Sermon: For all the Saints -- Cellar Voices and Balcony People

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For All the Saints – Cellar Voices, Balcony People * †

By Charles Rush

October 28, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 6.4 Mb) ]

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 read 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 ‘Wedding Crashers' 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.

I got a call from a friend a few years ago, asking for a sounding board to deal with his mother-in-law. He had married a girl from China and her mother lived right off Bowery and Canal street in Manhattan. She was a toddler during Mao's reign of terror in the Cultural Revolution that starved 25 million people to death. She came to this country after her husband jumped ship from the Chinese Navy into the Hudson River (and he was finally able to bring her here), managed to live the rest of her life without learning English and was now enfeebled and needed home health care.

As we walked up the block, this European son-in-law explained that the home health care providers refused to go to the apartment until some changes were made. As we walked up the dingy hall of those 110 year old tenements, he pushed open the door and this tiny apartment was dark, not only for lack of windows, but also because there were boxes packed from the floor to the ceiling, so high they impeded the single bulb in the middle of the room. It was crammed full of a dozen cans of tuna here, a crate of dry noodles there, a vast labyrinth of Chinese foodstuffs that almost exist as a parallel universe to western cuisine.

As we wended our way to the kitchen, also completely filled, there sat Grandma in this tiny space watching TV. He translated about 1/4 of the actual conversation, an anxiety filled screed that the home health care workers wanted to take her stuff. I just said to her, "no one is going to take your stuff" as I surveyed this surreal insulation that was apparently protecting her from some remote deprivation that I couldn't really ever appreciate. Never mind that her children were now relatively wealthy and could take care of her. In her mind, she was only safe in this constricted prison, a toddlers nightmare that had consumed more and more of the psychological landscape of her world. That nightmare appeared to have come back to her in vivid color now that dementia had begun to set in.

No that childhood script of deprivations, distortion and abuse, stays with us long after the realities that shaped it are gone. I watched the disturbing documentary "Deliver Us From Evil" that deals with Father Oliver O'Grady, a thirty year pedophile priest who served various parishes in California. All three of the victims that they interviewed have had substantial difficulties getting on with their lives as adults, getting beyond feelings of self-loathing, a distressing anxiety, an inability to just feel normal. One of the women, now in her late 40's, described how for years when she was driving down the California highways, if she saw the make and model car that the Priest drove that she was molested in, she would irrationally slam on the brakes or speed by it out of control with such anxiety that she wasn't entirely clear as to what she was doing in the moment.

Sometimes they can be genuinely tragic in their scope. I got the distinct impression reading the Starr report a decade ago 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 these encounters 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 otherwise incredibly accomplished: bright, with terrific grasp of the issues, a people person, a consensus builder.

But surely historians will write that at precisely his most influential time of life, 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 I know are like this that it is probably 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 24 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 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 cannot pass this on to another generation.'

Who is it that is in your cellar? Who taught you to doubt yourself and think that you are not really worthy of what you are? When do you flip into auto-pilot 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 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 she was 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 and 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 ya'll 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 'As Good as it Gets', ‘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 Kant's political philosophy' which proved to be too much even for the devoted. Socrates, St. Augustine, Luther, Erasmus, Edmund Burke, Reinhold Niebuhr. 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.

You would not be here today, except that someone, probably several people, inspired you. I want you to bring them to mind for just a minute. Who is it that blessed you? Who is it that encouraged you? Who gave you what you needed so you might become who you are? Who is it that comes to your mind? Bless them… You can open your eyes… That can be surprisingly emotional in a complex way.

The scripture says that whenever a couple of them meet together and bless each other, 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.

* With gratitude to Carlyle Marney

† A version of this sermon was preached at Christ Church on Sept 20, 1998.