s90-12 Harry Hope, Scrooge,&CB

"CHARLIE BROWN, HARRY HOPE, SCROOGE, & US"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

12/11/05

Since the beginning of the U.S. occupation, CPT members have quietly yet courageously worked on behalf of Iraqi detainees imprisoned by U.S. authorities. After collecting lists of prisoners, they translated the lists, formed data bases, met with communities and individuals seeking loved ones, documented human rights abuses, and wrote reports about their experiences living alongside ordinary Iraqis as Baghdad became the most violent city in the world.

Interviewed by Amy Goodman on the November 30th segment of Democracy Now, Seymour Hersh (who helped break the Abu Ghraib story) told about his first encounter with CPT members: “…they were on a cutting edge. …most of the things that I ended up writing about in Abu Ghraib, most of the general concepts, they knew a great deal about earlier…so, these are people toiling, really for the good of Iraqi people, and often in obscurity, in terms of the mainstream media.

Now Christian Peacemaker Team has entered the mainstream media with headlines telling about a previously unknown Iraqi group called Swords of Righteousness, which has been holding four CPT members since November 26th. The group demands the release all Iraqi detainees held in U.S.- and Iraqi-run prisons. They’ve threatened to kill the four CPT men if this demand isn’t met. A painful irony is that CPT has worked so fervently on behalf of Iraqi detainees.

Our friends in the CPT are learning first hand the agonizing experience of over 5,000 Iraqi families whose loved ones have been abducted over the past year. The lives of other westerners who’ve been abducted, a German archaeologist, a French engineer, and an American security contractor are also in jeopardy.

Throughout the past week, CPT made clear that their prayers include loving care and concern not only for their own team members but also for all of the people in Iraq afflicted by the sad and tragic realities of warfare, including those who call themselves Swords of Righteousness.

By living outside the Green Zone and traveling without armed guards, CPT has risked a great deal to educate us about the plight of people living through the strains of war and occupation. Now they are helping us learn at deep and challenging levels about embracing the teachings of Jesus, who urged his followers, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Their courage helps liberate the essential Christian call to take serious risks on behalf of bringing liberty to the captive, relief to the oppressed and good news to the poor. With CPT members in the public eye, and as we enter the season when people will ostensibly celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, who was crucified under Roman Occupation, I hope we can still hear that call, above all, to pursue the works of mercy and end the works of war.

On the internet, I found this words written by Tom Fox, one of the captives, the day before he was taken kidnaped:

I have read that the word in the Greek Bible that is translated as "love" in the word "agape". Again, I have read that this word is best expressed as a profound respect for all human beings simply for the fact that they are all God's children. I would state that idea in a somewhat different way, as "never thinking or doing anything that would dehumanize one of my fellow human beings."

As I survey the landscape here in Iraq, dehumanization seems to be the operative means of relating to each other. U.S. forces in their quest to hunt down and kill "terrorists" are as a result of this dehumanizing word, not only killing "terrorist,” but also killing innocent Iraqis: men, women and children in the various towns and villages.

It seems as if the first step down the road to violence is taken when I dehumanize a person. That violence might stay within my thoughts or find its way into the outer world and become expressed verbally, psychologically, structurally or physically. As soon as I rob a fellow human being of his or her humanity by sticking a dehumanizing label on them, I begin the process that can have, as an end result, torture, injury and death.

"Why are we here?" We are here to root out all aspects of dehumanization that exists within us. We are here to stand with those being dehumanized by oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization. We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God's children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls.

I delivered the original version of this sermon in response to a question from one of our members, who said, "I really am not sure what is we can get out Christmas. What is Christmas about?"

I am sure that question lingers in the minds of some lo these fifteen years later. Some may remember my response – others were not here at the time. Being that it is one of my favorite sermons, I decided to revisit it this morning.

Sally Brown, Charlie's sister, is writing a letter to Santa Claus. "Dear Santa Claus . . . " when Charlie offers the gratuitous comment, "Actually, there is no Santa Claus." Sally goes on, "This year, please bring me a camera, a pony, and a bicycle . . . " Charlie tells her, "There comes a time when we have to stop trusting certain legends." Ignoring him completely, her list continues, " . . . some money, a desk, a goldfish, a record player, a bracelet . . . " Charlie continues the lesson, "As we grow older, we have to face life's realities." Still Sally continues, ". . . a hair dryer, a radio, a portable tv, and some sweaters and jeans." Charlie insists, "Myths have to be replaced by truth." Sally turns to Charlie and asks, "Do you want me to put you down for a baseball glove?" Charlie says, "Yes, that would be very nice."

As Sally adds, "And a baseball glove for my brother," Charlie exclaims, "Tis the season to be wishy washy!"

What some people find hard to understand is that the fact that we believe that religion should be rational, that legends should not be confused with fact, and that life's realities must be faced, does not mean that we cannot or should not occasionally suspend judgement for a time. On the contrary, I believe that a life without some dimensions beyond mundane reality would be a drag indeed. In fact, it might be beyond survival, and change would be inconceivable, because change requires a vision of something better than what is presently real. Our theme this morning is our need to transcend that "foolish consistency," of always being “realistic.” The story Colleen told the children clearly points in that direction.

The next example I want to explore has nothing, on the surface, to do with Christmas. It is the dramatic situation offered by Eugene O'Neill in his play, “The Iceman Cometh.”

Let me remind you that the play takes place at "Harry Hope's Hotel and Bar" on the west side of New York. It's a hotel to the extent that there are some rooms upstairs above the bar, the letting of which make it legal for the sale of liquor on Sundays and after hours. The characters of the play are mostly people who have retreated from life into permanent anesthesia with alcohol. They sit around Harry Hope's Bar all day, and most of the night, with only occasional interruptions for naps.

The group includes Harry Hope, the proprietor - a former precinct captain in the Tammany political machine, who hasn't left his hotel since his wife's death twenty years before. There's Larry Slade, a one time anarchist who has lost his commitment to any movements - - he's the resident philosopher and father figure - he's O'Neill's mouthpiece. Willie Oban is a Harvard Law School alumnus who couldn't hack it in the legal world. Pat McGloin is a former police lieutenant who was kicked off the force for taking bribes. Jimmy Cameron, also known as Jimmy Tomorrow, is a former war correspondent who covered the Boer War. The group also includes two combatants from that war: Piet Wetjoen and Cecil Lewis, who were on the Boer and British sides, respectively and who met at the World's Fair at the Boer War exhibit. There are others, too, but you get the idea.

There is one thing that unites the denizens of Harry Hope's Bar: they keep telling themselves that "tomorrow" they are going to get up, get out, and return to life. It is that hope that sustains them as they drink their lives away. Harry himself is going to take a walk around his precinct and possibly run for office. Willie Oban is going to get a job with the district attorney - - tomorrow! Pat McGloin is going to get himself reinstated on the police force. Jimmy Tomorrow is going to get a job in public relation. The war veterans are going to return to their native countries. All of them talk endlessly of their dreams of tomorrow in Harry Hope's Bar, while, in the meantime, they drink.

There is one more important person in that community. In fact, most of the first act is spent waiting for his arrival. His name is Hickey, and he isn't quite like the others in that he does function in the outside world. Hickey is a traveling salesman who punctuates his career with occasional binges at Harry Hope's, during which he is the life of the party.

Harry Hope's birthday is coming, and that is one time when Hickey can be counted on to show up, buy the booze, and entertain the gang. But when Hickey does appear, it's not the same old Hickey. He won't drink, though he is willing to buy. Hickey has a mission: to save their friends from their pipedreams. He has discovered reality, and he wants to share it with them.

I know now, from my experience, [pipedreams] are the things that really poison and ruin a guy's life, and keep him from finding any peace. If you knew how contented I feel now. I'm like a new man. And the cure for them is so damned simple, once you have the nerve. Just the old dope of "honesty is the best policy" - - honesty with yourself, I mean. Just stop lying about yourself and kidding yourself about tomorrow."

Hickey, like Charlie Brown, sets out to free his friends from their pipedreams - - to bring reality into their lives so they, too, will be free. He prods them into acting on their dreams: he calls their bluff. He gets Harry to set out on that walk around his precinct . . . Willie Oban to go out to see the DA about that job . . . Jimmy Tomorrow to see about that PR job . . . Pat McGloin to see about his reinstatement.

They all fail, just as Hickey knew they would, and they return to the bar in defeat, admitting that they had been kidding themselves all along, and accepting the reality of their failure. They're so depressed by the reality that they can't even get drunk any more - - they just sit around Harry Hope's Bar without any hope - - only pain.

Then they discover the basis of Hickey's new found freedom. Hickey's wife had complete faith in him, and always believed that "this time" he would stop drinking and stay on the wagon. Her pipedream of his reform was more than he could handle. He couldn't bear constantly disappointing her, so he resolved the tension between her hope and his reality by killing her. The police come and take Hickey away.

His companions seize upon Hickey's crazy act as a sign that everything he said and did during his whole visit was crazy. Therefore, none of the things that have happened was real. They pretend that they knew all along that Hickey was crazy, and they were only humoring him.

pretending to start for a walk to keep him quiet. I knew damned well it wasn't the day for it. The sun was broiling and the streets full of automobiles. Bejees. I could feel myself getting sunstroke, and an automobile damn near ran me over.

The others come up with their rationalizations, too, and regain their pipedreams, and their ability to live, and to get drunk. There is, again, a tomorrow for them to look forward to.

Now, heaven knows, O'Neill is not an optimist. He had a tendency, based on his own painful life experience, to divide people into two groups: the dead, and the living-dead. That vision does not include all the options we might wish. O'Neill maintained that it is our "ego-sustaining mechanism for spawning and nurturing illusions" which separates the living dead from the dead. We need our illusions to survive, and with survival there is hope. Facing only the realities, replacing all the myths with truth, trusting none of the legends, leaves us with lives that are hardly worth living.

There is another example of one that O'Neill might have called one of his dead - - a man of few illusions who had freed himself of all the pipedreams. It was said:

he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone . . . a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature about with him. He iced his office in the dog days and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

I would suggest that here we have a character truly bereft of pipedreams: a truly rational man. Like his office, his heart was not thawed one degree at Christmas, about which his comment is classic:

"Christmas a humbug, Uncle," said Scrooge's nephew. "You don't mean that, I'm sure."

"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry! What reason do you have to be merry? You're poor enough!”

"Come then," returned the nephew gaily. "What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough!"

Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said "Bah!" again, and followed it up with "Humbug."

"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon Merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money: a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen months presented dead against you? If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He Should!"

"Nephew!" returned the uncle sternly. "Keep Christmas in your own way and let me keep it in mine."

"Let me leave it alone, then," said Scrooge. "Much good may it do you! much good it has ever done you!"

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest, but I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come around, . . . as a good time, a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem, by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they were really fellow passengers to the grave, not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it HAS done me good, and WILL do me good, and I say God bless it!".

We know, of course, that Ebenezer Scrooge's position on Christmas is transformed by the visits of ghosts, led off by the spirit of his partner, Jacob Marley, who had died seven years previously. Marly was fated to drag a long chain, the links of which were forged by his failure to live a more humane life.

“At this time of the rolling year," the spectre said, "I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds if fellow beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me?"

Marley alerted Scrooge to the impending visits of three other spirits who could help him avoid a fate similar to his.

The Ghost of Christmas Past led Scrooge back to the time when he was a little boy who was left alone in a boarding school over the holidays, and was forced to turn to characters in books for his companions . . . to later years when his sister persuaded their father to let Ebenezer come home for Christmas . . . to the year when he was an apprentice to Mr. Fezziwig who held a ball for his employees at Christmas, and to the Christmas when his fiancé confronted him with her discovery that he was more interested in money than in her, and so left him.

As the pieces of his Christmases past fell into place, Scrooge became more aware of the pains and sorrows that had led him to his present position. The ghost of Christmas Present took him to see what was happening in the streets and shops; to the mines and lighthouses and ships at sea; to the home of his nephew, who was expressing concern for his uncle; and to the home of his clerk, Bob Crachit, where, in spite of abject poverty, Christmas was being observed with warmth and joy.

Scrooge was then led by the ghost of Christmas Yet To Come to see what lay ahead for him, should his ways not change: people expressing disinterest at his death, the bargaining off of his possessions by his household help, and a visit to Bob Crachit's house where they were mourning the death of Tiny Tim.

We know, of course, that the confrontation with the Christmases of his past, present, and future, result in a conversion experience for Scrooge that is very different from Hickey's. Instead of grasping the mundane, Scrooge embraces festivity. Dickens tells us:

Scrooge . . . did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe for good at which some people did not have their fill of laughter at the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived on the Total Abstinence principle ever afterwards; and it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.

It seems to me that the three characters, Charlie Brown, Hickey, and Scrooge, come together in a way that responds to the question I was asked about the celebration of Christmas.

Young Charlie there, wrestling with the gap between his rational self who debated the myths of the season, and a self who, putting it in the best light, wanted to believe and receive the benefits of belief.

Harry Hope and his friends found that, as limited as their pipedreams were, they were better off WITH the fantasies than without them.

Dickens, who used this story as well as others to reflect his Unitarian theology, told of a Scrooge who had long since left his pipedreams behind for a life that was strictly business, and yet he rediscovered the ability to dream his pipedreams and to change his world.

Dickens wrote in a letter, “I have carried into effect an old idea of mine, and joined the Unitarians, who would do something for human improvement, if they could; and who practice Charity and Toleration.”

Dickens himself worked tirelessly for a wide range of charitable causes, raising funds for soup kitchens, emigration schemes, housing associations, prison reform, hospitals, adult education, and disabled artists. He also believed that through his fiction he could promote moral solutions to social ills and could change society for the better.

All Dickens’s novels reflect the central ideas of nineteenth-century Unitarianism: the belief that Jesus was a human being who exemplified a truly religious life; the rejection of materialism and the doctrine of necessity; the rejection of a God of stern judgment; a disdain of theological controversy; the rejection of dogma; an inclusive rather than an exclusive religion; and an emphasis on doing good works.

I am intrigued that some Christians who feel persecuted see nefarious secularism in NAT’s decision to run Alice in Wonderland rather than a Christmas Carol. I suspect that they have not realized Dickens’ theology. As Stites points out:

In A Christmas Carol, without once mentioning Jesus, Dickens shows it is possible to experience a conversion--not necessarily based on a specific religious experience--but a personal regeneration that leads one to help others. With Scrooge’s transformative change of heart, Dickens illustrates that his readers, too, can be converted from a harsh, complacent, selfish worldview to one of love, hope, and charity and, like Scrooge, can again become part of the human community. For Dickens, that was the true meaning of Christmas.

Where do we come into this? We have a tendency to draw pictures of ourselves as religious liberals that characterize us as highly rational, barely emotional people - - sometimes known as "God's Frozen People." There are times when we seem to be caricatures of ourselves. The tension between our realism and our idealism sometimes results in victory for cynicism. We have little time for pipedreams. Faith? Who us??? WE are reasonable and rational!

We are full of what have been called dualities. The pipedreamer and the realist are both portions of ourselves. We are more than a little like Charlie Brown. It IS dumb to write to Santa Claus, but yes, please, while you're about it, do ask for a baseball glove for me. Dickens' Christmas Carol became a classic because we experience within ourselves the tension he describes between the old and the new Scrooge - - and he reaffirms the hope that there is still time for us to be made new.

It is not rational to celebrate a supernatural birth with stars calling to wise men, and angels singing to shepherds. Look at the condition of our world, of our nation, of our families, of our own psyches! How can we possible believe in Christmas when we look at all the greed and hypocrisy and the pain and the sorrow.

Christmas is a pipedream, it may be one of O'Neill's "ego sustaining mechanisms for spawning and nurturing illusions, " But, rather than leading us into the alcoholic stupor of the living dead, as O’Neill’s theology sees as the positive choice, from my Unitarian Universalist perspective, I believe as Dickens did, that it can lead us into richer life.

It may be that we need, like Scrooge, to be visited from time to time by the spirits of OUR Christmases past, present, and yet to come: they are always with us, but we are not always sensitive to their presence.

Dare you permit yourself a moment in this busy season to travel back to your Christmases past? Close your eyes and see where YOUR spirit of Christmases past leads you . . .

Take also a moment for a brief journey with the spirit of your Christmas present - what possibilities are in the present moment for you?

I confess that my feelings of enthusiasm for Christmas are probably the products of my own experience. I would never say that I had no disappointments in my childhood Christmases, but my Christmases past evoke memories of family and warmth and delight - I can almost smell the smells, and taste the tastes, and feel the joy of a boy and then a young father who feels in danger of bursting with happiness.

My Christmas present is not unmarred with tasks uncompleted, people unvisited, a hectic schedule almost beyond belief . . . but the important elements are there, and I am managing to keep them clear.

My journey to the future is the most difficult for me to take, with change looming so large in the future. I frankly do not know now where I will be when Christmas next comes and that is daunting, but it is not frightening - it is filled with new adventures. There is change but there is also continuity.

I am led by the Spirit-journeys to the celebration of a pipedream. I continue to hope that this celebration of one birth, may cause the birth in us once more of the hope that we may yet help to bring about, the kind of world in which peace and justice can reign.

Let our wishy-washiness at this season apply ONLY to our rational reservations. As to our celebration, let it be in no way wishy washy! Let it be enthusiastic!

We are told that, in the end, it was said of Ebenezer Scrooge that "he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any alive possessed the knowledge." As Dickens wished, so do we, that "May that truly be said of all, and all of us!"