THE GOSPEL OF BROADWAY

INTRODUCTION: In the late 1950s, the famous duo of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein teamed up for one more musical. They already had to their credit, fabulously successful Broadway runs of Oklahoma, South Pacific, Carousel, the King and I, plus much more. Those had won them 15 Oscars, 24 Tony's, two Pulitzer prizes, and two Grammy awards.

This new musical was to be based on a true story in Austria about the interaction of a young nun-to-be, a novice, who was assigned by the Mother Superior to serve as governess for seven children whose mother had recently died. Since the mother’s passing, the father, totally clueless, had tried through a string of governesses, to impose on his children a strict military type of discipline. It had resulted in an unbroken string of failures, firings, and resignations by all of the governesses to that point.

So, fresh in from the convent comes young Maria, who has never served as a governess before, and has consistently failed in the discipline of the convent. Her first decision was to teach the children to play and sing – they even made costumes out of the bedroom curtains – all unbeknownst to her employer, Georg von Trapp.

One day when he comes home unannounced and discovers what is happening, he immediately orders Maria to leave and return to the convent. Before that can happen, he hears the children singing one of the songs she had taught them. He is so deeply moved by it that he has a change of heart and asks her to stay. He then becomes infatuated with her, and eventually breaks off his planned marriage to the baroness.

Maria, however, already has a commitment – a planned marriage to the church and to Christ. She is to become a Roman Catholic nun. But she discovers that she is in love with the man who loves her – von Trapp. In conflict and bewilderment, she races back to the convent, determined never to leave its hallowed walls again.

It’s then that the Reverend Mother convinces her that spiritual freedom is not always the same for everyone. Different people respond differently to life. A loving relationship is a high calling, as is entering the convent. Life’s choices are not always easy. Sometimes we have to climb mountains, forge seas, and follow rainbows, before our dreams come true.

Maria returns to the von Trapp family and she and von Trapp marry. But in the midst of their honeymoon, Hitler annexes Austria, and von Trapp is ordered to take an officer’s commission in the navy, which he desperately does not want to do. In the midst of a daring on-stage performance, the whole family escapes to Switzerland, and as we’re left to believe, lives happily ever after.

It’s a magical story, with a wonderful ending. And when we listen to its gorgeous music, we might be inclined to think it’s rather dated fluff, too light-hearted, and unrelated to the real struggles of life, such as sickness, death and dying. How surprising then to learn that Oscar Hammerstein, the writer of the script and the lyrics for the songs, was dying with stomach cancer as he wrote. In fact, the last song he penned words to was Edelweiss, which many mistake for an Austrian folk song, because it resonates so authentically.

Although quite ill, Hammerstein attended the 1959 grand opening of The Sound of Music on Broadway. He died less than a year later, which means he never saw the magnificent movie made from the play, which my daughter recalls watching at least 20 times or more during her Junior High School years.

So almost 50 years from its opening on Broadway, please listen to its advice, as Charles Couglin sings for us, Climb Every Mountain.:

That poses for us this question: In the play and movie, when it says, “Climb every mountain,” is it referring to for real mountains, or does it mean mountains of despair and disappoint? Is it referring to mountains outside or inside?

For certain, there is something majestic about physically present mountains. To stand upon a plain or valley and look up at a mountain can create a wondrous sense of calm and peace. Even a beautiful picture of a snow-capped mountain, can be quieting. The mountains seem to stand as sentinels into the portals of time. They seem ancient and forever.

I remember playing golf during a retreat one summer in Colorado, on a course that was surrounded by mountains. When I went to drive the ball from the tee-box as I looked up to see where to hit it, there always was a mountain in the background. No matter where I was on the course, nor what direction I was hitting, ahead of me, behind me, or to the side, a majestic mountain filled the space. It was a marvelous feeling. Truly, there is something sacred about mountains themselves.

When our ancestors first began to develop worship practices, they many times went to mountain tops. Tradition tells us that Moses for example went up the mountain to receive the Torah from Yahweh, with its instructions on how the Hebrew people were to live. Those are the commandments contained in the first five books of the bible. Jesus gave one of his most famous sermons on a mountain, appropriately named, the Sermon on the Mount. A holy place for Muslims is the Dome of the Rock, from where they believe Muhammad was taken up into heaven, which others call the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,

So it’s true in one very real sense that climbing for-real geologically formed mountains represents something of a spiritual discipline. Once there, once on the mountain top, we feel a sense of closeness to the awe that permeates the Universe.

One of the spiritually diminishing experiences to come out of supernaturalism was that it placed God in heaven – up there – rather than pervasively present upon Earth, and upon mountaintops. Arnold Toynbee, the great Jewish historians of the 20^th century, contended that the result was God absented herself from down here – the Earth. We divorced the sacred from the secular. We removed divinity from the physical planet, and thereby denied the sacredness of all life on this planet…which is why our environment has been reduced to matters of business development.

Toynbee’s charge creates a very challenging question: how do we restore the sacredness of life here…the divinity of all things here…or as faith proclaims, the pervasive presence of God in everything? How do we re-appropriate that sacred dimension? How do we create an awareness of the sacral nature of our planet? How do we reinvest divinity in to the very essence of existence – the trees, the plants and oceans, wildlife, human beings – all that is? It’s more than a rhetorical question as America evidences.

One of the great tragedies of our nation is also one of our greatest strengths, namely, our pervasive emphasis upon individualism, upon doing our own thing.

At dinner Friday night, my daughter Laura, my son and daughter-in-law Brett and Tamara, and I were visiting together. The subject of the significant drought last year in Texas came up. As you can well imagine, the most precious commodity during a drought is water. The Dallas Morning News did a story on the major abusers and misusers of the water during the drought. Records accessible to the public disclose how much water each home or business paid to the local utility.

As you can imagine, exclusive country club golf courses were among the worst offenders. The fertilizers, plants, and special grasses they use to create the beautiful landscaping golfers love, require enormous amounts of water. But incredibly, during the drought, one individual in Dallas with a huge, huge home had used more water than the entire Dallas Golf and Country Club had used on its 18 greens, tee boxes, fairways and roughs. He’s a famous, very wealthy developer, whose name many of you would immediately recognize. The drought that was worrying farmers, households, and cities was not his concern. Keep that water running!

That’s not a cheap shot at the obscenely rich. Rather, it reveals a very insightful disclosure about what happens when we achieve the real American Dream – to be rich. As nature writer, Bill McKibben, recently observed, “When there’s too much money floating around, it enables people to have no need of each other.” Because we’re self absorbed and feel self-sufficient, we lose the notion of community, of doing for others, our immediate neighbors, our city, state, and federal government, and even the world.

What might be called hyper-individualism perpetuates the notion that we don’t have to worry about our neighbors in Dallas or Texas or the Southwest, and certainly not about the thirsty of Africa, and the billions of women on this planet desperate for access to clean water.

The precious landscape of our planet is in deep jeopardy. The snow from the mountains that fill the creeks and the rivers and stock our dams is succumbing to global warming. A majority of scientists have united in raising their voices in concern. We need to be in awe of our mountains, and their place in our eco-sphere.

So in a sense, there is a for-real, physical reality to the song, Climb Every Mountain.

But there was another dimension to what the Reverend Mother was singing about in the play and movie. It was a totally different kind of mountains: The mountains that arise in our lives and seem to block our way forward…the mountains that pose difficulties far beyond our capacity to face…the mountains that stand in front of us and between the dreams we hope to achieve. These are really the mountains we have to climb.

The Christian religion has Jesus offering a solution when he challenged his audience that, “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, ‘Be cast into the sea,’ and it shall be done.”

No one’s ever been able to do that – to throw a mountain into the sea. So either the statement is false, or else it means something totally different, namely, the mountains that we face are not the Rockies, nor the Himalayas. They’re not Mt. Everest or Mt. Kilimanjaro. No, the real mountains are, how do I make it to next year, to next month, to next week. How do I make it to tomorrow, when it seems like I can hardly put one foot in front of the other. When dreams have vanished, when hope is gone, to where do I turn? Like some of you are experiencing.

Jesus said that faith as small as a tiny grain of mustard seed could result in that mountain being cast into the sea. What does that mean? How do we do that?

So what do we do when we face mountains we cannot climb and rivers we cannot cross?

One of my favorite quotations of Christian scripture comes from the Gospel of John. According to John, after a great start, the mission and ministry of Jesus had failed miserably. The masses had turned on him. He’s about to be arrested, stripped, beaten, and a fake crown of thorns placed on his head in ridicule. Then he will have to carry his own cross, the one upon which he will be executed, to the site of crucifixion.

As this end is fast approaching, his closest disciples voice their concerns. They hadn’t really planned on this. They liked it better when the crowds were large, and Jesus was hugely popular. Now though he’s under criminal indictment and they’re feeling the need to get out of town before they get caught in the undertow.

The response of Jesus seems at first glance to be the words of someone disconnected from reality. He says, “Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”

What that means is that facing mountains of disappointment and difficulty always begins as a spiritual matter. Before we address the roadblocks of reality in the world, we must seek to address the roadblocks within our inner world. When we’re spiritually in tune, no matter what happens with the mountains, we’re much better able to face them. Mountain climbing of the variety mentioned by Jesus and sung about in musicals starts inside…in services like these…in daily prayers like Muhammad practices…in songs and prayers…in meditation and reflection…in reaching out to others.

So the creed of the gospel of Broadway is that every challenge, every inner struggle, no matter how large the proportion, is a spiritual matter. Before we can engage in damage control, or strategic planning, or time management…before we face the tragedy of life lost and efforts failed…before we try to make a difference…it’s imperative to address within. It’s a spiritual matter.

To cast mountains into the sea…even to face the prospect of another day…to climb a mountain of pain and disappointment…begins first as a spiritual matter – before one step is taken up the mountain. It’s an inside job.

A great 20^th century European novelist (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) once wrote, “It’s a question of discipline: When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet.”

Maybe a corollary imperative is, “When we’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, we must also tend our inner spiritual planet as well.”

In doing so, we may find the resources to climb the mountains that life will most surely bring us. Amen and blessed be.

[1] Second in a series on “The Gospel of Broadway.”

[2] Given October 08, 2006, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister, at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting for the second time at its new site, Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows Drive, Ft. Myers, FL.