Summerland
Preacher: Reverend Andrea Abbott
Dover Beach]
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Summerland.
The Spiritualists believe that all go to heaven after death and that heaven is called Summerland. As the name implies, it is a place of perpetual warmth and sunshine where trees cast leafy shade and flowers bloom year round. You can tell that Spiritualism began in upstate New York, can’t you? Here, summer is anticipated eagerly throughout the rest of the year, fall, winter and mud season, and its passing is deeply regretted each year as well. There is a lot of year here that is not summer.
But summer, summer, when it comes offers us its beauty in such profusion that we hardly have senses enough to take it all in. It rushes on us, swamping our starved eyes and ears and smell and taste and touch with so much that we almost reel, overloaded as we are with its glories. Eternal summer would indeed be paradise.
But for it to be complete paradise, I would like to suggest that, for me, one corner of this heaven would be saved for our fourteen year old selves, ourselves on the cusp between childhood and adolescence, still unselfconscious enough to be curious about the world, not yet overwhelmed by the ups and downs of being a teen, and yet old enough to explore and seek adventures. We are beginning the dance of finding ourselves, who we are at the core of our being, a journey that is never really finished as long as we remain alive to curiosity and wonder. It is a journey that is often obscured by the disappointments and disheartening events life throws our way, but a journey that it is always possible to resume as long as we have the interest and will to do so.
It was a glorious summer like this when my friend, Candy Davis, who is singing for you today and I took over my parents’ attic and put up a notice that said, “The Garrett. Starving Artists and Poets Only.” I don’t recall that starvation was ever any kind of real threat but it seemed like the thing to say at the time. I also don’t think that Candy stayed with my family the whole summer but the funny thing about the past was that somehow minutes were different. They lasted much longer than they do today and hours and days were almost eternities. Like so much else in contemporary life, I’ve noticed that they seem to make time out of cheaper material. It does not last as long as it used to. So, perhaps we only colonized the attic for a week, maybe less, but it was a longer, more durable week.
What made that time most important for me was that we really got a chance to know each other. We had been part of each other’s lives since we were babies. Her grandmother and my aunt were best friends and we visited the small town in which they both lived off and on while we were growing up. What I remember about those visits was that, like myself, Candy was in rebellion against restriction, restriction of any kind but especially those restrictions that defined who we were supposed to be as girls.
This was in the 50’s and 60’s and, though it is hard to remember now, women’s lives were much more limited than they have become. The main goal of a woman’s life was supposed to revolve around home and family. If there was something else she wanted to do, it had to take second place to that goal.
Though around us we had examples of women who had defied those boundaries in one way or another, we also knew that to fully be complex people with work that mattered as well as a family was a goal that was very hard, almost impossible. Women like my mother gave up careers when they married. Women like my aunt chose independence and self-reliance at the cost of love.
Candy and I tried to push the boundaries of what was possible by doing things that other girls didn’t—lots of exploring of places where we weren’t supposed to be as I recall and bike rides out of bounds, things like that. But that summer in the attic we also talked about things that no one in my little town was interested in, the books we were reading, the ideas about people and society that we were beginning to explore, history, poetry, myths, religion, science. All very unfeminine things to be interested in. We were, resolutely, not interested in nail polish or hair dos. Not obsessed, as I recall, by the latest pop stars.
And we talked about our dreams for the future, a future that might or might not contain an abstraction called a husband but that very much contained the opportunity to do something for the world, to change things in some unspecified way, to find a place where we could make our marks. How we were to obtain these goals we had no idea but we knew that this unspecified place was where we felt we belonged. This is where we would most fully be ourselves. I would wish for everyone a friend like this, a friend who helps you to your own self-birth.
Candy and I have, separately and together, walked down the roads of the past in our minds a lot this past week. It was for both of us, our 50th anniversary from high school, from different high schools, and we both attended our 50th anniversaries in the schools from which we graduated.
And so, in addition to seeing each other for the first time in over fifty years, we have also just seen many other people who left our lives years ago. I know after my reunion, I found myself babbling at my disinterested children about this one or that one, how lives had turned out in unexpected ways, at the tragedies and triumphs, unexpected joys or heartrending sorrows that had been accumulated along those fifty years. I will spare you the blow by blow account.
But within each of our lives, whether it was talking to my former classmates or talking to Candy, within the recital of what fifty years had done to us and what we had done with fifty years, two things stood out for me. The first is that all of us had lived through a time in which possibilities had opened and that life had offered more choice than we might have thought in 1966. Education became more open and many took advantage of that, some soon after high school but some later in life. There was, for many in my generation, more material wealth than the previous generation had enjoyed as well as more uncertainty and less security. Many did better than their parents ever had and many also had traveled, had explored the world in ways that their parents could never have done. But there were also stories, particularly about those who didn’t attend, stories of poverty and alcoholism, broken families, broken dreams.
For all of us, the great events of the twentieth century had shaped our lives, the Vietnam War, which had taken most of the boys into the service loomed large in many lives still. But there were more ephemeral changes that the 60’s brought about, changes in relationships, a widening of possibilities for all kinds of people. The legacy of the civil rights and women’s movements spread beyond their intended boundaries and en-couraged people, the understanding that worth and dignity were the legacy of all people was strengthened by their actions.
Those years may have also brought confusion, disorientation, abandonment of responsibilities but for those who felt hemmed in and trapped in the rigidities of earlier years, that freedom inherent in the 60’s came as a welcome relief. What we lost in certainties, we gained in self-determination. For the first time, personal happiness and self-fulfillment became acceptable.
Thinking back on those two young girls in that attic, so long ago, I think how much of what we saw imperfectly and distantly became a living reality as we got older. Choices for women did open up and within time both of us were able to take advantage of them. Perhaps most importantly, as we grew up we were able to our lives as ours to create, ours to reinvent when we needed to, ours to turn into something of the dream we had dreamt so long ago.
No one’s life turns out the way they expect. We are, at the same time, more able to create the lives we dream of and also more impeded from doing so than we believe when we are young. We are both more free and more constrained. Each life is shadowed by inner conflict and by constraints and obstacles that we cannot see when we are fourteen. The world is not our oyster, we find, and yet there is much that is good in it.
Life has great passages of sorrow, of regret, of despair and helplessness. Those are the moments that, at fourteen we were, thankfully, unable to comprehend. And yet, through those twistings and turnings, those hard moments and long, sad nights, that is where we become who we are. We cannot do it in our heads, in our imaginations. Life takes living to become life. It is not just bright primary colors that make up a picture. It is also the greys and browns that add shading and depth. Children’s pictures are painted in bright reds and yellows. Masterpieces have all the colors somewhere in them. Wanted or unwanted, and few want sorrow, it is those unwanted moments that mature us, that lead us beyond our surface to find who we really are.
This seems to be how life is constituted. It would be possible for any one of us to come up with a better alternative to the realities of life, I’m sure. That is the appeal of Summerland, a place where the birds sing and no snow falls. A place where the summer sun casts no shadows.
Fifty years later, neither Candy nor I nor any of you, I imagine, could have said our life was a straight line, run according to how we had planned. (For one thing, Candy became Unitarian-Universalist, unbeknownst to me until recently and has been ministering to U-U churches in both song and story in Illinois) All of us have been through setbacks large and small, frustrations, as well as those things that we thought were terrible but later turned out to be, unexpectedly, just what was needed. We cannot script our lives and perhaps that is a good thing. Our stories might be purer, more innocent, but they would also be more child-like.
No matter how much we would like to avoid those terrible moments, it is those parts of the story that link us to others, those stories that make our arms open to each other, that let us reach our hands out to each other.
It is the stories I heard over the past week or so, that made the poem, Dover Beach, come back to me so strongly. It is a much cited poem, much assigned in English classes, much quoted in many contexts. I have always loved it though it is perhaps a little worn with use. It, too, was written in a time that stood at the doorway of great changes, another time of uncertainty and the loneliness that accompanies rapid change. The poem feels much more modern than it is. When all the old consolations, philosophy, religion, have been revealed as inadequate to the modern age just dawning, it calls on the eternal source of strength in our lives, the strength of our love for one another.
Unitarianism and Universalism both shattered the settled certainties of their times. They are an unspoken part of this poem as they also are inherent in its last stanza. If we have gone past the certainties offered by earlier ages, on what do we rely? I think we rely on the miracle of each other, the miracle of open minds and hearts and arms, the miracle of friendships maintained and friendships renewed and the miracle of love that needs no reason. This is the light that never fails and the summer that has no end.