The Lame Duck's Swan Song (verse two)

a farewell sermon by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
preached at the Second Congregational Meeting House
on Nantucket Island, Sunday August 10, 2003

***
I’ve been thinking all summer about what I wanted to say here this morning. I can’t really say I’ve been looking forward to it (in fact, in many ways, I’ve been dreading it), but I’ve certainly been thinking about it, because this really is my last Sunday in this pulpit as your interim minister, and no matter how hard I try, I know I will never be able to say everything that I feel I still have to say to you. And one of the reasons I wanted to present this “Lame Duck’s Swan Song” in two parts, is that last week I hoped to get all of the sad and sentimental stuff out of the way, so that this week we could really be free to laugh and celebrate the two years we’ve spent together.

Last week I spoke a little about the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- emotions we experience around all kinds of losses in our lives; and how one of a minister’s most important jobs is to sit with people in their time of grief, and to reassure them, simply through one’s presence as much as anything one might say, that they are not alone in their grieving. I then tried to describe some of the ways in which I have experienced you as a wonderful congregation [This probably would have been the promotional sound bite if this were actually a two-part television program instead of a sermon: “Previously from the South Church Pulpit.”]

But I said last week, and it bears repeating, that this congregation enjoys both a rich heritage, and a highly-visible and respected identity within the larger Nantucket community. You have a devoted core membership, and the support of a much larger constituency of individuals who share your core values and beliefs. You have a growing cadre of skilled and dedicated lay leaders, and perhaps most importantly, you really seem to like one another, despite (or perhaps because of) all of your eccentric, island idiosyncrasies.

You are passionate and committed, but also tolerant and forgiving; you are hard workers, generous and creative, but you also know how to let your hair down and have a good time; and you always seem to be there to help one another out in times of need or crisis. And I encouraged you then, as I encourage you again now, to learn to build upon these strengths, in partnership with your new minister, Jennifer Brooks, and you will be astonished by how much you can accomplish together.

And finally, I spoke about how proud and privileged I have felt to serve this congregation as its minister, and how grateful I am for the many ways that you have embraced and supported me through MY time of transition here on the island; how you’ve given me both permission and the personal space simply to be myself, and to still be your minister, and thus made it easy for me to be both happy and successful in my ministry here. And, of course, I mentioned how I will always carry a little part of Nantucket with me now wherever I go. And I meant this not only figuratively, but also literally. But this magnificent stole is not the only memento I will be taking with me when I leave Nantucket.

Two years ago, I arrived on this island with half-a-dozen baseball caps. This past week, as I was packing, I discovered that I now possess twenty-three, and here are some of my favorites, in the approximate order that I acquired them. [Hats]

I’ve also accumulated quite a collection of coffee mugs and Christmas tree ornaments, refrigerator magnets, T-shirts, sweat-shirts, golf shirts, a navy windbreaker and a yellow slicker, as well as this especially lovely gift from all of you: a representation of the view of the old North Wharf and our church tower, a view which delights every passenger aboard the Steamship as they approach or depart Nantucket. So I will have much to remind me of where I am not in the years to come, as well as many fond memories of the twenty-three months (and two weeks) of my life that I have spent so pleasantly as your interim minister.

In any event, I thought that today I would just continue with this theme for awhile, and talk a little bit more about some of the things I am going to remember about my time here, and especially the things I am going to miss. But first a brief word of explanation. When I first moved to the island I was advised that, if I were planning to survive the winter here, I should be certain to order the “big” cable package. And I wasn’t really sure whether that meant HBO and Showtime, or merely the “extended basic” cable I was accustomed to back in Oregon, but since the church was going to be getting the bill, I thought I’d better be conservative and stick with the Starz/Encore movie pack (which, as I recall, was only a couple of bucks more a month), which meant that while all of you were home watching new episodes of “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under,” I probably saw the movie “High Fidelity” about thirty or forty times.

How many of you know this movie? In this self-described “dark, romantic comedy,” John Cussak (whom some of you may remember from his staring role opposite Demi Moore in the classic Nantucket film “One Crazy Summer”) plays the underachieving owner of a failing used record store whose lawyer-girlfriend has just dumped him for a more stable and mature, sensitive new age guy (played by Tim Robbins). The story is structured around the device of a trivia game that the record store employees play to pass the time when business is slow (which is most of the time) -- a game in which they attempt to create lists of obscure things like the “top five nicknamed jazz musicians,” the “top five songs about rain,” or even the “top five things other than ketchup to put on french fries.”

So now that everyone understands my subtle, yet sophisticated pop culture allusion, here (in reverse order) is my personal list of “The Top Five Things that I’m going to miss about Nantucket after I am no longer the minister here.”

• Number Five: Nantucket Weddings. Weddings are one of those things about a minister’s job which individual ministers either love or dread. I happen to fall into the former category. Christenings are nice too, and Memorial Services often represent some of the most profoundly moving moments in a minister’s career, but for pure, unadulterated celebration of the joy and privilege of being a minister, there is nothing like officiating at a wedding.

When I was still married myself, my wife Margaret would always admonish me as I was leaving the house on my way to yet another wedding: “Remember Tim, they’ve invited you to share the happiest day of their life, so don’t let them down” -- and I always took her advice to heart, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, in sorrow and in joy. Here on Nantucket, I’ve been fortunate enough to officiate at 32 weddings -- the first was three days after September 11th, and the last was just a week ago; in Carlisle (judging from the parish register) I will be lucky to officiate at one or two a year.

Not only do weddings (even first weddings) represent the optimistic “triumph of hope over experience,” there’s also generally a terrific party afterwards, which unfortunately I don’t always get to attend, since I usually have to work in the morning. We all know that life won’t always be cake and champagne; in fact, it rarely is, even for the happiest of couples. But as a minister on Nantucket, it’s been nice to be regularly reminded that sometimes it is too.

• Number Four: My complimentary membership at the Sankaty Head Golf and Beach Club. I have no idea how this policy came about (and I was kind of reluctant to ask, since I was afraid that if they found out who I really was they might change their minds), but I sure am grateful to whoever was responsible for offering island clergy this truly amazing and generous perk, and I just wish that I’d had the time (or maybe the nerve) to take more advantage of it than I did.

I’m the kind of golfer who tries never to let the game itself spoil a good walk, so I tend to play at inconspicuous times anyway, but even so, it was comforting to know that whenever I wanted to I could drive out to ‘Sconset and play a quick round, or hit a bucket of balls on the range, or even just sit on the clubhouse patio and order a cup of coffee and a sandwich and enjoy the view.

And now that I’m actually leaving the island, I’m really tempted to try sending in a routine change of address notice in the hope that maybe I can slip in under the radar and remain just as inconspicuous living off island as I have been up until now. But I probably won’t, because it wouldn’t be honest, and as we all know, honest golfers (assuming they really exist) never take a mulligan.

• Number Three: Wing Night at the Atlantic Cafe. Last Sunday I expressed my great thanks that you all somehow managed to resist the temptation to entertain one another with amusing gossip about my pathetic social life (or at least if you did, you did it so discretely that *I* never heard about it). But the sad fact of the matter is that Wing Night at the A.C. basically *was* my social life, since as a minister I didn’t really want to run the risk of embarrassing any of you by showing up at the Muse or the Chicken Box (at least without a chaperone).

My first winter on the island I went out practically every night: Mondays after basketball (and a shower!) it was a New York burger and a Cisco Ale at the Brotherhood; Tuesdays the Community Dinner at Saint Paul’s; Wings on Wednesdays; Thursdays the Steamship beef at the Taproom, and on Fridays I generally paid a visit to Charlie Sayles. But as time wore on, it was those fifteen cent buffalo wings that really won my heart. For all you “summer people” who aren’t quite sure what I’m talking about, it’s kind of hard to explain; you sorta have to be there. But I strongly suspect that the next time I come back to Nantucket to visit, it will be on a Wednesday night off-season.

• Number Two: the Bob Lehman trio. I’m a big fan of the Bob Lehman trio. I first started watching them perform down at Captain Tobey’s, where (as they reminded me just the other night) I startled them one evening by showing up in the company of a beautiful blonde woman half my age, whom they were relieved to discover later was actually my daughter Stephenie, who was here visiting me on the island. Since then I’ve seen them at numerous other venues, together as well as separately at White Elephant and the Summer House (where the one who isn’t performing is typically in the audience), and of course most recently in their Cabaret Show Sunday nights at the Methodist Church; and they never fail to entertain me. I just hope that I have been half as successful at inspiring them.

And of course, my most favorite moments are the times when they are performing here in church, either on Sunday mornings, or at our annual Fellowship Dinner, or last February’s Valentine’s Day variety show, where I enjoyed the once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated pleasure of having them both carry me through a duet of “Hey There” from my High School musical, “The Pajama Game.” I was honored to be asked to officiate, along with Ted, at their wedding last year; they’ve been my frequent companions at Wing Night (and my occasional chaperones at the Chicken Box and the Muse), and I’m grateful that neither of them have confided to me that they golf, or I would probably NEVER get off of this island. And among the many other mementos I will take with me to my next assignment in Carlisle are two of their CDs, which I will no doubt continue to listen to on Saturday nights as I prepare my sermons for my new congregation.

There are many other things that I will miss about Nantucket; some of them I mentioned last week’s sermon, and others in my last “Spiritual View” column in Thursday’s Inky. But if you haven’t already guessed by now, The Number One Thing I am going to miss about Nantucket is not the beach, or the boat basin, or the moors, but all of you. You have all been so good to me, in more ways than I can possibly begin to name or enumerate; and if I tried to list even half of them we would never make it to the party I know you have planned for me following the service.

I don’t think I’m being biased, but I honestly believe that we practice the best religion in the world. And one of the things that makes our faith so great is that we feel free to steal whatever we want, all the good stuff, from all the other religions, and also to reject those things which simply don’t add up. Because on some level we understand that the Truth is The Truth no matter where you find it, and that living “truthfully” truly matters, and is ultimately what gives life meaning.

There are critics of our faith who would say that Unitarian Universalism isn’t really a religion, because we are free to believe whatever we like. But this simply isn’t true. There are a lot of things I would *like* to believe. But as I’ve said before from this pulpit on more than one occasion, Unitarian Universalists are not free to believe whatever we like; we are *compelled* to believe what our reason, and our experience, tell us to be true. It takes a very special kind of person to practice this style of religion: to trust the authority of our own best judgment, fallible as it may be, and then to live our lives accordingly.

Because we know we’re not perfect. We all make mistakes; I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t do at least one stupid thing, and I’m sure the same is true for many of you. But we forgive ourselves, and we forgive one another, and we continue to try to do our best, because we know that we are accountable, not just to some law or rule, or even to God, but ultimately to our own integrity as human beings. And this is what gives our lives meaning.

And this is also, as I understand it, is the essence of the Gospel, as well as the essential truth of every other authentic religious faith. I knew I raised a few eyebrows a few weeks ago when I described myself as a Christian, but I hope you all understand that, in my view at least, there are Christians and there are Christians: there are those who attempt to use traditional religious language in order to impose their own repressive social and political agenda on others, and there are those who understand that the message of the Gospel is one of liberation, and not oppression, and who try to articulate this “good news” in contemporary terms that anyone can understand. And this is what makes us religious liberals -- we believe in liberation, in liberty, in freedom, and we believe that the best protector of that freedom is more of the same, and not less.

And I’m not talking here about the bizarre kind of freedom which justifies the strong doing unto others before they get a chance to do it unto you. I’m talking about a freedom which affirms the inherent worth and dignity of EVERY person, no matter what race, or gender, or sexual orientation they may happen to be; a freedom which respects and defends the rights of the weak and the helpless as much as those of the rich and powerful; and which understands that there is no justice without compassion, no peace without mutual respect and understanding, and that All Souls are precious in the eyes of our Creator.

These may sound like radical ideas to some, but they are True, at least as best as I’ve been given light to understand the truth, and I, for one, feel compelled to live them out as best I can. And that truly is just about everything that I know, at least about religion, in essence if not in detail. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to share it, and to live it, with all of you these past two years.

And now, before I sail on out of here, endeavoring (as those old Nantucket sailors used to say) to “keep ‘er East,” I have one last official duty to perform.....

[keys to Jennifer]


READING: “If Once You Have Slept On An Island” by Rachel Field

If once you have slept on an island
You'll never be quite the same;
You may look as you looked the day before
And go by the same old name,

You may bustle about in street and shop
You may sit at home and sew,
But you'll see blue water and wheeling gulls
Wherever your feet may go.

You may chat with the neighbors of this and that
And close to your fire keep,
But you'll hear ship whistle and lighthouse bell
And tides beat through your sleep.

Oh! you won't know why and you can't say how
Such a change upon you came,
But once you have slept on an island,
You'll never be quite the same.

The Lame Duck's Swan Song (verse one)

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday August 3rd, 2003

***
I’ve been thinking a lot this past week about my departed mentor, Rhys Williams. Rhys taught me a lot of things about the ministry, and he tried to teach me a lot of other things which, for some inexplicable reason, I simply had to learn for myself, the hard way, and only later was able to understand the wisdom of what he’d been trying to tell me all along. And, of course, like all great mentors, he taught me as much by example as he did by precept, and those lessons, over time, have turned out to be the most subtle, and the most valuable, of all.

Some of you may also recall that it was Rhys who gave me the single best piece of advice about preaching that I have ever received, which is: “Don’t try to tell them everything you know on the first Sunday.” And although he didn’t say so explicitly, I’ve discovered over the years that this advice works equally well for any given Sunday; and it takes on an added poignancy as one approaches one’s final Sunday with a particular congregation. It forces you to confront and admit the fact that you are NEVER going to be able to say it all; there will always be some things left unsaid, some things left undone, left over for someone else to say or do....

And that’s OK, because there’s really nothing that you can do about it anyway; and there will always be another Sunday, maybe in another pulpit, maybe with a different preacher, but one thing you can pretty much count on is that Sunday comes, every week, whether we want it to or not. You can pretty much take it to the bank....

I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about death this past week, and not merely because of Rhys’s death, nor even the feeling I sometimes get when I look around at all the things I still DO need to accomplish before I leave the island, that someone should just come put a gun to my head and put me out of my misery. But Bob Hope also passed away this past week, at age 100, so I’ve been thinking about the qualitative difference between living an entire century, and being struck down by cancer at age 74 (like Rhys was), or collapsing unexpectedly on Centre Street at age 46, like Jestina Laing did a week ago Friday, or having one’s life taken by violence in a foreign land in one’s 20’s, as too many of our young soldiers and Marines have in Iraq these past few months.

I know that we all have to die of something -- none of us gets to cheat the reaper forever -- but still one would hope to be able to postpone that moment as long as possible. Even if you’re convinced that you’re going to a better place (or at least a place less challenging, difficult, and painful), what’s the point of rushing into anything? Life should be lived fully and deliberately; neither squandered nor even sacrificed without need, but rather savored, celebrated, squeezed firmly until the last, full measure of its essence has been extracted, and then gently surrendered, graciously and with gratitude for this inexplicable and undeserved gift we have received from the Universe.

It doesn’t always happen that way of course (in fact, it very rarely happens EXACTLY that way at all), but at least it’s something to aim for; and maybe, just maybe, with a clear eye, a steady hand, and a little luck, you might get close to the target when your time comes.

Of course, death is just one of the many transitions we experience in living, a transition notable principally for its permanency as much as its inevitability; and even when it comes at the end of a long, full life, our natural reaction is one of loss, and grief. Yet death is only one of the many, more transitory losses we experience in living -- the loss of a job, a home, a relationship -- and we grieve these losses in much the same way that we grieve a death.

When I was in seminary, I was taught that there are basically five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- and the point is not to rush through the entire cycle as quickly as you can (which is a natural assumption for an impatient, goal-oriented student-cleric in his early twenties) but rather simply to recognize what you are feeling, and to be able to sit comfortably with that feeling and explore it until it resolves into the next.

And I was also taught that one of a minister’s most important jobs is to sit with people in their time of grief, and to reassure them, simply through one’s presence as much as anything one might say, that they are not alone in their grieving, and that everything they are feeling is real and meaningful and has been felt by other human beings from time immemorial. It doesn’t necessarily make their loss any easier. But it does, perhaps, make it slightly more bearable.

So when people ask me how I feel about leaving Nantucket, I have to be honest, and tell them I feel OK about it. Sure, I’ll miss the island; this has been a great job, and I’ve certainly felt right at home here, and I’ve made a great many friends (and not too many enemies, I hope), all of whom I will miss a great deal. But it’s not as if it’s going to kill me to leave Nantucket. I’ve missed every church I’ve ever served, and I still have friends in most of them; and besides, I’m much more likely to visit Nantucket again than to ever return to, say, Midland, Texas.

But from the moment I arrived here, we’ve all known that someday I would be leaving. At first we thought that I would be here for just a year. And then, after you asked me to stay on for a second, I know that there were some of you who hoped that I could remain indefinitely, as some sort of perpetual interim minister, particularly since it seemed at the time like you might otherwise be perpetually in search.

And I know that some of you were angry at the UUA for their “stupid rules,” and perhaps even hoped that the denomination would make an exception in my case, since this was such a special situation. But that’s all behind us now. And I just hope that whatever lingering sadness some of you may be feeling about my departure is more than made up for by the knowledge that you have found an excellent new minister to serve this congregation, and this time you are entitled to keep her for as long as you like.

About the only real regret I have about leaving the island is that I know how much more work there is to do here, and I feel a little guilty about leaving so much of it for Jennifer to do, rather than having simply taken care of things myself. But that’s always the way it is with interim ministry. My job was simply to help you prepare for the REAL journey that lies ahead. And I wanted to make certain that your new settled minister had the freedom to lead you in the direction that she felt you ought to go, rather than trying to follow a path that I had chosen for her.

Which was a little silly, really, since at the end of the day any minister worth their salt is going to try to lead you where YOU want to go. But before Jennifer can do that, you are going to have to point her in the right direction; you are going to have to take the time to get to know her, and to help her get to know all of you. Finally (and this is the tricky part) you are going to have to come to some sort of agreement about what your destination ought to be, and how best to proceed from here to there.

And this means learning to listen to one another, as well as merely expressing your opinions. Jennifer can help to facilitate this conversation; she can listen carefully to what you tell her, try to articulate publicly what she has heard in private, and define the consensus as it evolves, as well as draw upon her professional experience and education in order to help you anticipate and overcome problems, and ultimately to achieve the things that until now you have only dreamed of. But she can’t do it all by herself. She needs your help in order to help you get to where you want to be as a religious community.

This truly is a wonderful congregation. You have a rich heritage, and a highly-visible and respected identity within the larger Nantucket community. You have a devoted core membership, and a much larger constituency of individuals who share your core values and beliefs. You have a growing cadre of skilled and dedicated lay leaders, and perhaps most importantly, you really seem to like one another, despite (or perhaps because of) all of your eccentric, island idiosyncrasies.

You are passionate and committed, but also tolerant and forgiving; you are hard workers, and generous, but you also know how to let your hair down and have a good time; and you are always there to help one another out in times of need or crisis. So learn how to build upon those strengths, in partnership with your new minister, and you will be astonished by how much you can accomplish together.

I’m going to try to resist the temptation of talking too much about what I think I’ve accomplished during MY ministry here. This has not always been the easiest job on the planet, but I’ve tried awfully hard to make it LOOK easy, and with your help I think I’ve mostly succeeded. I’ve been proud to represent this congregation publicly as its minister, and I’ve tried not to embarrass you TOO badly with my outspoken political opinions.

I’ve especially appreciated the excellent relationship I’ve enjoyed with your minister emeritus, Ted Anderson, and I trust that he will continue to be as good a friend, colleague, pastor and mentor to your new settled minister as he has been to me. Mostly though, I’m just grateful for the many ways that you have embraced me and supported me through MY time of transition here on the island; how you’ve encouraged me in my efforts through your own attendance and participation, and particularly how you’ve given me both permission, and the space, simply to be myself, and to still be your minister.

You’ve patiently allowed me to regale you with game-by-game reports of my experiences as a youth basketball coach; you’ve resisted the temptation to entertain one another with amusing gossip about my pitiful social life (or at least you’ve done so so discretely that *I* haven’t heard about it); you’ve invited me into your homes; taken me sailing and golfing; allowed me to sing the solo from my High School musical, and walk around town dressed like the Skipper from “Gilligan’s Island,” without laughing; in a word, you’ve made it easy for me to be both happy and successful in my ministry here, and for that I can’t thank you enough.

And now, I am approaching my final week here on Nantucket. One more Sunday here in this pulpit, and then I’m off to the mainland to begin my new ministry in Carlisle. I still have a lot to do between now and then, and I am feeling a little anxious about getting it all done, but I also know that what must be done will be done, somehow, because that last Sunday is coming, whether I want it to or not, and when it arrives I have no choice but to be as ready as I can.

And then, ready or not, away I go...the same tide that washed me ashore here two years ago will carry me again “off-island” to another ministry in another community. And there will be new friends, and a new home, and a new set of challenges to be met to the best of my ability. But when I go, I will carry a little piece of Nantucket with me always, just as a little piece of me will always remain here on this “Faraway Island.” But I’ll have more to say about that next Sunday. I look forward to seeing you all again in church.

Are There Any Original Sins?

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House
on Nantucket, Sunday July 27, 2003

***
I thought I'd start out today by telling you all how I became a Unitarian Universalist Christian without even knowing it. One sunny afternoon in the Autumn of 1998, I came home from the golf course and found a message on my answering machine from my friend and colleague Suzanne Meyer, asking me whether I would be willing to serve as a member of the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship. Curious about how my name had happened to come up in this context, but knowing from past experience that no good deed goes unpunished, I called her back immediately and left a long message on her answering machine telling her how flattered I was, and then carefully spelling out all of the reasons why I would be a terrible board member and why she really ought to get someone else for the job. Not, of course, that it did me a speck of good. It's a lot easier to fool strangers than it is to fool your friends.

Now admittedly, I've been a member of the UU Christian Fellowship, on and off, for over 20 years. Their journal, appropriately named The Unitarian Universalist Christian, is one of the most intelligent publications our denomination has to offer, and since membership in the UUCF and a subscription to the journal are basically the same price, I hadn't really given it a second thought. Likewise, I'm enough of a historian to know that our roots are liberal Christian even if our denomination has branched out considerably from that now, but even so, it felt a little odd to be "outed" as a Christian by someone who has known me as long as Suzanne has, especially since I hadn't particularly thought of myself in those terms at all. In my own mind, I was (and remain) a "broad church" Unitarian Universalist: rational, yet mystical; a "Naturalistic Theist" strongly influenced by Transcendentalism, and deeply sympathetic to Buddhist thought; a pragmatic existentialist; an advocate of the Social Gospel, comfortable perhaps with the label "Christian Humanist," but at bottom basically what one might call "Zen Baptist" — just another iconoclastic, low church, highly independent, sudden enlightenment kind of guy.

If anything, the label "Christian" left kind of a sour taste in my mouth. It's a word that reactionary, right-wing neo-Fascist fundamentalist televangelists and their ilk have corrupted almost beyond redemption, and I certainly hate even to be mentioned in the same breath as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. And in many ways, that bothers me quite a bit, because the style of religious faith I hear expounded by these Televangelists really bears very little resemblance whatsoever to the intellectual understanding of Christianity that I've developed as a result of my own academic study of religion. There are lots of things I find objectionable about it (somebody really ought to pass a "truth in labeling" law) but I think the one thing I find most objectionable is the sanctimonious way they tend to deal with the notion of "sin."

As best I can tell, a "sinner" is anyone who doesn't conform to a rigid standard of "Biblical" morality, but this standard actually seems to move around quite a bit depending upon what part of the Bible one happens to be reading at the moment. Drinking, dancing, smoking, sexual activity of just about any kind, voting for the wrong candidate, talking back to your parents, taking the Lord's Name in vain, playing cards, eating meat on Fridays or candy during Lent — these are just a few of the things that I've heard since childhood described as "sins" — while lying, cheating, stealing, even killing, might sometimes be OK if it was actually "God's Will." About the only constant seemed to be that the sins of Christians are somehow forgiven, provided of course that you are the right kind of Christian, who has accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. In other words, just about anything you might actually want to do is wrong, but that's all right, because there are no consequences, provided simply that you believe whatever you are told to believe.

It was stuff like this that used to drive me nuts when I was younger. Still does, really. But the most confusing thing of all was something called "original sin." According to my childhood friends, because Adam and Eve had sinned in the Garden of Eden, all of their subsequent descendants (including me) were tainted with the guilt of that sin, and were going to be punished for it even though we hadn't actually done anything wrong ourselves. Now to my childish mind, this was clearly unfair. Moreover, as my friends started to go into a little more detail about this story, things became even more confusing. Adam and Eve's sin was that they had disobeyed God and eaten a piece of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now clearly, disobeying God was wrong. Even a child could see that. But how were Adam and Eve supposed to know it was wrong until after they had eaten the fruit and could tell the difference? To my way of thinking, knowing the difference between right and wrong was a good thing — and the serpent was the hero of the story, someone like Prometheus, who had stormed heaven and stolen fire from the Gods as a gift to human beings. I could understand why the Gods would be angry. But as human beings, shouldn't we feel gratitude rather than guilt? This equation of innocence with ignorance really bothered me. What kind of a God would punish two people just because they didn't know any better, and then punish all of their descendants as well just because now they do? It just wasn't fair. And God, if nothing else, should always be fair.

Of course, now that I'm older, I know a lot more about sin than I did when I was a child. I understand that life isn't always fair, and I also understand that Adam and Eve were not real people — that their story is a myth, a metaphorical allegory which contains within it a more subtle, spiritual truth about the nature of human existence. But I'm getting a little ahead of my story. By the time I entered Divinity School, I had pretty much rejected Christianity as a meaningful religious pathway for myself. I was much more attracted to the Buddhist perspective on the world. According to the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, the basic condition of human existence is one of Dukkha, which means "sorrow" or "suffering." This suffering is brought about by tanha or "thirst" — our attachment to the world, our craving for things that are impermanent, which "come into being and pass away." But fortunately for us, there is a way to escape this affliction and extinguish the craving, which involves giving up our constant striving to satisfy our appetites and following instead the "Noble Eight-Fold Path," — Right Thought, Right Understanding, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Concentration and Right Mindfulness — a combination of spiritual wisdom, mental discipline, and compassionate ethical conduct which leads to a state of enlightened liberation, in the world, but not of it.

Buddhism seemed like such a rational religious worldview compared to the rantings and ravings of born-again televangelists. And it had an added attraction in that there was absolutely nothing miraculous or supernatural about it: no virgin birth, no vicarious atonement, not even a belief in God, at least in any conventional sense. But the most amazing thing about the Buddhist religion was its ability to cast a different light on the more traditional Christian theology I was studying at Harvard. And this was particularly true when it came to the notion of sin.

In the Bible, there are several different words that are sometimes translated into English as "sin." There are words whose literal translation would be something like "trespass" or "transgression," another which means "disobedience," still others which mean "wicked," "evil," "dishonest," "unclean." But the most common word for sin, at least in the New Testament, is Hamartia which means, literally, to be off target or to make a mistake, to take the wrong path or be headed in the wrong direction. Its a word that appears outside of Scripture in contexts like missing the bull's-eye in a javelin-throwing contest, or making a procedural mistake when conducting a ritual, like letting the groom kiss the bride before he's given her the ring. But in the context of the New Testament, which reflects the usage of the Hebrew Bible, Hamartia refers to activities or behaviors which cause an individual to stray off of the path that leads to God — which is to say, to Truth or Ultimate Meaning. In a more general sense, it means being alienated from the creative power that gives life purpose, being "aimless," misdirected, ignorant, and confused. It means chasing after false goals which we think will make us happy because they temporarily satisfy our appetites, but which ultimately only leave us disappointed and hungry for more. Buddhism helped me to understand what it was these early Christians were really talking about, despite the way in which the Televangelists had twisted those words to their own ends.

If you look again at the story of Adam and Eve, you can see how these dynamics play out there within the drama of the myth. Because Adam and Eve were ignorant of the difference between Good and Evil, God had given them specific instructions intended to preserve their innocence. They were "naked and without shame," the Scripture tells us, but once they had given in to temptation and tasted of the forbidden fruit, what did they do next, now that they knew better? They covered up! They pointed fingers, and blamed everyone but themselves, they even tried to lie to God in order to avoid the consequences of their actions. There's nothing particularly original about that, is there? — except that if we take the story literally, they were the very first: the Original Sinners, who set the pattern of denial, shame, blaming and rationalization for all the rest of us.

When we look at the story in this light, we see that sin is behavior which is essentially self-destructive in and of itself. And it grows out of one of our innate shortcomings as human beings: our shortsighted tendency to look first at what we think will gratify our most immediate desires, but which actually often work in opposition to our more broad and enlightened interests. It's something that we're born with, but which we can eventually outgrow. A baby thinks only of it's own hunger when it cries, and is essentially incapable of understanding anything else. But where would we be as a species if we did not eventually learn how to be mature and loving parents, able to care for and nurture screaming, helpless infants? The point of the story is not that God is out to punish us for our shortcomings. The point is that God recognizes our shortcomings, and wants to guide us on a path that will allow us to transcend them. But to follow that path, we need to get focused on the target, rather than wasting a lot of energy trying to think up new excuses.

It might interest you to know that, historically-speaking, controversy about the true nature of sin stands at the center of both the Unitarian and the Universalists traditions. For the Unitarians, it was the rejection of John Calvin's notions of Predestination and the "Total Depravity" of humankind in favor of a belief in the necessity of free will for human Moral Agency, along with the conviction that human beings were born with the potential for either good or evil, and that it was the role of religion to guide them toward the good. And Universalism takes its name from the belief that ultimately All Souls will be reconciled to God, who expresses omnipotence not by the power to condemn the wicked to eternal damnation, but rather by the ability to bring them to the truth.

I suppose this may have been what caused my friend Suzanne Meyer to nominate me for the Board of the UU Christian Fellowship in the first place. Perhaps it was because she knew that I wouldn't be ashamed to preach the Gospel, at least according to my understanding of it, despite my many shortcomings as both a minister and a human being. Or maybe it was simply because she knew that I owned a Bible, and that I occasionally even opened it. What worries me is the thought that between two part-time pulpits, a half-time teaching assistantship, and my efforts to write a half-way decent doctoral dissertation, she merely figured that I didn't have enough to do already, and wanted to make certain that I didn't stray too far from the path of my vocation.

Vocation is a funny concept. It comes from the Latin word for "calling" — it's not simply the means by which we make our living, but the purpose which gives meaning to our lives. And in my particular line of work, it demands a peculiar combination of arrogance and humility: the arrogance, if you will, to claim to speak the Word of God; and the humility to recognize one's own fundamental limitations and shortcomings when it comes to meeting that challenge. I guess this is why I still feel so reluctant even to think of myself as a "Christian," even though it doesn't bother me so much now to hear others speak of me in those terms. Because whatever I am, the substance of it ought to be apparent from the way I try to live my life, regardless of what people choose to call it.

And the same, of course, is true for all of you as well. In an 1866 letter to his wife Henrietta, the Unitarian minister Thomas Lamb Eliot observed "Christians think me an infidel, while infidels and spiritualists find me too Christian." And it seems to me that this is exactly where we ought to be, recognizing at the same time that whatever "Truth" may stand at the center of Christian faith would be just as true by any other name, true even if Jesus of Nazareth had never lived, and is no doubt contained as well, in some form or another, in all of the authentic religious traditions of the World.

And what is this Truth? Well, that's what we come here every week to talk about, isn't it? But it probably couldn't hurt, from time to time, to begin where Jesus began, with his first public words after returning from his fasting in the Wilderness. You'll find it in the Gospel of Mark, chapter one, verse fifteen: "The Time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand, Repent, and believe in the Gospel." Or to paraphrase this in a slightly different idiom: "Open your eyes and look around you, the benevolent power that created everything you see is still in charge this very moment. So get your mind around this fact, and get yourself headed in the right direction, and trust this Good News that I'm about to give you: no matter how big a screw-up you may be, there is still a place for you at the table if only you can learn this one, simple lesson — stop worrying so much about "getting your share," and start worrying instead about how best to share what you already have with others.

It's All Greek to Me

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House
on Nantucket Island, Sunday June 20, 2003

***
I suspected when I was nineteen that I didn't have what it takes to be a good physician. But my intuition wasn't confirmed for another five years, when I enrolled in Greek Three through the Classics Department at Harvard University. Lewis Thomas would have been pleased with the Divinity School curriculum. We had our choice of five "languages of theological scholarship:" theological German, theological French, Latin, Hebrew, or Greek. It was a tough decision. My mother and my aunt, proud of their Jewish heritage, encouraged me to try Hebrew. But I am suspicious of languages without vowels. French or German might have proven the least difficult alternatives. But I felt little desire to spend a year puzzling through the confusing theologies of Jean Calvin or Martin Luther just to prove to an examiner that I could do it. Latin held a strong appeal for me. But Latin's charms seemed pale when compared to the rich and manifold possibilities of Greek: the language, not only of the New Testament, but of Plato and Aristotle, Euripides, Sophocles, Heroditus, Marcus Aurelius.... And when I learned that even educated Romans had prefered Greek to their native tongue, my mind was made up.

My flirtation with Greek began innocently enough with Greek One: "Elementary Koine." I suppose I should explain that although there are dozens of dialects of Greek, only three, other than modern, are ordinarily taught today: Homeric, the dialect of the Iliad and the Oddessy; Classical Attic, the dialect spoken in Athens during the Golden Age of Pericles, the language of Plato and Socrates; and finally Koine or "common" Greek, a derivative of Attic which was spread throughout the Mediterranean world by Alexander the Great, and which is the dialect of the New Testament. We began by learning the Alphabet -- the real Alphabet -- which until that time I had known only from the front doors of fraternities and sororities, and by spring were slowly and cautiously making our way through the Euangelion Kata Markon, the "Good News According to Mark." I was far from being the best student in the class, but I did manage to struggle along at a respectable "B" pace.

That summer I registered for an intensive seminar in Intermediate Koine, and was nearly handed my head on a platter. After a full day's work as a research assistant at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where I inventoried 17th century Boston Church records, I would repair to the Mug & Muffin restaurant in Harvard Square, consume large quantities of coffee, and prepare for my dreaded evening rendezvous with the Apostolic Fathers. We had been promised a year's worth of Greek in a period of eight weeks. I just squeaked through with a "Gentleman's C" -- in those days they still existed at Harvard -- but only after several intense, all-night review sessions with a doctoral student in New Testament studies.

At this point in my career as a classical scholar, wisdom and common sense would have dictated that I repeat Greek Two at a more leisurely pace, mastering at my own speed the subtleties of the Optative mood and the Genitive Absolute which had raced past me during those humid summer months in Cambridge. But I was impatient for Plato, and so it came to pass that I enrolled in Greek Three.

At mid-terms my professor told me not to worry -- he was only concerned with how much we knew at the end of the semester. When classes let out in December, I knew that I had a month in which to master the eloquence of Socrates' Defense of his life before the Athenian jury. My vocabulary cards now numbered in the thousands. The slim green volume from the Loeb Classical Library was my constant companion; I would even read it on the subway, covering the English translation with my hand and then checking my own against it. With each passing day my anxiety increased. I discovered the joys and merits of antacid tablets. I re-read my dog-eared copy of John Jay Osborne's wonderful novel The Paper Chase (especially the part where Hart and Ford lock themselves in a hotel room for a week studying for their final exams), and of course I prayed -- prayed for a miracle. On the morning of the exam I trudged through the snow in Harvard Yard, my eyes heavy with lack of sleep, the brisk West wind slapping me awake. I found a seat in the large examination room, and waited for the proctors to distribute the exams. My classmates joked nervously around me. When the test arrived I glanced at the first page, and then quickly thumbed through all eight pages to make certain I was not mistaken. It took me about five minutes to realize that I had actually failed Greek Three.

This was not my first experience with failure, nor has it been my last. When I was sixteen I somehow managed to fail my driver's license test three times. In two years of High School Junior Varsity football my team boasted a combined record of 0-12-2; let me tell you, those two ties felt like great moral victories for us. I have been turned down for jobs that I had wanted with all my heart; I have felt promising relationships go sour, and slip through my fingers.

But failing Greek was a “liminal” experience for me. When I realized I had finally failed Greek Three, the emotion was not one of disappointment, but of relief. Although it may sound trite, it was as though a tremendous weight had been lifted from my head, and for the first time in months, I could relax.

Unfortunately, there is a rule at Harvard University that anyone who shows up for an exam must remain in the room for an hour and a half before leaving. I spent that time translating as much of the exam as I was able, in the cavalier hope that perhaps somewhere in my subconscious mind existed just enough Greek to be worthy of a "D." There didn't. Ninety minutes passed very quickly; I turned in my test, and walked home a free human being. My career as a classical scholar was over.

Perhaps you've heard it said that the fear of a thing is often worse than the thing itself. This was certainly true of my experience with Greek. In fact, there were several things I learned from my study of Greek that were not part of the formal curriculum, but which have served me far better over the years than anything that was.

The first thing I learned was the real meaning of the word hubris. Nowadays we tend to associate the notion of hubris with the idea of misplaced pride; but this is only part of the concept. Hubris means insolence, outrage, wanton recklessness and disrespect; and it was a criminal offense in ancient Athens, roughly equivalent to today's "lewd and lascivious conduct." But it was also a philosophical concept, which refered to the ontological and metaphysical state of being "too big for one's britches." It is good to be proud of things that are important. Pride makes for quality, excellence, and virtue, (all things which the Greeks admired). But it was hubris for me to enroll in Greek Three after my narrow escape from the clutches of Greek Two. Misplaced pride had something to do with it: I was infatuated with the idea of knowing Socrates in his own tongue, or doing free-wheeling, off-the-cuff exegesis of the Greek New Testament at parties; I was seduced by the idea of being a classical scholar. But mostly it was my insolent disregard for my own limitations which led me in over my head, and then swept me out to sea.

And then I learned to differentiate between the Alpha and the Omega. Herodotus once wrote that the bitterest sorrow a human being can know is to aspire to do much, and to accomplish nothing. But it seems to me even a greater tragedy to aspire to do much, to achieve it, and then to discover that it was not worth doing. And there are other variations on this theme we can explore. What about the person who aspires to do nothing, who simply goes along with the crowd, and then discovers they have been the unwitting pawn in someone else's cruel or evil aspiration? Or the person who is denied the opportunity to even develop their aspirations, on account of some arbitrary restriction or capricious prejudice? Or even the person who naively aspires to do more than they are able, and then is destroyed in the futile effort to achieve it?

American folklore is full of stories about ambitious young men, and more recently, young women, who have risen from rags to riches through force of will and boundless energy, who work smarter and harder, who refuse to quit or accept failure, who are "winners" rather than "losers." But this is because America is what one might think of as an "Alpha" culture, constantly standing at the threshold of some brave new enterprise, looking to the future with the confident expectation that we will overcome whatever obstacles stand in our way. The future is plastic; we think nothing of driving past a vacant lot we haven't seen in, say, six months, and discovering that an entire shopping center has sprung up while we've been busy with other things.

But Classical Antiquity was, for the most part, what one might think of as an "Omega" culture, which saw itself not as standing at the apex of history, but rather in its waning moments. The Greek countryside was cluttered with ancient shrines and temples whose origins were lost in mythological obscurity -- no one knew who had built them, yet they had endured while their creators had passed away. The limits of the flesh were not a barrier to be transcended by Force of Will; rather, "the body was a tomb" which imprisoned a fallen spirit.

Socrates faced his death with the strong conviction and sense of confidence that what he was doing was philosophically correct; and centuries later, his example became an important reference for Christians attempting to explain the significance of the crucifixion to a Greek-thinking world. It was no great miracle that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God; was not Hercules the son of Zeus? It was no big deal that he had walked on water and cast out demons; hundreds of others had claimed to do the same. A good exorcist would even make the demons do tricks for the audience first. And did not Osiris rise annually from the dead?

What impressed the Greeks and Romans about Christianity was its compassion, and the fact that Jesus, like Socrates, had gone voluntarily to a painful execution as a common criminal rather than compromise the integrity of his beliefs. Most of the subtlety of Christian theology comes from Greek (the language of philosophy, the “love of wisdom”); and most of the problems from attempting to translate into Latin, (a language of lawyers and soldiers and engineers). Sin, for example, is not disobedience, but rather hamartano -- to "miss the target," to be "aimless" or “misdirected.” Grace is not a reward, but charis -- charity, a freely given gift. To repent is not to feel guilty, it is metanoia -- to "transform one's mind" (just as metamorphosis is to transform one’s shape). And faith -- pistis -- is not belief, but trust, a confidence in the validity of living one's life according to an unseen higher principle.

I did not need to study Greek in order to learn these things -- I probably could have discovered them in any halfway decent concordance. I could have found out for myself that "the Kingdom of God" is not a place, but rather refers to "the reign of the divine," and exists "among us." It might have been a little more difficult, perhaps, to realize that "Eternal Life" need not necessarily refer to a life-span which lasts forever, but might just as accurately describe a life-style which is grounded in a profound sense of the ultimate. But what I ultimately took away from my study of Greek was the sense that these were Omega values, and that one must "transform one's mind" in order to make sense of them in an Alpha-based, achievement oriented world. By any standard of the Alpha world, I was a failure, a loser. I was about as far away from the A-team as one can possibly get. But by the standards of the Omega world, I had freed my spirit from the prison of the flesh, had done my time in the belly of the fish, and had been spit forth upon the sand a changed human being, purged of the arrogant pride which had momentarily led me astray.

You have heard it told how I finished my study of Greek by failing the final examination for Greek Three in January of 1981. But what I have yet to mention is that the study of Greek was not quite finished with me. You see, I still had to sit before an examiner from the Divinity school and demonstrate a satisfactory reading knowledge of an approved language of theological scholarship. And so it came to pass that after a reasonable interval of recuperation, I returned to my flash cards and my Greek New Testament, and diligently reviewed the noun declensions and verb paradigms that had kicked me in the head for the last year and a half. It was not easy to get back up on the horse again. But here I am, all matriculated and ordained, so you can guess the final outcome. And every once in awhile I will doodle the Greek alphabet while talking on the telephone or attending a tedious meeting, and reflect back upon who dragged whom around the walls of what. Or I will recall with some irony that I can justly claim to have forgotten more Greek than most folks would ever care to know. And every now and again I will recall an aphorism still lingering in memory from my painful struggle for "reading knowledge."

Things like:

μακαριοι οι πεινωντεs και διψωντεs την δικαιοσυνην οτι αυτοι χορτασθσονται

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be made full."

Or....

ο δε ανεξεταστοs βιοs ου βιωτοs ανθρωπω

"For the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being."

Or even:

και γνωσεσθε την αλνθειαν και η αληθεια ελευθερωσει υμαs

"And you will know the truth, and the truth will free you."

Strange sounding words from a time long, long ago. But lessons, nonetheless, that we can understand in any language.

One of God's Clumsy Innocents Who Found His Way Among the Angels

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday July 13, 2003

***
I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought this past week about what I wanted to say to all of you in my last few appearances in this pulpit. Two years ago I arrived on Nantucket with approximately a twenty-year supply of old sermons, and in the time I’ve been here I’ve drawn liberally upon that resource.

There are a couple reasons for this.

First, I don’t really have that many good ideas, so I like to make the most of those I do have; but beyond this, one of the most frustrating things about being a preacher is that you rarely get a chance to write a second draft, yet, as every writer knows, one’s best writing rarely comes in a sudden flash of inspiration, but rather typically results from the more difficult work of editing and rewriting.

So I’ve taken full advantage of the opportunity you have afforded me; but now, as I approach the end of my tenure here, I find myself in the ackward situation of having more sermons than Sundays. So today I’ve simply picked out one of my personal favorites. It’s probably not the best sermon I’ve ever written in my life, but it’s one I like a lot, and I hope you will too.

Folks frequently want to know how I do come up with ideas for my sermons (and particularly sermons like this one, on "the world's worst poet"), and usually I'm at something of a loss to tell them. I mean, who can say for sure where these things really come from? But this morning I can tell you precisely how and when the Muse whispered to me in a mysterious way. It was Sunday, July 5th, 1987; and I was sitting out by the swimming pool at the parsonage at my first church in Midland, Texas (whatever else you may think of Texas, they certainly know how to treat their ministers!) and I was reading (of all things) the local Hearst newspaper, the Midland Reporter-Telegram.

And I noticed an article, a feature off the Associated Press wire, which turned out to be my introduction to the life and work of William Topaz McGonagall — the man reputed to be the world's worst poet. I knew right away that I had to preach a sermon about this man. There was something about his life which cried out to be expressed — a certain courage and nobility of spirit deserving of our attention.

One phrase in particular, a comment by a Scottish literary critic named James Cameron, captured my imagination. He described McGonagall as "one of God's clumsy innocents, who found his way among the angels." I read that phrase and I thought to myself "What better epitaph could any of us ask? What commentary speaks more profoundly to the universal human condition?"

Unfortunately, Midland Texas was not exactly overflowing with easily accessible McGonagallia. It was not until some time later, when I happened to be in Boston and had the opportunity to stop by the Weidner Library at Harvard University that I was able to obtain the materials I was looking for: the complete works of William McGonagall, anthologized in three volumes: *Poetic Gems,* *More Poetic Gems,* and *Last Poetic Gems.*

Moreover, I was overjoyed to discover that, as an alumnus, I was able to check them out and bring them back to Texas with me. (Frankly, you just don't find these kinds of scholarly resources at other seminaries like Meadville or Starr King!) I kept the books out well past their due date (fortunately, no one at Harvard was clamoring for their quick return); and by the time I was finished with them, not only could I honestly claim to be the foremost authority on this subject in all of West Texas, but I could also state with some confidence that McGonagall's reputation as the world's worst poet is both well deserved, and not likely to be challenged in the foreseeable future.

Yet it is more than the quality of one's poetry that makes a poet. William McGonagall had poetry in his soul, a poetry which burst forth with an authentic, Wordsworthian "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling," despite his undeniable lack of skill or talent.

He was born in Edinburgh, in either 1825 or 1830 — We don't really know for sure, and he himself reports both dates in different places; but as a child moved with his family to the city of Dundee, located in the east of Scotland on the Firth of Tay, where his father was employed as a handloom operator in a Jute-weaving mill: a trade which McGonagall himself also practiced until improved machinery made his vocation obsolete.

It is reported that he had only 18 months of formal education, yet he was literate enough to be familiar with Shakespeare, and even performed for a time as a Shakespearian actor, where his powerful voice and striking appearance, as well as his obvious enthusiasm for his roles, made him quite popular with the rowdy and boisterous Dundonian audiences. It was not until he was in his forties that McGonagall turned to composing and reciting his own "poetic gems." He describes that moment in one of his brief autobiographies:

**I remember how I felt when I received the spirit of poetry. It was the year of 1877, and in the month of June, when trees and flowers were in full bloom. Well, it being the holiday week in Dundee, I was sitting in my back room in Paton's Lane, Dundee, lamenting to myself because I couldn't get to the Highlands on holiday to see the beautiful scenery, when all of a sudden my body got inflamed, and instantly I was seized with a strong desire to write poetry, so strong, in fact, that in imagination I thought I heard a voice crying in my ears — "WRITE! WRITE!" I wondered what could be the matter with me, and I began to walk backwards and forwards in a great fit of excitement, saying to myself — "I know nothing about poetry." But still the voice kept ringing in my ears — "Write, write," until at last, being overcome with a desire to write poetry, I found paper, pen, and ink, and in a state of frenzy, sat me down to think what would be my first subject for a poem....**

The result was "An Address to the Rev. George Gilfillan," which was published anonymously in the Dundee Weekly News. All told, McGonagall would eventually compose some 576 poems during his lifetime: poems which were uniformly, as James Cameron notes, "of a magical dreadfulness that reached the sublime." McGonagall's early reputation was established by his poem "Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay," which some believe foretold the Tay Railway bridge disaster of 1879, in which 90 lives were lost after the poorly constructed bridge collapsed during a violent storm. The verse in question reads:

**Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay!
I hope that God will protect all passengers
By night and by day,
And that no accident will befall them while crossing
The Bridge of the Silvery Tay,
For that would be most awful to be seen
Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green.**

In 1881 he added the words "By Appointment to Her Majesty" to his calling card: "William McGonagall, Poet and Tragedian" after receiving the following letter from Queen Victoria's personal secretary:

**General Sir Henry F. Ponsonby has received the Queen's commands to thank Mr. McGonagall for sending the verses which were contained in his letter of the 10th instant, but to express Her Majesty's regret that they must be returned, as it is an invariable rule that offerings of this nature not be received by the Queen.**

McGonagall typically published his verses as broadsides, single sheets containing his latest composition, which were often printed gratis by a local publishing house and then sold by the poet himself for a penny apiece to passers by. Needless to say, it was not a particularly profitable enterprise. Slightly more lucrative were his performances in Public Houses — ironic, since McGonagall himself was a teetotaler; but the barmen soon discovered that the presence of "The Great McGonagall" was sure to draw a thirsty crowd. A typical performance is described in a biography by David Phillips, which draws upon a contemporary newspaper account:

**The hall was filled by a large audience, the majority of whom were young men and lads, all evidently in a thorough mood for fun....

Then came the recitations, received in a manner "most uproarious, altogether past description. Every now and then, and particularly when the performer was uttering some choice bit and giving it the 'sweetness long drawn out the audience would burst out with the chorus of “John Brown's Body” in a manner that completely 'shut up' the gifted artiste. Notwithstanding all the irreverence on the part of the audience, the bard remained perfectly calm, and seemingly not in the least disturbed by the riotous proceedings around him; and whenever the noise ceased he resumed where he had left off with the greatest nonchalance....

A tremendous crowd thronged the street, almost all of whom seemed to be in a very frenzy of amusement. Mr McGonagall had ultimately, owing to the great crowd, to take shelter in a shop nearby....The general impression of the audience seemed to be that they never in their lives were so thoroughly entertained as they were by the celebrated McGonagall.**

Marcus Eliason, the Associated Press writer whose article first introduced me to McGonagall, offers this summary of his career:

**...Dundee, a hard-drinking, ruffianish sort of town, turned McGonagall-baiting into a sport.

He was pelted with peas, pies, and rotten hams, shouted down by hecklers, mocked by street urchins as "Mad McGonagall," and hounded by magistrates for causing the unruliness.

A barman, incensed at McGonagall for having the nerve to recite teetotaling propaganda in his pub, stuffed a wet towel in his mouth.

Soon he was refusing to perform unless a clergyman sat on the stage....

He would recite his poem about the Battle of Bannockburn brandishing a sword with such exuberance that the front-rows had to duck....

In 1887, fed up with these riotous spectacles, Dundee's elders bought McGonagall a one-way ticket to New York....**

It's through incidents such as these that McGonagall's true character is revealed. There are thousands upon thousands of bad poets in the world, poets who aspire perhaps to achievements beyond their gifts, and who fail ingloriously, lapse into obscurity. What separates McGonagall from all the rest is his unflagging sincerity and dogged persistence, a tenacious optimism which endures beyond all sense or reason. The Times of London has called McGonagall "a real genius, for he is the only memorable truly bad poet in our language." His anthologies have sold over half a million copies, well outstripping sales of the work of his far more talented Scottish contemporary, the (Unitarian) Robert Burns. McGonagall's poetry radiates an enthusiastic reverence and passion for life which transcends the technical flaws of the verse itself — the clumsy meter and the awkward rhyme — to express a vitality somehow compelling despite its obvious artistic limitations.

McGonagall returned to Dundee from New York, and for a time it was business as usual. He hit upon an ingenious scheme for supplementing his income — printing dittys such as this one on the back of his broadsheets, in exchange for a small sum:

**You can use it with great pleasure and ease
Without wasting any elbow grease;
And when washing the most dirty clothes
The sweat won't be dripping from your nose....
And I tell you once again without any joke
There's no soap can surpass Sunlight soap....**

The harassment continued however, while failing health and constant poverty likewise took their toll. In December of 1892 he composed this poem in anticipation of the coming year:

**Welcome! thrice welcome! to the year 1893,
For it is the year I intend to leave Dundee,
Owing to the treatment I receive,
Which does my heart sadly grieve.
Every morning when I go out
The ignorant rabble they do shout
'There goes Mad McGonagall'
In derisive shouts as loud as they can bawl,
And lifts stones and snowballs, throws them at me;
And such actions are shameful to be heard in the city of Dundee.
And I'm ashamed, kind Christians, to confess
That from the Magistrates I can get no redress.
Therefore I have made up my mind in the year of 1893
To leave the ancient City of Dundee,
Because the citizens and me cannot agree.
The reason why? -- because they disrespect me,
Which makes me feel rather discontent.
Therefore to leave them I am bent;
And I will make my arrangements without delay,
And leave Dundee some early day.**

The poem drew this editorial response from the newspaper the Scottish Leader:

**Dundee is threatened with a very serious calamity, to wit, the departure from its gates of the Poet McGonagall.

McGonagall is a very good poet for Dundee, with limitations — such things as a lack of ideas, a trivial shakiness about spelling, and a want of familiarity with syntax, for which doubtless his parents are more to blame than himself. He is never at a loss for a rhyme, and when he discovers the full value of the circumstance that Dundee rhymes with 1893, he may be induced to reconsider his decision and stay for yet a year....**

Sure enough, it was not until 1894 that McGonagall and his wife moved to the city of Perth, where he continued to compose and to perform his poetry until his death in 1902. He lies buried there now in an unmarked, pauper's grave; his only memorials the poetry itself, and a modest plaque on a park bench near the statue of Robbie Burns in downtown Dundee. Throughout his life, William McGonagall was the object of ridicule and derision, the butt of cruel hoaxes and practical jokes. Yet the last laugh, it seems, belongs to him, for through no other merit than perseverance he has earned himself a slice of immortality. He is truly "one of God's clumsy innocents who found his way among the angels" — a hope and inspiration for all of us whose gifts and talents likewise fall somewhat short of the mark, but who notwithstanding continue to aspire to high ambitions....

***
AN ADDRESS TO THE REV. GEORGE GILFILLAN

All hail to the Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee,
He is the greatest preacher I did ever hear or see.
He is a man of genius bright,
And in him his congregation does delight,
Because they find him to be honest and plain,
Affable in temper, and seldom known to complain.
He preaches in a plain straightforward way,
The people flock to hear him night and day,
And hundreds from the doors are often turn'd away,
Because he is the greatest preacher of the present day.
He has written the life of Sir Walter Scott,
And while he lives he will never be forgot,
Nor when he is dead,
Because by his admirers it will be often read;
And fill their minds with wonder and delight,
And wile away the tedious hours on a cold winter night.
He has also written about the Bards of the Bible,
Which occupied nearly three years in which he was not idle,
Because when he sits down to write he does it with might and main,
And to get an interview with him it would be almost vain,
And in that he is always right,
For the Bible tells us whatever your hands findeth to do,
Do it with all your might.
Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee, I must conclude my muse,
And to write in praise of thee my pen does not refuse,
Nor does it give me pain to tell the world fearlessly, that when
You are dead they shall not look upon your like again.


AN ADDRESS TO SHAKESPEARE

Immortal! William Shakespeare, there's none can you excel,
You have drawn out your characters remarkably well,
Which is delightful for to see enacted upon the stage—
For instance, the love-sick Romeo, or Othello, in a rage;
His writing are a treasure, which the world cannot repay,
He was the greatest poet of the past or of the present day—
Also the greatest dramatist, and is worthy of the name,
I'm afraid the world shall never look upon his like again.
His tragedy of Hamlet is moral and sublime,
And for purity of language, nothing can be more fine—
For instance, to hear the fair Ophelia making her moan,
At her father grave, sad and alone....
In his beautiful play, "As You Like It," one passage is very fine,
Just for instance in the forest of Arden, the language is sublime,
Where Orlando speaks of his Rosalind, most lovely and divine,
And no other poet I am sure has written anything more fine;
His language is spoken in the Church and by the Advocate at the bar,
Here and there and everywhere throughout the world afar;
His writings abound with gospel truths, moral and sublime,
And I'm sure in my opinion they are surpassing fine;
In his beautiful tragedy of Othello, one passage is very fine,
Just for instance where Cassio loses his lieutenancy
...By drinking too much wine;
And in grief he exclaims, "Oh! That men should put an
Enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains."
In his great tragedy of Richard the III, one passage is very fine
Where the Duchess of York invokes the aid of the Divine
For to protect her innocent babes from the murderer's uplifted hand,
And smite him powerless, and save her babes, I'm sure 'tis really grand.
Immortal! Bard of Avon, your writings are divine,
And will live in the memories of your admirers until the end of time;
Your plays are read in family circles with wonder and delight,
While seated around the fireside on a cold winter night.

...Of Like Passions With You

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House
on Nantucket Island, Sunday June 8, 2003

READING: Acts 14: 8-18

***
In many ways, I feel like I’ve been looking forward to this Sunday for almost two years now. Since the moment I arrived here on Nantucket, some twenty-two months ago, to serve as your interim minister, all of my efforts have essentially been focused on one overarching objective: helping you to prepare for the day when you would be ready to call your next settled minister. And now, one week from today, your search committee’s chosen candidate, Jennifer Brooks, will be here in this pulpit to preach to you for the first time, and I, for one, am just thrilled about it. Not only does it mean that we can ALL pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, it also means that I can look forward now to four straight weeks in a row out of the pulpit, as well as moving on to my own new, settled ministry in Carlisle this August confident in the knowledge that you will be in good hands, and ready to begin writing yet another illustrious chapter in the 195-year history of this congregation.

Our form of church governance, or “polity,” is based on 355-year-old document known as the Cambridge Platform, or more accurately “A Platform of Church Discipline gathered out of the Word of God and agreed upon by the Elders and Messengers of the Churches assembled in the Synod at Cambridge in New England.” Obviously, we’ve made a few modifications over the years (I like to think of them as “upgrades”), but the basic principles are still intact. And one of the fundamental features of the Platform is the authority of local congregations to call and ordain their own clergy. This may not seem like such a big deal to you, since in this day and age most congregations have some say at least , either directly or indirectly, about who their ministers will be. But there’s a lot more to it than simply being able to choose your own pastor.

The authors of the Cambridge Platform believed that the model of church government which they had articulated was grounded in the authority of Scripture. And they believed that Scripture taught that the church was a community of the faithful -- whom they called “saints” -- who had been gathered together under a covenant of mutual accountability in order to worship God and to do God’s work in the world. The authority of a congregation to elect its own leaders -- not just Pastors and Teachers, but also Elders and Deacons -- was a right and a power, a “prerogative or privilege which the church exercises...for its own preservation & subsist[en]ce.” It was essential to its very existence, a right AND a responsibility ordained by God in order to empower the church in its ability to fulfill its mission and purpose as the people of God.

I want to say just a little bit more about this, not only because it’s important, but also because it’s interesting. Ministers were understood to be “Ambassador[s] for Christ,” and were charged with the responsibility “to preach and teach the pure doctrine of the Divine Word, to administer the Holy Sacraments, according to the institution and ordinance of Christ as revealed in Scripture, to instruct the young in the way of salvation, to counsel the inquiring, to strengthen the weak, to seek the lost and reclaim the erring, to comfort the sorrowing, to care for the needy, to visit the sick, to minister to the dying, and ever to pray for the welfare of all under th[eir] care.”

Nowadays we tend to simplify this list a little; often times at ordinations and installation services ministers will be charged “to preach the truth in love,” and occasionally one will also hear talk of “comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable.” But you can see, the job description really hasn’t changed that much in the last three and a half centuries. And at its center is the covenantal relationship between the pastor and the people. Having exercised their God-given prerogative of selecting their own minister, the people were then expected to “sit under” that person’s ministry, and to support their minister -- spiritually, physically, emotionally, and financially -- in the neverending effort to do God’s work, both in the church and in the world, on their behalf.

Since in those days a minister’s tenure, like that of a Supreme Court justice, was generally understood to be for life (and without possibility of parole, or time off for good behavior), obviously the selection of a minister was a very important decision. And local congregations were thus strongly encouraged to seek the assistance of other, neighboring churches in evaluating the worthiness of prospective candidates for the ministry. Perhaps the most important resource in this regard were people who were already serving in the profession themselves. There were basically three criteria which were considered crucial. The first was education (which would have meant the ability to read theology and the Bible in their original languages: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew); the second was personal piety; and the third moral character.

Typically, potential ministers who appeared to possess the latter two qualifications would be identified by their own ministers when they were still quite young, and then be “fitted for Harvard” (or Yale or Princeton) by being taken aside and tutored in the ancient languages until they achieved a proficiency sufficient to pass the entrance exam. Upon completion of their college educations, they would then ordinarily apprentice themselves to yet another minister who would supervise their theological reading and instruct them in the ways of the profession. When it was felt they were ready, they would next appear in front of their local ministerial association, who would examine them for knowledge, piety, and character, and if they were found worthy, grant them a “certificate of approbation” recommending them as qualified for the pastoral office.

The final step remained in the hands of the local congregations, who would invite these fledgling ministers to come preach for them, in much the same way that you will be hearing Jennifer in the next two weeks. If the “candidate” proved acceptable, the congregation would then vote to “call” them as their minister, and offer them a “settlement” -- generally a house and land, a cash salary, so many cords of firewood cut and stacked, grazing rights on the common, and whatever other inducements they could come up with in order to convince the minister to come and make a home in the community. The people provided for their pastor’s material needs, so that the pastor could provide for their spiritual needs. And because the minister was expected to be a leader in the community, is was strongly felt (at least by the ministers) that their social position, like the position of their pulpits, should be “slightly elevated” above the norm.

You may well be wondering how I just so happen to know all this. When I was researching my doctoral dissertation, I had the opportunity to read dozens of 18th and 19th century ordinations sermons, in which these themes are hammered away at over and over and over again. A service of ordination is really a rather unique event, when you stop to think about it. Not only does the nature of the occasion give ministers carte blanc to talk about their profession to the laity, it is also one of the few opportunities ministers have to speak and listen to one another in a formal, organized way about what we do for a living, and what it means to us.

I think my favorite of all the ordinations sermons I looked at during my research was one preached by the Reverend Ebenezer Gay on May 12th, 1725, at the ordination of Joseph Green as the Pastor of a newly-gathered church in the East Part of the town of Barnstable. Ebenezer Gay graduated from Harvard in 1714, at the age of 19, and served as the minister of the Old Ship Church in Hingham from 1717 until his death in 1787, a period of nearly seventy years. He started his career as an orthodox Puritan, and ended it a full-blown Unitarian, one of the first in North America. Yet even early in his career, his thought betrays a direction which hints at his later destination. Gay took as his text that day a verse from the book of Acts, και ημειs ομοιιπατηειs εσμεν υμιν ανθροποι -- “we also are human beings [anthropoi] of like passions [homoiopatheis] with you” -- which he used in order to illustrate the doctrine that it is not the “exalted” quality of the ministry that gives it its effectiveness, but rather the fact that ministers are human beings just like us, and who struggle with the same issues and problems that we do, which makes their example so effective.

“If GOD should send his Holy Angels...to Preach unto us; yet the Lustre of Seraphim would dazzle and confound, rather then inform and edify us,” Gay proclaimed. Human beings “of like passions with others are appointed to be ministers, because such can be Examples unto the Flock....Preachers of Religion should be Patterns of it....This is the Shortest and easiest way of Instruction: and without it our Preaching is commonly in vain.” “Our spiritual Pilots do not stand on the shore, looking upon us, and only Calling to us in a Sea of Dangers,” he continued, “but they embark with us, and venture their Souls with ours.”

Of course education, and piety, and moral character are important. But the PERFECT example is less important than the SINCERE example; perfection is meaningless, since none of us are perfect; all human beings have their “[f]aults and failures.” But “if people wont receive them as Ministers, with these,” Gay said, “they must refuse all such whom GOD sendeth unto them. To reject them, because they are not perfect, is to impeach the Wisdom & Goodness of GOD, from whom they receive their Commission.” Thus (and this is my favorite quote) “Sins of Infirmity, and of daily surreption, ought not to be pried into, with Eagle-ey’d Malice: nor expos’d, to their disgrace, when they are no other than such as are common to Humanity. Their Failings should be cover’d with the Mantle of Christian Charity.” According to Gay, a “Superstitious Reverence” of the “persons” of ministers borders on idolatry. Likewise, ministers themselves should always endeavor to maintain an attitude of humility, which both shelters them from the sin of Pride, and can “yield them some comfort, when they are unsuccessful in their work.”

Inasmuch as Gay’s sermon that day probably lasted a couple of hours, I could go on and on in this vein for some time, but I think you probably get the idea. But he does make two other additional points which I feel are worthy of mentioning in passing. The recognition that ministers are human beings of like passions with others is also a warning against “blind obedience” to their authority -- people should always examine and compare what a minister says against their own understanding of religious truth. Furthermore, the awareness of a minister’s personal shortcomings should not be allowed to “prejudice the due reception of the Truth which they preach,” since “Many seek to excuse their Disregard of the Message, by their dislike of the Messenger.” Because ministers are human, we will always be imperfect servants of God. But because all human beings are likewise imperfect, the faithful efforts of a sincere and devoted minister are often the best example of how we might ourselves become better, or (as Gay would have put it) more “godly,” than we presently are.

I wanted to share all this with you, so that you can try to bring some of this information forward to the here and now, and perhaps better understand the continuities between the early days of our tradition, and the task that you will be performing, as a congregation, in the next few weeks. Obviously, some things have changed a lot since 1725, or even 1808. We see the world through slightly different eyes; our understandings of the nature of God, and of the role that the church should play in our lives, even of the ministry itself, have evolved and developed over time. Your Ministerial Search Committee has literally searched the world over in order to find the minister they feel is best suited to serving the needs of this congregation at this precise moment in its history. As a congregation, you are not necessarily being asked to re-evaluate her education, or her piety, or her moral character (although I’m certain if you did you would find them exemplary, just as your Search Committee has). What you ARE being asked to do is to affirm the hard work which your Search Committee has done on your behalf, and also to express your willingness to support your new minister in the hard work she is about to do, also on your behalf, here in Nantucket as a “settled” member of your community.

No minister is ever “perfect” -- so let’s just get that off the table right way. If you have learned anything from me during my two-year tenure as your interim minister, you must have at least learned that. So cover whatever normal human faults you may see, or think you see, shortcomings real or imagined, with the “mantle of Christian Charity,” and look instead at her considerable strengths. Ask yourself whether you think this is someone you can learn from, someone who inspires you, someone you would like to get to know better, and who will grow on you over time. And if after all that, you still find yourself harboring doubts, take another bit of advice from your religious forebearers, like Ebenezer Gay, and ask yourself why it is that God, or Providence, or Fate or Destiny, or even just all of your neighbors sitting around you (and especially the members of the Ministerial Search Committee whom you elected to the task), have decided that this is the spiritual leader and teacher under whose ministry this congregation needs to be sitting at this point in time. Ask yourself what lessons YOU still need to learn, and what changes you need to make in your own life and attitude, in order to become capable of learning them. Often times the faults we perceive in others simply mirror our own. But when we learn how to look beyond them, and mimic the strengths we discover in the midst of the shortcomings, the pathway to our own religious growth becomes more clear.

Exercising the prerogative of calling and ordaining a new minister is a significant moment in the life of a congregation. It’s not only a right which you enjoy, a privilege which goes part and parcel with the very nature of BEING a religious community, it is also a duty and a responsibility which you exercise on behalf of the entire “church universal.” By designating a specific individual of high moral character, exemplary piety, and outstanding intellectual preparation, as the spiritual leader and teacher of your community, you are not only affirming their ministry, you are affirming the value of ALL ministry, as something worthy of our attention, and support and beneficial to human happiness. So exercise this duty seriously and responsibly, but also joyously and enthusiastically. Because a good minister is a human being of like passions with you. And it is only in partnership that you can walk together humbly into your glorious shared future.

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.