Parable Of The Deck Chairs

September 1982
Lakeland
Port Charlotte
Clearwater

I did not go on a cruise, so the Parable of the Deck Chairs is not how I spent my summer. A couple of weeks ago, a Peanuts cartoon strip (published in 1981) stimulated my remarks today.

http://comics.com/peanuts/1981-03-15/

Charlie Brown is standing at Lucy’s booth, which is marked with the sign “Psychiatric Help – 10¢” Lucy says to Charlie Brown, “Maybe I can put it another way ... life is like a deck chair.” “Like a what?” asks Charlie Brown. Lucy explains, “Have you ever been on a cruise ship? Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun. Some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they’ve been. Other people face their chairs forward – they want to see where they’re going. On the cruise ship of life, which way is your deck chair facing?”

Charlie Brown: “I've never been able to get one unfolded.”

The cartoon is an apt description of most of us, is it not? We look back, we look ahead, and there are times in the present when we can’t seem to get our own deck chairs unfolded. Pared down to the essence, one’s religion is one’s understanding of the meaning of life and the attitudes and conduct that develop from that understanding.

Particular religions differ in uncountable ways, rituals, doctrines, and practices. Wisdom from the past is interpreted in unlike ways. Goals for the future are not identical. Sadly enough, when we can’t get the deck chairs unfolded, then we are blocked from the wisdom of the past, have trouble setting goals for the future, and can’t seem to get comfortable in the present.

There is wisdom to be found in looking backward. The cure for the troubled self is found often enough by looking back into one’s personal history. With the help of a skilled counselor, one can bring to light hidden conflicts, fears, angers, frustration. When brought to light, understanding increases and the health of the self improves.

Then there is the enriching, fascinating history of humankind. We sang that fine hymn,

“Bring O Past your honor,
Bring O Time your harvest,
Golden sheaves of hallowed lives
And minds by truth made free.”

As a reader of history, I know there is a harvest of honor in the past and hallowed lives and minds by truth made free.

But history is a record of follies and crimes as well as honor and truth. Wisdom resides in recognizing both the follies and the honor.

The worship of a particular version of history is a common idolatry. Millions take a Bible verse or story and find in it an inerrant guide to present conduct and belief. They cannot accept or do not know that the Bible is a literary collection, the product of many authors in different times, for unlike purposes. To rely wholly on what the Bible says and persist in a determined, unwavering look at a particular segment of the past is to turn one’s back on new light, accumulated learning, and fresh insights.

There’s usually in any gathering nostalgia about the good old days. I clipped this little story: “You’re all in black, Millie. Did your husband die?”

“No, not this one. But he’s been so impossible lately that I went back into mourning for my first husband.”

Well the good old days weren’t so good. In my own memory is a time when I was a delivery boy for a chain grocery store [CJW note: The manager’s speech was a rich Irish brogue, for he had not been long in the country.]

My last delivery every Friday evening was one I didn’t enjoy. After a long week pushing my delivery cart, I would lug a 50 lb. bag of potatoes to the top floor of what we called a three-decker. I carried the bag into a cluttered kitchen, redolent with the odor of unwashed diapers and a smelly oil stove, loud with the crying of babies and children, many more than the cramped quarters could house with any comfort. I never collected – I surmised that my boss paid out of his own pocket to help a fellow immigrant family. Beyond doubt, those potatoes were their principal, and most of the time, only food. There was no ADC, no welfare as we know it, no food stamps. The good old days were not that good.

In addition, when sitting on the deck chair looking backward, one cannot see the whole horizon by focusing on one small arc of the circular sweep.

Historians try to be objective but they are human [and] must be selective. Unavoidably, historians sift through the sieve of their own values and goals. We read that in Japan, there was an effort at revisionist history in order to lighten the stain of that country’s imperialistic aggressions prior to and in World War II.

There are many examples. Reading [about] the American Revolutionary War, one of the hottest sparks that lit the first of rebellion was the Stamp Act, taxation levied by England. “No taxation without representation” was the war cry of colonists. There was violence – the Boston Tea Party – attacks on custom houses, threats on the lives of English officials. We see the protests and rebellion against the Stamp Act as a proud and nation-forming event in our national history.

However, if at the time you were in Parliament as a member of His Majesty’s government, you would have been appalled. Colonies never had representation. The revenue from the Stamp Act could begin to compensate for the British soldiers who defended the colonies in the French and Indian War – at great expense to the Crown. Furthermore, many American colonists had done quite well financially during that war trading with the enemy and smuggling. Furthermore, the M.P. asked, what representation do these colonists give to their slaves and bondservants?

So when looking backward at the wake of the ship, beware of a fixed focus or a blurred lens. But also, unless we know the past, we are fated to repeat its mistakes.

Next, if we are in the deck chair facing forward, we see storm clouds and the white caps of a gathering squall. We also sang Tennyson’s optimistic, idealistic lines to a bright future:

“Yea, we dip into the future,
far as human eye can see
See the vision of the world
and all the wonder that shall be,
Hear the war drum throb no longer
see the battle flags all furled,
In the parliament of man
the federation of the world.”

Idealistic, visionary, and naïve. As some wag noted, “the future isn’t what it used to be.” Those looking into the future now seldom see “all the wonder” that is yet to be.

These are the Biblicists who see all events leading to an Armageddon soon, the second coming of Christ, and examine Bible verses to support that prediction. But the ominous guesses have been made many times before in the Christian centuries and the heavenly armies never arrived. To me, Armageddon is a baffling theological proposition. Why would a parent God, whose nature is Love, destroy all his children except a select few who are “saved?” I can only conclude that attributing such designs to God more often represents a narrow spirit of meanness against those who do not share or support such beliefs.

There are other sad prophecies with a more substantial basis. Nuclear, biological, chemical weapons when used, could bring an abrupt end to human life. That threat is real and present. The prevailing government attitude is that if we build more and more frightful weapons, we will prevent war. This to me is nonsense and a more irrational policy than a fanciful Biblical Armageddon. There will be emphasis on this urgent problem on October 17, when I hope, in the company of millions, we will say, “no more nuclear weapons.”

Also, we are aware of the concern so many have for planet Earth. The exploitation of resources, the toxic waste dumps, the heedless ways that surface and ground water are being contaminated, the acid rain, the potential dangers from nuclear power plants, on and on. As we gaze out on the future, there is the possibility, [which] many predict, [that] we will suffocate in our own wastes and poisons. [CJW insert: Donald Kaplan – likelihood of no future at all. p. 127 – studies – Platt 1969 – Crowe 1969 “conclude that the rate at which mankind is progressing toward planetary extinction is significantly more rapid than the rate at which existing institutions solve problems.”]

There are those who hold a more optimistic view – that developing technology, new energy applications, greater awareness, will avoid a calamitous end to the inhabitants of planet Earth.

I hope so. But I am not greatly heartened when I read a quotation from Justin Dart, multi-millionaire Californian and close personal associate of the President. Dart said, “I’m for preservation. I say we should preserve the redwood, sure, maybe 100 acres of them, to show the kids.” (Los Angeles Times, quoted by Context). Such dismal ignorance of the interrelatedness of the human and natural environment is both astonishing and depressing.

There are other views of the future. I do not know enough to venture predictions. Niels Bohr, Nobel physicist, quoted by Kilpatrick, remarked, “prediction is a very difficult thing when it involves the future.”

But of this I am sure, the future will be guided by how many are able to get deck chairs unfolded in the present.

All of us at various times, perhaps persistently for some, have jammed our fingers getting the deck chair unfolded. That is, we are beset by circumstance, deterred by own own fears and guilts, our reluctance to like ourselves, our hesitations to be responsible, responsive, autonomous persons. Some of us stay in the trap of beliefs which are outmoded or unreal because there is emotional security in not venturing into new experience.

Thomas Jefferson, at the age of 50, finishing his term as Secretary of State, was tired, not well, and longed for the green hills of Monticello and the joys of family, farm, and library. He noted, “The motions of my blood no longer keep time with the tumult of the world.” We share such feelings at times, don’t we all. But Jefferson responded to the demands of his time and went on to a two-term presidency – 8 difficult years before going to his beloved home.

Benjamin Franklin, in many ways the most remarkable of Americans, always seemed to get his deck chair unfolded. The late Catherine Drinker Bowen, a superior writer and biographer, author of studies on John Adams and on Holmes as well as Benjamin Franklin, never completed fully her studies of Franklin (THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA), dictated this from her bed as she was in her last illness:

“Benjamin Franklin was a philosopher, he absolutely knew himself, and without self-guilt or self-righteousness, set about improving himself. What young revolutionary today wants to improve himself? He only wants to improve other people. To seek self-improvement, a man has to believe in life, which means believing in himself. Montaigne said ‘of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to despise our being.’”

To believe in oneself is not to look into a fantasy mirror and expect the message “you are the fairest one of all.” That is not reality. The reality is to see the accurate reflection and either chuckle or cuss, but still maintain oneself and not despise oneself. Andre Gide noted in his journal, “to love the truth is to refuse to let oneself be saddened by it.”

That’s not easy. In the soap opera parody of a couple years back, Mary Hartman’s mother says, “you can always find something in the 6 o’clock news to take your mind off life.”

We are tempted to take our mind off life, because there is pain in meeting it and liking oneself.

If we unfold our deck chairs, there will be pain, whether in our personal struggle for a strong self or in the agonizingly difficult task of amending and re-forming the institutions of government, business, religion, to the end that the peoples of the world may be saved from nuclear blast and poison, maybe saved from destroying the planet, which is our only nurture.

There will be pain. May Sarton, the poet, notes “To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth, isn’t it? Nothing that happens to us, even the most terrible shock, is unusable and everything has somehow to be built into the fabric of the personality, just as food has to be built in.”

Such, it seems to me, is a dimension of a religion for humans. Unitarian Universalism attempts to be that – a human religion. Not the romantic optimism of Tennyson, not the pessimism of a pre-determined Armageddon, but to play one’s part, to make real that which is ideal, the worth of all persons, including you, me, and persons everywhere under whatever sun.

Simone Weil, the French writer, expressed this realistic optimism in a manner which for me is an undergirding value in our religion:

“At the bottom of the heart of every human being from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. In this above all that is sacred in every human being. The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what pertains to it.” (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 240)