Malvina Reynolds, Viktor Frankl, and Howard Thurman: Trust, Hope and Compassion*

Doctors of Durability, Reverend Clergy, Friends,

When children ask questions, most often they start with the question, “why?” It is in your life that they will see the answer.

Each of us is an answer to the questions, “How should I live? What should I do? What may I hope for? What’s it all about, Alfie?” As Emerson said, “Do not say things. What you are thunders so, that I cannot hear what you say.” O, do not try for perfection. One of the great teachers who preached from this pulpit was Dody Donnelly. She told us, “Stamp out perfection.” Dody was a nun who split with the church when the Pope would not give equal rights to women. May her tribe increase.

Another great campaigner for justice, for human rights, for individuality, and ecology was Malvina Reynolds. Malvina would stand in the center of this chancel and sing her heart out. She warned us not to let our lives be locked up in “little boxes, … all made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same.” When Joe McCarthy and Congressional Committees destroyed lives in the name of Patriotism, Malvina was one of those little old ladies in tennis shoes out there protesting. She sang for heroes of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade like Milton Wolfe, whose wife’s ashes are buried next to this church wrapped in the flag of the Spanish Republic. Malvina sang for the planet, she sang for the soul. And she sang for children of Sesame Street:
    “Where are you going, my young girl, my pretty one?
    Where are you going, my baby, my own?
   Turn around and you’re three. Turn around and you’re four.
   Turn around and you’re a young girl going out of my door.”

But Malvina refused to be stuck in the old songs. One Sunday she was singing in this chancel and Shirley Adams yelled out from the congregation, “Malvina, sing LITTLE BOXES just one more time.” Malvina came back in essence saying, “I’m not singing old songs. I’m singing new songs that I’m writing today.” A great reminder to all of us, don’t just to live in old memories: come alive in this moment. Malvina taught us, TRUST TODAY. There will never be any other time than today. She would tell us, “Don’t despair of democracy.” Vote this Tuesday.

Four days ago, I walked in the rain in the Cemetery across from Fat Apple’s. Once again, I found the grave of my friend, Joe Fabry. Tomorrow, the sixth of November, would be Joe’s 97th birthday. Think of Joe, a Jewish boy growing up in Vienna in the 1930s. Just escaping the death camps, he made his way to California to help build Liberty Ships at Kaiser Shipyards in Oakland. When I came here as minister, Joe brought me in touch with Viktor Frankl. Frankl’s book, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, has been called one of the ten most important books of the 20th Century. Joe brought Frankl to speak from this pulpit, not once, but several times. Like Eleanor Grossman, another member of this congregation, Frankl was a survivor of Auschwitz. Viktor’s experience in the camps led him to teach Logotherapy, or therapy by meaning, moving beyond Freud’s stress on the sexual principle. Those who lost meaning in the camps soon became the ”walking dead.”

Viktor’s play about Concentration Camp, “Buchenwald,” had its one performance in our social hall with Frankl in the audience. The theme was seeking wisdom in the face of death. There were dream conversations with Socrates, Kant, and with Mother. In rehearsals, actors would break the tension by singing, “Come to Buchenwald, come to Buchenwald, where you can be a master or a slave.”

Some thought this disrespectful, but Frankl smiled. In his books he speaks of the importance of humor for survival. How to survive? Remember that you always have some power. “You cannot always control your circumstances, but you can control your response to your circumstances. Each of us is questioned by life, and we answer with our own lives. Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. Since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.”

In the shadow of the Vietnam War, Frankl preached hope. Frankl told us how he renewed his hope in communion with nature. He tells of an evening when one of the prisoners “asked us to run out and see the wonderful sunset. After minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be.’”

When we renew our oneness with the Universe, we become whole. We experience ourselves as part of a greater whole. At the 8:30 meditation this morning we communed with a third person whose spirit haunts these walls: Howard Thurman. Like Viktor Frankl, Howard renewed his soul in walks in nature. As a child in Florida, he would walk at night on Daytona Beach. He would look up at the stars and down at the ocean. He wrote, “The ocean at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the flow of circumstances. Death would be a minor thing, I felt, in the sweep of that natural embrace.”

In 1977 Howard gave the second Lawrence Lecture from this pulpit. He opened with the words of 139th Psalm, “if I should take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy right hand lead me.” He graciously had asked me what topic he should speak on. I told him of the split in the church between the Jungian Mystics and the Social Actionists.

Howard took the challenge and spoke on MYSTICISM AND SOCIAL ACTION. He told us “my heart must be a swinging door, that opens in, and opens out.” Later he said, mysticism and social action are linked like breathing in and breathing out. In the 1930s Howard and his family spent an afternoon with Mahatma Gandhi. Howard was the living link between Gandhi and M.L. King, Jr. After Martin Luther King was stabbed in New York City, he asked to see Howard. When Howard came to the hospital room, King was reading Howard’s book, JESUS AND THE DISINHERITED.

After his lecture, Howard gave the Sunday service here at least two times. And he came to give the eulogy for his friend, Dryden Phelps. Howard said, “It is not death we fear, but the valley of the shadow of death. Dryden was a man who was not afraid of the shadow of death.”

Martha Helming got the BBC video of an interview with Howard. Each week we would watch 10 minutes of the tape, and then discuss. Howard told of an experience from childhood that shaped his life. When he was a child of six, his father died. Howard’s father was not baptized, so the preacher told the congregation, “He’s in Hell because he didn’t accept Jesus.” Little Howard squeezed his mother’s hand and said, “He didn’t know Daddy, did he?”

Howard was an ordained Baptist Minister, but he was a universalist who loved everybody: Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, Jew. A Quaker wrote, “When Howard Thurman spoke, he filled the entire room with compassion.” Geneva Gates told how Howard helped her face her approaching blindness. What did he say? Geneva replied,“ He didn’t say anything. He held my hand and cried.”

I attended Howard’s funeral at the UU Church of San Francisco. Twenty speakers were each given three minutes to speak. Jessie Jackson got up and said, “I have been given three minutes to speak on Howard Thurman. Howard Thurman could pause for three minutes.”

Doctors of Durability, Colleagues, friends: May you have the zestful trust of Malvina, the courageous hope of Viktor, the deep compassion of Howard.

It seems fitting as I close this sermon on Trust, Hope and Compassion, that we pause for silence.  ♦