Yesterday I said I threw out all the sermons I'd kept since 1978, the year I started preaching in seminary. Two men reacted. One just endorsed the idea because he believes in dumping everything except what will fit in one bag. To him it's a sign of freedom and a kind of faith that he will survive through the kindness of others who loan beds and showers.
The other man asked the journalist question: "How did it feel?" Because, I suspect, he has the journalist's sceptical assumption that religion is an encumbrance and that one would naturally feel lightened by breaking with these symbols of religion so as to look at "reality."
Neither one of them is right. Neither one of them really knows what it is to dump that many sermons: a physical task. In this little town one takes one's trash to the roll-off a mile out of town, next to the sewage lagoon. It is a ridge with an arroyo alongside so that three huge dumpsters can be parked with their tops level with the drive-up ground, so you can back up your pickup and throw your junk into the dumpster. Every morning the meat cutting courier brings out a carcass to discard the entrails, which makes the eager seagulls very happy. People throw whole sofas in. I've seen a complete kitchen: sink, fridge, stove. A few times there have been sheets of corrugated tin and I beg to have them for my shed roofs.
I don't want to discard the plastic document boxes with lids that the sermons are in, though I cheerfully throw out the cardboard versions, esp. after they've gotten wet. So I transfer the sermons to plastic bags, using contractor's bags which are much bigger and stronger than ordinary garbage bags. Once an inspector for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings found one of those big bags with a dead woman inside.
The woman who runs the rolloff is strong and intelligent, the paycheck for the family. She took the day off, probably to go shopping now that school has started, and a substitute old guy wielded the clipboard list, which is how you pay, along with holes punched in an annual card. I always shudder when this happens because the male subs are from a generation of men that tells women what to do and does all physical stuff which they are convinced they know all about. They attack the back of the pickup and can't tell garbage from laundry, so I have to confront them and tell them off. They stamp off angry at women. One or two have almost become dangerous.
This trash is driven away and re-sorted at a place miles away where it is not burned but piled up as compost in a huge mountain. Trees are planted around it and eventually covered by dirt. Skunks always hang around so you get a little whiff when you drive by.
Packets of 81/2" by 11" paper don't burn very well because there's no way for the oxygen to get between the pages. They don't compost very well either for the same reason. Burning and some composting but certainly all animal life is based on the process of oxygenation. I've had little fantasies about someone pulling an edifying page out of the compost. Intellectual oxygenation.
Both Twitter commentators seem to think of sermons as socially sacred somehow, a myth encouraged by those who create and voice them but not so much by those dozing in the pews. My sermons are just like my blog posts: little stories mostly, with some proposal of meaning attached. Rungs up the ladder of understanding.
You could call it "Jacob's ladder" if you're into that kind of thing, or the axis mundi ladder up to the entrance to a SW kiva. (which is in the roof) if you read Joe Campbell. The thought called up in my mind's eye is the Sunday that Jon Chacopulos had just bought an old hook-and-ladder fire engine and the entire Helena fellowship climbed aboard, traveled through the window of a Dairy Queen so that we were all properly equipped with ice cream cones, and then toured the city, running the lights and siren. Isn't that what a church should really be like?
All the holiness has worn off in a hail of potlucks, arguments, Sunday school, board meetings and other trash of living. The real emotional task will be later today when I tackle the four-drawer file cabinets. There are six of them: one for Bob Scriver memorabilia, one for Blackfeet school's lesson plans and theory, one for writing, and one for stuff I intend to get to someday. That last one will be easy. OUT. There are two for UU stuff.
I've tried to find archives that will take these old newsletters, correspondence, song-sheets, convention notes and so on, but no one wants them. I'm not forbidden -- though if I made a fuss I might be -- but merely bypassed as irrelevant. I don't have passwords to the organizations. "Elderberries" is the newsletter of the retired ministers, but I only read it. They go on trips and cruises and conferences and do good and have lovely homes: all things that take a decent income. I know there are other veterans like me who have simply disappeared. The denomination did such a good job of representing prosperity, education, and leadership in the world, that people we always defended in absentia (dark, uppity, foreign) have now captured the castle to show they're just as good.
No matter. It showed me that only winners are welcome, that there is no particular advantage to any bureaucracy, religious or not, and that no one will rush up to say, "Oh, yes! We want your records of three years of fellowship growth where everyone said it was impossible." The young women who are now the district execs and growth chairs don't know my name, and don't grasp the heroism of living in a old van while driving among four fellowships. But they still believe -- secretly -- that the idea is to maintain the organization and not much more, really.
Circuit-riding was a conceit anyway. A dodge. A selfish bit of narcissism that meant I snored so loudly that no one would room with me, so I went on sleeping in the van at minister's meetings. I'll keep the stories of those years because they were so much fun as well as sometimes hair-raising. I'll throw out the 3X5 cards for people but that will be the hardest, because each name is a real person. Some have stayed UU. I don't know what percentage.
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