There’s a little story that seems always to be told to ministry students of every denomination. It’s by that most prolific of writers: “Anon.” It goes something like this:
Once there was a rocky, windy shore of a great ocean where ships often ran aground, with much loss of life and property. Because of shifting shoals and sandbars, all attempts at warning lights and changing information on nautical charts hadn’t helped much at all. Ships continued to break up in the violent waters.
A group of people got together and had an idea. They would build a sturdy little lifeboat, and take turns watching for shipwrecks. Then they would dare the waves, because their own familiarity with the waters made it possible to navigate over the shoals even in extreme weather. And so they did. They put the lifeboat in a little shed, and over the next years saved many sailors who otherwise might have drowned.
The fame of the little lifeboat station spread far and wide. Soon they decided to enlarge the shed and use it for meetings. They took so much effort with this that rescues started to decline in number. Finally, their lifeboat was placed on an altar at one end of the meeting hall, where people decorated it with flowers and sang lifeboat songs. As this happened, many more sailors started to drown.
A small group of concerned members pointed out that the original purpose of the lifeboat was being ignored. Their protests fell upon deaf ears, and so, finally, they moved a way up the coast and built a new lifeboat, which they placed in a shed. But after a few years, the new lifeboat station suffered the same fate as the first, and its original purpose was forgotten.
From time to time a new concerned group would arise from within the station, and they in turn would build a new station until the same thing befell them. Today there are lots of lifeboat stations up and down that coast, but many people drown.
Now it doesn’t take rocket science to unravel this little parable. The lifeboat stations are churches, and the story unpicks a certain tendency within denominations to stray a long way from their original purposes, to the corresponding cost of their missions. The lifeboat becomes, not an instrument of rescue, but a pretty metaphor, worthy of being adorned and adored, but not employed. The lifeboat’s original shed becomes a great hall, just as the descendents of the little groups huddled in the catacombs built cathedrals. The medium has not only become the message, but in fact has replaced any sense of purpose. Meanwhile, the sea rages, and people continue to drown.
This parable is undeniably full of good advice for churches. The loss of purpose is as old as church itself. In Revelations, the book usually attributed to John the Gospel writer, churches are being chastised for wandering from their missions. This is around the end of the first century A.D., but Paul’s blistering letters to new Christian franchises, now having become Bible chapters, are even earlier—from about 56 A.D. So there is no time, we gather, when mission wasn’t hijacked by mere formalism and sometimes even worse.
There are even some useful warnings in it for enlightened beings such as ourselves, and as far as it goes, it makes sense to indoctrinate a ministry student with its sentiments. But there is one major sticking point in the story for me: the problem, you see, is the sea. I suggest looking at it with the detachment of, say, an anthropologist, to see what it can tell us about our age. Maybe it will reveal why I feel a little discomfort with the “Little Lifeboat Station,” and why I hope it won’t occupy much of our future ministers’ time.
It is clear that the writer was concerned with salvation, just as were the readers who have so cheerfully adopted it. The rescue of poor lost sailors from death in those violent waters can only refer to the salvation of people from the currents of the sinful world, and their eventual consignment to a terrible end. The grateful wretches are pulled from the sea into a place of safety; they abandon their sinful ways for the hallowed dry land. The sea is bad, the land is good. Before they were drowning, now they are safe. The boat is the engine of salvation; the church is rescue.
In some ways this rings a bell. Don Cupitt has said that life since Arnold’s poem had become “a heaving tide of relativity”, or some such phrase. Taking the title of his ground-breaking book, The Sea of Faith, from the poem, “Dover Beach”, by Matthew Arnold, he quotes:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Old certainties are gone; new ones have not yet emerged. Floundering in post-modern confusion, we can’t see the shore either before or behind us. In such straits, even we might be willing to snatch at apparent rescue, as so many fundamentalists—both Christian and Muslim—seem to be doing. The deeps of confusion and relativity make even the shallowest of certainties attractive. Better to clamber into a leaky and outmoded boat, say some among us, than to drown in this directionless ocean.
When I was training for the Unitarian ministry an eon or so ago, we were expected to attend the annual retreats of the Ministerial fellowship. This was three days at the lovely Hucklow retreat center, in which you got to meet your future colleagues and engage in workshops designed to sharpen your ministerial skill. They were very informal affairs, with a lot of pub time, some rousing hymn-singing and even the odd dash of romantic intrigue—but that’s another sermon.
In one workshop, ministers were discussing ways to come up with sermon ideas. I was feeling oddly uncomfortable. The more people talked about their ideas—about picking a notable Unitarian, for example, and doing a potted biography of same—the less I liked it. You could take a favorite hymn, maybe, and go through it line by line, it was suggested. I muttered to a friend I was sitting next to something like, “And there wouldn’t be anyone left awake to take the offering.” Uh-oh! I was overheard—nailed. The leader asked me to explain. She was smiling like a python. Emboldened by several nights of pub worship, I said “To hell with it. ‘ I think it shouldn’t be so hard to come up with something to say every Sunday, given the state of people and the world.’” I was implying that coming up with some time-filling anodyne noise was worse than saying nothing at all.
Ah, idealism! Even though I was no longer young, I was green as an old penny. And I had had the temerity to pass implicit judgment on a roomful of good, earnest professionals. I was sunk, and I knew it. Plus, I richly deserved it; my mouth has very often landed me in the deep water. But the leader was intrigued. I realised years later that she was probably grateful to me for raising the temperature of what was turning out to be a fairly tepid session. She wrote on the board, “Given the state of people and the world they live in, it shouldn’t be hard to think of something to say to them.” What followed was a formative hour for me, as we all had the chance to talk about how people really were these days, about the confusion and depression and sense of loss and even terror that seemed to dog almost everybody.
Bill and I sometimes talk about this. When you walk up these stairs, you had better have something to say. Because this is a particularly aware congregation, but so are a few other ones. We know that half of the people in this room could fill his or my shoes at the drop of a hat, and that makes it even more of a personal crucible. He often uses the phrase, “preaching the soul,” from his favorite Ralph Waldo Emerson. I think he says that because it is the soul that is both hearing and speaking if the sermon is truthful. And what the soul wants to hear about is the real business of life and living. Not potted biographies, unless that becomes a vehicle for that task. Not mere entertaining jokes of humorous anecdotes, unless they really unravel a knot of the soul’s meaning. And the soul has no patience with over-intellectualized argument or needlessly stretched metaphors. It strains forward to hear from another soul in a time of soulessness and relativism. In the presence of dishonesty of any kind, it goes soundly to sleep.
Which brings me back to the little lifeboat station. What seems to stick in my craw is the idea that anybody knows the route to the salvation of others. Especially if their problem is that they are bobbing about in a sea of sin, that what is needed is some form of reform or correction, an overthrow of their natures. And that any one person or group has got the answers. Any boat that is having an easy time of things these days, you might say, just isn’t paying attention.
The sanctity and safety of the dry land to which the rescuers propose isn’t all that great, either. Most people who have been “saved” in the metaphorical sense seem to spend all their time defending their newly found truths. Instead of resting more easily, they seem to be even more in need of continual reinforcement. Often that means convincing others, making them members of their lifeboat society. The truth must be filtered through a tight screen of ideas, a test of so-called faith, before being allowed into the mind. This turns out to be the price of all that “safety”, and it’s a high one. Too high for me, and I expect for you, too.
So if we dismiss the idea of salvation, of being pulled safely onto dry land, where does that leave us? After all, we are no less at the mercy of the waves. We have left witches and evil spirits behind for denial and alcoholic spirits. Pharaoh has let us go, but our addictions haven’t. Family isn’t necessarily a refuge any more; sometimes it is more like an emotional obstacle course. Serpents don’t speak to us, but we are shocked to realise that sometimes two contradictory things can be true at the same time. Logic and proportion, in the words of Jefferson Airplane, have vanished. Wouldn’t it be nice, wouldn’t it be wonderful, if there were a sturdy boat we could scramble aboard and just ride peacefully away?
Well, no, actually. Because what we would leave behind in Davy Jones’ locker would be our own souls. Yes, our own confused collection of experiences, dreams and memories that make us us. And it may be—take my word for it—that there is a reason to be where we are. There’s a reason to feel lost from time to time, to cope with realities that were once as certain as Arnold’s Sea of Faith dissolving like ice in a furnace. To live the life of this time and to do it with courage and awareness and as much skill as we can.
You know, I think that’s really why we gather here every Sunday. We’re not really looking for salvation at all, which is why certain people simply look at us with confusion and even dismissal when we try to explain ourselves. If we are floundering in a sea of relativity, we are not doing it alone. Besides, we have reason to believe—call it a hunch, if you want, faith, if you don’t—that something is working in and through us that is better than a magical rescue from a lifeboat. The Sea of Faith has become the sea of consciousness. God bless us, I think we are learning to swim. We are not drowning, but waving, after all.
Art Lester
Dublin Unitarian Church 14st August 2005