The Persistence of Memory
Sermon by Barbara Hale
February 23, 2020
When I agreed to do a sermon during Rev. Craig’s sabbatical, I was just starting to reread Kurt Vonnegut’s novels and I thought I would be doing a sermon about Vonnegut as a Humanist Hero. But that will have to wait until another time, because as part of the reading group here, I picked up The Library Book by Susan Orlean and read the passage that was our second reading today. It made me stop and think.
“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying.” Orlean writes. She goes on, “(Our life) is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it – with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited – it takes on a life of its own.”
Today, I want to share some of the stories I’ve heard or experienced here at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church during the last 29 plus years and give them a life of their own. These stories are all filtered through my own interpretation. You may have heard the same stories over the years and remember them in a different way, but I am the one up here talking, so after the service, let’s discuss your interpretations of these stories.
Some of our old friends have died and left us and we miss them. If you are new here or even newish, you may not have known them, but their contributions to the church have helped us build the congregation we are today.
When the Hale family first started attending the BUUC, the minister was the Rev. John Agnew, who served this church from 1977 to 1995. He gave very good, sometimes brilliant, sermons and had burn marks on the sleeves of his robe where he often came into close contact with the candles of joys and concerns. He wasted no time getting people to sign the membership book. I don’t think Greg and I made it to a month’s worth of services before he had us sitting in the front pew putting our John Hancocks on the dotted line. The Hyde Family started coming to church regularly right around the time we did and if Nancy and I were talking to each other at coffee hour, John would inevitably come up to us and say, “It’s so great to have a Hale and a Hyde in the house.” Rev. Agnew passed away on July 10, 2004 at the age of 85.
Then there was Rev. Bonnie, one of the interim ministers who served us between Rev. Agnew and Rev. Sara Ascher. On one memorable Christmas Eve, Rev. Bonnie failed to show for the service until it was over. Apparently she couldn’t find her cat and had panicked. Actually, in my opinion, Bonnie did us a great favor. We found that even on short notice here; we can pick up and carry on. Kim Burdon took the reins and we had a wonderful service that night.
My family lost our beloved boxer dog Dinah due to cancer during Bonnie’s tenure and we were devastated. Bonnie decided to do something about it. She finagled us into fostering a dog named Angel. Angel was a hyperactive yellow lab mix with a club foot on her front right side. We were used to crating Dinah when we weren’t home and figured that crating Angel would be the best thing for both Angel and us. Well, there wasn’t a crate built that could hold Angel. One morning in desperation, knowing I had to be gone for most of the morning, Greg secured the crate with bungee cords in all directions. But of course, you guessed it, when I got home, Angel greeted me at the door and the bungee cords were still intact around the crate. I’m not one to believe in miracles, but Angel tested my limits there.
Finally, we found a woman from Holland who wanted to come over and meet Angel. She had recently lost her dog and was on the lookout for a replacement. So the day before, we took Angel to the groomers and she was looking good. The next day when the woman was set to come, our friend Doug Smith, the hardworking Treasurer of this church, came over with his dog Nell and she and Angel romped around in our muddy back yard until you could barely see what color Angel was. The woman took her anyway, which made her the angel in my mind, and was very happy to do so even though her husband was in the background saying, “Don’t you think we should think about this?” I think it might have been a good thing that Rev. Bonnie was only an interim minister or who knows how many dogs we would have fostered before we gave our greyhound Tigger his forever home, which, by the way, we did very quickly after our Angel experience. Rev. Bonnie Devlin died in March of 2018. May she rest in peace with the angels: canine, feline and otherwise.
I know that there are many people who are attending services these days who never had the opportunity to meet Loana Gadaire. She was born in 1909 and became a member of the church in 1927. But she told me one Sunday that she had attended church at the BUUC since she was four years old. When my family first started attending the BUUC in 1991, Loana was a fixture nearly every Sunday morning in her pew on the left hand side of the church. One Sunday morning, she shared some information with me about the beautiful window in the entranceway of the church – the one with the purple irises. That window is dedicated to Bernice P. Nichols, who was Loana’s mother. She said that her mother “loved our church and never missed a Sunday unless she was sick. She furnished flowers every Sunday, worked on the church supper, decorated the church at Christmas with wreathes and garlands. Bernice Parkhurst Nichols died in 1977 at the age of 93.” Loana was happy to share her mother’s story with me and it is a privilege for me to share it with you. Loana left us in 2008. I often think of her when I pass Bernice’s window.
Did you know that our old friend, the late Alan Hyde was a super-athlete in his youth? He went to Tantasqua High School and was captain of the baseball, football and basketball teams. Alan was a Humanist like me and we liked to congratulate ourselves and each other on that now and then. He wore many hats as a member of the BUUC including president and handy man at large, but when he was acting as Clerk of the church, his Executive Committee meeting minutes were famous. He could make people laugh at the driest and most mundane parts of church business. Alan’s whole life is interwoven within the threads of this church. His father Louie’s turkey dinners were legendary and I will never forget the Sunday that Alan’s daughter Meredith thought it would be funny to put a fart cushion on the seat before her father sat down after the first hymn.
I don’t think any of us sitting here who knew her will ever forget our dear Ruth King. To me, she was one of the bravest and most interesting people I have ever met. One day at the Stone Soup luncheon, she told us about her adventure of traveling through the Suez Canal. I can’t remember now if she was coming home from or going to Malaya where she was doing missionary work, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that she was a passenger on a freight ship and as they were passing through the Canal, they were being shot at. The captain told her to go below decks to be safe. Thankfully for all of us, a little out of character, she did as she was told. I think we could spend hours sharing stories about Ruth.
My late husband Greg sang in the BUUC choir almost as soon as we started coming here. Occasionally, he would get decide he was sick of it and I would have to listen to him complain about having to go out on a Thursday evening for rehearsal after a long day at work or because he had to miss a particular baseball or football game. I got sick of listening to him now and then and would tell him, if he felt that way about it, why didn’t he just quit? Well, long story short, Greg was in the choir up until the day he finally got too sick to come here. And truthfully, I don’t think he ever would have quit if nature hadn’t forced him to. Such is the power of our music director, Lila.
Our current members have fantastic stories to tell.
Did you know that our esteemed John Kennison once saved chess master Bobby Fischer’s life? If I have this wrong, John, please let us know at coffee hour. He pulled Bobby Fischer back from the street in New York City to save him from being hit by a car. He also once beat the great Bobby Fischer at his own game.
Many people who have ended up here have ties to Old Sturbridge Village. But did you know that Donna Sullivan and Lila Farrar worked together at Old Sturbridge Village as milkmaids from 1974 through 1976? They were responsible for five cows of various temperaments, Donna told me once. She said, “One cow that stands out in my memory is Ruby. This was a cow with an attitude! Once when her stall was blocked by a milking stool, she pulled a U-turn in the barn and came right at me, bellowing and shaking her head. Her long (and sharp) horns made me take a quick leap over the fence. Ruby was a cow that would make anyone question their vegetarian convictions. . .” However, I guess Lila and Ruby got along. Maybe Ruby was a soprano?
Our youth have had their moments too. I remember one Sunday quite a few years ago, young Amy Mulligan was participating in an intergenerational service. She was to give a short talk about what she appreciated about the church. The thing that sticks with me to this very day is that she appreciated the church because if it weren’t for the BUUC, her parents would have no friends.
Some of us can remember the sight of Eunice Whitehead smiling at three year old Nick Smith when he crawled under the pew to say hello to her. Eunice wasn’t much of a smiler, but Nick had her number.
Then there was the time many years ago that the members of the Women’s Alliance invited all the young women of the church to a meeting following the service. Those of us who attended, including Laurel Burdon and me, thought that we were finally going to be included in their meetings. Up to that time, the Women’s Alliance always seemed like a secret society like the Masons or something. Instead, after we got settled in, the older women got up, handed us over the old records and marched straight out of the church, leaving behind Jane MacKenzie who would to be our guide until we established ourselves.
Not all the things we share here are happy or funny moments, of course. Here we share our concerns and sorrows too – sadness over a member who has been diagnosed with a serious illness or a parent who is succumbing to dementia, concern for a best friend who is dealing with the loss of a family member, hopelessness over a niece or nephew who has gotten involved with drugs, or simply the broken heart of losing a dear beloved pet. We know accident victims, people who have lost their homes and possessions because of fire, someone who has lost a job that they desperately need. But we know that here we can always count on sympathy and empathy. We can count on someone asking if there is anything they can do. We can often count on a meal or two.
Susan Orlean writes: The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten – that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose – a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.
Sure Orlean is talking about books and libraries here, of course, but she could just as well be talking about our church. Sometimes keeping the BUUC open does seem like “an act of sheer defiance” but yet we have been carrying on since the 1700s.
And every Sunday these days, we recite our affirmation in unison.
HERE: We unite in an atmosphere of care and support to foster spiritual health and growth.
HERE: We focus on sharing our ideas and histories, with warmth, hope, loving friendship and an open mind.
HERE: We nurture stability for our daily lives and seek motivation to reach out to the larger community.
The second part of the affirmation may be the one that means the most to me: Here, we focus on sharing our ideas and histories, with warmth, hope, loving friendship and an open mind. Here, we share our joys and our concerns and know we will be met with people who want to share them with us.
I am not a believer in a god so I don’t really pray, but in my Humanist mind this is exactly what a prayer is: That sharing and accepting, the willingness to be a part of another person’s story. So let us share with one another.
We are people from many places and circumstances. We have had many achievements and have overcome many trials. Every day we deal with heartbreak and worry. There are times when we can almost burst with joy and pride. We have done countless fascinating and unusual things in our lives that deserved to be shared even if to us they seem to be mundane and ordinary. Our ideas and histories have ultimately brought us together to this place on this Sunday. Let us share with one another. Then maybe someday Emily or Cara or Isaac or Avery or Jack will be up here relating your story or my story. Thus is the persistence of memory and we may never really die.
Here: We, the people of the BUUC, are extraordinary! Here: We are surrounded by saints who make living in this often “obscene” world worthwhile. And I am privileged to be a humble part of this extraordinary place.
And if this isn’t nice, what is?
And so it goes…
Sermon by Barbara Hale
February 23, 2020
When I agreed to do a sermon during Rev. Craig’s sabbatical, I was just starting to reread Kurt Vonnegut’s novels and I thought I would be doing a sermon about Vonnegut as a Humanist Hero. But that will have to wait until another time, because as part of the reading group here, I picked up The Library Book by Susan Orlean and read the passage that was our second reading today. It made me stop and think.
“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying.” Orlean writes. She goes on, “(Our life) is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it – with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited – it takes on a life of its own.”
Today, I want to share some of the stories I’ve heard or experienced here at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church during the last 29 plus years and give them a life of their own. These stories are all filtered through my own interpretation. You may have heard the same stories over the years and remember them in a different way, but I am the one up here talking, so after the service, let’s discuss your interpretations of these stories.
Some of our old friends have died and left us and we miss them. If you are new here or even newish, you may not have known them, but their contributions to the church have helped us build the congregation we are today.
When the Hale family first started attending the BUUC, the minister was the Rev. John Agnew, who served this church from 1977 to 1995. He gave very good, sometimes brilliant, sermons and had burn marks on the sleeves of his robe where he often came into close contact with the candles of joys and concerns. He wasted no time getting people to sign the membership book. I don’t think Greg and I made it to a month’s worth of services before he had us sitting in the front pew putting our John Hancocks on the dotted line. The Hyde Family started coming to church regularly right around the time we did and if Nancy and I were talking to each other at coffee hour, John would inevitably come up to us and say, “It’s so great to have a Hale and a Hyde in the house.” Rev. Agnew passed away on July 10, 2004 at the age of 85.
Then there was Rev. Bonnie, one of the interim ministers who served us between Rev. Agnew and Rev. Sara Ascher. On one memorable Christmas Eve, Rev. Bonnie failed to show for the service until it was over. Apparently she couldn’t find her cat and had panicked. Actually, in my opinion, Bonnie did us a great favor. We found that even on short notice here; we can pick up and carry on. Kim Burdon took the reins and we had a wonderful service that night.
My family lost our beloved boxer dog Dinah due to cancer during Bonnie’s tenure and we were devastated. Bonnie decided to do something about it. She finagled us into fostering a dog named Angel. Angel was a hyperactive yellow lab mix with a club foot on her front right side. We were used to crating Dinah when we weren’t home and figured that crating Angel would be the best thing for both Angel and us. Well, there wasn’t a crate built that could hold Angel. One morning in desperation, knowing I had to be gone for most of the morning, Greg secured the crate with bungee cords in all directions. But of course, you guessed it, when I got home, Angel greeted me at the door and the bungee cords were still intact around the crate. I’m not one to believe in miracles, but Angel tested my limits there.
Finally, we found a woman from Holland who wanted to come over and meet Angel. She had recently lost her dog and was on the lookout for a replacement. So the day before, we took Angel to the groomers and she was looking good. The next day when the woman was set to come, our friend Doug Smith, the hardworking Treasurer of this church, came over with his dog Nell and she and Angel romped around in our muddy back yard until you could barely see what color Angel was. The woman took her anyway, which made her the angel in my mind, and was very happy to do so even though her husband was in the background saying, “Don’t you think we should think about this?” I think it might have been a good thing that Rev. Bonnie was only an interim minister or who knows how many dogs we would have fostered before we gave our greyhound Tigger his forever home, which, by the way, we did very quickly after our Angel experience. Rev. Bonnie Devlin died in March of 2018. May she rest in peace with the angels: canine, feline and otherwise.
I know that there are many people who are attending services these days who never had the opportunity to meet Loana Gadaire. She was born in 1909 and became a member of the church in 1927. But she told me one Sunday that she had attended church at the BUUC since she was four years old. When my family first started attending the BUUC in 1991, Loana was a fixture nearly every Sunday morning in her pew on the left hand side of the church. One Sunday morning, she shared some information with me about the beautiful window in the entranceway of the church – the one with the purple irises. That window is dedicated to Bernice P. Nichols, who was Loana’s mother. She said that her mother “loved our church and never missed a Sunday unless she was sick. She furnished flowers every Sunday, worked on the church supper, decorated the church at Christmas with wreathes and garlands. Bernice Parkhurst Nichols died in 1977 at the age of 93.” Loana was happy to share her mother’s story with me and it is a privilege for me to share it with you. Loana left us in 2008. I often think of her when I pass Bernice’s window.
Did you know that our old friend, the late Alan Hyde was a super-athlete in his youth? He went to Tantasqua High School and was captain of the baseball, football and basketball teams. Alan was a Humanist like me and we liked to congratulate ourselves and each other on that now and then. He wore many hats as a member of the BUUC including president and handy man at large, but when he was acting as Clerk of the church, his Executive Committee meeting minutes were famous. He could make people laugh at the driest and most mundane parts of church business. Alan’s whole life is interwoven within the threads of this church. His father Louie’s turkey dinners were legendary and I will never forget the Sunday that Alan’s daughter Meredith thought it would be funny to put a fart cushion on the seat before her father sat down after the first hymn.
I don’t think any of us sitting here who knew her will ever forget our dear Ruth King. To me, she was one of the bravest and most interesting people I have ever met. One day at the Stone Soup luncheon, she told us about her adventure of traveling through the Suez Canal. I can’t remember now if she was coming home from or going to Malaya where she was doing missionary work, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that she was a passenger on a freight ship and as they were passing through the Canal, they were being shot at. The captain told her to go below decks to be safe. Thankfully for all of us, a little out of character, she did as she was told. I think we could spend hours sharing stories about Ruth.
My late husband Greg sang in the BUUC choir almost as soon as we started coming here. Occasionally, he would get decide he was sick of it and I would have to listen to him complain about having to go out on a Thursday evening for rehearsal after a long day at work or because he had to miss a particular baseball or football game. I got sick of listening to him now and then and would tell him, if he felt that way about it, why didn’t he just quit? Well, long story short, Greg was in the choir up until the day he finally got too sick to come here. And truthfully, I don’t think he ever would have quit if nature hadn’t forced him to. Such is the power of our music director, Lila.
Our current members have fantastic stories to tell.
Did you know that our esteemed John Kennison once saved chess master Bobby Fischer’s life? If I have this wrong, John, please let us know at coffee hour. He pulled Bobby Fischer back from the street in New York City to save him from being hit by a car. He also once beat the great Bobby Fischer at his own game.
Many people who have ended up here have ties to Old Sturbridge Village. But did you know that Donna Sullivan and Lila Farrar worked together at Old Sturbridge Village as milkmaids from 1974 through 1976? They were responsible for five cows of various temperaments, Donna told me once. She said, “One cow that stands out in my memory is Ruby. This was a cow with an attitude! Once when her stall was blocked by a milking stool, she pulled a U-turn in the barn and came right at me, bellowing and shaking her head. Her long (and sharp) horns made me take a quick leap over the fence. Ruby was a cow that would make anyone question their vegetarian convictions. . .” However, I guess Lila and Ruby got along. Maybe Ruby was a soprano?
Our youth have had their moments too. I remember one Sunday quite a few years ago, young Amy Mulligan was participating in an intergenerational service. She was to give a short talk about what she appreciated about the church. The thing that sticks with me to this very day is that she appreciated the church because if it weren’t for the BUUC, her parents would have no friends.
Some of us can remember the sight of Eunice Whitehead smiling at three year old Nick Smith when he crawled under the pew to say hello to her. Eunice wasn’t much of a smiler, but Nick had her number.
Then there was the time many years ago that the members of the Women’s Alliance invited all the young women of the church to a meeting following the service. Those of us who attended, including Laurel Burdon and me, thought that we were finally going to be included in their meetings. Up to that time, the Women’s Alliance always seemed like a secret society like the Masons or something. Instead, after we got settled in, the older women got up, handed us over the old records and marched straight out of the church, leaving behind Jane MacKenzie who would to be our guide until we established ourselves.
Not all the things we share here are happy or funny moments, of course. Here we share our concerns and sorrows too – sadness over a member who has been diagnosed with a serious illness or a parent who is succumbing to dementia, concern for a best friend who is dealing with the loss of a family member, hopelessness over a niece or nephew who has gotten involved with drugs, or simply the broken heart of losing a dear beloved pet. We know accident victims, people who have lost their homes and possessions because of fire, someone who has lost a job that they desperately need. But we know that here we can always count on sympathy and empathy. We can count on someone asking if there is anything they can do. We can often count on a meal or two.
Susan Orlean writes: The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten – that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose – a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.
Sure Orlean is talking about books and libraries here, of course, but she could just as well be talking about our church. Sometimes keeping the BUUC open does seem like “an act of sheer defiance” but yet we have been carrying on since the 1700s.
And every Sunday these days, we recite our affirmation in unison.
HERE: We unite in an atmosphere of care and support to foster spiritual health and growth.
HERE: We focus on sharing our ideas and histories, with warmth, hope, loving friendship and an open mind.
HERE: We nurture stability for our daily lives and seek motivation to reach out to the larger community.
The second part of the affirmation may be the one that means the most to me: Here, we focus on sharing our ideas and histories, with warmth, hope, loving friendship and an open mind. Here, we share our joys and our concerns and know we will be met with people who want to share them with us.
I am not a believer in a god so I don’t really pray, but in my Humanist mind this is exactly what a prayer is: That sharing and accepting, the willingness to be a part of another person’s story. So let us share with one another.
We are people from many places and circumstances. We have had many achievements and have overcome many trials. Every day we deal with heartbreak and worry. There are times when we can almost burst with joy and pride. We have done countless fascinating and unusual things in our lives that deserved to be shared even if to us they seem to be mundane and ordinary. Our ideas and histories have ultimately brought us together to this place on this Sunday. Let us share with one another. Then maybe someday Emily or Cara or Isaac or Avery or Jack will be up here relating your story or my story. Thus is the persistence of memory and we may never really die.
Here: We, the people of the BUUC, are extraordinary! Here: We are surrounded by saints who make living in this often “obscene” world worthwhile. And I am privileged to be a humble part of this extraordinary place.
And if this isn’t nice, what is?
And so it goes…
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