“Going Where We Have Never Gone Before”

“Going Where We Have Never Gone Before”  Dec. 30, 2018   Dr. Roger Ray

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Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ring Out, Wild Bells"

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that sapsthe mind For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be

There is nothing especially funny about the dementia that often accompanies old age but I have known several people who have approached it with uncommonly good humor. One of our city’s matriarchs, Marion Hobblet, was one of my parishioners 25 years ago who would show up in her stretch Lincoln on Sundays, usually bearing fresh dents and paint chips on all four corners of the car. She announced one day, “I feel just like Christopher Columbus every time I leave home. I have no idea where I’m really going or how I am going to get there and when I get home, I have no idea where I’ve been.” 

I thought at that time, she wasn’t really that much different from the rest of us. As Yoda told Luke in the Empire Strikes Back, “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.” Kierkegaard said that we live our lives like a ship that sets sail with sealed orders, you have to strike out without knowing exactly how things are going to turn out.

Do you remember the original prologue to the old TV show, Star Trek? 

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!

It sounds a little kitschy to our ears now, but it was actually adapted from a 1958 White House pamphlet that was encouraging interest in space exploration. Ironically, the prologue had almost nothing to do with the actual episodes in the popular sci-fi series, perhaps because none of us ever know where we are really going when we launch into the future.

And yet it is hopeful isn’t it? It anticipates exploring strange new worlds, it expects to find new life forms and new civilizations. Of course, in the actual TV series, they did encounter new civilizations and life forms and seemed to engage in armed conflict with most of them. But at least initially, from the White House pamphlet promoting interest in NASA to our own early interest in sci-fi, space was the equivalent of looking out beyond the horizon for Magellan or Columbus. We would be Darwin on the Galapagos Islands for the first time.

When my daughter was young and the movie about the Titanic had captured her imagination, I took her out of school to come with me to hear a lecture by Robert Ballard, the archaeologist who had found the wreck of the Titanic. But he hardly mentioned that history making find that helped to inspire the movie. Ballard talked to us about the Black Sea, what was, five thousand years ago, a fresh water lake surrounded by villages and full of fishing boats, that may have been the site that inspired the flood narratives in the Gilgamesh Epic and in the Genesis story about Noah. 

It is possible that the earthen barrier that separated the lake from the Mediterranean collapsed all at once, burying all of those towns and people in a flood that never receded. Ballard told us that there are more historical finds on the bottom of the Black Sea than there are in all of the museums all over the earth, just waiting to be discovered. I saw my daughter’s eyes light up at the prospect of discovering a virtual lost world from a time before written history; but I found it fascinating that a man who could boast about having found the Titanic, at a time when virtually everyone had images of that find burned into their recent memory, was hardly interested in what he had done last year or the year before, he was obsessed with  what might be in the next year or the year after that.

Of course, the turning of a page of a calendar means next to nothing. The assignments of names to months and days and numbers to years does not actually affect anything but what does made a difference is how much space in your skull you are renting to the past and how much room you are making in the coming year to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms, and new civilizations, to discover new things that have been long hidden from sight, to live a new life rather than simply repeating the past.

I talk about setting down your resentments, leaving the past behind, raising the rent on negative thoughts so that they can’t fill up your skull, but it is a lot easier to say than it is to do. A lot of the psychological attraction to gambling is believed to be the way in which unknown outcomes calls us into a present moment. When the cards are being dealt, you don’t have time to worry about the broken heart you got ten years ago, or the election your side lost two years ago, or even the outcome of the last hand. In the flurry of the game, you are only thinking about the next card to be turned up.

We tend to obsess about past failures, insults, broken hearts; sometimes you will lie sleeplessly on your bed, replaying painful incidents in your memory over and over again. I have stepped into those huge casinos in Las Vegas and looked around at all of hypnotized throngs, locked into an unblinking stare into the flashing lights of slot machines, and I wonder what all of those people are trying so hard to forget?

I often use sci-fi or fantasy movies in just this way. When I find my mind stuck on some past hurt or insult, some friendship lost or some cruel insult, I will just drop out and go see a movie that distracts me from myself. I don’t want to let my past take away my future but it is always there, a cloud of unhappy memories that could just fill your head and keep you from ever risking a new love relationship, a new friendship, heck, some of you people have never even allowed yourself to try sushi because you are afraid that you might not like it. 

I love the quote from John Shedd that observes that a ship in harbor is safe but that is not what we build ships for. Many of you will have gone back to your hometown to attend a class reunion and you know that there are few things more sad than trying to talk to that old friend who never left home, who stayed right where they grew up, who kept their ship of life tied to the dock, and never ventured away to experience a bigger world. It is as if they were perpetually in high school, undisturbed by a new thought or a new experience. There are exceptions, of course, I just can’t think of any right now. 

I thought my world had come to an end 25 years ago when my marriage abruptly ended. Again, I thought my meaningful life was over eleven years ago, when I was forced to resign from the denominational church where I had built my career. 

I have, at times, lost friendships that have made me promise myself that I would never ever trust anyone again. The past can make a horrible roommate in your head. 

The things that can make us check out of the future are not always personal. Probably everyone here has heard something on the news in the past two years that made you say to yourself, “That’s it, it’s too much. I’m not watching the news anymore, I’m not gonna care anymore, not going to try anymore.” 

My drug of choice when Trump just pushes the limits of American constitutional democracy and moral sanity, is to watch recordings of shows about moving to the islands of the Caribbean. When it seems like America is just too broke to go on believing that it can be fixed, I dream of moving to an island, growing vegetables and scuba diving every day. And that very thing may happen one day, but it needs to not happen now. I don’t blame anyone for taking a vacation from the news, or even from family, the church, or America but we go on vacation to get refreshed so that we can come home and try again. 

You know, a year ago this past summer I was down in Florida for a preaching engagement and I got a phone call that let me know that my good friend, Dan Goodwin, was in the hospital having had a heart attack. I was horrified by the thought of possibly losing Dan and I was eager to get on a plane and get home but like a true Ozarker, Dan got up out of his bed in ICU and walked out and drove himself home. But for a little while, I was afraid that Dan’s life might be over. A year later, without any warning, he just falls in love and announces his wedding plans. One year after having stints put in his heart, he starts acting like a teenager and his greatest health challenge becomes the prospect of getting acne again. 

In 2017, you could never have guessed what 2018 had in store for you. Aren’t you glad you hung around to see what would happen?

We don’t know what 2019 holds in store for us. We can be pretty sure that Trump will say or do something even more stupid than what he has said and done in 2018. But we have reason to expect Bob Mueller to issue his investigation’s report in the next couple of months. Spring will come again, maybe it will include an impeachment trial in the Senate but whether it does or not, there will be strawberries and if you allow yourself to venture out again, there are strange new worlds to be discovered, new civilizations, new love, new friendships, the potential for a better world. 

My friend, Dr. Nicole Fisk, brought this Tennyson poem to my attention… sometimes it is nice to have an English professor in your inner circle, but it is a bit disarming to have a British poet writing a poem 150 years ago that sounds like something we needed to write this week, about the transition from 2018 to 2019:

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be

Folks, we are not in the throes of slavery, with naked Africans being auctioned on the city square. We are not in the midst of a Civil War that will claim the lives of one out of every 40 people alive in America. We are not fighting a world war or an epidemic. We are living through a dark chapter in American history but not the darkest. This is not the end of democracy. Trump will not bring social progress to an end. He, of course, will not make America great again but he has made Saturday Night Live great again and I am grateful for that. 

I don’t want to make a habit of quoting Woody Allen, but I think that he was onto something when he said that 80% of life is just showing up. You have to keep your game piece on the board, you have to stay in the game. You can retreat for a moment, take in a movie, yell back at the TV news, then get up and give 2019 a chance. If we try, we can make it better than 2018.