Gliding like a Queen
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 08 February 2009 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2009-02-08-9am-sermon.mp3}
A Sermon in Honor of Trains and Journeys
You are thinking, first bagpipes and now train whistles. I am thinking, it is a long and cold winter, attendance has dipped what with a snow storm almost every Sunday in January, and we are needing to tap dance our way to spring, “tap dance,” as in comfort food, comfort the afflicted food, a sermon on trains, our very own stimulus package.
What to say about trains, I have been wondering for the past month or more. The service began with worship planning last spring, a Sunday with folk music, we said, and then, what kind of folk, how about folk music with a train theme, plenty of songs, you’ve heard some of them, and so many more we did not sing, my favorite discarded one was “Locomotion,” I could see the back-up singers up here with me.
And trains? How do you preach on the subject of trains? The songs are filled with images of freedom trains, glory trains, the Underground Railroad, the hobo, the romanticism of the train, the expansion West, the poignancy of the train whistle. What to say, I wondered. The Unitarian question here is not so much, “What Would Jesus Do?” as it is, “What Would Google Say?”
Google is an internet search ENGINE that finds poetry for me, finds recipes for me, finds hotels and restaurants for me. I wondered if anyone had ever preached on the subject of trains, so I typed in the search box these two words: TRAIN SERMON. Within seconds, I had my answer, but it was not the answer I wanted. I discovered there were indeed once such things as train sermons, and still are, as you will see in a minute.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was a genre of sermons known as train sermons, and this is what they were. They were delivered by the preacher on his very last Sunday in that pulpit before moving on. And so, more often than not, the preacher unburdened himself of all the resentments and slights, all the hypocrisy he had witnessed, all the lack of generosity he had endured, and he (how shall I put this?) spoke the truth, often singling people out. They were stem-winders. And why were they called train sermons? Because at the end of the sermon, the preacher headed straight for the door and jumped on the train!
My earliest memory of trains is as a little boy, growing up in Waterville, Maine, and the arrival of the campers by train in early summer, from such exotic places as Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York. These children would arrive by the hundreds, with their steamer trunks and be bussed to the many residential camps of the Belgrade Lakes. I remember in the late 1950’s when passenger trains were about to be discontinued and my mother, wanting me to have the memory, took me to Augusta and back, what a day!
We each have our memories, a story to tell. Trains, it seems to me, are always taking people away or bringing people home. Trains are about what it means to be on a journey, taking into the imagery all the power of what journeys mean: finding our way home, needing to leave home, adventure, slipping out of town, the sadness tied up with some journeys, the excitement found in others.
My older brothers remember seeing my father off on the train as he left for the Navy and World War II, the poignancy of one of these brothers running down the track in a futile attempt to keep my father there. This is a sermon about trains and about journeys and the uniqueness of each of our journeys, the way we have come, the tracks before us, the stations, the end place, what awaits us there, the train is a metaphor for all this.
Carl Scovel, minister emeritus at King’s Chapel, and a dear friend of First Parish, led a summer service here five years ago, centering on the train. Let me speak a little of the history he shared that day. “George Stephenson designed and built the world’s first steam engine, in 1825, and in that year the first railway, a twelve-mile stretch from Darlington to Stockton on the North Sea. Five years later, his son Robert, a forty mile track from Liverpool to Manchester, the new locomotive reaching speeds of twenty-nine miles per hour.”
“America was not far behind,” Carl says, “a horse drawn affair, in 1826, from the Quincy granite quarries to the shore. By 1830 the Camden and Amboy Railroad was carrying passengers between New York and Philadelphia, three dollars for a seven hour trip. By 1835 lines had opened between Boston and Lowell, Providence and Worcester. And in the next twenty years, 20,000 miles of track had opened across the country: the Baltimore and Ohio, the Erie, the Boston and Maine, and after the golden spike was driven at Promontory Point in Utah in 1869, the Southern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”
“What was it like to ride those trains?” Carl asks, and then he finds Charles Dickens’ words and a trip Dickens took in 1842:
“On the locomotive whirls headlong,
Dives through the woods, emerges into the light,
Clatters over frail arches, rumbles on the heavy ground,
Shoots beneath a wooden bridge
Which intercepts the light for a second like a wink,
Suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes
In the main street of a large town and dashes on haphazard, pell-mell,
Neck-or-nothing down the middle of the road“There (in that town) with the mechanics working at their trade,
And people leaning from their doors and windows,
And boys flying kites and playing marbles,
And men smoking, and women talking,
And children crawling, and pigs burrowing,
And unaccustomed horses rearing close to the very rails –
And there – on, on, on –
Tears the mad dragon of the engine with its train of cars,
Scattering in all directions a shower of sparks from its wood fire;
Screeching, yelling, hissing, panting;
Until at last the thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink,
The people gather round, and you have time to breathe again…”
“Railroads were now a fact of life,” Carl says, “the train was not just becoming a fast, efficient way to move food, wood, coal, steel, stone, cotton, iron ore, and people; it was something else as well. The train had become a symbol – a way for Americans to understand themselves, a metaphor for people on the move.
“Around this system of locomotives, cars, rails, switches, signal lights, workers and timetables grew up a world of stories, jokes and heroes: Casey Jones, John Henry, the Wabash Cannonball, and songs: Morning Train, Freight Train, Midnight Special, Lonesome Hobo, Rock Island Line, Railroad Bill, I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain.”
And Carl ends where I began. “Trains are the symbol of the journey,” he writes, “to a new state, a new home, a new job, a new life, or perhaps the journey’s end, the coming back to home, the pilgrim’s journey to his or her promised land. The journey is the universal theme of liberation.”
I thank Carl and I thank all our musicians: Beth, Eric Kilburn, our choir, our soloists John and Larry, not just for the memories and the nostalgia, but for whatever is touched in us by this metaphor of train, and of the journey itself, of where we are going and where we have come from: (the poet John O’Donohue)
“Every time you leave home, another road takes you into a world you were never in.
New strangers on other paths await.
New places that have never seen you will startle a little at your entry.
Old places that know you well will pretend nothing changed since your last visit.“When you travel, you find yourself alone in a different way,
More attentive now to the self you bring along,
Your more subtle eye watching you abroad;And how what meets you touches that part of the heart that lies low at home:
“How you unexpectedly attune to the timbre in some voice,
Opening in conversation you want to take in
To where your longing has pressed hard enough inward, on some unsaid dark,
To create a crystal of insight you could not have known you needed to illuminate your way.“When you travel, a new silence goes with you,
And if you listen, you will hear what your heart would love to say.
A journey can become a sacred thing:
Make sure, before you go, to take the time to bless your going forth,“To free your heart of ballast so that the compass of your soul
Might direct you toward the territories of spirit
Where you will discover more of your hidden life,
And the urgencies that deserve to claim you.“May you travel in an awakened way,
Gathered wisely into your inner ground;
That you may not waste the invitations
Which wait along the way to transform you.“May you travel safely, arrive refreshed,
And live your time away to its fullest;
Return home more enriched, and free
To balance the gift of days which call you.”