Oh, Go ahead: Bring the Horse in the House!

March 12, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: The Horse in the House

It happened in the summer of 1955, and was both logical and necessary. We lived in Colfax, Iowa, a town of about 1800, twenty miles east of Des Moines. Formerly located on Highway 6, the Interstate bypassed it when it went in in the early 1960s, kind of leaving it where it was.

But where it was – at least in 1955 – was a wonderful place, at least for a 13-year-old boy with a horse. My younger brother also had a horse, named Spooky. Spooky was white, and hot-tempered, at least to me, though my brother seemed to get along with him.

My horse was brown, with a big white line running up the back of his left hind leg, around his rump and back down his right leg. He was laid-back and cool, and his name was Louie.

The horses were our freedom. We could come home from school, throw a saddle on, and just ride, ride, anywhere. A couple times on weekends, we left on horseback to make camp for the weekend. I had a Marlin lever-action .22 caliber rifle and a saddle holster, just like I knew all real cowboys had, and would hunt big game for our vittles. OK, squirrels. Whatever. We”d make camp, cut down some saplings, or cut branches, make a corral that straddled the small creek, so the horses wouldn’t wander off. Then I’d shoot a squirrel or two, which we”d cook on a stick over an open fire, then retire to sleep using our saddles as pillows, just like in the movies. I don’t think cowboys really used saddles as pillows. It’s very uncomfortable.

When my brother Peter and I were 13 and 10, our horses were sometimes our best friends. We fed them, cleaned their stable in the barn, and rode them around the fenced pasture next to the house almost every day. I had a paper route that went from downtown straight out Main Street about two miles out past our house. Every day, summer and winter, I’d get to our house, saddle up Louie, and we”d finish the route together. We were close.

My brother Peter and I used to like to give the horses sugar cubes, which they gobbled out of our hands almost too eagerly. That was until the vet said the sugar cubes would rot their teeth and we shouldn’t do it any more. Bummer. They liked carrots and apples fine, but they also had a sweet tooth. We understood.

We were looking for a loophole in the “no sugar cubes” deal. I think we found it by chance one morning, when my brother didn’t want to finish his grape juice because it was too sweet. The words hit like a revelation straight from the gods – or at least the god Poseidon, who was also fond of horses.

After our mother left for the day, we poured some grape juice in the dog bowls on the rickety back porch. The horses loved it! But there was an unexpected bonus that made it all even better. The grape juice made their noses and tongues purple. Now that was cool! Horses with purple tongues and, in Spooky’s case, a purple nose!

The occasion giving rise to the center of this story came on one of those days when both horses were up on the back porch, drinking grape juice out of the dog bowls. When Pete took Spooky back down, he broke the wooden steps – really, it’s amazing that both horses didn’t fall straight through the porch.

Well, now Louie was stuck up there on the back porch. He wouldn’t jump down, there wasn’t any other way off the porch, and our mother would be coming home in an hour or two. This called for quick thinking, which kids mostly know they’re pretty good at. We had two friends over, who would help with the horses in return for getting to ride them. I shared my plan. Joey could take Louie’s halter, I’d go ahead to clear away the furniture, and we would lead the horse through the house and out the front door, over the new porch with its sturdy cement step. Oh yes, and Jimmy would walk behind Louie, carrying a metal bucket, just in case. Jimmy protested, but he was the littlest, so it was only fitting.

No sooner had I announced this grand and eminently logical plan than my brother jumped on Spooky and rode away as fast and as far as he could.

The plan worked beautifully. I cleared the furniture out of the way, Louie was very well-behaved, and Jimmy whined all the way through the kitchen and dining room about the sorry hand that Life had dealt him.

When we got into the living room, the television was on, and Louie stopped. His ears shot forward, his eyes got big, and I could feel him thinking “Hey – we haven’t got this out in the barn! The Big House is a whole other thing!” I saw the family camera sitting on a hall table – a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye with flash bulb attachment – and quickly took a picture of this scene.

But I wasn’t as quick as Jimmy. When he saw me going for the camera, he walked up by the horse’s shoulders, and set the bucket down.

This was not good timing. It was not good timing because when the flash bulb popped, it startled Louie. And Louie pooped on the rug.

I yelled at Jimmy – his duties had been made very clear. But he snapped back – petulantly, I thought – “I am not going down in history holding a bucket behind a horse’s butt!” It was a good point, well taken.

Still, there was the poop.

We took Louie out the front, got him back into the barn, and both Joey and Jimmy disappeared as quickly as my brother had a few minutes earlier.

I scooped the poop, but it wasn’t going to be that simple. There was a stain. Not dramatic, but noticeable. I went into the kitchen and looked under the sink, where wondrous and mysterious Chemicals are kept. And there was a big bottle of Glamorene Rug Cleaner. It was, I’m quite sure, the only time in my life I ever saw or used that product, but its name was stamped in my mind forevermore.

Luckily, I had a bucket. Of course, if it had been used in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to use it in the second place. I filled the bucket with water, dumped in a lot of Glamorene, got a brush, and scrubbed.

Glamorene Rug Cleaner was truly miraculous! Unfortunately, there was now a large wet spot, a couple feet across, which was even more noticeable than the original stain. My mother had never been accused of being a good housekeeper, though this was the first time I saw that as a good thing. I took a throw rug from the other side of the room and covered the wet spot.

She never noticed. Neither did my father. And Peter knew better than to say one single word. During the day, I’d take the rug off, covering it again before my mother came home. In two or three days, the rug was dry, and looked like its scruffy old self again. When I moved the rug back where it belonged, both parents suddenly noticed it had been moved, though I assured them it had always mostly been there.

In short, I pulled off the caper of the century. I got away with bringing Louie through the house, even though he had had that little accident in the living room. In the days to come, both my brother and I would laugh about it while we were out riding. Certain kinds of kids live for moments like that.

It was – I don’t know, maybe two or three weeks later: a long time later. I came home from some serious playing, and no sooner had the screen door shut than I heard this Mother Voice shouting “Howie! Come in here!” Every kid knows that voice, and knows what it means.

I stood a little paralyzed there by the front door, wondering – not what I’d done, but what anyone could possibly have told her about. Nothing. There was nothing. I’d either been quite good, or left no evidence. I was sure of it. I went into the kitchen, and every kid knows just what comes next. With my most innocent look, I said “Yes, Mother?”

She was not a happy woman. “What do you mean, bringing that horse in the house?”

This took really quick thinking. Could she possibly know about that? It didn’t seem likely. Pete wouldn’t dare tell. And Jimmy and Joey knew if they blabbed, they”d lose their ticket for free horse rides. And Louie didn’t talk. That’s it. She couldn’t know.

So again with the innocent kid look, I said “What horse?”

The next line was the Voice of Damnation and Doom: “I just got the pictures back from Walgreen”s!”

Poop. That horse. Louie, the cool, laid-back horse. Ah, yes.

The next moments were a bit awkward. Denial seemed out of the question. But explaining the logic of it – and especially how responsibly we brought the horse into the house, with moving the furniture and Jimmy and the bucket and all – that was a little trickier. And then there was the matter of the poop. I couldn’t really leave that out. And the Glamorene, and the wet spot – which finally cleared up the mystery of the moving throw rug. It was actually quite a complex story. And telling it did sound a bit odd, even though it was all quite logical from beginning to end.

As I stumbled through the story, I suddenly saw a gift from the gods, a shot of pure Grace: the corner of her mouth twitched. She was on the verge of laughing! Oh, Hallelujah!

Again, every kid would know what move to make next. “What’s the matter, Mom? Are you going to laugh? It’s really pretty funny, isn’t it? Huh?”

Her expression was one of those that should have been filmed. She needed to be serious – it was still Serious Parent time – but she could barely keep it in. Finally, she blurted “I have no idea what to say to you. I would feel ridiculous saying “Don’t bring that horse in the house again”!” I look back on that as about the most ideal way a parent could handle this situation – not that more than like one in a billion parents will ever have to face this situation. As for the back steps; they were rebuilt, but I don’t remember anything about it. Maybe Pete and I had our allowances docked to help pay the carpenter, but I don’t think so. I think the family absorbed Louie’s Big Day as one of those Memories we’re always trying to make – or perhaps as the sad sign of a child too far gone to save.

And that’s the story of how the horse was brought into the house, way back in the summer of 1955 when both I and my world were a lot younger and simpler.

But as logical as it is, I have learned through the years how filled with Basic Disbelief many people are. Like you. You don’t quite believe it – at least not all of it – do you?

Oh, come on. This is better than most history. Even if you don’t believe it, can’t you pretend to?

But no. No. And so, for those too cynical to accept the simple truth of a childhood memory from a half-century ago, a gift for you too. I carried that photo in my billfold for over twenty years. Louie was with me through the Army, in Germany, even through the Vietnam War. Then sometime in the mid-70s, while I was spending a weekend with my brother’s family, he picked my pocket as I slept, stole the picture, and sent it off to have it copied. At Christmas, he gave me a 16×20 print of that old photo, complete with its fading and scratches, which I then had mounted and framed. It still hangs on my office wall today.

PRAYER

There are little sparks of life around that we often miss: a special person, a twinkle in the eye of someone who just seems to very real to us.

Little lights are scattered here and there in our lives: people, places, even things that can awaken our own spirit in ways large and small, but in ways we wish for.

So often when life seems dull or we seem to be in a rut, we’ve lost sight of those sparks, or lost touch with them. Spontaneous things, unplanned fun, or contact with those people who have such a young spirit, no matter how old they are.

There is an old mystical story that says all these sparks are parts of God, and that our task is to find them, draw them to our lives, and use them to transform ourselves and our world back into an image of God.

Drawing the world back into an image of God sounds like a task far beyond anything we can do. But we do recognize those moments, people and places that make us feel more alive, that seem to make life offer more options, that open us up.

Let us start there, attending to the sources of inspiration that make us feel more alive, more thankful, more joyful. Let us claim those sources and the little sparks of life they offer, even if they offer them only to us.

The task of reconstituting the world is too big to imagine. Let us bring it down to a level we can see and feel: reconstituting one spirit at a time, one life at a time, one relationship at a time, to make them show forth more light, love, and joy.

It’s a start. A good start.

Amen

SERMON: Oh, Go ahead: Bring the Horse in the House!

There is a wonderful story from medieval Jewish mysticism about how in the beginning, God existed just as undifferentiated infinite light. But God wanted to behold himself, and so he created the world; the world is the image of God. Then God withdrew, and the world was no longer the image of God, but a fractured, separated place. But spread throughout this world, there are billions and billions of sparks from that divine light that can connect us with all that is sacred.

Our task in life is to cherish those sparks that it is our good fortune to encounter in life, and to raise and spiritualize them, so we can reconstitute the world as an image of God. Each of us, they say, encounters those persons, events and things that contain sparks that we are uniquely suited to redeem.

And our sacred task in life is to find those sparks we are lucky enough to come across, to cherish and embody them, to lift them up and spiritualize them, and by doing this to reconstitute the world so that it can once more take on the image of a God of love, justice, happiness and peace.

There are a lot of ways to describe those sparks, but when you’re around one you usually notice it.

Mostly, we seem to notice those sparks when they’re gone.

I think of the final lines from a poem written 150 years ago by Thomas Hood, called “I Remember, I Remember.” It’s looking back to a childhood when the world seemed to be whole and sacred, but looking from a present where it isn’t. The final lines of the poem say,

I remember, I remember,

The fir trees dark and high;

I used to think their slender tops

Were close against the sky:

It was a childish ignorance,

But now ’tis little joy

To know I’m farther off from heaven

Than when I was a boy.

He’s talking about heaven as though it were above the sky. But the real “heaven” he’s talking about was that state of spirit in which we were close enough to the soul of life nearly to touch it.

And when we miss that – well, missing it has produced a lot of great tragedy and poetry, including some poignant funny poems. One of my favorite of those is a great favorite of women, at least women who think that one day they might become old. You’ve probably all heard it. It was written in 1961 by an English woman named Jenny Joseph, and her original title for it was simply “Warning”:

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

with a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

and satin candles, and say we’ve no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

and run my stick along the public railings

and make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

and pick the flowers in other people’s gardens

and learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

and eat three pounds of sausages at a go

or only bread and pickles for a week

and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

and pay our rent and not swear in the street

and set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Sometimes, it seems that we lose the ability to see and save these sparks just by growing up. Thomas Hood’s poem longs for his first childhood; Jenny Joseph’s poem seems to be looking forward to her second childhood. That’s a big part of why it’s so much fun seeing the children come up for their story each Sunday: they bring that sense of wonder with them. They seem to do so easily what we grownups sometimes have trouble doing at all.

During my first year in the ministry, in 1986, I witnessed such a scene: one I’ll never forget.

It was after the third sermon I had preached there. I had written a series of children’s stories for those three weeks. They were like a serial, and were a simple story, if not a great one. It was a story about a bush that became unhappy just being a bush because all those darned birds kept taking it for granted and it didn’t have a starring role like the big trees did. The more unhappy it got, and the angrier it got at having to be a bush, the more its roots withdrew from the soil, until at last they pulled out, the wind blew, and it became a tumbleweed.

Now it roamed everywhere, but never had a home, and began feeling lonely. When the wind stopped for awhile, it found itself resting not far from a lovely little river, in a beautiful meadow. It was grateful for the rest, and to be in such a beautiful place. And soon, it put down roots and again became a bush. Now when birds came to sit in its branches, it was thankful for the company. It came to love the place, and all the other creatures in its world. And as that happened, it grew and grew, and finally became a very, very big tree. The End.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened after the service. In the foyer, a church member who was a physics professor came up to me, raging mad. He was actually red in the face, as he accused me of having done a ridiculous and shameful thing. My crime was that I had told the children a story that could not be scientifically true.

I could hardly believe it! It was ridiculous, he yelled, to say that a tumbleweed could again put down roots and become a bush. Though he didn’t know the scientific names of the plants involved, he was quite sure it couldn’t happen. And then, as though that weren’t bad enough, I had gone to absolutely stupid extremes by then telling the children that the bush could become a tree!

“It’s ridiculous!” he said, getting pretty worked up. Then he shook his finger at me and said “Do you actually believe that a bush can become a tree?”

I said Yes. Now he turned nearly purple. He was almost shouting, as he said “Well, I would like to know how in hell a bush can become a tree!”

That’s when the six-year-old boy who had been standing behind me waiting for his turn finally had all he could take. He stepped forward, looked up at the physicist, and said “It’s easy, Mister. It just has to learn how to love!”

You hear something like this, and it can be easy to feel like Peter Pan, like you never want to grow up if it means losing the ability to understand even the simplest of stories. The little boy had been waiting to tell me how much he had liked the three stories, and that he would never forget them. The man was in his fifties, with a Ph.D. in physics, yet actually seemed to think the story had been about a bush! If we must lose the ability to see even the simplest magic when we grow up,

But of course we do grow up. We have to grow up. Eventually, our parents want us to move out and get a job. And to do that – well, we have to grow up. You know, it’s one thing to have your kid bring a horse in the house once. But if every role of film you got developed had a picture of your child with another large heavy animal standing in your living room, you”d be looking for a good therapist.

There’s a famous passage from the Christian scriptures, written by St. Paul, where he says, “When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.” (I Cor. 13: 11). When you think about it, it’s an odd thing to say, after Jesus had said that you can’t hope to enter the kingdom of heaven unless you’re like a child! Maybe Paul didn’t get it.

I don’t know quite what happens to us when we grow up, but something does seem to change – that change that Peter Pan was so afraid of. I remember stories on the old hippies of the 60s and 70s who had tuned in, turned on and dropped out, then growing into investment bankers and organization men and women, becoming the new incarnation of the very Establishment they had earlier hated, as they raised their own children and suffered through their teen-aged rebellions, wondering why they didn’t grow up.

Sometimes, it seems that part of growing up is losing touch with that spark, the almost magical and transformative insights of even the simplest fairy tales and stories – about a beauty that remains asleep until wakened by a loving kiss, about frogs turning into princes the same way, or tumbleweeds turning into bushes and then trees, just because they’ve learned how to love.

But without seeing the sparks within these stories, and being open to them, we really are farther off from heaven than when we were young. And the “heaven” in this story isn’t a place, you know, but that kind of life where it feels the sacred dimensions, the sparks, are right there near us, close enough to touch. That’s what we seem to lose.

Of course, growing up doesn’t have to mean just growing old, and we all know some people with both plenty of years and plenty of sparks. In fact, they are probably some of our very favorite people in the whole world. They’re some of the vessels carrying those sparks for us to find, and claim, and embody, in our own sacred task of trying to reconstitute the world so it can once again be the image of God, of all that is holy and life-giving.

When I was a graduate student, in a very arid, intellectual and sometimes impersonal graduate school, there were a few of these living sparks around, and they were absolutely magical for me.

My teacher was one of them. He was a man in his 60s who wore beads, had an earring, wore jeans, sometimes sandals, and open collars that somehow survived from the hippie movement, and shoulder-length hair, except on the top where he didn’t have much hair at all.

He looked like a walking refutation of grown-up seriousness. We became close, I had many dinners with his family, and still remember the feeling that one of the greatest living theologians was also an over-sized elf.

I had another professor who was much more sober and quiet, very grown-up. During the week, if he wasn’t teaching an advanced seminar or discussing the footnotes of footnotes, you would find John in the library, meticulously digging up even more footnotes.

Ah, but on Sunday night, after the sun went down, some of the students would gather in the lounge for an evening of playing Dungeons and Dragons. And there was John, playing the Dungeonmaster, dressed in a wonderful brownish medieval robe with hood and rope belt that his wife had made for him, his eyes twinkling like a six-year-old boy, and more excitedly alive than I ever saw him at any other time. On Sunday nights, he was just full of sparks.

And I suspect that if someone were to have asked John whether he actually believed in that ridiculous Dungeons and Dragons stuff, he might have said he actually believed that letting ourselves expand in imaginary escapades we’ll never be able to encounter in grown-up life can open up whole new and wonderful avenues for our souls to take flight.

In religious studies, you often call figures like this Trickster figures. Those are the figures that don’t follow grown-up rules, that bring spontaneity into life whether you want it or not.

Even the more official and restrained parts of the University sometimes welcomed in these Trickster figures, and there would be a quiet explosion of sparks that could just take your breath away.

The most memorable came one Christmas Eve, in the big formal service in Rockefeller Chapel. Built with the money of John D. Rockefeller, this huge stone building was over a hundred feet high inside, seated two thousand people, and seemed modeled on the magnificent cathedrals of medieval Europe. The Sunday services were so dismal it seldom drew more than fifty.

But on Christmas Eve, it was packed. Organ, huge choir, medium-sized orchestra, priests in formal robes, everybody being very sober and pious.

Then, into the middle of this great pomp, they staged a re-enactment of the old Bible story of Joseph and Mary looking for a place to stay. And slowly, from the end of the long stone aisle all the way to the front, came this year’s Joseph, and Mary – and real live donkey! A donkey! The little donkey didn’t know the story, didn’t care for the music or the costumes or much else besides the carrots Joseph would try to slip him unnoticed.

The donkey had no costume, no pretense at all, couldn’t have cared less about Christmas, and completely stole the show! Finally, when the donkey entered, there was something that was simply real. I don’t remember much else from the program that night, but the donkey, at least, was sacred, and everybody there with eyes to see could see it. There was one of those magnificent sparks, clip-clopping down the aisle: just clip-clopping and looking around.

Bringing the donkey into the temple revealed the temple in the donkey. And if even a little donkey could contain a temple, then surely we could, too. And just knowing that helps to accomplish the sacred task of reconstituting the world.

Sometimes just telling these stories is like bringing a donkey into the temple. That’s the role that stories, fairy tales, movies and some imaginative fantasy games can play for us, and it’s a role we need, if we’re going to find any of those sparks at all.

I don’t know if Mardi Gras or Burning Man or the others offer more escape than transformation. But anywhere that spirit is present, it can offer transformation, because it shows that power of life, that power that represents life unchained, that most powerful force anywhere.

How many of you have thought some version of “When I’m older and no longer afraid of what people might think, I’ll wear purple. I’ll do the harmless but outrageous things I don’t dare do now”?

What would those things be, that would let your soul take flight? Do you think perhaps it might be wise to practice them a little now, so that when you get older and have the nerve to do outrageous things that let your soul soar, people won’t be so surprised?

In the beginning, God, the divine and magical dimension of the universe, existed just as infinite light. But God wanted to behold himself, and so he created the world; the world is the image of God. Then God withdrew, and the world was no longer the image of God, but a fractured, separated place. But spread throughout this world, there are billions and billions of sparks from that divine light that can connect us with all that is sacred. And our sacred task in life is to find those sparks we are lucky enough to come across, to cherish and embody them, to lift them up and spiritualize them, and by doing this to reconstitute the world so that it can once more take on the image of a God of love, justice, joy, and peace.

My story about bringing the horse in the house may not be about much more than dealing with a problem you will never, ever have: what to do with a horse that’s stuck on your back porch before your mother comes home. That’s not a spiritual quest at all. Yet there’s something in it that still has some magic about it, a spark to it, even fifty years later, isn’t there?

Let’s not grow up without bringing with us that child’s ability to feel pure joy, to expect magic everywhere, and to find it. These sparks can come through so many different doors. They can arrive like a little donkey. They can be like a spark, or a lightning flash. Sometimes they come announced by that “still, small voice” that prophets have written about. And sometimes – you can trust me on this one – they even whinny.

Virtually the whole story is captured in this photo. At the far right, you can see the edge of the console-style television set. Louie’s alert eyes and ears speak for themselves. That’s Joey on the sofa, and Jimmy, derelict from duty, peeping over the horse’s shoulders. On the floor, you can still see the top of the metal bucket – which, like Jimmy, is about four feet from where it should have been.