I was in the last weeks of my senior year of high school in 1956, kind of coasting. Track season was over, final exams were perfunctory – I’d already been admitted to college and, besides, some of the courses I was taking I was taking were just for fun, like Radio Speech, instead of College English, and Art, instead of Calculus. I had a date for the prom, but it was with a girl I’d known since kindergarten, someone with whom I looked forward to having fun, and I don’t mean the kind that might make it into an x-rated film.
The end of high school was like coming to the end of a honeymoon, with a future about which I was scared stiff. In the fall I would be going half way across the country to a college in the back woods of an under-populated and strange state where I’d never been. I didn’t know a single person on campus and I was going to be competing with prep-schoolers I was sure would be a lot better prepared than I was.
But I chose the college in which I enrolled because I wanted to see if I could make it in that kind of world. It’s something I’d done a lot of as a kid, whether it came to sports, running for class office or studies. I’d done pretty well at all of them. I earned a varsity letter as a freshman wrestler, played football and ran track, and was a class president. I was a National Merit Scholar, so I got into one of the Ivy League colleges, even if it wasn’t Harvard. Actually, I didn’t want to go to Harvard. I wanted to go to the school my father had gone to. Though I had no idea what I wanted to do after I got out of college, I wanted to at least be as successful as my dad, perhaps even follow in his footsteps.
Of course, that was the imagining of an eighteen-year old moving away from home for the first time with the challenge of now having to navigate life on his own. Or at least, I was going to have to navigate it partly on my own, since I was blessed with parents who had put away enough money to allow me to go to college and maintained a home to which I could return at vacation time to regain some perspective – and to have meals cooked by my mother!
But, even the security of this safety net leaving home was still scary. But I did pretty well in college. Even if I hadn’t taken a bunch of college courses in prep school getting ready to compete, I worked hard and I got better grades than most of the preppies, being blessed with a knack for taking tests. I exempted out of Spanish, for instance, without ever really learning the language – something I’ve regretted ever since.
But working hard on something, like getting good grades, can mean ignoring other things, like having a decent social life. This was made all the harder for me by going to an all-male school with no sister school near by, like the rest of the Ivys. I tried to solve that by getting married to my high school sweetheart between my sophomore and junior year in college, way before I was mature enough to understand what being married meant. As a result, my marriage didn’t survive, creating a lot of pain for those involved, including the children of which my former wife and I were – and still are – the parents.
Then there was the question of what to do when I got out of college and had the responsibility men felt in those days for supporting their families. I didn’t have the luxury of being able to take time off to “get my head together” – no trips to Europe or being a ski bum or joining the Peace Corps, especially since though there wasn’t any Peace Corps in those days. So, like going to college, I decided to take the path of least resistance and try to follow in my father’s footsteps. My dad had gone to work for his father when he graduated from college, so I decided to do the same. One thing different about my grandfather was that though he was married to a college graduate, one of the first women to be granted a degree from the University of Western Ontario, had never gone to college himself. Instead, straight out of high school, he went to work for the Simmons Mattress Company. After several years working for Simmons he was offered a job as the sales manager of a company that manufactured the springs on which one put a mattress. My grandfather died the year my mother and father were married, but within a few years my father had been given his father’s job and after several more years, he was able to acquire a majority interest in the company and become its President.
So, when I had to declare a major in college, I decided on economics and gained early admission to the college’s graduate school of business. Degree in hand, I returned home to work for my father. Though I didn’t really know whether that’s what I wanted to do, my wife was pregnant, so I had to do something to make some money. I thought that what someone in my position was supposed to do was put on a tie, get a job and buy a house out in the suburbs. Fifty years ago, with a little help from their family, it was something a young married person in my social position was supposed to do. These days it’s something that’s almost impossible to do.
But it turned out that what I was doing wasn’t very satisfying. I couldn’t find a place in the business world which seemed to fit either my particular set of skills or my values. It wasn’t until I discovered Unitarian Universalism and a Unitarian Universalist church I really liked that I was able to begin imagining the kind of profession in which I could feel fulfilled. Though I’d never taken a course in religion and didn’t think of myself as a particularly religious person, there was something very appealing to me about the meaning that little Unitarian Universalist church in Chicago had for its members and about the role its minister had in it. So, after a couple of false starts, I packed up my family and went off to a seminary on the other coast, earned another degree and forty-five-years ago was ordained and then called by the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, N.Y., to fill a role much like the one Nathan has here at JUC.
Graduating from high school I could never have imagined getting married at twenty, getting divorced at thirty-four, then getting married again and having another child, becoming a grandfather and having a forty-nine-year-old daughter who still calls me daddy. And I could never have imagined becoming a minister. When my time here at JUC is over, I can’t imagine what’s going to happen next, any more than when I decided to retire as a seminary professor I could have imagined being invited to come here. The future for me is just as mysterious as it is for the young people whose bridging we honor this morning – and, frankly, the same is true for most of us.
But there’s nothing wrong with the future being mysterious, at least if we were secure enough to be open to the mystery. In this it helps to be courageous enough to make decisions, when we need to make, and to undo them when that needs to be done. For instance, though it was the most painful undoing of a decision I’ve ever to make, I ended my first marriage when it was clear remaining in it would cause more pain for those involved than ending it. This allowed me to do what would otherwise have been impossible: finding a partner with whom the love we share has never faded and create a home in which there was none of the anger and dis-ease present of my former marriage, something that had become very destructive for all of us involved.
I hope the young people whose bridging we honor this morning will be able to avoid having to make a decision like this and will get things right the first time, instead of having to get a second chance. Some of my own children have, and some of them haven’t, A key to being able to make good decisions is figuring out who really are, deep inside. It wasn’t easy for me to discover this. I certainly hadn’t when I first got married. Few people have when they’re twenty. And doing so is complicated in an interesting way by something most think will help us. We turn to all kinds of mechanisms to help uys understand who we, like Ennegrams and the Meyers-Briggs Inventory or sun signs. I’ve looked at all of them – and on the surface they do say something about how I approach life. But I’m more than just an Aquarian who’s an 8 and an INTJ! People are more than just psychological descriptions, profiles on vocational inventories or those born at certain times of the year. And we’re also more than what our friends might imagine us to be – or fail to imagine us to be. My high school friends, for instance, would never have imagined their beer drinking, swearing buddy becoming a minister, any more than would my business school professors have imagined me teaching theology. But each of us has within ourselves a real person – a soul, if you will – that has a uniqueness that it is there for us to discover, whether we’re a teenager or a person in our eighties. So the task of a young person moving out into the world on her or his own isn’t just to get profiled or to make lists of pluses and minuses so they can decide on a profession. It’s to discover who he or she is: who this unique person is to whom a name has been given, like the children whose entrance into our community we honored earlier this month.
This being said, it will help our young people if those around them can be mirrors for them, reflecting back to them their true selves, at least as we seem them. It will help if we can be exemplars and models, showing them how we’ve worked things out in our lives. What won’t help is trying to tell them what they should be, as though it’s our decision to make. It can be hard because young people don’t always make the right choices – or the right choices they make may not be the ones we like. For instance, I thought my oldest daughter would make a really fine minister. I would have been enormously honored by having her follow in my footsteps. But that’s not who she is – and it finally dawned on me that I didn’t need her to become a minister to prove that, for me, it was a good choice – any more than my father needed me to follow in his footsteps to justify his career.
What I want for my children, as well as the young people we recognize this morning, is exactly what I wanted for myself when I was younger: a chance to make it in that mystery I was about to enter along with the courage and support I needed to make the kind of decisions I needed to make, and to unmake them, if that needed to happen. If that could happen, I was sure, things would turn out all right even though I had no idea what those things would be.
I didn’t know where I’d go when I began to think about this sermon. It’s more personal than the kind of sermon I usually give. But it’s persons we’re honoring this morning: young people who have their own unique identities, skills and desires to fulfill as they face the mystery of the life that lies ahead. As they do this, our wish for them, just as is our wish for ourselves is that what they do and what they become – how they live and what they achieve – ends up being fulfilling. Our hope is that they will be able to have lives, whatever their lives turn out to be like, that are ones they believe, deep inside themselves, were lives worth having. It’s that to which we hope they are bridging – and as they do so we want them to know that they take with them our love and support.
The one thing I might add is that these young people have one advantage I didn’t have. They are already a part of a UU community. As they move into the future I hope they will not only understand what this community can mean to them, because we’ll always be here for them, but I hope they will be able to find communities like this of which they can be a part wherever it is they go. Being a part of UU communities as meant a lot to me and my family – and I don’t mean just in a professional sense. UU communities have inspired, sustained and encouraged us on our journeys, providing us with comrades with whom we could laugh and cry, think and imagine, hope and dream. May such communities always be there for all of us as we move ahead in our lives.
Amen, we say, knowing that amen is not an ending. It’s a beginning.