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The Secret of the Universe Revealed July 10, 2005 John Kelly Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland I will tell you right now that you are all the victims of a tremendous bait and switch. I don’t really have the secret of the universe. I know that must come as a great surprise, and I understand if you are disappointed, or even angry. There it was in the church newsletter: Secret of the Universe Revealed. It’s on the front of the order of service: Secret of the Universe Revealed. Can’t you believe what you read nowadays? I can understand if you feel cheated and I wouldn’t blame you for getting up and walking out right now. I’m reminded of the Sunday when Roger gave his sermon on Polyamory and the Prairie Vole. All those would-be polygamists were sitting at the back of the room, just waiting for the green light on their adultery. Man, they must have been ticked off when Roger never gave it. To be honest, like a crooked CEO hyping the value of his company so his stock would rise, my sermon title was an exaggeration. I was flattered to be asked to deliver a sermon, but I was worried about whether anyone would actually show up on a Sunday in July. I don’t have a jazz band or a magician or a school superintendent. I needed something catchy. Since Roger had already done the polygamy thing, it was a choice between titling my sermon “Free Beer” or going with “The Secret of the Universe Revealed.” You know which one I picked. I’m glad I got that off my chest. It’s even possible that the secret of the universe could come to me in the next 15 minutes, or to one of you. In the mean time, I have ANOTHER sermon that I prepared. It’s called “My Life As an Altar Boy.” How many people in here were altar boys? I grew up a Roman Catholic and did the whole Catholicism thing: I was Baptized, First Communioned, First Confessioned, Confirmed. I even spent a few years at Catholic school, where my most vivid memory is of playing tag in the first grade and accidentally knocking off my teacher’s wimple and being amazed that it hid two feet of rich brown hair. It had never crossed my mind that nuns had hair. Even so, we were not hardcore Catholics, not compared to most of my cousins. We had crucifixes hanging on the wall, but only in bedrooms, not in the living room. We had rosaries, but we only said them when on long car trips, where we believed that the protective power of Hail Marys and Our Fathers would keep us safe from head-on collisions. (It must have worked.) And when I was eleven I became an altar boy. What I mostly remember is being a sort of on-call altar boy, an altar boy of last resort. The phone would ring early Sunday mornings when some other boy was sick or on vacation. I don’t think I was a very good altar boy. I didn’t do it regularly enough to get totally comfortable with it. There are so many rules with the Catholic Mass. There are times when you’re supposed to sit and times when you’re supposed to kneel and times when you’re supposed to stand. And there’s none of this “as you are able” stuff. A religion that believes in Purgatory isn’t going to have any of that. When you’re in the congregation you can always kind of sneak a peek at the people near you. If they’re standing, you stand, if they’re sitting, you sit. That’s hard to do when you’re an altar boy, up on the altar. So I was always nervous, afraid of being exposed as a fraud. In fact, it was a bit like that nightmare where you find yourself taking a final exam for a class you don’t remember signing up for. Still, there were things that I liked about being an altar boy. I liked the outfit. I liked ringing the bells. These were four brass bells that looked like inverted egg cups, joined with a brass handle. They made a great sound. If I had been putting together the ceremony I would have rung them all the time, not just when the body and blood of Christ were being raised. I also liked holding the little brass plate under the chins of celebrants who were taking Communion. I especially liked extinguishing the candles after Mass was over, using a special snuffer on a pole, the candle sizzling briefly when I dropped the metal cone over the flame, then a wisp of smoke when I removed the snuffer. The altar boy has a lot to do. He’s responsible for bells and candles and cruets of holy water. It’s a bit like being a bat-boy for a major league baseball team. There’s lots of STUFF in Catholicism, and to a kid these things are almost like toys. Occasionally at home when no one was looking, I would take a crucifix down from the wall. It slid open, revealing two candles and a tiny bottle of holy water. It was like Batman’s utility belt, or some gadget Q would make for James Bond. Catholicism is a great religion for people who like a lot of accessories. But obviously none of this really stuck, for when I was around thirteen I started not wanting to go to Mass. For whatever reason, I wasn’t doing much altar boying anymore. Being an altar boy at least had made the time pass more quickly but now, sitting in a pew like everyone else, the Mass seemed to drag on. What’s more, without the distraction of bells and candles and holy water, I had started listening to the words and realized that things didn’t add up. The Bible didn’t seem literally true to me. Worse, all the Catholic rituals that I had liked as a child now seemed corny. Luckily, salvation was at hand: Around this time my parents got divorced. Perhaps the Kellys just don’t have the neatly compartmentalized brains of, say, the Kennedys, which allow them to be divorcees AND staunch Catholics. In any event, except at major holidays, we just sort of stopped going to church. When My Lovely Girlfriend became My Lovely Wife, it was a judge who married us, not a priest. And things might have stayed this way for the rest of my life if not for two people whom I met a while back: My children. An aside: Recently, another Washington Post writer and I were having lunch with Caryle Murphy, a reporter who had just returned from several months in Baghdad. Things are as bad there as you’d expect them to be, she said. It’s unsafe for Westerners to venture anywhere other than between heavily armed compounds. It’s unsafe for Iraqis, too, but they don’t have much choice. Sunnis and Shiites are at each other’s throats, but, said Caryle, there is occasional intermarriage between them. How does that work? Asked the other Post reporter. How do they raise the kids? Unitarian! I said. My wife and I don’t fit that cliched model: Catholic plus Jew equals Unitarian. Ruth’s father was Jewish, but her mother’s an Episcopalian. Ruth mostly attended Episcopalian church growing up, but like me, she had come to find the whole thing unnecessary. And yet we both still harbored some warm feelings toward those experiences, not the rigid pronouncements from the altar, but the stories told in church, the stories in the Bible, some of the messages… the REASONS for religion, if not the practice of it. When our oldest daughter was a toddler we found her a place in a preschool in a Methodist church. It wasn’t run BY the church but our then-4-year-old asked enough questions about this fellow Jesus whose picture was plastered all over the place that we thought we’d better get some answers. Neither Ruth nor I wanted to return to the churches of our youth. That seemed hypocritical: Look, WE don’t really believe this stuff, but we’re going to drag YOU here. I realize this is the basis for probably 90 percent of the churchgoing in this country, but we were determined to resist it. Someone recommended Cedar Lane and here we are, 10 years later. Never did I know how adept I could become with a craft knife until I went through those several cardboard-intensive years in religious education. I don’t know if I’ll ever be totally subsumed by Unitarianism. I think to be honest, I’ll always have a journalist’s skepticism. I find Unitarianism strangely self-referential. We’re always trumpeting the various founding fathers and literary greats who were Unitarians, ignoring the scoundrels and ax murderers and tax cheats who were probably Unitarians as well. My older daughter, especially, struggles with the squishiness of this religion. I think that, like many of us, she occasionally wants to be told what to do. She wants to be told what is right and how to act. There is something comforting in that. But Unitarianism’s great strength, I guess I should say Unitarian Universalism’s great strength, is that you are free to think for yourself, bound by a belief that others should be treated with dignity and respect. Our daughters are reaching the age where they drag their heels on Sunday mornings, just like I did 30 years ago: Do we HAFTA go to church? It’s boring. Boring! I want to say to them. You want boring, try the church that I had to go to. And I’ll tell you, when I was in Sunday school we NEVER got to pin the clitoris on the vagina. This, of course, has little effect. Children are strangely immune to tales of how bad you had it when you were a kid. But I love this church. I appreciate Roger’s sermons, which I think of as his weekly magazine cover story. I love the music and the setting. And I also like the protection the church gives me. Not just against sorrow and heartache, but against people who can’t believe a liberal or a journalist, or, worse, a liberal journalist, actually goes to church. When I’m around really churchy people I love dropping that I go to church. Being a Unitarian gives you the benefits of a religion without the icky parts. And we have room for all sorts of believers, don’t we? My wife Ruth, for example, is an atheist, something I’m not sure I knew until Roger had a show of hands here during one sermon asking how many people believed in a god, considered themselves Christians, considered themselves atheists, etc., etc. Maybe it’s my vestigial Catholicism but to be honest I was a little horrified by Ruth’s admission. Is it too embarrassing to recommend a belief in god as a sort of insurance policy? Let’s say you say you don’t believe in god, and when you die, you turn out to have been right. So what? You’re still dead and there’s no god. But let’s say you’re wrong, and there is a god? And he’s none too pleased by your earlier stance. It’s like, what does it hurt? Would it kill you to believe in god? On the off chance that there might be something to this God thing, why not keep that option on the table? Of course, it’s not just at the moment of your death that you should be thinking about how you lived your life. Which brings me to my closing remarks. Exactly three years and 51 weeks ago I was riding an exercise bike at the Silver Spring YMCA when I felt a heavy pressure in my chest, a sharp pain in my left arm and an overwhelming sense of dread in my very being. I drove myself home, whereupon My Lovely Wife called an ambulance. At the hospital, after I’d been told I was having a heart attack, there came the moment when I was wheeled away from Ruth. I was going to the room where they would try to clear the blockage in my heart and save my life. I won’t keep you in suspense: They succeeded. I spent the first few months after my heart attack sleeping with the lights on and occasionally, for no apparent reason, breaking into tears. I think this was a reaction to coming so close to dying. And to the realization that though I’d foiled the Grim Reaper this time, he was going to get me eventually. Despite being a pretty nice guy who’d never really hurt anyone, I was going to die. This is a bit of knowledge some of you may already possess. You may have understood it long before you were 38, which is how old I was when I had my coronary and my epiphany. But it was new to me, and while it was scary at first, it was also liberating. And even reassuring, the way that finally realizing something so obvious can be. And it was not long after this that I realized the secret of the universe, or at least one way of looking at our lives. To be honest, though, I can’t quite grasp it, this secret. I glimpse it out of the corner of my eye, but when I try to pin it down it squirts away. But it goes something like this: 1. You’re born. 2. You live. 3. You die. There might be a Step 4—Heaven—but frankly who knows? We’re all in Step 2 right now, doing our best not to think about Step 3. But this is the inevitable step, the one thing we can’t change. And the realization I had, the wispy secret that made sense to me but will probably sound silly as I try to describe it to you, is this: We construct our lives trying to just fill time before the inevitable. It’s cute, really, the things that we do: We go to school, we fall in love, we procreate. We start careers. We travel. We get a pet. We learn to play the oboe. We collect Hummel figurines. We go to church. We make a mean chili. We teach ourselves macrame. We read a book when our plane is delayed. We plant annuals. We plant perennials. We strongly object and write a letter that says “Dear Sir or Madam, I strongly object.” We have a word at the tip of our tongue. We shop for a new winter coat. We think of old lovers and clean the garage. We cry over spilt milk. We go for a run. We finish the crossword and turn out the light and do it all again in the morning. And really, what else are we gonna do? My realization wasn’t that we live lives of utter banality when weighed against the certainty of death. It’s that we take everything way too seriously, when really, everything that we do is a hobby. It’s not just the hobbies that are hobbies. It’s EVERYTHING. It’s ALL a way of filling time while ignoring how the story is going to end. It’s all reading a book when our plane is delayed. So what I try to remember now is not to take anything too seriously. To not be beaten down by small setbacks or destroyed by big ones. To rejoice in the mundane. To understand that there’s nothing I can do to change the way this story is going to end, so I might as well enjoy my hobbies while I can. It’s not much as far as secrets of the universe go. But it’s all I’ve got. |
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist
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