“Father, Do You Have Another Car?”
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 15 November 2009 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
When we moved to Concord in 1988, one of our cars was a 1984 Renault Sportwagon. On the very day we mailed our forth-eighth and final car payment, some tiny part called the “cooling fan relay” bit the dust. This meant that each and every time from that moment on when we stopped the car, we needed to perform the Dance of the Deranged Driver, popping open the hood, reaching down inside the wires and hoses to disconnect one of the battery terminals, lest the fans run endlessly while we slept or shopped or worked.
It was not that we did not intend to replace this relay part. It was instead that we could not identify it; our mechanic could not find its replacement in the terrifying world of Renault Parts and (then) microfiche cards and superseded order numbers. We served as couriers for weeks, scampering around eastern Massachusetts, only to have our hopes dashed on the rocks of four prongs instead of five, black facing instead of blue facing.
At last, the stars were aligned, the part was in, and on a fateful Tuesday morning, I ventured to a Renault garage in Marlborough. Now there are two places in this world that absolutely intimidate me, where I know I have no place, I do not belong. One is a lumberyard; the other is an auto repair shop. So bright and early I enter this garage, this very small garage, the hood yawns open, and the mechanic asks me where the cooling fan relay is.
“I’m a minister, not a mechanic,” I say, in order to firmly establish the relationship. I do place a telephone call to the mechanic here in Concord for him, and they talk only the talk mechanics can talk, and then the Marlborough man removes the front grill of my Renault Sportwagon; he removes the front grill and many other parts in order to get at the diseased part. “Start your engine,” he says to me, this to see the fan run, the car heat up; we are readying the patient for surgery. I start the car and then I walk around to the hood to stare, in fascination and wonder, into the open space.
Lurking unseen, and only proving the stars were not quite aligned, a loose bolt, once fastening the grill to God knows what; the bolt, vibrating in its own unique dance of death, the bolt shakes loose and falls into the humming motor, propelled in an instant with the shriek of metal hitting metal, clear through my radiator, and to our mutual horror, mechanic and minister, we are left standing in greenish-blue steaming coolant water. “Father,” he says to me, thinking I am a priest, “Do you have another car?”
I told this story here in the fall of 1988, and I told it again in the fall of 1992 when I needed a quick sermon, forgetting what I now teach. Sermons are generally quite forgettable, but stories are not. Seventeen years seems a safe time span though, and since we are all faced with human aggravations, and since Pam and the R.E. teachers are taking our children into Jesus’ teachings on the Sermon on the Mount today, I am delighted to tell it to you again.
I was at the purported site of the Sermon on the Mount a year ago, there on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, surrounded by Christian pilgrims from around the world, tour busses as far as the eye could see, but if you stood in the right place you could imagine it all. There is Jesus, at the height of his preaching career, in full power, turning the world upside down. If you were raised in a Christian church, as I was, you know the Beatitudes that he preached there: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the world,” and on and on.
Why this story of my worthless Renault? How does it relate to the Sermon on the Mount exactly? Do you remember Robert Eliot’s rules? “Rule number one,” he says. “Don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule number two: it’s all small stuff.” And he adds a third rule we don’t hear much. “If you can’t fight and you can’t flee, then flow,” as in go with the flow. This advice is, on the one hand, a shallow bumper sticker philosophy; it is, on the other hand, found in Jesus’ teachings, right there in the Sermon on the Mount, when he points to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. “Do not be anxious,” Jesus says in one translation. “Do not worry,” it says in another. Don’t sweat the small stuff, we might say.
THAT bumper sticker is followed by a line that says, “it’s all small stuff,” but I’m not sure that’s true. It’s not small stuff when you learn on a Friday afternoon that you’ve been laid off from your job. It’s not small stuff when someone you love dies or leaves you. It’s not small stuff if you haven’t heard yet whether the tumor is benign or malignant. It’s not small stuff if you’ve been threatened or assaulted and you’re afraid to go outside. It’s not small stuff if you can’t overcome the addiction of alcohol or pills. It’s not small stuff when you feel the accumulated weight of one worry after another, and you suddenly find yourself in a pool of radiator coolant.
In fact, there are therapists who say it may be more the everyday annoyances, the hassles, more than any major life changes that contribute to illness and depression. “It’s not the large things that send us to the madhouse,” writes the poet Charles Bukowski, “No, it’s the ongoing series of small tragedies that send us to the madhouse, not the death of a love but a shoelace that snaps with no time left.”
So it is both the big and the small which make up all the anxieties of life, the phone call in the middle of the night that can change a life forever or the story in the newspaper a while back of the man in Oxford, England, who couldn’t stand it anymore, broke into the aviary in his neighbor’s yard and strangled a parrot to death who had been taught to scream the impending murderer’s name one hundred times a day at full voice. The man willingly paid both the fine and damages. The aggrieved party, the newspaper reported, used the money to buy another parrot.
“It’s when life is like a pathless wood,” writes Robert Frost, “where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs broken across it, and one eye is weeping from a twig having lashed across it open. I’d like to get away from earth awhile,” Frost says, “and then come back to it and begin over.” Shoelaces or separation, job dissatisfaction or jail terms, shattered radiators or shattered dreams, small or large, we are not so unlike Robert Frost in his wish. Life is sometimes “a pathless wood” and we’d like to begin again.
But remember the next line. “Earth’s a place for love,” he says. “I don’t know where it’s likely to get better.” And so we are called back to this imperfect world. Religions across the board say the same thing to us: life is a gift even with the suffering, even with the tragedies, even with the heartaches. “Is not life more than food and clothing?” says Jesus. Keep your eye on what life might be (called the Kingdom of God in the Gospel of Matthew); keep your eye on what a gift life is.
Here’s the question: what keeps us hopeful in the face of that twig lashing across our eye? What keeps us hopeful when the path in the woods is not clear? So much of the research into stress and preventative medicine focuses on what psychologists call coping behavior. Those who cope the best, they say, the most hardy among us, are those who able to show resiliency in their lives.
I watch you, so many of you, who find ways to cope, cope with your marriage, your illness, your losses, your sadnesses. You are my teachers. You find networks of friends; you learn to be flexible; you learn to be hopeful. One of you this past week talked to me about prayer and we talked about prayer as being a way of putting life into alignment. Howard Thurman wrote once of a man who was describing a fundamental difference between his two children. “When they were babies,” he said, “one of them always crawled around an object that blocked their path, while the other always tried to push it out of the way.”
Thurman concludes that “sometimes a decision has to be made. The matter of timing is crucial. To know the difference in techniques demanded is a kind of wisdom that is not easily won.” You probably know the prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr: “Grant us the serenity of mind to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change that which can be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That’s what I mean by putting our lives into alignment.
I’m talking today about becoming “a swinger of birches,” as Frost puts it, not in the sense of doing away with anxieties because we know they will always be there. How is it that we can learn to take the large and the small, the aggravations and the tragedies, the long lines and the long nights, and incorporate them all into the fullness of life? Consider the lilies of the field, Jesus says, speaking of what it means to be resilient and flexible and hopeful. How is it we can learn to be invigorated by the perplexities of life and not be ravaged by them?
Why is life the way it is, we ask. How do I find life again? How do we learn to hope, to be resilient, to say yes to life? How do we come to know hope? I believe the answer is found in turning and looking around you. This is a community of hope and acceptance. We are a community which acknowledges interdependence and the need for flexibility. We are heirs to a heritage which has not only affirmed resiliency but lived it.
“All church services have this wonderful element,” John Updike wrote once. “People with other things to do get up on a Sunday morning, put on good clothes, and assemble out of nothing but faith – a vague yen toward something larger. Simply as a human gathering I find it moving, reassuring and even inspiring. A church,” he concludes, “is a little like a novel in that both are saying there’s something very important about being human.”
We are people of many generations here at First Parish, coming together now for nearly three hundred and seventy five years, grounded in a rich heritage, learning how to live out our principles and our benediction, words of respect and love. This community, at its best, can be a haven, a sanctuary, a safe place, as we struggle with both the mighty and the petty in our lives. We can help one another. Here the whispers that are unsaid: your smile made such a difference. Your note made my day. Your touch meant a lot. Your phone call lifted my spirit. You gave me hope and perspective. Maybe I can do the same for you. We are not alone.
Whether it be the panic of a deadline or a separation from a spouse, whether it be the nuisance of a car repair or a frustration with a child or parent, whether it be a line too long or a job not yet, we can be a swinger of birches. “Earth is the right place for love,” Frost says. “Earth is the right place for love.”
Reading
Birches
WHEN I see birches bend to left and right
Across the line of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
...
So was I once myself a swinger of birches;
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Robert Frost