By now, many of you have noticed that the pulpit has moved. Until recently, the pulpit was dangling out over the chancel steps like a diving board from which the preacher launched him- or herself into homiletical flight. Now the pulpit stands on the chancel itself, which is where it was designed to be and probably belongs. But the move of the pulpit to this location was not prompted by an act of historical revisionism. If it were, I would be preaching from the high pulpit today, using supplemental oxygen because of the altitude. You would be craning your increasingly stiff necks and wondering where you could find a good chiropractor.
If not historical revisionism, what prompted the move? There are several possible reasons. One could be to make room for the new Steinway concert grand piano we are buying in honor of Wally. The piano is due to arrive in the fall, and it is splendidly large. Big pianos need lots of room. Another possible reason could be that it's simply a sign of the times: everything else seems to be moving to the right, why not the pulpit? The real reason is both less interesting and more important. It's because of the sound system. The pulpit had to be moved back onto the chancel so that the pulpit microphone was behind the plane of the speakers. If the pulpit microphone can pick up directly the sounds produced by the speakers, a feedback loop begins which causes the sound to deteriorate and, consequently, the sermon to sound like mush. This we do not need.
Whatever the reason for the move, the new location of the pulpit does quite literally provide a new perspective for you and for me. The move was not far: a few feet further back, and a few feet higher. Nonetheless, things look different to me from here than they did from there, as they doubtless do to you looking at me. The question that arises, of course, is why the pulpit is in one of these locations instead of somewhere else. Where should it be, symbolically? Up high, to reflect our longing that the preacher's words point toward inspired ideals and transcendent values? Or down low, to reflect our belief that my insights as your minister derive mostly from my personal talents and professional training, and not from my role as god's spokesperson? Should the pulpit be located in the middle of the chancel, as it was originally, or off to one side or the other, and why? However we answer these questions, the point is that we begin to ask them only when something happens to change our perspective, and causes us to wonder why things are the way they are and to ask how they could be different.
Something like that happens when we take a vacation--when we leave the established routines of our usual lives and look at familiar things in a different way. A vacation gives us the opportunity to take a risk of seeing things differently, to gain a new perspective on our lives. We need not be on vacation for this to happen, of course; we can gain new understanding without going on safari to Kenya or on an expedition to the South Pole. But I do be-lieve that new perspectives have a better chance of getting through to us when we are away from our usual habits of life, doing things we don't usually do.
One way of understanding a vacation is as a time to empty our lives of the routine experiences that we have come to take for granted, and to replace them with new experiences that we don't take for granted. If it works, the process once again piques our interest in the life around us. We notice in a new way the play of light and shadow, the smell of the marsh and the pleasure of conversation, the sound of laughter and the feel of raindrops. We have time to think big thoughts, pay careful attention, ponder things we can never com-prehend. Energized by this new appreciation of the world around us, we then return to our everyday lives to find the old routines transformed by our new attentiveness. That's the theory, at least. And it's not a bad one. If that can even begin to happen, then any vacation is worthwhile.
But there is something more that can happen as well, something far more risky. It has to do with who we are, not just how we live. Often, we understand ourselves as individuals more in terms of what we see outside ourselves than on what we feel inside. In other words, if I want to know who I am, I look at the way I live my life. No need to look inside myself; context serves as a mirror of my soul. I see myself reflected in my life and I assume that I am the person who my roles and commitments and responsibilities say that I am.
Sometimes that assumption holds true. But sometimes it does not. A new perspective gives us an opportunity to risk finding out which is the case. When things and people around us are unfamiliar, we cannot fall back on the im-age of who we are that is mirrored to us by our everyday lives. We are forced to do the hard work of rediscovering precisely who we are--we who have set out in search of something new. The catalyst may be as simple as the discovery of a new pathway through the park or as daunting as an extended sojourn in Tibet. If we are lucky, we may find ourselves wandering toward some place we have never been be-fore, toward some place of self-awareness or self-accep-tance that will genuinely transform us.
Our usual image of the ideal summer vacation--whether it is leisure time in the sun, or reading books by the pool, or hiking in the mountains, or exploring new cultures or eating inventive cuisine--is incomplete. A vacation, if we take the meaning of the word seriously, is a time when we empty out all the routine stuff of our everyday lives, in order to make vacant our homes and offices, maybe even our minds. This also requires, however, that we figure out what to put back into our minds and homes and offices when we return. Does everything go back into the same place? Or do things look different now? Summertime, while it invites us to enjoy simple pleasures and common delights, also compels us to ask complicated questions about how we live and what we are doing.
I was reminded of this paradox just this past Monday, as I watched a quintessential small-town Memorial Day parade on Shelter Island. There were ten fire trucks in the parade, along with three ambulances, one marching band, four scout troops, three antique cars, and a phalanx of retired soldiers from the local American Legion post marching in time, followed by the women of the American Legion Auxiliary, matching them step for step. Main Street was lined with spectators of all ages, many of them children waving American flags. The parade went past once, then circled around the block and came by for a second time, finally stopping at the far end of Main Street in front of the American Legion Hall. There a retired soldier in uniform reminded us of what Memorial Day is meant to memorialize: the men and women who fought and died on behalf of our country and our freedom. After his speech, seven soldiers fired three volleys into the air--a twenty-one gun salute--and a lone bugler played Taps. Then, the official summer season having begun, we all went off to barbecue and drink iced tea.
There is something both ironic and appropriate that summer begins with Memorial Day and the playing of Taps. Both originated in the 1860's, as the United States was recovering from the long and bloody Civil War between the North and the South. The dead soldiers were being buried, and surviving soldiers were coming home. Henry Welles, a drugstore owner in Waterloo, New York suggested that all the shops in town close for one day to honor the soldiers who were killed in the Civil War and were buried in the Waterloo cemetery. At about the same time, Retired Major General Jonathan Logan planned a similar ceremony for soldiers who had survived the war. He led veterans through Waterloo to the cemetery, where they decorated their fallen comrades' graves with flags. The townspeople called it Decoration Day.
In Logan's proclamation of what came to be called Memorial Day, he declared: "The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country and during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance, no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit."
A few years before that proclamation, Taps had been adapted from a French tune by Daniel Butterfield, a Union General in the Army of the Potomac, in order to honor his Brigade following their heroism during a battle in Virginia. Like Memorial Day itself, these twenty-four notes invite the living to pause and measure their own lives by the standard set by men and women who gave their all to defend and protect what they deeply valued. Soon after Taps was composed, words were put with the music.
Day is done, gone the sun,
From the hills, from the lake,
From the skies.
All is well, safely rest.
God is nigh.
Fades the light; And afar
Goeth day, and the stars
Shineth bright.
Fare thee well; day has gone.
Night is on.
Thanks and praise, For our days,
'Neath the sun, Neath the stars,
'Neath the sky,
As we go, this we know,
God is nigh.
Most children who lined the main streets of our nation on Monday have no idea why those men and women in uniform were marching along with the fire trucks. Many of the adults have forgotten as well. Memorial Day, the spirit of which is hauntingly captured by the bugle tones of Taps, invites us to remember those whose wartime commitment and courage make our peacetime ignorance and forgetting possible. It also invites us to pause and reflect on the ideals to which we have committed our lives. Summertime, in and among the barbecues and beaches and books well read, invites us to step back from everyday routines and do the same.
At its best, summer is a time when, as George Gershwin's song Summertime says, "the living is easy: the fish are jumping and the cotton is high; your daddy's rich and your mother's good lookin', so hush little baby and don't you cry." But then comes the part that's not so easy: "one of these mornings you're gonna wind up singing; you're gonna spread your wings and reach for the sky." Ah, yes, but in which direction will you fly and toward what goal? Those are the questions we have the leisure to ponder, during the summertime.
The Summer Day (Mary
Oliver):
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth
instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous
and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms
and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?