Rodgers, Hammerstein and Hart
It's important right up front this morning to state that today's service is unusual. Looking to Broadway entertainers and their show tunes for spiritual guidance is generally not the typical focus of religious worship. So I want to be clear from the 'get-go.' Today is not about taking a break from normal worship. We are not having fun, though fun we might have. We are not just trying to do something different for the sake of being different. We aren't doing creative worship. What we are doing is worshiping in the most distinctively UU way one can-namely, the belief that spiritual truth is not the exclusive property of any one person, religion or text.
UUs have for hundreds of years at peril to themselves and sometimes their lives, argued and defended the idea that religious truths aren't captured in one place at one time. Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the central thinkers of our faith, didn't just say that all religious texts are our texts. He said the whole world is our text reminding us that the sacred speaks not only through words written on a page, but through the colors of a sunset, the sound of the first robin in April, the gesture of a bereaved widow, an act of justice, and yes, even Broadway entertainers and their show tunes.
So, we turn to the lives and music of Rodgers, Hammerstein and Hart to lead us this morning in worship. We want to begin in the year 1956. To refresh your memory, in 1956 some of the current events embedded in people's minds and hearts were:
- Lucy Authering, the first black student at the University of Alabama, was suspended due to riots,
- The Montgomery bus boycott, after a year of protest, was still in full swing with the seemingly fearless leadership of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. at the helm,
- Woody Guthrie could be heard over the airwaves singing: This Land is Your Land,
- And a popular musical, South Pacific, was on tour.
This song was one of the highlights - "You've Got to be Carefully Taught," sung by Grady.
In 1956, Rodgers and Hammerstein took their musical on tour throughout the country, and when they reached the South they ran into a few snags. Many southerners were pleased as punch to have this show coming into town as long as they pulled the song, "You've Got to be Carefully Taught." (Apparently they thought it was controversial.) Rodgers and Hammerstein refused. And so their production was canceled over and over again.
So where's the sacred in all of this? You might say it is in the song itself, as it speaks to ethics that have religious and spiritual overtones. But for me, it's located in another spot. I think it is in how they allowed a social justice number to infect their Broadway show. How the song, and their insistence on including it, symbolizes how Rodgers and Hammerstein let the barrier between ethics and entertainment fall down.
Ethics and the spirit of justice are always trying to make their way into the various realms of our lives. But there are many ways that we keep them out. We live in a world that divides life into distinct compartments: fun, work, joy, entertainment, parenting, vacation, social activism. All of them kept nicely and neatly separated from each other. Many of us go off to our jobs in the morning and work. If we want to receive emails from a particular social justice organization on a particular topic, we cannot use our work email. Our employers won't allow it. Work is for work. When we get home and spend time with our families, we do family things: after-school activities, sporting events, music lessons. When social justice does work its way into our lives, it is because we carved out a separate niche for it, one that we can do in a finite amount of time on a Saturday morning. And most people, when they go to entertainment events, enjoy escapism. I would bet my entire salary on the numbers of folks that saw the movie The Incredibles is much higher than those that made their way to see Hotel Rwanda.
Which makes this all the more intriguing. Because we aren't talking about non-profit theater; we are talking about commercial theater. And their act of defending and including this piece in a show is a radical act of letting social justice infect our everyday living.
Which, in short, is something we liberals need to get better at, because, let me tell you, the conservatives aren't relegating their social justice to a small realm. Their social justice gets infiltrated into everything they do - from work, to parenting, to education.
How so?
The New York Times published the results of a survey conducted by the National Science Teachers Association noting that 31% of teachers felt pressured to present creationism in the classroom right next to evolutionary theory.
The Washington Post noted (3/28) that a growing number of pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control and the morning-after pills based on their own personal religious grounds. These pharmacists talk of a personal belief that in effect is undermining the laws that made the drugs safe and legal in the first place.
The New York Times highlighted a story on a national trend toward "conscience" or "refusal" legislation. It seems, in Illinois and Mississippi these new policies allow doctors and health care providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient based on their own religious beliefs.
And with all the turmoil and controversy over Terri Schiavo, Senator Tom DeLay clearly pointed out to the American public that he was, in his own words, "on a mission to bring a biblical world view to American politics."
I think it is because of these current events that Rodgers and Hammerstein are reminding us that we cannot afford to wait any longer. If liberals keep their ethics separate from their living, from their parenting, working environments, community voice and social gatherings, all of our lives are going to be defined by conservative values whether we like it or not.
[Kaaren sings "Little Girl Blue."]
Rodgers, who worked with Lorenzo (Larry) Hart first and then Oscar Hammerstein, was a versatile artist, flexible and attune to his collaborators' styles. The biographer Holden notes that Hart's work tended "to be intimate, wry and bittersweet (Little Girl Blue) as compared to the grander (more) formal ballads of Hammerstein." Richard Rodgers' wife once commented on the difference between their styles: "When Larry worked with Dick, he would never put pencil to paper until Dick had finished a tune. And Dick always had to stay in the room while Larry was working. Oscar, on the other hand, was meticulous, methodical, dependable. He liked having the freedom to write his lyrics before Dick set them. And Dick didn't really care which way he worked. He adapted easily."
What I love about both the work that Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein produced was in the interchange and exchange of ideas, styles and product. It was in their collaboration that greatness was achieved, and, I think one could say, the divine was active.
Twyla Tharp, the contemporary modern dancer and choreographer, wrote one of the finest books I've read, The Creative Habit. In it she gets at the importance and mystical power of collaboration. She writes, "It doesn't matter what genre you work in, you need to rub up against other people. If you're a composer, it's your collaborators on lyrics, or the singer, or the members of the band (think Mozart with daPonte, Verdi with Boito, Rodgers without Hammerstein.)" She notes that Stravinsky, the Russian composer, is often thought of as an energetic productive talent who worked in a vacuum. But quite the opposite was true. He collaborated with Picasso, the novelist Andre Gide and W. H. Auden, and had an ongoing working relationship with the choreographer, Ballanchine, for more than 40 years. Stravinsky's work was always a product of the creative interchange, and it was in the midst of this collaboration, says Tharp, that all of them discovered something greater than the sum of their individual efforts. A third energy, she says, arose and added its input.
Indeed, preachers are fond of saying that sermons write themselves, that once you bump up against others' ideas and concepts (show your work to your husband), it starts having a mind of its own. You aren't writing it any more; it takes itself in its own direction.
This may sound strange but one of the most spiritual moments I've experienced was while engaged in creative exchange.
In my first church, I had a group of dancers who performed every Easter. And the first year, they asked me to sit and talk to them about my thoughts. I shared with them a vague conceptual idea. About a week later, they asked me to come see what they were working on and to give my feedback. Was it what I was looking for? I went and watched. Having danced for 15 years myself, I made sure my judge was turned off and let the experience wash over me. And man, I tell you, it was life affirming. The more I watched, the more ideas came to me, and then we talked about theology, life, death, birth. Maybe we could try the woman carry in the man on her back, like a heavy cross up the center aisle, instead of the other way around. When they changed the genders, it changed my angle. I went home to write, and came back, and they listened. They caucused for 15 minutes and came out with a whole new idea. The end product felt like something had come about that none of us had control over. There was an otherness present, one that none of us could completely call-oh, that was my idea-my step-my thought process; instead, it had a life of its own and it carried us forward with something larger and greater than we could have achieved on our own.
You know, so often we argue about God, what God is and isn't. But this understanding of divine otherness is an understanding that Atheist and Theist can both affirm.
And if liberal theologians like Henry Neilsen Weiman are right, God isn't a being and isn't an entity. God is an experience-that when we create together, we exchange pieces of ourselves. And when our ideas bump up against each other, there is a third entity that is created-that comes into being. A being that doesn't have a consciousness of its own, but certainly has an influence that acts on us as much as we act on it.
And frankly, I think sometimes we can get too enthralled with an idea being our own, with the ownership of our thought and images. And we need reminders that most often this creative exchange doesn't happen alone, in our own room, in our solitary chair; it happens when we crash and jostle up with one another. We need reminders that it is in the work of folks like Rodgers, Hammerstein and Hart that the creative interchange can and did happen. Collaboration breeds the spiritual otherness where we create together masterpieces of our hearts' deepest desires.
[Marge sings "Spring is Here."]
Rodgers once said about himself, after walking into the theater on any given day: "If I'm unhappy, it takes my unhappiness away. If I'm happy, I get happier." Or, as his granddaughter (Nina Beatty), commented: "In anything to do with musicals he lived in full color; the grass was green, the sky was blue, the birds sang and the butterflies flitted about."
Clearly, Rodgers had found his Joy. A life of writing, collaborating, producing and playing music.
These comments bring to mind an old Egyptian myth that teaches a valuable lesson about joy and the purpose of life. The Egyptians believed that after death they would be confronted by the God Osiris with a quiz of sorts that the deceased was required to answer honestly. It involved 42 questions that ended with requirement of complete candor. The question: Did you find joy in life and did you bring joy?
Now, I want you to note the emphasis is not on did you produce something of worth, did you do good? Did you use your talents, squander your money? Nope, not the question. For the Egyptians the purpose of the earthly journey was simple:
Did you find joy and bring joy during your earthly sojourn?
If they answered these questions affirmatively they were given a measure of continued existence. If not, they were taken away and eaten by a hippopotamus (Owen-Towle). Point of story is there is nothing trivial about joy. Which gets me back to Rodgers' joy - his life was in Technicolor in the theater. He was at his best, vibrating on another plane. He was alive-awake.
For me that's what joy gets at, being awake. When I experience joy or give joy, it's not so much that I am enjoying myself, but it is a testament to being present, in the moment. When I'm doing something that doesn't bring me joy, I end up sleepwalking a little, vaguely paying attention to details, the edges become blurry, things are rote, dull tarnished. Joy enlivens one's soul-awakening us to life and those around us.
It was G. K. Chesterton, the author, who wrote: "Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties but in anything important-such as sex, death and religion, you must have mirth, or you will have madness."
Let us leave the madness to those unwilling to open their souls to joy-to those willing to be eaten by hippos of old. May we be motivated by the likes of Rodgers, to live from and give joy!
So may it be.
Amen
April 3, 2005