First Parish Unitarian Universalist"One is Silver, the Other Gold"
Sermon by the Rev. Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
April 29, 2001
It was Emerson who said the obvious, "The only way to have a friend is to be one." ("Friendship," The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 124.
Not long ago, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby published a letter to his four year old son who had recently discovered friendship. Not just the "playmates who were fun to run around the park with, but out of mind as soon as they were out of sight. Now you have friends whom you think about when you're apart and whose company you relish when you're together…'I wish Matan's family lived in the house next to us,' you said last week. 'Then I could play with him every day.' On Wednesday morning, you told me, 'This is who I like the best: You and Mama and Matan. And Peter.' Matan doesn't realize what exalted company he is in-your father, your mother, and your favorite stuffed animal [Peter]….
A few weeks ago it was Akiva you talked about all the time. No doubt a few weeks hence you'll be enamored of someone else. In January you announced, quite firmly, 'Zoe is not my friend.' Lately you appear to have changed your mind about her. (Or did she change hers about you?)…
Lately, 'I'm not your friend!' has become your fiercest declaration of anger. I guess you've figured out that withdrawing your friendship can be a kind of punishment. That is a good thing to realize-but far better is to know how to choose friends well and make your friendships last." (March 29, 2001).
When my children were small, one of our most cherished friendships in literature was that between Frog and Toad, as in our first reading this morning ("Alone" in Days with Frog and Toad from the series of early readers by Arnold Lobel). These two chose well and learned important lessons about how to make their friendship last.
They learned all sorts of things together, such as it's easier to have will-power to not gorge yourself on cookies if your friend is also committed to not eating another cooky. And, that sometimes, when you are feeling terribly grumpy, you need your friend to pull you out of bed, and your doldrums, to see the blue sky on a sunny day. Or, as in the story this morning, they learned that when one friend wants to be alone it is not a criticism of the other friend; in fact it's a healthy thing in any close relationship. You may remember the last line: "They were two close friends sitting alone together."
Do you have a close friend with whom to "sit alone together?"
How is it that we find our friends? Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet, advises, "A hand shifts our birdcages around. Some are brought close. Some move apart. Do not try to reason it out. Be conscious of who draws you and who not." (The Essential Rumi, translated by coleman Barks, p. 83).
And from the contemporary mystic, former rabbi of Temple Shalom in Sudbury, MA, Lawrence Kushner, "There must have been a time when you entered a room and met someone and after a while you understood that unknown to either of you there was a reason you had met. You had changed the other or he had changed you. By some word or deed or just by your presence the errand had been completed. Then perhaps you were a little bewildered or humbled or grateful. And it was over.
Each lifetime is [like]… a jigsaw puzzle. For some there are more pieces. For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble. Some seem to be born with a nearly completed puzzle. And so it goes. Souls going this way and that, trying to assemble the myriad parts.But know this. No one has within themselves all the pieces to their puzzle…Everyone carries with them at least one and probably many pieces to someone else's puzzle. Sometimes they know it. Sometimes they don't. And when you present your piece which is worthless to you, to another, whether you know it or not, whether they know it or not, You are a messenger from the Most High. The Hebrew word for angel is malach. Which also means messenger. One who is sent." (Honey from the Rock: Ten Gates of Jewish Mysticism, pp. 68-70).
Do you have a close friend with whom to "sit alone together"? Who draws you and who not? Who might be the puzzle piece you need?
There is a profound description in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, "She is a friend of mine. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good you know, when you got [somebody] who is a friend of your mind."
Do you have a close friend with whom to "sit alone together"? Who draws you and who not? Who might be the puzzle piece you need? Who gathers the pieces of you and gives them back in the right order?
In Wallace Stegner's masterful novel, Crossing to Safety, the missing puzzle pieces for Larry, the narrator, a first-year professor/would-be writer, and his pregnant wife Sally were another junior faculty couple Sid and Charity Lang, Boston Brahmins re-located to Madison, Wisconsin-university town in the late 1930's.
"We straggled into Madison, western orphans, and the Langs adopted us into their numerous, rich, powerful, reassuring tribe. We wandered into their orderly Newtonian universe, a couple of asteroids, and they captured us with their gravitational pull and made moons of us and fixed us in orbit around themselves…
When the Langs opened their house and their hearts to us, we crept gratefully in.
Crept? Rushed. Coming from meagerness and low expectations, we felt their friendship as freezing travelers feel a dry room and a fire. Crowded in, rubbing our hands with satisfaction, and were never the same thereafter. Thought better of ourselves, thought better of the world." (p. 38).
These two young couples, drawn to each other, jigsaw pieces interlocking-who's to say for what mix of reasons: shared literary interests, love of the outdoors? that they had new parenthood in common? Or was it that one couple's neediness matched so perfectly the other's need-to-be-needed, humility paired with largesse? Or, looking more deeply, that the needy couple's stronger characters provided stability for the other couple's weaker ones?
Who's to say why any of us are interlocked with those we call our best friends? Do not try to reason it out. Be conscious of who draws you and who not."
For whatever the reasons, the friendship of these two couples lasted a life-time, in large part because they had borne each other's troubles so well. When Sally was stricken with polio, her and Larry's small children went home with Sid, and Charity stayed with Sally and Larry to make absolutely sure they did not give up hope. It went on that way for months of treatments, with Sid and Charity paying many of their bills even. Forty years later, Sally re-tells the story for Sid and Charity's adult daughter and concludes, exclaiming, "I was just a crippled thing that had to be made to want to live. They made me-Charity especially, but both of them. I had to live, out of pure gratitude." (p. 246).
Cicero said it so well in the first century before Jesus. "What could be finer than to have someone to whom you may speak as freely as to yourself? How could you derive true joy from good fortune, if you did not have someone who would rejoice in your happiness as much as you yourself? And it would be very hard to bear misfortune in the absence of anyone who would take your sufferings even harder than you….For when fortune smiles on us, friendship adds a luster to that smile; when she frowns, friendship absorbs her part and share of that frown, and thus makes it easier to bear." ("On Friendship" in Cicero on Old Age and Friendship, trans. By Frank O. Copley, p. 55-56)
In Crossing to Safety, Larry looks back over his and Sally's friendship with Sid and Charity with this observation, "My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive." (p. 13).
Knowing how easy it is for me-and perhaps some of you-to quarrel with one or another part of myself, and knowing how tempting it is to renege on relationships that are sometimes abrasive, I'm aware that Larry's description is of a deep kind of friendship. It's not just that it had longevity, though without longevity it could not have been what it was. It's not just that they had much in common, because they also differed in significant ways. It's not that it was perfectly maintained, because it wasn't-they had not seen each other during the seven years preceding the final scene, in which Charity, stricken with cancer, is nearing death's door.
It's deep because they made each other's misfortunes easier to bear. "Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness," wrote Euripides.
Do you have such a friendship? Whose misfortunes have you made easier to bear? And who has eased yours? If not, who draws you? Who is a puzzle piece you need? Who might gather the pieces of you and give them back in the right order? Who might become a close friend with whom to "sit alone together"?
For insight on what makes such a friendship, I look to poetry more than to novels. A poem more likely may convey the ineffable quality of friendship, the spark, almost-magic, that makes a friendship work and is so hard to capture in words.
For twenty-five years one of my favorites has been Marge Piercy's ode to friendship, written when she was forty.
My old friend, how we sustain
each other, how we bear witness.
We are each other's light luggage of essentials.
We are each other's film archive and museum
packed in the crumbling arch of the skull.
Trust is the slowest strength, growing
microscopic ring on ring of living wood.
The greater gift is caring,
the laying on of hands in the dark,
of words in the light.
The lesser gift is remembering,
the compass in the bush that makes clear the way
come, the way to go.
We have shaped each other.
(from "The Homely War, Part 6" in Living in the Open, p. 66)
"We are each other's light luggage of essentials." I love that line!
A good friend knows what our essentials are-what we really value in life. A good friend is someone whose mere presence reminds us of our essentials when we forget.
A friend carries our light luggage, though, not heavy baggage. The latter is more often carried by a spouse or partner, who knows what our "baggage" is, whose very presence sometimes reminds us of that unpleasant stuff! Such relationships are blessed with other joys and intimacies…But, to have a friend, oh, to have a friend be your "light luggage of essentials!"
I have such a friend. At her fortieth birthday party, we went around the circle of her friends there-gathered, each saying how we first met or something about what she meant to us. When it came around to my husband he said of her, "When she and Diane have gotten together during the day, I can always tell in the evening." It's true: I am renewed by our time together.
Who is your light luggage of essentials? Whose essentials do you carry? Whose misfortunes have you made easier to bear? Who gathers the pieces of you and gives them back in the right order? Who draws you and who not? Who might be the puzzle piece you need? Who might become a close friend with whom to "sit alone together"?
Poets nearing the end of their lives speak so gratefully of the friendships they've known. Another of my favorites, May Sarton, published this one in the thin volume called Coming Into Eighty.
Through the silences,
The long empty days
You have sat beside me
Watching the finches feed,
The tremor in the leaves.
You have not left my mind.
Friendship supplied the root-
It was planted years go-
To bring me flowers and seed
Through the long drought.
Far-flung as you are
You have seemed to sit beside me.
You have not left my mind.
Will you come in the new year?
To share the wind in the leaves
And the finches lacing the air
To savor the silence with me?
It's been a long time.
In the late 1970's, after sixty years of writing poetry, Stanley Kunitz (who, at age 96 is still writing poetry) wrote ”The Layers" speaking gratefully, but painfully, of the deaths of some of his friends along the way.
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
To decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
(in Fooling with Words, Bill Moyers, Ed., p. 13-14)
Have we each made for our self a tribe out of our true affections? Who is your light luggage of essentials? Whose essentials do you carry? Whose misfortunes have you made easier to bear? Who gathers the pieces of you and gives them back in the right order? Who draws you and who not? Who might be the puzzle piece you need? Who might become a close friend with whom to "sit alone together"?
Whoever we are at whatever age or stage in life, may we take the time, knowing the time is now but it is never too late, to cultivate friendships-new and old-for "one is silver and the other gold."
Amen.
Let me tell you a story.
Toad went to Frog's house. He found a note on the door. The note said, "Dear Toad, I am not at home. I went out. I want to be alone."
"Alone?" said Toad. "Frog has me for a friend. Why does he want to be alone?"
Toad looked through the windows. He looked in the garden. He did not see Frog. Toad went to the woods. Frog was not there. He went to the meadow. Frog was not there.
Toad went down to the river. There was Frog. He was sitting on an island by himself.
"Poor Frog," said Toad. "He must be very sad. I will cheer him up."
Toad ran home. He made sandwiches. He made a pitcher of iced tea. He put everything in a basket. Toad hurried back to the river.
"Frog," he shouted., "it's me. It's your best friend, Toad!"
Frog was too far away to hear. Toad took off his jacket and waved it like a flag. Frog was too far away to see. Toad shouted and waved, but it was not use. Frog sat on the island. He did not see or hear Toad.
A turtle swam by. Toad climbed on the turtle's back. "Turtle," said Toad, "carry me to the island. Frog is there. He wants to be alone."
"If Frog wants to be alone," said the turtle, "why don't you leave him alone?"
"Maybe you are right," said Toad.
"Maybe Frog does not want to see me. Maybe he does not want me to be his friend anymore."
"Yes, maybe," said the turtle as he swam to the island.
"Frog!" cried Toad.
"I am sorry for all the dumb things I do. I am sorry for all the silly things I say. Please be my friend again!"
Toad slipped off the turtle. With a splash, he fell into the river.
Frog pulled Toad up onto the island. Toad looked in the basket. The sandwiches were wet. The pitcher of iced tea was empty.
"Our lunch is spoiled," said Toad. "I made it for you, Frog, so that you would be happy."
"But Toad," said Frog. "I am happy. I am very happy. This morning when I woke up I felt good because the sun was shining. I felt good because I was a frog. And I felt good because I have you for a friend. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think about how fine everything is."
"Oh," said Toad. "I guess that is a very good reason for wanting to be alone."
"Now," said Frog, "I will be glad not to be alone. Let's eat lunch."
Frog and Toad stayed on the island all afternoon. They ate wet sandwiches without iced tea. They were two close friends sitting alone together. ("Alone" in Days with Frog and Toad, p. 52-64).