Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Helen Keller was born in Alabama, in 1880, to a father who was a former officer of the Confederate Army, and a mother who was a cousin of General Robert E. Lee, head of the Confederate Army. At nineteen months of age she became seriously ill, which left her deaf and blind. At age seven, her family hired Anne Sullivan, who was herself visually impaired and then only 20 years old, to become Helen's teacher.

Anne immediately started teaching Helen to “finger spell.” She spelled out the word “doll” to signify a present she had brought for Helen, then “cake.” Although Helen could repeat the finger movements she did not understand that they meant something.

While Anne was struggling to try to help Helen understand, she was also struggling to try and control Helen’s continuing bad behavior. Of particular concern was Helen’s eating with her hands and from the plates of everyone at the table during dinner.

Over the coming weeks, however, Helen’s behavior began to improve as a bond grew between the two of them. Then, on April 5, 1887 at the water pump in their well-house, Anne pumped water over Helen’s hand. She then spelled out the word “w-a-t-e-r” in Helen’s free hand. Anne later said that she could immediately tell something was happening.

“We walked down the path to the well-house. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the water gushed over one hand she spelled into my other the word “w-a-t-e-r,” first slowly, then rapidly.

“I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.”

Helen immediately asked Anne for the name of the pump to be spelled on her hand and then the name of the trellis of honey suckle nearby. All the way back to the house Helen learned the name of everything she touched and also asked for Anne’s name. Anne spelled the name “Teacher” on Helen’s hand. Within the next few hours, Helen learned thirty new words.

Eventually, Helen moved on to the Cambridge School for Young Ladies and then in 1900, entered Radcliffe College, becoming not only the first deaf and blind person to enroll in college, but also the first to graduate.

Later, Anne Sullivan married, and her husband John Macy introduced Helen to politics. In 1909 Helen became a member of the Socialist Party of Massachusetts.

She began extensive fundraising tours for the American Foundation for the Blind. She not only collected money, but also campaigned to call attention to the living and working conditions of blind people, who at that time had few opportunities for education, with many living in asylums.

After World War II, she spent years travelling the world fundraising for the American Foundation for the Overseas Blind. And in 1953 an award winning documentary film, “The Unconquered,” was made about Helen’s life. In 1957 “The Miracle Worker” was first performed. In 1959 it was re-written as a Broadway play and opened to rave reviews. In 1962 it was made into a film and both of the actresses playing Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller received Oscars for their performances.

In 1964 Helen Keller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson. A year later she was elected to the Women’s Hall of Fame at the New York World’s Fair. On June 1, 1968, at Arcan Ridge, she died peacefully in her sleep. She was cremated in Bridgeport, Connecticut and a funeral service was held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where her ashes were deposited next to those of Anne Sullivan, her first teacher.

One of the great gifts of her life was to demonstrate that disability need not be the end of the world. In Helen’s own words:

“The public must learn that the blind person is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. Blind people have a mind that can be educated, a hand which can be trained, ambitions which it is right for them to strive to realize, and it is the duty of the public to help them make the best of themselves so that they can win light through work.”

She was named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20^th century.

Helen Keller’s life is a symbol of many things – personal achievement against incredible odds…understanding those who are visually impaired…as well as learning more about those who are hearing impaired. But I would like to suggest that the incident at the well-house is also an incredibly religious symbol. It was truly a conversion experience for Helen Keller: She learned in that single incident that:

May I suggest that is really what all religions are about: Though they might package it differently, all religions are at heart a statement about life and how to live it. Their sacred scriptures, their major inspirational figure, their transformational claims, all root in offering a specific and intentional way to live, so that life will be more full.

Religions are not about history, though they each have a history. They are not about extraordinary events, though each has significant events it recounts as crucial. They are not about future time or past time though they each have a past and a future. Rather, they are about how to live this moment in time.

So when Helen Keller has her water well experience, she is not saved from her sins…she is not exempted from suffering…nor is she guaranteed entrance into Paradise. No, she understands for the first time that life has meaning and purpose.

So if you would for a moment, take a trip with me. What is involved in our having a water well experience? What would it mean to have an experience in which we realized that life has meaning and purpose?

The water-well experience had nothing to do with the cosmos or life before or after death. It was about life here having meaning and purpose.

I’ve always been an admirer of those ancient astronomers from Egypt, Babylon and Greece, who charted the paths of the stars and imputed meaning to life on Earth based on the alignments of the heavenly bodies in the cosmos. They did so, imagining all the time that our planet Earth was the center of the Universe and that everything revolved around life here.

Many of the religions of that time and now as well, constructed world views which were dependent upon an Earth-centered view of the Universe. The terms “Earth” and “world” were even interchangeable. This world was the measure of all things.

When we learned differently, not only about the Earth and our Sun, but also our galaxy, and our Universe, it was a body blow to that cosmology. Rather than being formed by the hands of a loving deity, our Universe began with a chemical Big Bang for which we have no words adequate to describe. And on our Planet, we are the result of a 4.5 billion-year-process of trial and error.

So while it’s an interesting exercise in literature and religious history to read, the faiths of the world have nothing to contribute to cosmology…how the world came into being or what the future of the cosmos will be. Whether there is life on other planets similar to us and our species can be nothing more than statistical projections. We may well be a fascinating anomaly of the Universe.

My point is this: To find meaning and purpose in life does not rely on beliefs about the past or beliefs about the future. We are not here because of what Genesis says, or the Apostle Paul or the Qur’an, or the Veda.

Rather, the first step in a water well experience for Earth residents in the so-called 21^st century is knowing that we have to create whatever meaning we find in living. There are no required courses and no prerequisites. It’s all up to us.

That is a different ball of wax. It’s up to us whether we include the beliefs of others, or the religious dynasties of the past. But as Emily Dickinson wrote, know this: “The world is not conclusion.” It’s an open Universe. We are on a mediocre planet, in a not so special solar system, part of a Universe that has a billion more Galaxies larger and smaller than our own Milky Way Galaxy.

So what do we do? It’s a Mystery. But that does not excuse us from class. We still must write a term paper. We still must take a test. We still must determine how we will live. Like Helen Keller when she discovered that water was also, w-a-t-e-r. Just because we learn that the Earth is much different than we were taught in Sunday School or Church, synagogue or mosque, doesn’t give us a free pass to irresponsibility. Life is ours to live. Life is ours to experience. Life is ours to explore and to understand.

As the children’s song of the 60’s said, “We are free to be.” The only question is, what will we be? And that question is posed to us each and every moment.

When I had my heart attack and a triple bypass, it was really a quite rude interruption of my long-term plan and strategic objectives. It did not include any of my goals, and it skewed the heck out of any measurements.

I was not planning to live forever, but for certain I was planning to live many years longer. It really irritated me that it all started while exercising at the gym. Eating a big Mac with French fries, maybe, but not while exercising. How totally inappropriate! To be totally helpless was absurd. And to be told that I would be sore because they had to use the paddles to “bring me back” – say what! From where!

I mean, I was here all the time, right. Does that mean that if they hadn’t used the paddles there, I wouldn’t be here. Surely not.

It was a two-by-four to the head, and a great course corrector. Pay attention! Live life now. Don’t postpone until tomorrow. Live life with purpose and that becomes the meaning.

That means that infinitesimal though we may be, we belong. When the stars were cast into the heavens, we were there. When Planet Earth cooled and entered into orbit around the sun, we were there. When life formed in the mud of the earth and the muck of the sea, we were there. When mammals first gave birth, we were there. When our primeval ancestors stood on two feet we were there. When our species distinguished itself from all others, we were there. And today, we in all our worth and value, our wisdom and experience, our strengths and weaknesses, our assets and debits – we are here as a marvelous and wondrous Part of the Whole.

That works the other way as well. I don’t know that I’ve said this, but I do believe it.

I grew up on Gospel hymns and love them still. Most of them had a huge emphasis upon life after death. Songs like, In the sweet by and by, Shall we gather at the river? Will the circle be unbroken?

In fact, I still know most of the lyrics. I’m sure they provided comfort to many. The truth is they are the poetry of a very real reality. As I’ve quoted so many times, Werner von Braun said, “The Universe does not know extinction, only transformation.”

That is not to say we’re all going to have a mansion on a straight street, paved with gold; fortunately, we will not have to spend eternity listening to harps and choirs of angels 24-7. But it is to say that we are a part of this wondrous Mystery that cannot be explained or dismissed, erased or destroyed: We will be when we cease to be. We will be Part but a different part.

The ancient bone discovery of DNA in dinosaurs, the use of DNA in the Prison Project, are all ways of underscoring that though who we are changes in death, there is a Part – a Part that will always remain a Part of the Whole.

The many languages of faith give us the poetic vocabulary to address the Mystery before which we all stand. We stand before the water well wondering and listening to the encompassing mystery of existence. And we say “yes.”

I noticed in the New York Review of Books this past week that Elie Wiesel’s book Night, which he wrote almost 50 years ago about his Holocaust experience, has been reissued and has made it back on the best-seller list. In one scene, he describes a horrific experience.

A fellow inmate in Buchenwald gives up and announces, “God is no longer with us." He then offers himself to the executioner when the selection process comes. Wiesel's own confrontation with the horror of what is being done to him and to six million other Jews, can only be expressed in a contradiction. In the midst of a sea of evil unlike any other, he says, "In spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart to that God in whom I no longer believed."

[1] Given June 24, 2007, as the fourth Sunday of Unitarian Summer 2007, at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, Ft. Myers, Florida, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.