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Time travel is one of the most tried and true tropes of science fiction...there is something so compelling about going back in time and, perhaps, changing something that will turn out to have made all the difference. The problem with all of those stories is that the person we will have become, as a result of that change or changes made in the past, will not be us. We are the result of what has happened, and any veering from the path to today will disallow us from being the people we are. Now, perhaps some of us would welcome being someone else, but our mission at UUCMC is to celebrate ourselves as we are, to love ourselves and one another in all of our presence—in the present, not the past.
It has been ten years since I walked through the doors of the meetinghouse, and as I cast my thoughts back, as if through a wormhole, there are surely things I wish I had done differently. In that context, I offer a poem by David Ray, one of the founders in 1966 of American Writers Against the Vietnam War. In this piece, Ray enters into an imagined conversation with his poet idol, Robert Frost, and takes a lesson from words of the master:
Thanks, Robert Frost
David Ray
Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.
What do you make of the (lovely, I think) notion of "hope for the past?"
Does this poem allow you to engage in some of your own healing about things that happened in the past?
Read the poem aloud to yourself, noting what words or phrases emerge as powerful for you. Read through again, and a third time, noting the same. What images are prominent for you? What does the poem say to you?
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epically famous poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (read it here if you like!), the albatross emerges as a metaphor for a burden from which it is difficult or impossible to escape. How does this image operate in Frost's poem? Is there hope even for the "albatrosses" in our pasts?
I hope to see you Thursday at Tea Time and then again on Sunday, as I look back with, hopefully, minimal regret! As part of the service, we will celebrate the retirement from active ministry of the Rev. Rosemarie Newberry, ordained by this congregation...and there will be cake afterwards!
Rev. Craig
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