Cellar Voices and Balcony People
With Gratitude to Marney
By Charles Rush
September 20, 1998
Hebrews 12: 1-2
his sermon on this passage,
Carlyle Marney, began: As though it were only yesterday, I can remember
that 4-going-on-5 autumn-day room when I noticed those words over the
copper trough in the boys and I realized that those words smelled acrid
too. I could not read them yet but I could smell them. They darkened
me. I did not ask for them, they were just there, given. And within a
few years I would be taken up into the world they represented.
It was Freud who said that our
first 5 years of development define for us scripts of behavior that we
will likely repeat unconsciously for the rest of our lives. For some
of us there are anal, controlling scenarios. For others there are
oral, hungering scenarios. For some of us the issue is anxiety and
trust. For others still there are scenarios revolving around libido
competing against our need for order and decency. They are responses
to the manner in which we developed through our primal stages of
existence. Some of us were given bad scripts to work with and even
great actors like Laurence Olivier and Meryl Streep can't make the
script of Rambo a great work of art.
Aristotle used to say that we can
only become as moral and virtuous as the world that we are born into
because excellence is based on habit and habits are ingrained before we
are old enough to know whether they are good for us or not. This is
bad news for most of us here.
No, for most of us, the shrewd
observation from the book of Exodus is probably more apt. It says that
the sins of the Fathers are visited upon the children unto the third
and fourth generation. It is a shrewd observation on a number of
levels but easiest to see in severity.
There was a show on prostitution a
few years back. Have you ever asked yourself how some women end up
working the streets? The oldest profession on earth can not be simply
what it appears. It turns out that on interview some 70% had some
sexual trauma as a child, molestation either by a father, stepfather,
uncle or other older man. One woman that was interviewed looked
blankly at the PBS reporter and said that it wasn't but a few months
after her stepfather stopped molesting her that another man offered her
money for sex and she took it. Up close and personal, she still seemed
very much like a teenager in her late twenties, a warm and worried
soul, dragging a mutilated self-esteem behind her. I imagined that she
was rather monotonously acting out a predictable script, half hoping it
would play out differently the next time. We create the world around
us fairly dramatically and give to our children a script with
parameters that define the scope of their destiny.
And that script stays with us long
after the realities that shaped it are gone. Perhaps you heard the
interview this week by the reporter who had recently returned to
Sarejevo for the first time in a couple of years. Gone are the
invading Serbs. Present are the soldiers from the United Nations. The
streets are quiet and a hum of relative normalcy has returned. He said
that he still has a hard time walking down certain streets. He keeps
looking up at the Hotel, the third floor, where the snipers used to sit
and take out anyone they saw. When he gets to that corner he has the
strongest urge to run. One day recently her heard a loud noise when he
was walking and he dove for cover. Our cellar voices are like that.
They bind us with fears and anxieties that we would like to overcome
and cannot entirely be rid of. They emotionally bribe us with the long
rope of childhood memory.
Sometimes they can be genuinely
tragic in their scope. I got the distinct impression reading the Starr
report that we were peering into the cellar of the President. There
was something about the description of these series of sexual
encounters that seemed compulsive and strangely unfulfilling despite
their scintillating character. It was less like he was making this up
as his own reward for himself in the exercise of power, and more like
he was following, yet again, a destructive pattern of relationship that
he couldn't seem to be free of even when it was killing him. By all
accounts, President Clinton is incredibly accomplished: bright, with
terrific grasp of the issues, a people person, and a consensus
builder. But surely historians will write that it was his cellar
voices that trumped all of his considerable gifts and achievements.
That is the peril that we all face potentially if we do not pay a
certain attention and respect to the ghosts in our cellar.
And most of our cellars are filled
with hosts of lesser demons that need to be addressed even if they are
not terminally toxic. I inherited an impulsive, explosive, tantrum
like anger. Where did it come from? Surely it was modeled for me to a
certain extent, reinforced in sports, but so many men are like this
that it is best considered one of the by-products of 40,000 generations
of genetic wheeling and dealing (Marney). It was unchecked in my youth
but about 13 years ago our family was stuck in a traffic jam in
Washington and I was cursing the traffic gods who are responsible for
putting the 10,000 tourists in front of me just to ruin my life. I
finished cursing the gods, the guy immediately in front of me, the
U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Senate and everyone else
that was part of this plot. I got it out of my system and then came a
moment of deafening silence at the end.
At the time, Ian was only an
infant. He only had a couple of words in his vocabulary. But during
this tirade he stood up in his seat, sucking his thumb, surveying the
situation. And in this moment of silence he took his thumb out of his
mouth and said Damn traffic. He didn't even know what traffic was and I
had already taught him to curse it. Now I can't stand before you and
say that I am a model of even demeanor but I have been working on
exorcising that demon and each year I make a little more progress. And
an enormous corner was turned that night when I said to myself, I can't
pass this on to my children.
Who is it that is in your cellar?
Who taught you to doubt your self and think that you are not really
worthy of what you are? When do you flip into autopilot and find
yourself rehearsing words and behaviors almost compulsively? What is
it that makes you anxious in the night when no one is around and why
does that anxiety persist even though there is no serious rational
basis for it? What is the frame to your picture of what it means to be
a success and have you really spent enough effort re-shaping that for
yourself? Have you been content to let others tell you what you need
to be about and when is enough really enough? When do you get a volt
of anger running through you that those close to you feel is
overblown? What is the script behind that anger and where does it come
from?
We have to pay attention to our
cellar voices. For better and worse they were given to us before we
could even say come on in. They are the great accidents of our
destiny. They may control us, we may learn to control them, but one
way or the other, we are given to wrestle with these demons all the
days of our lives. They become the particular way we develop signposts
and stops in our spiritual journey. They are just there and we cannot
wish them away anymore than we can invite them in.
But they do have an antidote in our
balcony people. Our scripture this morning suggests we are really all
surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses that are also pulling for us.
The author to the Hebrews makes the great models of faith the theme of
his letter. Some of them are great Sarah and Abraham, Hagar, Moses.
Others, I am glad to read, are people who were considerably
compromised. David, who had sex with the wife of one of his soldiers
and then sent the soldier to certain death to cover it up. And Rahab
is mentioned too. Rahab hid a couple of scouts that were surveying
Palestine just after the Exodus, before the Israelites took possession
of the Promised Land. Rahab hid these men which took considerable
courage on her part. She ran into them because her home was a house of
prostitution. These scouts were out the night before surveying more
than just the countryside.
All of them are as models of faith,
not because they were people of perfect character, but because they
wrestled profoundly with the issues that were before them. Some of
them were able to achieve great feats; others just overcame the demons
in their cellars, more or less.
The author is poignant about this.
He says that the life of faith is not about achieving perfection. All
of us, he says, are like Moses at the end of his life. We are given a
chance to go to the top of the mountain, perhaps, and see the Promised
Land in the distance but we don't actually enter the Promised Land
ourselves. Not in this life. No, we are just on a journey. And we
would be overcome with fatigue, ennui, or distraction, if we did not
remember that we are not on this journey alone. We have these great
models of faith, this cloud of witnesses, that cheer us on.
These are our balcony people. They
pull for us. They inspire us. They tell us that we are up to the task
and that we can see this difficult time through. They model for us
what excellence is all about. They fill us with vision when the rest
of the world is wearing bifocals. They keep us on the path towards
hope because it is in their presence that we have had the experience
that profound change is possible and that we, even we, can be
different.
Unlike our cellar voices, we choose who is in our balcony. Who is in
your balcony? I have one friend that I talk to regularly by phone.
When I hang up my wife will say to me did yall talk about anything
important or did you just tell each other how great you are. It is
usually the latter but what is wrong with that in small, occasional
doses?
I have a college professor in my balcony, a football coach, and one of
the great blessings in my life is that my wife is in my balcony. Like
Jack Nicholson said in his most recent movie She made me want to be a
better man. I am eternally thankful for that and much more. Some of
the most influential people in my balcony I have never met face to
face. From the first time I read Hannah Arendt I had that intellectual
intoxication that most graduate students secretly hope for, to be in
the presence of a great mind. I very nearly read everything she wrote,
stopped only in the middle of her discourse on Kants political
philosophy which proved to be too much even for the devoted. Socrates,
St. Augustine, Luther, Erasmus, Rousseau, I might have been content
with the slumber of nothing but good golf and good wine, but that they
roused me towards much more. These are just a few of the people in my
balcony and when I am standing for the very best of what I am capable
of being, I can feel their pleasure. They are my saints, interceding
on my behalf, taking me to the next level, inspiring me beyond the
ordinary.
The scripture says that whenever a couple of them meet together, there
is church. Church is all about inspiring each other to live out of our
higher selves, to help each other stand over against all of those
cellar voices that would bind us. Church is the community that tells
you that you can change, you can be different. Church is the people
who help see you through. Where does church meet for you?
The good news of the bible is that God comes to meet us where we are.
That was the life that Jesus modeled for us. In his presence, people
became healed, enemies became reconciled, sinners caught in a
destructive way of living experienced the reality of change in their
lives, people came together and supported one another. That is
fundamentally what the spiritual life is all about. Why don't we let
church meet here?
Brothers and Sisters, do not despair, do not be distracted. Wherefore
seeing as how you are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let
us lay aside every weight and sin which clings to us so closely and let
us run our race with purpose, looking to Jesus the pioneer and
perfecter of our faith.
Amen
