Back to the Garden Room
August 19, 2007
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

How many of you were here 20 years ago? Can you remember where else you might have been? I think I was on Long Island at the First Congregational Church of Riverhead, hoping the ladies would redo the kitchen into a soup kitchen. (They did!)

I can hear September rumbling in the distance, reminding me ever so much how getting a hold of a symbol wrong can really mess up your life. August is the symbol of freedom, September the symbol of oppression. August is the symbol of vacation, September of work. It would seem that our book bags and sharpened pencils have gotten deep into our psyche and ruined our ideas of both work and leisure.

Imagine a world of work and play vigorously related, imagine a marriage between August and September - and then you will understand the more positive of these two lessons today (the other is a curse). In the Isaiah passage we are to be king over the ruined vineyard (who cares really?), and in the Jeremiah passage we are to be a deeply rooted tree, planted by water, which sends out roots, does not fear, and "does not cease to bear fruit."

We are the people deeply planted, who continue to bear fruit. We are not prisoners of our metaphors or our Garden Room. My friend with two kids at home recently said to me, "I just hate summer." I was invigorated by her freedom from the standard metaphor. Some of you will remember the columnist Thomas Wicker. He wrote one of the best Labor Day pieces ever when he spoke elegiac of the island of summer and the mainland of fall, allowing both of them to have equal value. He even built a bridge between them. So I will try the same today - and Judson's Garden Room will be our starting place.

I think it must have been wonderful; I never saw it. I have a feeling that it was huge and spacious, full of flowers in constant bloom, a place where it never rained. I miss it even though I never knew it.

Romanticizing the past - or August - is a real problem for people. It has a tendency to twist into a curse. Appreciating the past is just the opposite: it has a tendency to become a blessing, a well watering of our future. Tradition also is the living faith of dead people ? and traditionalism the dead faith of living people.

It is fascinating that Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died within 30 hours of each other on July 30. They remind us of another kind of past, a modern one, which our postmodern world has all but wiped out. They were so new. They were so daring.

David Mamet speaks of going to an Ingmar Bergman Festival: "It was 10 a.m., I stayed all day. When I left the theater, it was still light, but my soul was dark and I did not sleep for years afterwards." Stephen Holden, of the New York Times, speaks of Antonioni as letting us know of the failure of Eros in a hyper-eroticized climate: "On the screen for the first time we saw attention deficit disorder, and the uneasy sense of impermanence that goes with it." I have a feeling that Eros was not failing in our Garden Room, if even half of the stories I have been told are true. I have a feeling that the Garden Room was a sign of permanence and Eros in a modern world that was exploding.

Again Holden says, "Today the religion of high art that dominated the 50's and 60's seem quaint and provincial." Again, Judson and its Garden Room were profoundly affected by these debates and made an important contribution to them, artistically. As we look at these two deceased filmmakers, we see the death of many of the debates that were had over coffee in the Garden Room. Obviously I regret the loss of its symbol and its myth - and you all regret something much more real, tangible, and actual. Back to metaphors and August and September: it is important to appreciate the past and not be its prisoner. It is important to preserve our past and not get too sweet when we make it into jam and jelly.

Nan Cohen has written a wonderful poem, called the "Girder," about a rope bridge. She says that the rope bridge is, "...a promise that you will go forward/ that you can come back…. I am a figure in a logic problem/ standing on one shore/ with all the things I cannot leave/ looking across at what I cannot have."

Many of us get stuck in our metaphors. I know in my own family life that I often project things that happened a long time ago onto present situations. I also know that I am still having that conversation with the Women's Fellowship in Riverhead when I attend church meetings. We are all figures in a logic problem, standing on one shore with all the things we cannot leave, looking across at all we think we cannot have.

The question I pose today within this context of the Garden Room is one for us as Judson: Are we a ruined vineyard or a tree planted by water? What metaphor frames our understanding of ourselves today? Are we has-beens or will-bes? I've been at that question myself for some time. Am I still a gardener, even though I don't have much of a garden right now? Am I still a farmer, even though I no longer have chickens? Am I still a pastor, even though my church doesn't say the Lord's Prayer or sing the doxology? Am I still a mother even though my kids have flown the coop? Are we still groovy even if Antonioni and Bergman and their ideas are kind of old - and are we still shaped by them? Is there such a thing as freedom from our formation? And if so, why would we want it?

Last Sunday I preached at Shelter Island, a summer community on the Eastern End of Long Island. The last time I had preached there was the day my father died. Thus it was yet another stocktaking in this thick soup of a summer for me. You look at life differently: life with father alive, life with father dead - and of course, life with father internalized. Still, even with grief waiting in the wings to come on stage, it was an absolutely comic experience. A born again opera singer belted out a Carmen-esque version of "Great is Thy Faithfulness." The liturgist greeted me at 9:30 to announce what I was to do and that I was to do nothing till we got through with all that "junk" (her word) at the beginning of the service. The junk was 15 minutes of warm-up - wordy versions of the Kyrie that did seem to go on forever. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy, ad infinitum. She "whoopsed" the word junk and I said, don't worry, I understand. I forgot to mention that the service was Garden Club Sunday and quite a number of women (average age: 74; average size: 16) wearing large hats, girdles, and brassieres marched in with the first hymn (played on an organ - remember organs?) and sat in the front row. Everything was going kind of normally for this kind of crowd on this kind of Sunday - after I got Warren to stop laughing at the Garden Club ladies - until it was time for me to lead the Lord's Prayer. Not only was I wondering when I had last said it ? after 33 years in ministry of saying it every Sunday ? but I also had no idea if this was the debt crowd, the trespass crowd, or the sins crowd.

Back to metaphor control - I am a gardener without a garden, a pastor without a Lord's-Prayer-saying-church (please don't anybody tell my Grandmother because she will say I am not a pastor), a mother without kids, an August facing a September, and either a ruined vineyard or a tree planted by the water.

Judson has been going through this kind of constant change since its beginning. So, by the way, have most people. This is life. This is normal. "The sense of impermanence" is pretty permanent and universal. Indeed, half of the American people, according to Gallup, think something capital Terrible is going to happen, and that right soon. Market gyrations, cracked space ships, and lost miners do not help. We live in the metaphor of the ruined garden. And we need not.

We can control our metaphors and we can re-imagine our past. Not only can we, but we may and we should. We live in a world where lots of people misuse the past all the time. I think of the great quote about New York, from the New Yorker, and I can't find the author: "They turn the city into an antique and then sell it back to us at thrice the price." We add value by antiquing things, which is another abuse of the past, acting as though we appreciate it, while letting Greenwich "Village" (another metaphor that needs unpacking) turn into "Old Navy" and "Home Depot" and other such fictions.

Note what just happened to Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel peace prizewinner, UNESCO goodwill ambassador, Guatemalan presidential candidate, and figurehead for indigenous rights. She was wearing Mayan dress, the traditional attire of indigenous people in central America, and the staff at Cancun's five-star Hotel Coral Beach appear to have assumed she was another street vendor or beggar, so they ordered her to leave.

The human rights activist was in the Mexican coastal resort at the request of President Felipe Calderón to participate in a conference on drinking water and sanitation and was due to give interviews at the hotel. Like a tree that's planted by the water! Up-market resorts discriminate against real Maya while trying to attract tourists with fake Mayan architecture and spectacles.

Many people abuse the past. Many people get stuck on the rope bridge to the future. I know I do. I think Judson rarely does. We are part of the seed that fell on good ground. We remain an untapped reservoir of deep springs. In a world where the average American uses 160 gallons of water a day, personally, and the Average Indian family uses 30 and spends most of the day retrieving it, we are people planted by water, sending out roots into streams, not willing to ignore these realities and not willing to be overwhelmed by them either. We have been hung up about water here for a long time. The power of eccentricity was present in our Garden Room. That power is still here.

When someone said to Dwight Moody, "I don't much like your way of doing things," Moody is said to have responded, "I don't much like it either, but I prefer it to your way of not doing things." We surely are not doing everything right, nor are we doing everything well. We vacillate between conceit and caring, self-congratulation and self-giving. We still have lots of people who say "Judson people won't like this or that," as though they were speaking for the whole. We have a long way to go to realize our full potential. It will take all our Augusts and all our Septembers, all the rope bridges we can tie.

Let us not go back but forward to our garden. May our best days be today and tomorrow. Amen.

Ancient Testimony: Isaiah 5: 1-7, Jeremiah 17: 5-8