“When Great Trees Fall”

“When Great Trees Fall”        May 27, 2018                 Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 “When Great Trees Fall”  by Maya Angelou 

When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.

When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence,
their senses eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines,
gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.

Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us.
Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed and informed

by their radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold caves.

And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly.

Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”

 This is Professor Peter Gomes. He was the chaplain at Harvard University for forty years. He was a remarkable man who was full of paradoxes. Very short in stature with a high-pitched voice, that was lightly touched with a British accent that was entirely contrived; Peter was a Baptist minister, a black American, he was gay, and he was a Republican.

                      

He was my New Testament professor when I was a fellow at Harvard in 2004. I didn’t go to class this dressed up but you did get dressed formally when you were invited to Professor Gomes’ home for tea. An event that I never missed on Tuesdays at 4. 

Peter had a stroke in 2010 and though he hoped to return to the pulpit at the Memorial Church on Harvard’s Campus for Easter of 2011, he passed away in February of that year.

It has been 14 years since I heard him lecture. It has been seven years since he died. And yet, when I read his books, it is as if I can hear his voice in my head. In those moments, it is as if he were not really dead.

It is as if people die in stages. There is the death that comes when our hearts stop, and we cease breathing. But there is a second death that comes when those who knew you are no longer living to keep an organic memory of you alive. And then there is the death that comes when no one remembers you anymore. 

Authors try to extend the memory of their work through books, musicians through song, and politicians, largely through statues. I mentioned last week that during my recent lecture tour of England, I spent a day in Parliament and as we were escorted through the winding stairways and hallways of Parliament to the committee room where we were meeting, I secretly squeezed off pictures of busts and statues as we passed by.

There were a lot more but a heavily accented guard with his hand resting on his gun said, I’m pretty sure he said, “I said, ‘no pictures!’” 

It isn’t always easy to tell for sure. 

I’m pretty sure that I recognized a statue of Winston Churchill, which is not pictured here out of interests of leaving Parliament on my own power, but I couldn’t guess who any of those other guys were. I don’t know if they were conservative or liberal, I don’t know if they were slave owners or abolitionists. 

They were sons, probably husbands, possibly fathers, and grandfathers, who played some role in leading Great Britain through its thousand-year post-Norman history. But they are dead to me. Their handsome marble likenesses were, to me, just the backdrop of a five-hundred-year-old building. 

Even if a British historian had taken the time to walk leisurely through these halls, explaining something of the history of each, it would not do much to redeem them from the grave because I have no living memory of them.

Memorial Day, in the United States, was originally a day for Americans to decorate the graves of those who had died in the Civil War. Later it became the tradition to honor the graves of everyone who died in military service and now it has evolved into a day to decorate the graves of all of our departed friends and family.

In the history of the United States, there have been about 1,200,000 service members killed in war. That is a huge number of course but what is more mind -boggling is that half of those casualties were during the Civil War. That fact is compounded by the awareness that the country’s total population was less than 1/10 of what it is now. By the end of the Civil War, everyone had lost someone in the conflict. In a country of 30 million, 600,000 had died.

Pastorally, this is made all the more painful when you realize that other nations ended slavery peacefully, usually through reparations, but my stubborn country, we stubborn Americans, we had to fight a war that was as deadly as our 250 year history of war added together.  I am sure that none of us could imagine the national grief that first gave birth to Decoration Day which has become Memorial Day but we all have someone to think of this weekend. My mother died in 2003. My sister, Susan, died in 2006. My father died in 2010. Along the way I have lost professors who have had a huge impact on me: Herman Norton, Liston Mills, Peggy Way, David Buttrick, and Peter Gomes. 

And here, in our nearly 10 year old church, we have had to let go of the physical presence of many of our founders, people who literally launched this congregation through their financial generosity and their willingness to invest time and money in a very unlikely venture . . . starting a liberal church in Springfield, MO! Without Chuck and Ruth Snowden, we wouldn’t have lasted through our first three months. Rev. Nelson Parnell, Jim Price, and Nancy Pate brought their years of very public social justice advocacy to our little congregation, giving us the legitimacy we needed to get started. For fear of accidentally forgetting someone, I will not name everyone we have lost over the past decade but I can tell you that I never walk through this building without remembering them.

I remember seeing Robert Green rebuilding the studs that hold this building up, and Nancy Pate standing here patiently explaining to me why we didn’t need to replace this pink carpet in the chancel. 

This past winter we had to give up Ilse and Ed Meyer. Ilse died first and when she died a friend sent this Maya Angelou poem to Elizabeth and Judy. I had not heard it before, but its lines spoke to me as only great poetry can:

When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.
When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence,
their senses eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines,
gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
…
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly.

Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”

The deaths of some people have robbed us of our ability to think, to live . . . some of us have been trapped, quite literally, in mental prisons of grief. So, yes, when great trees fall, even lions look for a place to hide and the rocks in the ground are shaken. The world has to slowly come back into focus when we can no longer pick up the phone and call to make dinner plans, or to ask to borrow a book.

Our minds sometimes play tricks on us. We will think that we saw them in a crowd, or hear them speak to us in a moment of distress.

You do not need for me to tell you that a great deal of what has driven people to religion over the centuries has been their fear of mortality and their hope that this world that we see is not all that there is. Jews, Muslims, and Christians have regaled one another with stories about heaven and hell and tried to bolster their whistling past the grave yard faith with declarations of certainty regarding the one thing that no one on earth can be certain about.

There is a parable from eastern tradition about a great samurai who went to see the greatest of the Buddhist masters. After his long journey he demands that the master tell him about the afterlife. The master only smiled and said, “I know nothing to tell you.” And the angry samurai replied, “But you are the greatest master in the land, how can you know nothing about it?” And the old monk replied, “Because I am a living master, perhaps you should ask one who is dead?”

I have no rational reason to believe that there is any conscious existence beyond our physical life. I don’t begrudge those who feel a need to believe otherwise and I would gladly consider any evidence they might have to present to me, but short of that, I believe that the best hope that our dearly departed have of a life after death, is in our loving memory. 

I know of nothing more profound to say of any of those who have shaped our lives and are with us no more than how Angelou concludes this great poem:  We can be. Be and be better. Because they existed. 

You do not have to live forever for life to be meaningful. It is not the length of a life that makes it important, it is the quality of how it is lived. As Mark Twain remarked:  "Let us endeavor so to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." 

We are not working towards a heavenly mansion, we are working to make a difference in the world in which we live so that our friends and our family will build a mansion for us in their hearts and the ripples from the stone we have thrown into history’s pond might continue for a while, even after we are gone from sight.