’s promise to us all that this, too, shall pass. It’s a promise God makes a lot, and always seems to keep. It’s not the miserable weather per se that makes our moods equally grim and dreary; it’s the persistent, sinking feeling that things will never change, that we are destined to spend our entire lives in a cold, damp fog -- no warmth, no enlightenment, no bright new tomorrow on the horizon, but only never-ending shades of gray followed by more of the same. So when the clouds close in, try to remember the Rainbow which inevitably appears in the sky when we least expect it, and startles us with its brilliant beauty. A little sunlight refracted in the mist creates an entire spectrum of color. Call it simple optical physics, or call it metaphysical theology; call it whatever you wish, but don’t fail to appreciate the message of the rainbow: that both beauty and joy are typically profoundly simple things, and our ability to take pleasure in them is one of God’s greatest gifts to us all.
There were a few other relatively benign items in the news this past week that caught my attention. I mentioned in passing last Sunday that May 25th was the bicentennial of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson, an occasion that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been a tremendous source of joy and pleasure for me. But it just so happens that May 29th turns out to be the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of comedian Bob Hope, and thus the aphoristic musings of America’s Philosopher have had to share the stage with the clever, corny wisecracks of America’s Funnyman...and you can guess who the headliner turned out to be, and who ended up second banana.
I was never that big a fan of Bob Hope’s growing up; I’m much too young to have seen any of the famous “Road” movies he made with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour (except on cable television, or perhaps during a rain-delay of a Saturday afternoon baseball game) much less witnessed his vaudeville act or heard his radio program. My original introduction to his humor was watching the televised USO shows he broadcast from Vietnam at the height of the war there, and I’m afraid back then my own political sentiments kept me from truly appreciating the full range of his work and the many admirable things he has accomplished in his life.
Bob Hope has made a career out of playing the inept coward; he never got the girl in the final reel, he was always willing to be the butt of his own jokes. Yet even when he was entertaining the troops he was not afraid to poke fun at the foibles of military life or the folly our political leaders -- often gently, but sometimes quite pointedly -- above all else, there’s a sincere empathy in his humor for the plight of the ordinary guy, and this is what makes him such an extraordinary human being. He’s helped raise tens of millions of dollars for worthy charities, holds over 50 honorary doctoral degrees, and I attribute his longevity to two simple things: the fact that his greatest joy in life is making other people laugh, and regular golf.
In the 1995 Bob Hope Desert Classic he played in a foursome with then-President Bill Clinton and former presidents George Bush and Gerald Ford, and at the end of the day summarized the round by saying "Clinton had the best score, Ford the most errors and Bush the most hits... me, I cheated better than ever."
I doubt that one hundred years from now history will remember Bob Hope’s punchlines as well as it has remembered Mr Emerson’s essays. But I “hope” that humanity never forgets the more fundamental lesson of his life, that through good humor and regular play we can, for a time, cheat the forces which conspire to make us old before our time, and bring joy...and hope...to the lives of others as well.
May 29th also turns out to be the 50th anniversary of the first ever successful ascent to the summit of Mount Everest, by Sherpa mountaineering guide Tenzing Norgay and the British explorer Sir Edmund Hillary. I often used the image of the mountaintop in my preaching as a metaphor of spiritual struggle and attainment, but when it comes to real life, climbing mountains is something that I tend to stay pretty far away from. In fact, I think I knew that my marriage was truly over the day that Margie announced to me that she was training to climb Mount Hood, which is the highest peak in the state of Oregon, not “because it’s there” (which was the reason Hillary gave for climbing Everest), but because she knew I wouldn’t be. It took her five tries before she was finally able to reach the summit (and I’m still not sure how much money she spent doing it, although I suspect it was slightly less that the $65,000 price-tag typical for a single attempt at the highest mountain in the world), but eventually she persisted and attained her goal, and for that, I suppose, she is to be congratulated.
For my own part, I’ve been to the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire (I rode the historic “cog railway,” but I can’t recall how much I spent for my ticket either), and I’ve also been to Altar Rock, which I’m told is the highest point on Nantucket. And I confess, there is something exhilarating about standing at the peak of the tallest thing around, and then looking out at the world around you, the world beneath your feet, for as far as you can see, perhaps hundreds of miles on a clear day, perhaps somewhat less on those days when the fog is thick and you can’t even see you hand in front of your face. But there is also something exhilarating about standing with both your head and your feet in the clouds, or perhaps on occasion even climbing above the clouds, and doing so under your own power. Since Tenzing and Hillary’s “conquest” of Everest half a century ago, hundreds of other climbers have successfully made the journey (approximately 400 are scheduled to attempt the climb this year alone), while 185 souls have perished on the mountain (including 13 who died prior to 1953, often due to weather), some of whose bodies will probably never be recovered. There is a price to be paid for this opportunity to see the world from something even approximating a God’s-eye view. And that price has little (if anything) to do with money.
Just one more small item from the news, and then I will see if I can tie this all up for you in a tidy little package, and send you home with something you can think about for the rest of the week. But the cover story of the current Newsweek magazine is an article about America’s top 100 public High Schools and what we can learn from them. I didn’t really pay that much attention to the cover when the magazine arrived in my mail on Thursday; I generally just sort of start at the front and work my way through to the back anyway, but I was kind of surprised (and a little delighted) to discover, when I eventually got to the actual article, that my old High School, Newport High School in Bellevue, Washington, was ranked 18th in the nation, at least according to this rating, which on closer reading I discovered is simply based on the ratio of graduating seniors to Advanced Placement exams taken in 2002. Still, things have certainly changed a lot since I was a student there 30 years ago! It turns out that there are actually three schools from that particular district that are ranked in the top 20; Bellevue High School, our old cross-town rivals in Debate (they were never really much of a match for us in Football), came in at number 13, while a relatively-new alternative High School, International High School, which uses the International Baccalaureate curriculum (and has no sports teams of its own), was 16th on the list.
The reason for this phenomenon, according to the article, is the District Superintendent, Mike Riley, who is “on the leading edge of a movement...to make the hardest classes in U.S. High Schools today--the college-level Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses--mandatory for nearly all graduates.” The article then goes on to explore some of the controversy surrounding the AP curriculum and its rapid growth outside of the elite private and affluent public High Schools which pioneered the program in 1956 (the year that I was born). The dean of admissions at Harvard is on-record as saying that AP tests are already a better predictor of college performance than the SAT, and the college applications of High School seniors who fail to take them when they are available are apparently look upon with suspicion at many so-called “selective” schools.
Meanwhile, critics of standardized testing in general continue to raise doubts about the value of such tests in the first place, while a few private prep schools (such as the Exeter Academy) are declaring themselves “AP-free zones;” their students are welcome to take the tests on their own, but the curriculum itself has been replaced by more wide-ranging elective coursework. Yet in many impoverished rural and inner-city High Schools, the addition of more challenging, Advanced Placement courses has often worked wonders in improving the academic performance of the entire school. The article naturally concludes with a quotation from Bellevue School Superintendent Mike Riley: “Elitists will always try to find higher ground when it becomes apparent that others can scale their hill.... While AP’s standards, tests and curriculum have not changed, there are those who once thought the program was the gold standard but now see it as tarnished. What’s the only, and I underscore only, thing that has changed? More kids are included.”
There’s a theory in criminology, sometimes referred to simply as the “Broken Windows” theory, which basically states that often systematic attention to small things can deliver remarkable benefits in addressing larger problems. A broken window in a building which goes unrepaired is a sign that nobody cares; soon a second window will be broken, and then a third...passersby will assume that no one is in charge, and what might seem a relatively minor problem leads to an attitude that the system has collapsed and “anything goes.” On the other hand, a rigorous attention to small details (like repairing windows as soon as they are broken) sends a different message, which will often ripple through the system in ways that impact larger problems as well. It seems counter-intuitive at first, and the theory can also be mis-applied; just as being able to name a problem sometimes leads merely to finger-pointing rather than a true solution, so too can a rigorous attention to the WRONG details degenerate into petty irrelevance rather than providing the essential “tipping point” that transforms the entire system for the better. The two insights need to work together -- we need to be able to see the forest AND the trees, think globally but act locally, eat the entire elephant, one bite at a time.
The realization that I’ve been feeling depressed all month because of the gloomy weather, and that there were millions of other people who felt just like I did, didn’t (by itself) do anything to make me feel less depressed, and it certainly didn’t do anything to stop the rain. But it did make it easier for me to take care of the little things like washing the dirty dishes that were piling up in the kitchen sink, and shaving my whiskers, and returning those pesky phone calls that were piling up on my answering machine; and the next thing I knew the sun was out and all was right (or at least a little better) in the world again. And once again I could laugh at myself instead of railing against the universe. By stomping down the molehills, I once more found myself treated to the view of the rainbow from the mountaintop. And yes, it was just as beautiful as I remembered.
***
THANKS FOR THE MEMORY
Thanks for the memory
Of candlelight and wine, castles on the Rhine
The Parthenon and moments on the Hudson River Line
How lovely it was!
Thanks for the memory
Of rainy afternoons, swingy Harlem tunes
And motor trips and burning lips and burning toast and prunes
How lovely it was!
Many's the time that we feasted
And many's the time that we fasted
Oh, well, it was swell while it lasted
We did have fun and no harm done
And thanks for the memory
Of sunburns at the shore, nights in Singapore
You might have been a headache but you never were a bore
So thank you so much.
Thanks for the memory
Of sentimental verse, nothing in my purse
And chuckles when the preacher said "For better or for worse"
How lovely it was
Thanks for the memory
Of lingerie with lace, Pilsner by the case
And how I jumped the day you trumped my one-and-only ace
How lovely it was!
We said goodbye with a highball
Then I got as "high" as a steeple
But we were intelligent people
No tears, no fuss, Hooray! For us
So, thanks for the memory
And strictly entre-nous, darling how are you?
And how are all the little dreams that never did come true?
Aw'flly glad I met you, cheerio, and toodle-oo
And thank you so much.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island,
Sunday June 1, 2003
***
I heard something interesting on the radio this past week, and when I heard it, it made me feel so good, I thought I’d share it with all of you as well. But apparently all of this gray, dreary weather we’ve been experiencing this spring is due to something called a “great eddy,” which (as I understand it) is a persistent circular flow of cold, wet air around a stationary low pressure system just off the Eastern Seaboard, and furthermore, as a result of this unusual weather pattern, there are also apparently millions of Americans who’ve been experiencing extended symptoms of “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” or “Winter Blues” this past month.
And the reason this made me feel good is that all this time I thought I was the only one who was feeling S.A.D. and depressed and couldn’t figure out why; and now I find out that there are millions of others who’ve been feeling exactly the same way I have, and that it’s all because of the weather. So I guess it’s true: Misery loves Company; and I guess it’s also true that sometimes just being able to identify and name the source of a problem is a major step forward toward arriving at a solution.
Of course, it probably didn’t hurt any that the sun finally decided to come out again this past week as well, which I kinda like to think of as God’s promise to us all that this, too, shall pass. It’s a promise God makes a lot, and always seems to keep. It’s not the miserable weather per se that makes our moods equally grim and dreary; it’s the persistent, sinking feeling that things will never change, that we are destined to spend our entire lives in a cold, damp fog -- no warmth, no enlightenment, no bright new tomorrow on the horizon, but only never-ending shades of gray followed by more of the same. So when the clouds close in, try to remember the Rainbow which inevitably appears in the sky when we least expect it, and startles us with its brilliant beauty. A little sunlight refracted in the mist creates an entire spectrum of color. Call it simple optical physics, or call it metaphysical theology; call it whatever you wish, but don’t fail to appreciate the message of the rainbow: that both beauty and joy are typically profoundly simple things, and our ability to take pleasure in them is one of God’s greatest gifts to us all.
There were a few other relatively benign items in the news this past week that caught my attention. I mentioned in passing last Sunday that May 25th was the bicentennial of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson, an occasion that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been a tremendous source of joy and pleasure for me. But it just so happens that May 29th turns out to be the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of comedian Bob Hope, and thus the aphoristic musings of America’s Philosopher have had to share the stage with the clever, corny wisecracks of America’s Funnyman...and you can guess who the headliner turned out to be, and who ended up second banana.
I was never that big a fan of Bob Hope’s growing up; I’m much too young to have seen any of the famous “Road” movies he made with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour (except on cable television, or perhaps during a rain-delay of a Saturday afternoon baseball game) much less witnessed his vaudeville act or heard his radio program. My original introduction to his humor was watching the televised USO shows he broadcast from Vietnam at the height of the war there, and I’m afraid back then my own political sentiments kept me from truly appreciating the full range of his work and the many admirable things he has accomplished in his life.
Bob Hope has made a career out of playing the inept coward; he never got the girl in the final reel, he was always willing to be the butt of his own jokes. Yet even when he was entertaining the troops he was not afraid to poke fun at the foibles of military life or the folly our political leaders -- often gently, but sometimes quite pointedly -- above all else, there’s a sincere empathy in his humor for the plight of the ordinary guy, and this is what makes him such an extraordinary human being. He’s helped raise tens of millions of dollars for worthy charities, holds over 50 honorary doctoral degrees, and I attribute his longevity to two simple things: the fact that his greatest joy in life is making other people laugh, and regular golf.
In the 1995 Bob Hope Desert Classic he played in a foursome with then-President Bill Clinton and former presidents George Bush and Gerald Ford, and at the end of the day summarized the round by saying "Clinton had the best score, Ford the most errors and Bush the most hits... me, I cheated better than ever."
I doubt that one hundred years from now history will remember Bob Hope’s punchlines as well as it has remembered Mr Emerson’s essays. But I “hope” that humanity never forgets the more fundamental lesson of his life, that through good humor and regular play we can, for a time, cheat the forces which conspire to make us old before our time, and bring joy...and hope...to the lives of others as well.
May 29th also turns out to be the 50th anniversary of the first ever successful ascent to the summit of Mount Everest, by Sherpa mountaineering guide Tenzing Norgay and the British explorer Sir Edmund Hillary. I often used the image of the mountaintop in my preaching as a metaphor of spiritual struggle and attainment, but when it comes to real life, climbing mountains is something that I tend to stay pretty far away from. In fact, I think I knew that my marriage was truly over the day that Margie announced to me that she was training to climb Mount Hood, which is the highest peak in the state of Oregon, not “because it’s there” (which was the reason Hillary gave for climbing Everest), but because she knew I wouldn’t be. It took her five tries before she was finally able to reach the summit (and I’m still not sure how much money she spent doing it, although I suspect it was slightly less that the $65,000 price-tag typical for a single attempt at the highest mountain in the world), but eventually she persisted and attained her goal, and for that, I suppose, she is to be congratulated.
For my own part, I’ve been to the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire (I rode the historic “cog railway,” but I can’t recall how much I spent for my ticket either), and I’ve also been to Altar Rock, which I’m told is the highest point on Nantucket. And I confess, there is something exhilarating about standing at the peak of the tallest thing around, and then looking out at the world around you, the world beneath your feet, for as far as you can see, perhaps hundreds of miles on a clear day, perhaps somewhat less on those days when the fog is thick and you can’t even see you hand in front of your face. But there is also something exhilarating about standing with both your head and your feet in the clouds, or perhaps on occasion even climbing above the clouds, and doing so under your own power. Since Tenzing and Hillary’s “conquest” of Everest half a century ago, hundreds of other climbers have successfully made the journey (approximately 400 are scheduled to attempt the climb this year alone), while 185 souls have perished on the mountain (including 13 who died prior to 1953, often due to weather), some of whose bodies will probably never be recovered. There is a price to be paid for this opportunity to see the world from something even approximating a God’s-eye view. And that price has little (if anything) to do with money.
Just one more small item from the news, and then I will see if I can tie this all up for you in a tidy little package, and send you home with something you can think about for the rest of the week. But the cover story of the current Newsweek magazine is an article about America’s top 100 public High Schools and what we can learn from them. I didn’t really pay that much attention to the cover when the magazine arrived in my mail on Thursday; I generally just sort of start at the front and work my way through to the back anyway, but I was kind of surprised (and a little delighted) to discover, when I eventually got to the actual article, that my old High School, Newport High School in Bellevue, Washington, was ranked 18th in the nation, at least according to this rating, which on closer reading I discovered is simply based on the ratio of graduating seniors to Advanced Placement exams taken in 2002. Still, things have certainly changed a lot since I was a student there 30 years ago! It turns out that there are actually three schools from that particular district that are ranked in the top 20; Bellevue High School, our old cross-town rivals in Debate (they were never really much of a match for us in Football), came in at number 13, while a relatively-new alternative High School, International High School, which uses the International Baccalaureate curriculum (and has no sports teams of its own), was 16th on the list.
The reason for this phenomenon, according to the article, is the District Superintendent, Mike Riley, who is “on the leading edge of a movement...to make the hardest classes in U.S. High Schools today--the college-level Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses--mandatory for nearly all graduates.” The article then goes on to explore some of the controversy surrounding the AP curriculum and its rapid growth outside of the elite private and affluent public High Schools which pioneered the program in 1956 (the year that I was born). The dean of admissions at Harvard is on-record as saying that AP tests are already a better predictor of college performance than the SAT, and the college applications of High School seniors who fail to take them when they are available are apparently look upon with suspicion at many so-called “selective” schools.
Meanwhile, critics of standardized testing in general continue to raise doubts about the value of such tests in the first place, while a few private prep schools (such as the Exeter Academy) are declaring themselves “AP-free zones;” their students are welcome to take the tests on their own, but the curriculum itself has been replaced by more wide-ranging elective coursework. Yet in many impoverished rural and inner-city High Schools, the addition of more challenging, Advanced Placement courses has often worked wonders in improving the academic performance of the entire school. The article naturally concludes with a quotation from Bellevue School Superintendent Mike Riley: “Elitists will always try to find higher ground when it becomes apparent that others can scale their hill.... While AP’s standards, tests and curriculum have not changed, there are those who once thought the program was the gold standard but now see it as tarnished. What’s the only, and I underscore only, thing that has changed? More kids are included.”
There’s a theory in criminology, sometimes referred to simply as the “Broken Windows” theory, which basically states that often systematic attention to small things can deliver remarkable benefits in addressing larger problems. A broken window in a building which goes unrepaired is a sign that nobody cares; soon a second window will be broken, and then a third...passersby will assume that no one is in charge, and what might seem a relatively minor problem leads to an attitude that the system has collapsed and “anything goes.” On the other hand, a rigorous attention to small details (like repairing windows as soon as they are broken) sends a different message, which will often ripple through the system in ways that impact larger problems as well. It seems counter-intuitive at first, and the theory can also be mis-applied; just as being able to name a problem sometimes leads merely to finger-pointing rather than a true solution, so too can a rigorous attention to the WRONG details degenerate into petty irrelevance rather than providing the essential “tipping point” that transforms the entire system for the better. The two insights need to work together -- we need to be able to see the forest AND the trees, think globally but act locally, eat the entire elephant, one bite at a time.
The realization that I’ve been feeling depressed all month because of the gloomy weather, and that there were millions of other people who felt just like I did, didn’t (by itself) do anything to make me feel less depressed, and it certainly didn’t do anything to stop the rain. But it did make it easier for me to take care of the little things like washing the dirty dishes that were piling up in the kitchen sink, and shaving my whiskers, and returning those pesky phone calls that were piling up on my answering machine; and the next thing I knew the sun was out and all was right (or at least a little better) in the world again. And once again I could laugh at myself instead of railing against the universe. By stomping down the molehills, I once more found myself treated to the view of the rainbow from the mountaintop. And yes, it was just as beautiful as I remembered.
***
THANKS FOR THE MEMORY
Thanks for the memory
Of candlelight and wine, castles on the Rhine
The Parthenon and moments on the Hudson River Line
How lovely it was!
Thanks for the memory
Of rainy afternoons, swingy Harlem tunes
And motor trips and burning lips and burning toast and prunes
How lovely it was!
Many's the time that we feasted
And many's the time that we fasted
Oh, well, it was swell while it lasted
We did have fun and no harm done
And thanks for the memory
Of sunburns at the shore, nights in Singapore
You might have been a headache but you never were a bore
So thank you so much.
Thanks for the memory
Of sentimental verse, nothing in my purse
And chuckles when the preacher said "For better or for worse"
How lovely it was
Thanks for the memory
Of lingerie with lace, Pilsner by the case
And how I jumped the day you trumped my one-and-only ace
How lovely it was!
We said goodbye with a highball
Then I got as "high" as a steeple
But we were intelligent people
No tears, no fuss, Hooray! For us
So, thanks for the memory
And strictly entre-nous, darling how are you?
And how are all the little dreams that never did come true?
Aw'flly glad I met you, cheerio, and toodle-oo
And thank you so much.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 6:43 PM
