Me and Shaqille O’Neil - A Sermon on the Occasion of Deciding to Retire
Written by Gary E. Smith Sunday, 10 January 2010 00:00
Reading
Ellen Goodman
January, after all, is named for the Roman god of beginnings and endings. He looked backward and forward at the same time. So, this morning, do I.
I wish I could find the right language to describe this rite of passage. Retirement, that swoon of a word, just won’t do. The Spanish translation, jubilación, is a bit over the top for my own mix of feelings.
The phrase that kept running through my head as I considered this next step was: “I’m letting myself go.’’ I love the idea of reclaiming that phrase. After all, where will you go when you let yourself go? To let this question fill the free space between deadlines in my life has been quite liberating. It suggests the freedom that can fuel this journey.
Looking backward and forward, I belong to a generation that has transformed our culture. We’ve been the change agents for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights. Now, we find ourselves on the cutting edge of another huge social change. This time, it’s the longevity revolution. Ours is the first generation to collectively cross the demarcation line of senior citizenship with actuarial tables on our side.
“Senior citizen’’ is now a single demographic nametag that includes those who fought in World War II and those who were born in World War II. We don’t have a label yet to describe the early, active aging. But many of us are pausing to recalculate the purpose of a longer life. We are reinventing ourselves and society’s expectations, just as we have throughout our lives.
It has been a great gift to make a living trying to make sense out of the world around me. That is as much a disposition as an occupation.
Now, when people ask what are you going to do next, I am tempted to co-opt Susan Stamberg’s one-word answer when she left her anchor post at NPR: “Less.’’ I am more tempted to say, simply, “We’ll see.’’
Looking forward and backward, it is never easy to know the right moment to step onto that next stage. At a farewell lunch - which I described as the “sheet cake lunch’’ - my editor and friend read aloud some vaguely familiar words by a columnist 30 years my junior.
“There’s a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over - and to let go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives.
“It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on rather than out.’’
It was an odd experience to hear, let alone heed, my younger self.
“The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well,’’ I wrote back then. “It’s hard to recognize that life isn’t a holding action, but a process. It’s hard to learn that we don’t leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along - quite gracefully.’’
She knew then what I know much more intimately now. So, with her blessing, I will let myself go. And go for it.
Sermon
Gary E. Smith
I was speaking late this week to one of our college students, prior to his return to school, and he had just learned of my intention to retire in June of 2011. “You’re the only minister I’ve ever known,” he said, and then he quickly switched to a sports analogy he knew I’d appreciate: “You’re retiring the same year as Shaquille O’Neil,” he said. “That’s cool.” And Oprah Winfrey. And apparently Christopher Dodd.
We mailed the letters announcing my retirement on Wednesday, and I am writing these words on Friday, and, for the most part, not much has changed. I’m hoping that you’re not surprised by this news today, that that one more letter from First Parish didn’t get scooped up with your junk mail or, possibly, that things are relatively quiet because, like me, we’re all in denial. Maybe you hate change as much as I do. This is a sermon about change and about what’s left when change happens. Change is good. Change is bad. End of sermon. Please turn to our final hymn…
I’ve matured some in my reaction to change. Once I hated saying goodbye, the small ones and the big ones. Eliz and I remember the summer we were married, working with college students along the coast of Maine, sneaking away in the early dawn light of a Saturday morning to avoid the hugs and tears of leaving friends behind.
I dreaded the thought of my children leaving home for college and life until someone asked me, “What? You raised them to stay home?” I hated seeing my mother grow old and having to cope with big changes. I’m sentimental about places I used to live. I like to drive by these places of memory. I’m into nostalgia and sentimentality. Given all this, I chose a profession that puts change right in my face every day.
It’s been here in Concord with you that I’ve somewhat come to terms with all this. It was not me, but others, who introduced the holiday loss wreath, that wreath that stood up front here through the holidays and just as in past years became covered with tiny ribbons, each a symbol of goodbye. It was not me, but others, who introduced the recognition of our high school seniors, marking the time they would leave us for something and somewhere else. I can now sing the “Circle Song” without weeping.
I’m in my thirty-eighth year of ministry, my twenty-second with you, and we’ve seen and lived through plenty of changes, institutionally and personally. I’m thinking now of births and child dedications and marriages and memorial services. I’ve had plenty of practice celebrating life and I hope I’ve taught you something of the same.
First Parish has had plenty of change in my time with you: ministerial interns who have come and gone, children who were dedicated by me now in new adult lives here and there; I’ve had four offices, the staff has changed but blessedly stayed, too; these are my colleagues, my best friends. We’ve gone to two worship services, welcomed children into worship every Sunday, taken the pews out of the chapel, built a new religious education wing, debated the merit of a new organ and voted to stop debating, had the good sense and generous heart to replace the elevator.
You are now doing your own inventory of change in your life: changes in families, changes in friends, changes in work place or addresses. Some changes are planned; some are totally unexpected. Marriages break apart. There are illnesses and accidents. There are jobs lost, families reconfigured, families relocated. We laugh; we cry; we try to keep it all in equilibrium.
Change is inevitable and it can be frightening. The religious question here is an ancient one. What is transient and what is permanent? If Jenny can quote Frederick Buechner, then I can quote a Transcendentalist. Theodore Parker asked this question. If everything seems to change, then what remains? On a personal level, if a pink slip can take our job, a phone call take our marriage, a fire take our home, a heart attack take our spouse, an argument take our child, then what remains?
It seems like a good idea today to look at First Parish, this community today, and ask the same question. David Rankin (no relation), once minister at the Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, preached years ago on “The Transient and the Permanent.” “In the midst of all the transient factors,” he asked, “is there something permanent, without which we would no longer be the Fountain Street Church?” We’ll substitute First Parish from now on. “Ruthlessly,” he says, he “began to eliminate huge chunks of their heritage.”
He threw out the ministers first, transient figures, hardly known by the next generation. Ministers will always change. He threw out the congregation, humans beings, moving, fighting, dying. More than half of the membership had changed in his ten years there. Congregations will always change. What is transient? The building, a temporary building, subject to wind and fire. Buildings change. He threw out the R.E. program, always adapting, never finally established. He threw out the staff, the choir (sorry), the committees. They will always change, he said. So what is left?
David Rankin says what is left is “a moving vision, a blend of dream and reality, a seeking that is never satisfied, the constancy of change, the road unending, the call to be what we were meant to be.” When I read that this week, I remembered a book by Gary Dorsey, called “Congregation: the Journey Back to Church,” the story of a year he spent with the First Church, Congregational, in Windsor, Connecticut. It’s his own faith journey away from institutional religion and then back again and what he finds. Don’t let the word “church” paralyze you. Think faith community; think First Parish; think congregation.
“Most people think what is done at a mainline church is largely private. That’s correct. It is. Most churches do not sell a product. They are not charismatic. They do not evangelize. Most members do not even know they have a story to tell. No wonder the world outside assumes that what churchgoers really do well is consume lots of coffee, gossip, talk a lot of talk, hold meetings, fuss and work out compromises, sing with verve and mix a punch that looks like antifreeze. Believe me,” he says, “that’s true.”
“If you ever decide to go back to church, even despite yourself, you will eventually find yourself in a place where you can learn about mystery and timelessness. You will become a part of a tradition of stories and verses and gossip greater than you can imagine. Circling and turning with a carnival of small-time saints, whose tales and homespun customs marshal wisdom out of a religious calendar, you will become a character, too, and a player in a cast.”
“A church is like an enormous wooden calliope,” he says, and it is “a light that slips across the surface of things that inspires people to come here on a Sunday. They spend their time in daydreams. They have visions, suffer silences, sing songs, dance, laugh, practice and forget to hope. They curse and tell stories. They go round and round.” Think calliope.
“Their life,” and now he is talking about you and about me, “their life is made of that raw material of daily tasks – a steady attention to the quality of life they create as well as seek. Knowing the needs of others, encouraging constancy, patience, reading, wise direction, bread-baking, money-raising, service. The church is a tenacious institution. One generation’s vision is the next one’s tradition, the next one’s problem to be resolved. It was in church,” Dorsey concludes, that he “experienced the miracles of wonder.”
So may it be for us. What remains, what is permanent here in this place of daydreaming and visions, of forgetting and hoping, the around and aroundness that is captured in the image of a religious community as a calliope, what remains are the miracles of wonder. We who are privileged to be the ministers, we who serve on the staff and sing and teach and sweep and serve, we who are members here, always making room for others, we who have entered this room for the first time today, we are all keepers of the vision. There is a call to all of us to be who we are meant to be.
It’s the image of the wooden calliope that I hold close; it is the light that slips across the surface of things that I cherish. This is what remains; this is the permanent in the midst of the transient. So, to all of you who feel battered and broken by all the changes of your life, those of you who are angry, who are lonely, who are in despair, who are lost, who are sad, who are uncertain, who are in failing health, who feel no permanency in life right now, there are some truths that will never change.
And especially to you and to me, all of you who have felt our relationship shift just a bit in these days, let us hold each other. The future is not certain, as if it ever was. “The sea rises,” James Baldwin once wrote, “the light fails. Lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” That is why we need each other.
We need to hold each other. We need to keep faith with each other. This is a place we go around and around, telling our dreams and hoping our hopes. “Now, therefore,” writes Barrows Dunham, “since the struggle deepens, since evil abides and the good does not yet prosper, let us gather what strength we have, what confidence and valor, that our small victories may end in triumph, and the world awaited be a world attained.”
So may it be for us.