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“Persist and Prevail”
Last month I attended the Stonehouse Clergy Study Retreat which I mention to you from time to time. The eleven ministers who belong to the Stonehouse Group have met twice a year for many years. We usually spend our 2 ½ days discussing works and writing on a particular theme: adolescence, ministerial call, friendship are just some of the topics we’ve covered over the years. This last time, instead of a theme we read and reacted to a wide range of short stories – most of them fiction. I’d like to share the gist of one little story that we dealt with that has stayed with me – it’s not fiction – it’s an autiobiographical piece written by AJ Cronin called The Turning Point of My Career.
Cronin recounts that earlier in his life he was a busy physician in London, until at the age of 33, a serious case of gasteric ulcers forced him to give up his medical practice. Under doctor’s orders, he moved to a village in the Scottish highlands in search of rest and relaxation. Desperate for something to do, Cronin decided to write a novel – something he’d always wanted to try his hand at.
After 3 months of being engrossed in his new project, he sent his handwritten pages back to England for his secretary to type. When he got the typed manuscript back he eagerly reread the first chapter. But he didn’t like what he found. It was terrible! What had he been thinking? Angered at himself Cronin threw not just the first chapter but the whole manuscript, away and he stormed outside for a walk in the hills to cool off and calm down.
Down the road he came upon old Angus, a farmer working his land. This farmer knew of his illness and his budding novel. When Cronin told him what he had just done, and why, his weathered face darkened. He was a silent man and it was long before he spoke.
‘No doubt, you’re the one that’s right, doctor, and I’m the one that’s wrong” he said. “My father ditched this bog all his days and never made a pasture. I’ve dug it all my days and I’ve never made a pasture. But pasture or no pasture I canna help but dig. For my father knew and I know that if you only dig enough, a pasture can be made here.’
This brought him up short. There was a difference between himself and the farmer for which Cronin struggled to find words. Cronin wrote, “He had what I had not: a terrible stubbornness to see the job through at all costs, an unquenchable flame of resolution brought to the simplest, the most arid of duties of life.”
This recognition that he lacked the flame of resolution seemed to create it within Cronin. He went home, and doggedly worked and reworked his novel until it was done. You might guess the outcome. The novel became a best seller and the start of a new career.
Now I’m pleased for Cronin, with his new-found resolve and his new career – he was rewarded for it handsomely with both recognition and money.
But what about the farmer who dug the soil like his father before him and still digs? What about him? There’s something in the farmer’s words that goes deeper than mere resolve to finish a job. He is talking about determination to work at a job that will never be finished. What I want you to hear in the farmer’s words is the spirit in which he speaks. The farmer, a simple man of few words, is accepting of his task, but he is not resigned to it: “I canna help but dig. For my father knew and I know that if you only dig enough, a pasture can be made here.’
The farmer cannot help but dig because he believes in the Pasture –the Pasture beckons, all evidence and experience to the contrary. His terrible stubbornness, his resolve to see his job through is rooted in an equally stubborn Hope.
Pliny the Elder, who was born in the year 23 said “Hope is the dream of the waking man. I like that - not the dream of the one who is either completely asleep or awake - hope is the dream of the one who is in the process of waking. Thank heavens for Hope because it is that which seduces us and steels us to take on the burden of tasks that can never be finished. Theologian Richard Niebuhr understood this when he said: Nothing worth doing is completed in one lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope.
Back to the farmer- he accepted his task with equanimity because of his unshakable belief in the Pasture - which came from within – by virtue of that vision, he was called to his task just as the minister who sets pen to paper for the next sermon is called. There are many who are called to jobs that will never be done: the exhausted nurse who comforts the sick, the teacher who instructs and nurtures our children, the social worker who listens to those in need day after day, the firefighter or policeman who serve and protect, the activist who speaks out in the name of justice – each of those jobs comes with a vision – and many who perform them cannot help but dig. The doctor, the firefighter, the teacher, the social worker –each have their own version of “My father knew, and I know, that if you only dig enough, a pasture can be made here.”
The vision serves as a waking dream: in spite of the fact that the last patient will never be served, nor will the last student. The last fire will never be put out and the last hungry child will never be fed. In spite of the fact that the work just keeps coming and will still, long after we are gone – their visions live, maybe simply because they are worthy.
The Hope behind steely resolve like this is different from optimism. To be optimistic is to expect that certain specific things can happen. I am optimistic that our committees will find new ways to minister to newcomers who come through our doors. I’m optimistic that we’ll get our yard work done before the company comes. I’m optimistic that the bills will get paid. Optimism is based upon what is concrete or what can be seen.
But hope is based on what we do not see and it relates somehow to our meaning and purpose of life. Hope can give us direction, solidity and roots in spite of challenge, setbacks and change. And Hope, I believe, is in shorter supply today.
There is a Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy and Linus were sitting in front of the television set when Lucy said to Linus, “Go get me a glass of water.” Linus looked surprised. “Why should I do anything for you? You never do anything for me.” “On your seventy-fifth birthday, “Lucy promised, “I’ll bake you a cake.” Linus got up, headed to the kitchen and said, “Life is more pleasant when you have something to look forward to.” Now, if all Linus really wants Lucy to do is bake him that cake, he’s optimistic – overly optimistic at that. But my belief is that Linus is Hopeful. He is called – his animating vision is that he wants to live in a world that is a nicer place. This Hope gives him resolve enough to send him into the kitchen for water - it animates him and gives his actions both meaning and purpose - he canna help but dig. Like Linus, when you have hope you’re willing to get up and do something.
But now I want to go back to AJ Cronin, our writer because the quality he focused on in the farmer was his stubborn refusal to let go of the vision that drove both him and his father. In later years, looking back and thinking about the farmer, he named that magnificent stubbornness differently. At the end of the telling Cronin adds this:
“The lesson goes deeper still. Today, when the air resounds with shrill defeatist cries, when half our stricken world is wailing in discouragement, I am glad to remember. In this present chaos, with no shining vision to sustain us, the door is wide open to darkness and despair. But the way to close that door is to stick to the job that we are doing, no matter how insignificant that job may be, to go on doing it and to finish it. The virtue of all achievement as known to my old Scot farmer is victory over oneself. Those who know this victory can never know defeat.”
Cronin wrote that in 1941. The chaos he refers to is World War II. Those we terrible times – yet today we find ourselves in another different time also with no shining vision before us. Burnout is a common phrase – those who work in most dedicated fashion risk burnout – which is exhaustion from digging the field, which brings a feeling of despair.
A friend of my husband’s who has worked to better the lives of people with mentally disabilities for the past 30 years likes to say with his dry sense of humor, “What may be worse than burnout is when you never catch fire in the first place.”
Unitarian Universalism is essentially a religion about Hope – it is about expectation and longing for what cannot be seen, a willingness to move toward a vision, sometimes one without words, but which is nonetheless real and motivating, that lives in our hearts. This is a place we can turn to be refreshed and renewed; here we push back against despair. With open eyes we can look around at the world, knowing our work will never be done, and yet still say with a terrible stubbornness and deep conviction, “My father knew, and I know, that if you only dig enough, a pasture can be made here.”