“Listen to the Poet”

“Listen to the Poet”     Feb. 16, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

“The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.”  ― Leonard Bernstein

It seems like it was a lifetime ago now, but in the mid 90’s I went through a real “dark night of the soul” that left me broken hearted and bankrupt. About the only thing I had left to my name was a bunch of frequent flier points. My old friend and former board chairman, the late Dr. David Belcher, gave me some really good advice. He said, simply, “go to Paris.”

Paris is not necessary a great place to be when you are broke, but I found a really cheap hotel room in a pretty sketchy neighborhood and armed with a week-long subway pass and a Michelin Tour Guidebook, I set out to see Paris.

La Tour Eiffel, Notra-Dame, Momartre, and Palace Versailles.

What began to become evident to me 

Was the fact that even the ordinary, the purely functional aspects of the city, bridges, the tomb of Napoleon, just to look up the Champs Elysées and see the Arc de Triomphe in the middle of a busy intersection. . .

It was, as if, the French had decreed that anything, a school, a government building, a business district, that everything had to be the most amazing, the most beautiful, the most carefully designed and painstakingly thought out use of space, light, and building materials imaginable. David suggested that I go to Paris to fill my heart and soul with beauty, to restore my life. It was good advice. 

Life is often unspeakably hard. There are illnesses and heartbreaks, there are emotional and financial disasters, there are wars, plagues, and myriad forms of human evil. Fredrich Nietzsche said, “We have art so that we shall not die of reality.”

Leander Keck, a former Vanderbilt Divinity School professor, said that because the world is so hard, because the world is so full of suffering, we should expose ourselves to beauty in order to astonish our souls. Beauty can both heal and inspire. 

I heard Professor Keck lecturing in a cathedral in Atlanta, demanding of a large assembly of parish pastors, that we not fall prey to modern pressures to dumb down our church services, to fill them with cute, trite, trivializing songs, sermons and liturgy. And yes, sitting there among the marble and stone of an amazing cathedral, it wasn’t hard to feel that astonishment of the soul but what does that say to little churches such as ours who cannot possibly afford to build a building like that?

Obviously, everyone couldn’t do what we do, but we have the good fortune of having a collection of amazing musicians and we try to infuse our services with a variety of the most creative, inspiring, challenging, and beautiful music. Of course we try to write meaningful liturgy and I do my best to deliver sermons that are educational and morally challenging, but, and this is no exaggeration, many of the people who are among my most loyal listeners on line will eventually schedule a trip to Springfield to visit us in person and many of them tell me, that the sermons brought them here but the music was the most powerful and memorable part of their experience. I don’t feel the slightest bit of jealousy about that because, frankly, I agree with them. Our musicians are amazing.

I have delivered more than 2000 sermons in my life and I can’t tell you that any one of them stands out in my mind, but I can tell you about a night in St. Louis when I lay on the grass, looking up at the stars while James Taylor sang and played. I can tell you about the first of many times when I saw Les Misérables on stage. I can tell you about an evening at Gillioz when Jackson Browne stood on stage all alone with a dozen of his favorite guitars and played everything we asked him to pay for hours. 

So, I’m not talking about just church experiences. Several of us are going out to hear our friend Kelly Osborne sing tonight. I attend life music events from opera to the blues every week. And when I can, I expose myself to great art.

Last fall I was a passenger on a ship that spent about six hours in port in New York City. My friend, Dr. William Jimenez, offered to come pick me up and take me anywhere I wanted to go to spend that narrow passage of time and I asked to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

We had a wonderful visit, as we showed one another our favorite pieces in that amazing collection but whenever I am in New York, even for a brief layover, I try

 to spend some time sitting on this bench in front of this 19^th painting of St. Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage

 He depicts the teenaged martyr at the moment in her parents’ garden when she first hears the voices that commission her to save France from British occupation.

Clinically, you may say that Joan was mad, probably schizophrenic, but even the hardest of hearts could not say that she was just mad or merely schizophrenic. It is the look on her face that brings me back to the Met time and time again to gaze at this painting. So, it isn’t about the historical person of Joan, or the technique of the artist. It is that the painting is trying to say something to me.

Look at her, do you see both the awful dread of what she is being asked to do along with the noble resolve that she is a servant of God and her beloved France. You see the iron will that tells you that this 16-year-old peasant girl will do what is asked of her. 

I keep a print of this painting over my desk where I write because that is the intensity that I want to bring to my writing. An artist friend of mine, who knew of

 my love for this painting, and rather prophetically aware of how my denominational career was going, made this small sculpture for me . . . the immolation of St. Joan of Arc, who was, historically, rewarded for her passion by being burned alive at the stake. Artists can be tough that way. Art can speak to us at a deeper level than words alone.

I was talking about this sermon with a good friend of mine who spent a few years in what he euphemistically calls his “time out,” which happened to be in a federal prison. He said, that towards the end of his sentence, he couldn’t wait to get out and go to Kansas City to visit the Nelson Adkins Art Museum. The beginning of healing from such a hard period of deprivation and isolation was to be exposed again, to beauty. Can you imagine going from prison to sit in front of this huge canvas of Monet’s water lilies?  

Or my favorite from their collection, this amazingly intricate ivory miniature sculpture from Italy of the expulsion of the rebel angels from heaven, carved from a single piece of ivory that must have sent the artist over the edge of sanity before it was completed. You don’t need to own this art, you just need to go visit it, in Kanas City, or New York, or Springfield!

I asked Sean to include this song from Bruce Cockburn in our service today, in which he sings about the imperative to listen to our poets:

Pay attention to the poet You need him and you know it

Put him up against the wall Shoot him up with pentothal

Shoot him up with lead You won't call back what's been said
Put him in the ground But one day you'll look around
There'll be a face you don't know Voicing thoughts you've heard before

Male female slave or free Peaceful or disorderly
Maybe you and he will not agree

But you need him to show you new ways to see

I think that the late Lithuanian film maker, Jonas Mekas, was right when he said that civilizations perish because we start to listen to our politicians rather than our poets. That may seem like hyperbole on the face of it, but I challenge you, listen to Donald Trump’s latest State of the Union address and then read T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”  and tell me which one of them is telling you the truth!

There was not much of what could be called art or poety in my rural Kentucky homelife. In fact, the principle difference between a cup of yogurt and Glasgow, Kentucky is that a cup of yogurt has an active living culture. Seriously, the zip code there is E-I-E-I-O. But in the summer of 1973, when I was 16 years old, without my parent’s knowledge, I slipped off, night after night, to go watch the newly released movie and it set my mind on fire. I don’t know how many times I saw it, dozens of times. The music set my mind free of the magical religious form of faith my church had instilled in me and it inspired to start looking at the world in a whole new way. 

Nearly 50 years later, I still implore our musicians to take on the Herculean task of presenting this musical here on Easter and if there is not a cold hard place where your heart was supposed to be, this music still thrills, inspires, and teaches us. No one is preaching that day, but it will be the best sermon delivered in this sanctuary this year. 

I will conclude where I began this morning, quoting Leonard Bernstein – Art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job . . . art cannot change events, but art can change people. If we will but expose ourselves to are, we can be enriched, ennobled, encouraged . . . and when our souls have been thus astonished, it can change the way we live, the way we vote, the way we think. 

Please, support our local performing artists in music and theater. Don’t always think of art as something you have to own and hang on your own walls. Art is something that you experience. Go to our art museum. Support our local orchestra, and opera. Turn off your TV and go hear some live music. Go back to the poetry section of Barnes and Noble and sit down and read through a few collections until you find one that you can’t live without. If you need a suggestion, start with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. 

Don’t let the harshness and ignorance of this world dull your mind and kill your spirit. You are a community of prophets and if you cannot hear the voices on your own, I’m telling you, they are calling you to save the world.