SERMON: "The Light of Stars"

Rev. Paul Beedle

January 7, 2007

Last Tuesday morning I took a portable radio out into the back yard with me to listen to President Ford's memorial service while I pulled weeds. It was very interesting to me, what each of the five eulogists had decided to say. They all agreed that he was kind, decent and unassuming. But each saw those qualities in a certain light.

Henry Kissinger, who is known for his persistence about negotiation and his belief that personal rapport makes all the difference in diplomacy, portrayed President Ford as a negotiator who achieved “an unusual closeness to leaders around the world.”

Former President Bush, who is known for his loyalty, praised Ford for being a man of his word. Then he went out of his way to remark that “the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say” on the assassination of President Kennedy, because Gerald Ford signed it, and his “word was always good.” That seemed odd, but then I remembered there was news a day or two before about some declassified documents that seemed to connect the Kennedy assassination to Irish terrorists. If he feels a sense of loyalty to the people who served on that commission, this remark might be simply another manifestation of his steadfastness in standing by friends.

Tom Brokaw's remarks sounded like a chapter from his book, The Greatest Generation. He praised Ford as a member of “a generation accustomed to difficult missions, shaped by the sacrifices and the depravations of the Great Depression, ... that gave up its innocence and youth to then win a great war and save the world [and] came home ... mature beyond their years and eager to make the world they had saved a better place. They re-enlisted as citizens,” Brokaw said, and he ended his remarks saying, “Thank you, Citizen Ford.” His particular spin was that President Ford got along well with the press. “We could be adversaries,” he said, “but we were never his enemy, and that was a welcome change in status from his predecessor's time.” In one way or another, each of the eulogists tried to talk about that ideal of being adversaries without being enemies, and I thought Mr. Brokaw's way of putting it was very apt.

The current President Bush's description of Ford was interesting: a self-made man, “indebted to no man,” a football star and a soldier who found a good woman and became a “father and grandfather and great-grandfather,” and was “a rock of stability” with “firm resolve” – a macho man from central casting, in other words. This was something of a contrast to the other four speakers' remarks.

Finally, there was the Reverend Dr. Robert Certain, Ford's Episcopal minister in California. No surprise that he should depict President Ford as “an example of how to live as a man of faith, a man of the nation, a man for the world.” But he went out of his way to mention that President Ford did not think that “concerns about human sexuality and the leadership of women ... should be divisive for anyone who lived by the Great Commandments to love God and neighbor.” And he said that Ford asked him “to work for reconciliation within the Church” and that he assured him he would, just as Ford “had worked for reconciliation within the nation thirty years ago.”

It is so interesting to me, how the stars we steer by affect how we see others. We hope to see in others the values we cherish, the verities we believe, the virtues we strive toward. We look for assurance, perhaps, of the worthiness of our own commitments, the wisdom of our investments of self and soul, the wherewithall we have to navigate our lives with purpose and constancy. Because it's not like there's just one star we look to: there's a whole sky of them. And we each have spotted certain bright ones or constellations that we can find again and follow or use to orient ourselves where we are. The desire to navigate our lives well makes us want to compare notes, share charts, and inspire and mentor and remember one another.

I like that metaphor, that the values and verities and virtues we cherish are stars that we steer by. One of our Unitarian poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote that:

All things are symbols: the external shows

Of Nature have their image in the mind,

As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves

[“The Harvest Moon” (1878) ]

and in several of his poems he explored the symbols of stars, of night and day, moonlight and sunlight. Here is his poem, titled “Night”[1880 ]:

Into the darkness and the hush of night

Slowly the landscape sinks, and fades away,

And with it fade the phantoms of the day,

The ghosts of men and things, that haunt the light.

The crowd, the clamor, the pursuit, the flight,

The unprofitable splendor and display,

The agitations, and the cares that prey

Upon our hearts, all vanish out of sight.

The better life begins; the world no more

Molests us; all its records we erase

From the dull commonplace book of our lives,

That like a palimpsest –

that is, like a paper or parchment purposely erased so that it can be re-used –

That like a palimpsest is written o'er

With trivial incidents of time and place,

And lo! the ideal, hidden beneath, revives.

Notice that he says the daytime is haunted, not the night! Night offers a chance to clear our heads, to heal, to see again the stars we steer by.

He wrote that in his 70s; also this, called “Moonlight” [1882 ]:

As a pale phantom with a lamp

Ascends some ruin's haunted stair,

So glides the moon along the damp

Mysterious chambers of the air.

Now hidden in cloud, and now revealed,

As if this phantom, full of pain,

Were by the crumbling walls concealed,

And at the windows seen again.

Until at last, serene and proud

In all the splendor of her light,

She walks the terraces of cloud,

Supreme as Empress of the Night.

I look, but recognize no more

Objects familiar to my view;

The very pathway to my door

Is an enchanted avenue.

All things are changed. One mass of shade,

The elm-trees drop their curtains down;

By palace, park, and colonnade

I walk as in a foreign town.

The very ground beneath my feet

Is clothed with a diviner air;

While marble paves the silent street

And glimmers in the empty square.

Illusion! Underneath there lies

The common life of every day;

Only the spirit glorifies

With its own tints the sober gray.

In vain we look, in vain uplift

Our eyes to heaven, if we are blind;

We see but what we have the gift

Of seeing; what we bring we find.

So he makes daylight the thing that shows our ordinary daily lives, and moonlight into a spiritual light that only paints the ordinary an exalted color. He seems to insist that the dark is what we need, because it clears away the clutter of images so that we can see something else, so that, perhaps, we can receive what

“... comes to us at times, from the unknown

And inaccessible solitudes of being,

The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;” [“The Sound of the Sea” (1875) ]

He had long seen the night this way; in his 30s he wrote:

“Oh holy Night! from thee I learn to bear

What man has borne before!

Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care,

And they complain no more.” [“Hymn to the Night” (1839) ]

So if sunlight and moonlight offer clutter and illusion, what about the light of stars? Also in his 30s, he wrote a poem with that title [“The Light of Stars” (1839) ]:

The night is come, but not too soon;

And sinking silently,

All silently, the little moon

Drops down behind the sky.

There is no light in earth or heaven

But the cold light of stars;

And the first watch of night is given

To the red planet Mars.

Is it the tender star of love?

The star of love and dreams?

Oh no! from that blue tent above

A hero's armor gleams.

And earnest thoughts within me rise,

When I behold afar,

Suspended in the evening skies,

The shield of that red star.

O star of strength! I see thee stand

And smile upon my pain;

Thou beckonest with thy mailed hand,

And I am strong again.

Within my breast there is no light

But the cold light of stars;

I give the first watch of the night

To the red planet Mars.

The star of the unconquered will,

He rises in my breast,

Serene, and resolute, and still,

And calm, and self-possessed.

And thou, too, whosoe'er thou art,

That readest this brief psalm,

As one by one thy hopes depart,

Be resolute and calm.

Oh, fear not in a world like this,

And thou shalt know erelong,

Know how sublime a thing it is

To suffer and be strong.

I can't help thinking that's so New England, especially when I think of Robert Frost's poem, “Take Something Like A Star” – here's how it goes:

O Star (the fairest one in sight),

We grant your loftiness the right

To some obscurity of cloud –

It will not do to say of night,

Since dark is what brings out your light.

Some mystery becomes the proud.

But to be wholly taciturn

In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn

By heart and when alone repeat.

Say something! And it says, “I burn.”

But say with what degree of heat.

Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.

Use language we can comprehend.

Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,

But does tell something in the end.

And steadfast as Keats' Eremite, *

Not even stooping from its sphere,

It asks a little of us here.

It asks of us a certain height,

So when at times the mob is swayed

To carry praise or blame too far,

We may take something like a star

To stay our minds on and be staid.

Do you hear the resonances with Longfellow's poem? That night brings out the light of stars? And something about “the cold light of stars” that Longfellow talks about has affinity with the “steadfastness” and “staidness” in Frost's poem – the stars are where we find strength in the night, they both seem to say.

There's a curiosity about Frost's mention of “Keats' Eremite” – he's referring to John Keats's poem “To Sleep” which contains this stanza:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art –

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round the earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –

No – yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

That's a young man's poem – Keats died at 26 – and Frost distances himself from it. But he agrees with Keats that we somehow have to translate the light of stars into a way to be. Awake in the night, “in a sweet unrest,” Keats wants to find steadfastness in the intimacy of watching the rhythm of his love's breath. When the mob is swayed, Frost wants to find a certain height, a certain distance, to be calm in the storms of others' passions.

So President Ford had five eulogies, each lit a bit by sunlight (the commonplace aspects of his life) and by moonlight (his ordinary qualities of kindness and decency were painted in divine colors) and the light of stars (each eulogist's ideals were found in his character). They agreed on certain of his virtues, and I noticed that they agreed on some stars: respect for human rights (symbolized by the Helsinki Accords), the value of friendship, and love of neighbor. May our nation ever steer by those stars. And may we each become aware of how we see ourselves and others by the light of stars. Amen.