Salvaging the Leaning

October 8, 2000

"Who made you" was always
The question
The answer was always
"God."
Well, there we stood
Three feet high
Heads bowed
Leaning into
Bosoms.

Now
I no longer recall
The Catechism
Or brood on the Genesis
Of life
No.

I ponder the exchange
Itself
And salvage mostly
the leaning.
--Alice Walker

When my colleague John Gibbons read this little poem at a recent meeting of the Massachusetts Bay District Unitarian Universalist Ministers, it struck a chord. I, too, recalled similar Sunday School mornings, circa 1956 or '57, and though there was never a catechism to be memorized (we were Unitarians, after all), there were definitely lessons in leaning to be learned.

Oh, I learned a few other things, too. I was introduced to Bible stories like Noah and the Flood, Adam and Eve, the Good Samaritan, David and Goliath, and Samson and Delilah, to mention just a few, as well as stories from other religions and cultures like "The Blindmen and the Elephant," which I shared with you this morning, and the parable of the mustard seed, also from the Buddhist tradition. I learned about Moses and Jesus and Buddha, and I began to think about what it meant to live a good life, a self-sacrificial life.

Later, we discussed weighty issues like war and peace and the great civil rights struggle which was happening at the time, and I found a religious hero in Martin Luther King, Jr.

Through it all, the question of God loomed large. Who, or what, was God? Did God really exist? What if God did exist? What if God didn't exist? How could anyone know for sure? I was fascinated by the question, and though my head was and is doubtful, my heart has always sung a different tune.

Thankfully, I was spared a sense of my own sinfulness. Unitarianism (later Unitarian Universalism) saved me from that. Though one of my well-meaning Sunday School teachers, Kath Kaden, was fond of saying that our misdeeds only served to push the nails more deeply into the crucified flesh of Jesus. I never believed her.

But I loved her. I loved going to Sunday School, and seeing her old, black 1951 Ford sedan parked out front of the Parish Hall on Sunday mornings. O.K., she had some basic misunderstandings about Unitarian Universalism. But you know what? It didn't really matter. You see, I salvaged the leaning.

Later, I would enjoy spending Sunday mornings with Margaret Bowden, another teacher who was probably deficient in knowledge of Unitarian Universalism but rich in the qualities of love and kindness. She represented in her very person the Universalist claim that "God is love." I remember our little class of two meeting in the quiet sanctuary of the meeting house before church, the feeling of that place, though I remember almost nothing of the content. "I ponder the exchange/ Itself/ And salvage mostly/ The leaning."

I salvaged the leaning from those mornings when we would join the adults in church, and the sermon bored me to distraction, and I was really uncomfortable sitting in the old box pews. Why? Because there I was, surrounded by adults from my community who cared about me. I was a part of something larger than myself, and that was what mattered. I felt safe, and I felt that I belonged.

And in spite of its discomfort, I loved the silent old meeting house, with its clear glass windows looking out onto the town common, where I wished I could be, playing baseball or whatever sport was in season. Because, after all, that was sacred space, and its very presence along the street where I lived suggested that there was a place to lean in times of trouble. How did I know that?

I knew instinctively that it was important. There is a saying among our Transylvanian Unitarian friends: "In storm, even the trees lean on each other." We desperately need those places and people where we can lean when we need to.

The two ministers from my childhood and adolescence, Ken Lafleur and Timothy Behrendt, had a profound influence upon me in the brief time that I was exposed to them. Because of them, ministry became an appealing career possibility.

I don't remember a single sermon either one of them ever preached. But I salvaged the leaning; I knew they were all there for me if I needed them. As some wise person has said, with truth,

People will forget what you said.
People will forget what you did, but people will
never forget
how you made them feel.

We Unitarian Universalists spend an awful lot of time agonizing over our religious education curriculum. Most of that agonizing happens because we don't have a catechism which everyone is expected to memorize. We're not trying to indoctrinate our children, and there isn't a particular body of belief that we hope to have them learn.

Rather, what we hope against hope to do is awaken their spirits and open their minds, and that is a much more difficult task to accomplish than whether I can answer the question, "Who made me?" which still doesn't answer the larger question. We seek to make the moral life, the good life, a reality, to inspire a sense of wonder and awe about the world, to give our children questioning minds to inquire about the great religious questions. We seek to convince them of the truth of William James's claim that, "The great use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.." We want them to see that truth is a slippery topic, but that it is to be found in many places, not just in our peculiar way of being religious, and that it is up to each of us to seek it out and discover it for ourselves.

"The great end in religious instruction," wrote Channing, "is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own."

But when all is said and done, what I hope our children salvage, above all else, is the leaning. Knowing that when we need to lean, there will be someone and something there to hold us up like trees in a storm. Feeling that we are not alone in the universe. Believing that we are loved.

As so often happens, the following quotation came across my desk serendipitously this week. It is by Minot Savage, a turn of the century Unitarian minister, and it pretty much sums up what I think we want to accomplish in our religious education program:

. . .Remember that I do not want anybody for a teacher in my Sunday School who thinks he is very wise. I certainly don't want anybody who is possessed with the idea he is very good, and I really don't want anybody who has nothing else
to do. I want just human people, who appreciate that there is something that is worth their doing, and are willing to do the best they can.

I do not care so much whether you can teach theology, or how much religious history and biography you teach, or whether you are up concerning the missionary journeys of St. Paul. These are matters of interest and importance.
But the principle thing, after all, is that you should bring the children with whom you come in contact close to a warm heart, that you surround them with an atmosphere of devotion.

Teach them that they may become a part of this great effort of humanity to lift up the world.

By such a definition, my Sunday School teachers were fantastically successful.

I want to end with a story which I gleaned from a minister's column by my aforementioned colleague, John Gibbons. It is the true story of Mario Zacchini, the "Human Cannonball."

"From the 1920's into the 1940's, Mario thrilled crowds worldwide by sliding down the mouths of cannons, only to catapult over fairgrounds at speeds up to 100 miles per hour, then landing--usually--in a net hundreds of feet away. Born to a performing family in Italy, the Zacchini Family's act created such a sensation that it became the grand finale at the Ringling Brothers Circus.

"Mario often performed a double human cannonball act with his brother Hugo, but Mario's career ended after he broke some ribs and his shoulder after being launched over a Ferris wheel at the New York World's Fair in 1940. Later, he went into the carnival hot dog and hamburger business. . . .

"'The net is a very small thing up in the air,' Mario later told a reporter. He once landed perfectly in a net in Terre Haut, Indiana, 'but the net was rotten,' he said. 'I went right through it and hit the ground. I was temporarily paralyzed. I heard people saying, "He's dead. He's dead." I could see the people saying that, but I couldn't say nothing.'

"In a wise and classic epitaph, Mario's obituary quoted him: 'Flying isn't the hard part,' he said. 'Landing in the net is.'"

If I might offer an interpretation: what we are about is teaching our kids to spread their wings and fly. That's important, but even more important is that we give them a place to land. That's the tricky part, but when all is said and done, it may well be the most important thing we can give them. A place to lean in the storm; a net to land in. What more could we give, given a lifetime? If they can salvage the leaning, it will be enough, and we will have done our jobs, perhaps beyond our wildest hoping and imagining. May it be so, today and in all the days to come. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock