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2. school

What Was I Thinking?
Reflections Upon 40+ Years in the Ministry
May 31, 2015
Cedarhurst Unitarian Universalists
Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
Reading: God Will Save Me
A terrible storm descended upon a town and local officials sent out a warning that the
riverbanks would soon overflow and flood the nearby homes. They ordered everyone in the town
to evacuate.
One of the residents near the river bank was a man of deep faith. He heard the warning
but decided to stay in his home. He thought, “I will trust in God. If I am in danger, God will
save me.”
As the waters rose, his neighbors came by and said, “We’re leaving and there is room for
you in our car, please come with us!” But the man declined. “I have faith. God will save me.”
The man stood on his porch watching the water creep up the steps. A man in a canoe
paddled by and called to him, “Hurry and come into my canoe, the waters are rising quickly!”
But the man again said, “No thanks. God will save me.”
The floodwaters rose higher, now pouring into his living room, the man had to retreat to
the second floor. A police motorboat came by, saw him at the window. “We will come up and
rescue you!” they shouted. But the man refused, waving them off saying, “Save someone else! I
have faith that God will save me!”
The flood waters rose higher and higher and the man had to climb up to his rooftop. A
helicopter spotted him, dropped a rope ladder. A rescue officer came down the ladder and
pleaded with the man, "Grab my hand and I will pull you up!" But the man still refused, folding
his arms tightly to his body. “No. Thank you. God will save me!”
Shortly after, the house broke up, and the floodwaters swept the man away, and he
drowned.
The man ascended to heaven and stood before God. Now he had a bone to pick with the
Supreme Being. “Why didn’t You save me? I put all my faith in You.”
God replied, “What do you mean? I sent you a warning. I sent you a car. I sent you a
canoe. I sent you a motorboat. I sent you a helicopter. What else did you want?”
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Sermon
No one could be more surprised than I to find myself a minister 40 years after ordination,
some 45 years since beginning to take the role of minister in a congregation. When I was
growing up, ministry was nowhere in my plans, did not enter my consciousness. As I now look
ahead to retirement, I wonder how this has happened. What was I thinking?
When I was in the 8th grade, an assignment for my civics class involved each student
picking a career: research it, write a paper, make a presentation about what you would like to be
when you grow up. I had just read a book called The Hidden Persuaders. It was about
advertising, how companies persuade you to buy their stuff.
I still remember stories that turned up as I researched that paper. There was the car rental
firm that perpetually lagged behind the leader. The company hired market researchers to find
ways in which they could distinguish themselves, make them stand out from the others. After a
thorough study, the researchers came back and said, “You know, there’s not much difference
among car rental companies. You all do the same thing. All we can say about your company is
that you’re #2 and you try harder.”
Well, that became the basis for a fabulously successful advertising campaign as Avis
Rent-a-Car squared off against Hertz. “We’re #2,” the ads proclaimed, “We try harder.” As that
campaign was flooding the airwaves, employees at Hertz reported feeling bad about themselves
precisely because they were #1, which the Avis commercials effectively spun as being not cool.
Another story told of a German automobile company with a plain little car that didn’t
have much going for it, except that it was cheap and reliable. If that weren’t enough of a
disadvantage, this vehicle also had unfortunate associations with the Nazi regime—it had been
conceived by Adolf Hitler as the people’s car. Well, in the skilled hands of a New York ad
agency, the features of “cheap and reliable” were highlighted and the Volkswagen beetle became
one of the most successful cars of the generation. My first car was a VW beetle: no gas gauge, no
heat, certainly no radio—and actually it was not even that cheap or reliable—but I loved it.
There was an experiment involving shoppers in a grocery story. The theory was that as
we enter this environment filled with products designed to satisfy all manner of desires that
shoppers would become excited. The researchers devised a method of measuring excitement by
counting the rate at which shoppers blinked their eyes. Apparently, the more excited you are, the
more you blink.
Turns out the theory was wrong. We don’t blink more in a grocery store, we blink less—
far less than what is normal. Indeed, shoppers enter a mild state of hypnosis, which accounts for
how you might walk right by people you know without seeing them. And then you get home,
unpack the groceries, look at the stuff you bought and wonder, “What was I thinking?
Fact is, we aren’t thinking. We respond to deeper needs and motivations. When I reflect
upon the series of events that brought me into the ministry, it seems a similar process.
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* * *
With the advantage of hindsight, we might identify several factors which would
anticipate my ministerial calling.
I grew up in a family in which church was important. We were there every Sunday—
sometimes during the week too, except in the summer when—back in the day—Unitarian
churches would shut down. My grandparents were proud Unitarians, an uncle was a Unitarian
minister. Furthermore, the church gave me a different set of values than was customary in a
small conservative Midwestern town. It was the era of the Civil Rights movement. We stood for
the right things; I was proud of my church’s participation.
Growing up, we may encounter people we admire, who give us something to emulate. I
think of three people—three men who all happened to be ministers. There was my uncle, the UU
minister who seemed to have a more interesting life than the other relatives; he lived in different
places, traveled, was conversant on issues of the day.
The second was my sixth grade teacher, the first man I had as a teacher. He was also a
minister in a fairly conservative sect. Teaching 6th grade was how he paid the bills. I noticed that
he seemed to care about his students as whole people. To him, we weren’t just kids in a
classroom but people of worth and dignity—and he treated us that way.
The third person came along when I was in college, a semester in New York City in a
fine arts intensive. We were exposed to music, art, drama of the era. My drama teacher was also
a minister at Greenwich Village’s Judson Church, which was a center of activism and as well as
experimental work in the arts. He was a gifted musician, wrote the scores for original
productions, at least one of which made it to Broadway. He was articulate about everything in
the arts. He was also gay. I thought, well, this is an interesting collection of interests and talents.
But I didn’t connect the dots. Ministry did not occur to me or to anybody else either,
probably because of my intense shyness. I almost never said anything in a public setting, be it in
class, church, a social occasion, a family gathering. This led most people—myself included—to
conclude that I didn’t say anything was because I didn’t have anything to say. Which does not
make for promising ministerial material.
I recently came upon one of those top ten lists—you can find a top ten list for virtually
anything today. This was a list of the top ten colleges for introverts. That is, environments where
the qualities introverts have are valued and developed. According to this list, the top college for
introverts in this country is: The University of Chicago. Well, that’s interesting. My graduate
school training was through a consortium of seminaries anchored by the University of Chicago,
where I took most of my courses. The number two school in the country for introverts: Earlham
College. Oh. That’s my undergraduate school. Maybe there was a reason I ended up in both
places. (The #3 introvert school, by the way, is M.I.T., where I would not do well.)
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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Aside from my flirtation with the advertising business, I did not know what I wanted to
be when I grew up. I hoped that at some point, I would bump into something and realize: Aha!
This is it! I knew I was a pretty good writer, but I didn’t know what to do with that. I noticed that
people seemed to trust me, would tell me things they might not tell others—and I was interested
in other people’s stories. Questions of meaning and purpose were important to me. I also paid
more attention to issues in the society, in the world, than did others around me. Those scattered
traits, though, did not seem to add up to anything.
I proceeded through high school, and there were no “aha” moments. College too. Still no
“aha’s”. Graduate school was not on my radar, but I did notice when the Graduate Record Exams
(the GRE’s) were being given, and I signed up—to keep my options open. Back then, the GRE’s
and SAT’s were not the anxiety-provoking ordeals they are today. I don’t remember anybody
preparing for them; you just went in and took the test. Which is what I did. I was
uncharacteristically relaxed about the whole thing. I remember that at one point during the exam
I fell asleep. Not for too long, enough to refresh me.
I don’t remember what my scores were, but they must have been good enough. I applied
to three graduate programs in three rather different fields. One was a Ph.D. program in
humanistic psychology; that would have made me into a psychotherapist. Another was a master’s
program in religion and the arts. I have no idea what I would have done with that one. And also
Meadville Theological School, the UU seminary that was part of the University of Chicago
consortium. I had a cousin in that program—the son of my UU minister uncle—so I applied. The
psychology grad school admitted me but didn’t offer any money. The religion and the arts
program offered half tuition. The UU theological school awarded a full tuition scholarship,
which pretty much made the decision for me.
And seminary offered another perk: a draft deferment. At the time, the draft was still in
effect and the War in Vietnam was raging. I figured that school would offer a better life than a
battlefield in Southeast Asia. The part I didn’t think through was that seminary trained people to
become ministers. That is: you go to minister school, you come out a minister. I didn’t think
about that.
Yet, a couple of years later, the draft ended, and the seminaries emptied. But I stayed.
Because I liked what I was doing; actually, I loved it. The school’s librarian used to introduce me
as their “happy student.” Back in that time of student unrest, it was sort of required to be angry
about something. But I wasn’t. Hence, I stood out. “This is our happy student,” he would say.
* * *
So where are we?
This is the story of how I became a minister and what was I thinking that brought this
result. By now, an objective observer would likely ascertain a progression to what we all know
will be the end result. But I wasn’t getting it, a little like shoppers in a grocery store, bumping
around in a mild state of hypnosis amidst all the choices. Or like the guy in the flood waiting for
God to make a definitive statement.
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I was a happy student taking courses in a wide variety of fields from a series of truly
wonderful teachers: Jungian psychology, Indian art, comparative religions, mythology and
symbolism, spiritual themes in literature. I somehow managed to avoid taking much in the realm
of practical ministerial courses. I never took a course on writing a sermon, or on how to do a
wedding or a memorial service, or on church administration, or working with committees, or
religious education. One semester I decided to hitchhike to California, talk to people along the
way and write about it. I received University of Chicago credit for that little adventure. (Probably
couldn’t do that anymore, but things were looser back then.)
In my second year of seminary, I was placed in one of the larger Unitarian Universalist
churches in the Chicago area. My job was to watch, learn, and help out the minister. After a
while, he invited me to present a sermon—in the first service only: they had two. He probably
figured that’s where I could do the least amount of damage.
This was my first sermon ever. I don’t know the topic, don’t remember anything I said.
What I do remember is that people responded: they listened, they wanted to talk about what I had
shared, some told me that what I said was meaningful to them. The church’s minister was there
that morning to hear my very first sermon. Afterwards, he didn’t say much. He was a very nice
man, not a strong preacher, and was struggling in that congregation. He didn’t ever invite me to
present a sermon again.
So now it’s my third year of seminary. I get hired by a UU fellowship in downstate
Illinois. I was to be their student minister. My primary responsibility was to offer two services a
month. This was a lot, considering that I had only done one previously and that, as noted, my
seminary training didn’t include any practical training in how to do a sermon.
The format was similar to what we have here at Cedarhurst. A service followed by a
discussion. The fellowship’s building was an old house, slightly remodeled to accommodate the
congregation. We set up chairs in what had been the living room and formal dining room. Then
we adjourned to another room for coffee and discussion after the service.
It was a good laboratory for a student minister: I got immediate feedback, for better and
for worse. But very early on—like after my first sermon there—I realized something. I’m not
sure I would have actually said this at the time, but I felt it. Which was, “I know how to do this.”
I don’t know how I knew how to do this; I just did.
I remember once talking with a creative writing teacher. He said it was his experience
that you can’t teach people how to write. Either they know or they don’t. If they know how, you
can help them refine their skills, become more effective. But nobody can really teach writing. I
suspect that’s true with many things. Art, for instance. I can’t draw. I don’t think anyone could
teach me how to draw; I don’t have the basic instinct for it. Or working with tools. Again, I
bumble around, but that’s about it. But I do have an inner sense for how to put together a sermon,
at least in the style that is mine. Nobody has taught me; it’s just developed over time and trial
and error and learning to trust my gut.
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But that’s not when I realized I was a minister. Fast forward two more years. Now I’m in
my third year as student minister with this same congregation—I was there for three years while
completing a 5-year program in seminary. The eleven-year-old daughter of a family in the
congregation suddenly developed a rare and extremely virulent form of cancer. Within a month
of diagnosis, she died, and everyone was left reeling.
Her parents asked me to officiate at the memorial service. Again, no training, but there is
no training that can prepare one for circumstances as this. I had officiated at one memorial
service previous to this one. For that, I had found a standard UU service and followed its outline.
It wasn’t bad, but wasn’t good either.
I couldn’t do that this time.
The memorial service was held a few days after she died, in a funeral home probably
because the fellowship building was too small to accommodate those who would attend. The
night before, fellowship members gathered with the parents, and then I met with them. They told
me about their daughter, what she liked, what was important to them about her, what they
wanted to remember.
Then I went home, spent much of the night trying to articulate what they had said to me,
not just the facts but the feelings.
At the memorial service the next morning, I told her story. Not much else; that was about
it. But it mattered. In a situation in which everyone felt helpless, it mattered to remember and
honor this girl who had too short a life.
And that’s when it happened, when I became a minister. I realized that I knew how to do
it but, more importantly, that it mattered. A colleague in the ministry refers to ours as an “ancient
craft.” That’s right. What we practice is the ancient craft of attending to souls. Attending to who
we are and what we yearn for and our hurts and our joys and our losses and our dreams: it all
matters.
* * *
It is said that each minister has one sermon that he or she keeps repeating over and over.
Looking back I wonder, what is mine?
When I was in theological school, I came across a little book called Moments of Insight.
It featured excerpts from writings of well-known people in which they described times when
they realized something essential, a moment of insight.
One was from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. Throughout the years, I have
returned to this passage again and again—probably already used it here at Cedarhurst. Bertrand
Russell was a brilliant mathematician, a philosopher, an anti-war activist, and a critic of
organized religion. He wrote a book called, Why I Am Not A Christian. Yet what he describes in
this excerpt would fit just about any definition of a religious experience.
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The year was 1901. Bertrand Russell and his wife were sharing a vacation home with the
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and his wife. One evening, Russell and his wife, Alys, had
been out, attending a poetry reading. Upon their return, they found Mrs. Whitehead, who was
subject to angina, suffering a bout of severe pain in which she seemed cut off from everyone and
everything around her. He wrote:
Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another
region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the
loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest
intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not
spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless, it follows that war is wrong,…that
the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to
the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that…
At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time,
a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of
everybody that I met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion, I did in
actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many
of my acquaintances. Having been an imperialist I became during those five minutes a …
pacifist. Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with
semi-mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense interest in children, and with a
desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should
make human life endurable. A strange excitement possessed me containing intense pain
but also some element of triumph through the fact that I could dominate pain, and make
it, as I thought, a gateway to wisdom.
The mystic insight which I then imagined myself to possess has largely faded, and the
habit of analysis has reasserted itself. But something of what I thought I saw in that
moment has remained always with me, causing my attitude during the first war, my
interest in children, my indifference to minor misfortunes, and a certain emotional tone in
all my human relations.
I think my sermon is contained within that story—my sermon that I preach over and over
and not just on Sunday morning but every day I am on this planet. It has to do with encountering
what Bertrand Russell called the “core of loneliness in each person.” In that aloneness, we are
separate, and yet we are also profoundly together.
Bertrand Russell expressed his yearning for a philosophy “which should make human life
endurable.” I have never found such a philosophy or theology or set of beliefs that explained it
all, that in itself made sense of our lives. What there is, instead, is that experience he described.
It’s entering a space that contains both aloneness and togetherness, doubt and faith, hopelessness
and hope, nothingness and fullness. A space in which these fields converge—and yet also takes
us beyond them. As Bertrand Russell encountered the isolation of his friend that brought him to a
deep sense of connection. My sermon—my one sermon—has to do with entering that space.
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We find it in a moment when we sense another’s sorrow, and that sorrow becomes our
own—and in that sharing, we are empowered to move beyond it.
We find it in the courage it takes to make our way into the world, despite all that’s out
there to be afraid of.
It’s expressed when I see someone on the street—a stranger—and his or her face seems
to tell a story that I recognize as part of my own. And then that person isn’t quite a stranger any
more.
It can also be a moment when we encounter something of beauty—and we experience
both the deep sadness and transcendent joy that beauty represents.
Or it might be when something strikes us all as funny, and we laugh, together, each from
within our own aloneness.
That is to say, those moments when we reach past our isolation, when we find something
at the core of being that is shared by all. Which somehow changes everything.
That’s my sermon: finding the space in which there is both doubt and faith and speaking
from it. That place of pain and transcendence. That sense of mystic illumination Bertrand Russell
described that does not overcome the aloneness but enables us to connect with each other and
with the universe despite it, or even because of it.
* * *
So what was I thinking?
Looking back, I see that often I wasn’t—thinking, that is. It feels more like I have been
drawn in this direction by forces not fully in my control.
My evangelical friends might say that God has called me to this life. I don’t buy that; I
don’t have a theology that supports such an assertion, but I can’t dismiss it either. For it does feel
that I have been pulled toward ministry. From time to time, I have had fantasies about leaving; a
few times, I have actually tried. I have tried to find something less stressful, or less allconsuming, or maybe that paid better, or maybe that would offer more freedom to live my own
life without the expectations of what a minister is supposed to do and be. But it hasn’t worked.
Where doors opened toward ministry, doors in other directions have not.
And so here I am, concluding this phase of my journey. I have a deep sense of gratitude
for the opportunity to have shared significant moments in people’s lives. To have had your trust.
To have benefitted from your insights, your friendship, your tears and laughter, all of which are
ways of celebrating this mysterious life which we share.
People have asked what it feels like on the cusp of retirement. Well, it takes me back to
elementary school, at the beginning of June when you spend your last days in class cleaning out
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your desk, putting things away to be ready for those who will enter this space in the fall, hoisting
chairs onto desks so the custodians can do a thorough cleaning.
You look to the summer ahead, and it’s full and open and warm, and everything still
seems possible.
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