Ric Masten: Our Troubadour Minister |
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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
October 23,, 2011 Readings: Ric Masten was a singer/songwriter, a poet, and a Unitarian Universalist minister who traveled across the country making appearances in a variety of venues, including UU congregations. Ric first became known for his songs and then later concentrated on poetry. He called what he wrote, “speaking poems.” That is, they were written to be heard. Of course, we can read them and profit from the experience, but they are at their best when presented orally to an audience. This morning in this service devoted to the ministry of Ric Masten, I would like to begin by reading a few of Ric’s poems. I do this with the disclaimer that I don’t have Ric’s voice or his delivery. But maybe, having heard him sing, you might be able to imagine these words as he would have said them. A Tower i had a vision once of a tower here on the shoulder of this mountain and i went wild with a hammer and a dream but don’t be overly impressed with those of us who build towers any number of journeymen carpenters and stonemasons can tell you how to do it the building part is easy it’s the living in it that comes hard with some simple instructions anyone can hang a door but if you know the art of oiling hinges teach me Ric’s work was about oiling hinges, attending to the challenges of life in this everyday world. Among these challenges—hinges to be oiled—were relationships, such as, those within the family. The following is about Ric’s relationship his daughter and then one about his children and his mother. Ellen my youngest daughter likes to ride to the mailbox with me she fetches the mail while i turn the car around then she climbs into the back seat and doles out my letters slowly inspecting each envelope till i am infuriated and turn red and shout at her Ellen! gimme the letters! my youngest daughter likes to do this it is one of the few times she has my full attention Grandparents and Grandchildren trying hard to understand human nature i having pacifist leanings find my son learning karate breaking bricks with his bare hands so that he could kill a man in two seconds he says smiling as i go up the wall and i being the son of militant ex-Catholic atheist parents get myself ordained a minister much to the disgrace of my old mother whose reedy voice calls me on the phone… Ricky!—she squawks you’re not gonna let them put Reverend in front of your name in the phone book are you? now i suppose all this explains why the grandparents and the grandchildren usually get along so well they have a common enemy Finally, a poem about the human condition, which is the ultimate theme of all Ric’s poetry: the conditions of this life in which we find ourselves. The Wasp Nest it held my attention like the ash on the end of Grandfather’s cigar taking shape slowly the way some poems do the mind flying to and from it unable to leave it alone it hung in the eaves on the northeast corner of the house a small grey planet inhabited industrious a paper-mache world parallel to mine benign until the child was stung coexistence is no longer possible hissed the canister breathing violence into the cells of this geodesic dome and from deep within the abbey a choir of small voices swelled in a final angry ooooommmmmmmm a sound that clutched the evening air like a hand sinking in a pool of silence next morning I took a broom and once again the Hindenburg came down like a cardboard head spilling its beaded brains then sweeping up and burning the remains I had intended to put the incident away and would have were it not for that tiny starship coming in from a distant exploration returning to the place where earth had been and I could do nothing but sit at my window my God’s eye watching the lone survivor cling to the moorings having only himself now as proof of something more hanging on somehow till the darkness took him the wasp who knew what it was to be human Sermon This past summer I came across a biography of Ric Masten, written by a colleague of mine—Steve Edington, who is minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire. It’s a fairly recent book, published in 2007, a year before Ric died. At the beginning, Steve notes a certain demarcation along age lines among Unitarian Universalists in their response to Ric. Mention him to longtime UUs who are say, in their fifties or above, and they are likely to light up—“Oh, Ric Masten, yes, I heard him. He was great!” But among those younger, the response is likely to be more vague. Those who know his name at all might make an association with Let It Be A Dance, but that would be about it. Ric represented a certain era. It was the time of the counter culture when throughout our society assumptions about how we are to live were being questioned, alternatives sought; it seemed that society was on the cusp of a new way of being, led by young people, artists and musicians, social change advocates, those who dropped out of the rat race to find a truer way to live. In Unitarian Universalism, we inherited a fine and free faith that had made significant contributions in the realms of social justice and in modernizing theological thought, but it was a little dry, emotionally detached, super-rational. We too sought ways to break free, engage the whole person. We too desired to live more openly, more honestly, more intensely. We wanted our faith to engage not just our minds but our hearts, emotions, our fears, our desires, our yearning for beauty as well as the terrors and the regrets that keep us awake at night. Into this context walked Ric Masten: not your typical Unitarian Universalist minister but one who spoke to us at the time. He came bringing songs and poems, laughter as well as encouragement to address our pain, hope in the midst of struggle and moments when he made us pause, become quiet, realize “oh yes—he’s talking about something I have experienced, something I know but did not quite have the words for.” I met Ric twice, both times when I served the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington, New York, on Long Island. His reputation had preceded him. In a previous visit, before I was there, the congregation had been so taken by Let It Be A Dance that an impromptu kanga line formed, twisting its way through the sanctuary. That didn’t happen the times I saw him, but Ric had a singular presence. Some people really get poetry, and for them it is pleasure and joy. Others of us tend to struggle so we might approach a poetry reading as something we really ought to do because it’s likely to be good for us. “Verbal spinach,” you might say. But Ric had the art of entertaining his audience, engaging those present, and at the same time offering insights that address our experience. Consider this one that comes back to me often because it captures what happens with many couples—particularly married couples—at a certain stage in their lives together. Coming and Going I have noticed that men somewhere around forty tend to come in from the field with a sigh and removing their coat in the hall call into the kitchen you were right Grace it ain’t out there just like you’ve always said and she with the children gone at last breathless putting her hat on her head the hell it ain’t! coming and going they pass in the doorway Ric died three years ago, after a nine-year battle with prostate cancer. Today his books are mostly out of print. At General Assembly this past June, there was a stack of them on the sale rack, heavily discounted. He produced 13 records of songs and poetry and 18 books, but it’s hard to find them, even with the Internet as a resource. And yet in his time, he was such a vital presence. I wanted to look back, consider his work from the perspective of not so many years, see if they might yet speak to us. ● ● ● Ric Masten was born and raised in Carmel, California. His father, a newspaper publisher, died unexpectedly when Ric was twelve. His mother, with whom Ric had an ongoing conflicted relationship, remarried an optometrist. Her goal for her son was that he also become an optometrist. But Ric was unfit for formal schooling, subject to an undiagnosed severe dyslexia as well as hearing loss. He flunked out of four colleges and left a fifth, gathering D’s and F’s in every subject but art. That apparent failure opened doors that led him to his true vocation. He later reflected, “It’s a good thing they didn’t have spell-check back then, because I would have been locked up in life as an optometrist.” In that we have a theme of Ric’s life and his work: that apparent failure, even tragedy, opens doors that might have otherwise remained closed. Ric began writing and producing musical comedies. But then rock ‘n roll appeared on the scene, and he turned to song writing. He was on contract with Warner Brothers, wrote 92 songs with titles such as “Teen-Age Creature,” and “Baby, Baby, Baby, You’re a Thinkin’ Man’s Girl.” These were not big hits. At about the same time he met and married an aspiring actress, Billie Barbara Bolton. Billie Barbara became Ric’s life companion and inspiration and fellow writer, but theirs was not always an easy life together. She wrote, “As his constant companion, I haven’t always been happy but I’ve never been bored, always as many laughs as tears.” It was the mid-60s and Ric was an aspiring folk singer, as was just about everybody else during that era. He and Billie Barbara had started a family that would eventually include four children. But there was something unsettled inside that led them to start investigating churches. He had grown up in a family without any religious involvement: his mother was an ex-Catholic who was still angry at the church. Billie Barbara had come from a household that attended fundamentalist churches. They didn’t have much background to draw upon so their method for visiting churches was to proceed alphabetically, starting with the “A’s” in the Yellow Pages, dragging the kids to a new Sunday School each week. So there they were one Sunday, sitting in the car, scanning the religion page of the newspaper in search of directions to the Methodist church, having worked their way down to the “M’s.” Then an ad for the Unitarian Universalist Church in Monterey caught Ric’s eye. The sermon for the day was, “Are We Actors or Are We Authors?” Ric was intrigued so they skipped the Methodists and went to the UUs instead. In his sermon, the minister didn’t answer the question he raised, but Ric said, “I got it that his point was to make us think on the question for ourselves rather than hand us The Answer. We become UUs that day.” As a church member, Ric’s skills as a songwriter and performer attracted attention, and he began giving programs to his home church, then to others in the area which led to his being sponsored by the UUA to appear in churches and on college campuses nationwide. He was taking the role of a minister, offering inspiration and healing, sharing good news that exited and invigorated people. And the thought came to him, “Why couldn’t I be a Unitarian Universalist minister?” Well, the answer was obvious why he couldn’t be a Unitarian Universalist minister. He had no theological school degree; he had no college degree; he was not serving a specific church. Actually, if Ric had applied to be fellowshipped as a minister to the Unitarians before the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists, chances are he would have gotten nowhere, given the Unitarian emphasis on an educated ministry. But from the Universalist side, there was the tradition of the circuit riding preacher, who went from place to place, gathering a congregation wherever he went. Which is what Ric was doing in what came to be called his troubadour ministry. After a lot of struggle and maneuvering, Ric was granted fellowship, that is to say, recognition as a Unitarian Universalist minister. He was the first minister in Unitarian history without a college degree. He was also the first in what was to become a new category of UU ministry, today known as the “community ministry,” of those who do ministry in various realms outside of serving a church. In the course of Ric’s career, he appeared at over 500 UU congregations, surely more than anyone else before or since. In addition he presented programs on over 400 college campuses plus elementary schools, high school commencements, civic and business clubs, and the White House Conference on Children. Throughout his career, this troubadour minister presented programs in every state but North Dakota and Alaska. My memory of Ric is that of a joyful, funny, upbeat presence. He was always interesting, could get an audience up and dancing and feeling like it’s the most natural thing in the world. But as I return to his work, what I realize is how fearless he was in exploring the dark corners of his life which included periods of despair and suicidal impulses. He didn’t enter these expeditions simply for the sake of learning the nature of the landscape. Rather, he seemed driven by a faith that even in life’s most difficult circumstances, he would encounter something life-affirming, transforming, hope albeit sometimes a tough hope. A Kind of Hope i guess you’d call him a revolutionary but he laughed real laughter and when he was quiet his eyes were sad so i hung around and listened to him talk he said we have broken the ocean beyond repair the crabs are leaving we will soon follow he said we live in an insane asylum where the sensitive go insane that is to say go sane and then must kill the pain with pill and needle he said the next time the conquering heroes arrive the future is gone in a nuclear flash he said and there is no time left for the corn to grow but the fact that he bothered to get out of bed this morning and say it gives me a kind of hope. ● ● ● Ric’s signature song was Let It Be A Dance. It’s a song that gets congregations up and moving, and seems on first glace a light and joyful song. He tells the story about how it came to be. “It was one of those horrendous tragedies that happen in the American high schools every 4 or 5 years. This particular incident took place one December at Carmel High School. A first-year teacher, Sharon Elliot, offered a course on modern dance, and had 14 young women and men performing like Broadway professionals. My two oldest daughters took the class and were a regular part of the troupe. During Christmas vacation, Sharon saw that a famous ensemble out of New York City was performing in San Jose, about 80 miles from Carmel. She called up all her students and said that if they were willing to be crowded during the journey they could go up to San Jose in her VW bus. Both of my daughters wanted to go in the worst way but had other holiday engagements scheduled. “As the carload of dancers was rounding a corner on the way home, a drunk driver who had pulled over to the side of the road decided to pull back onto the highway without looking behind him. The VW bus crashed headlong into his car, killing the two front seat passengers, one of whom was the teacher, and a back seat passenger. All the other girls and boys in the back seats were seriously injured. “One of those injured was Barbara Brussell, my daughter Jerri’s best friend at the time. Her sister Bonnie was one of the passengers who got killed. Barbara’s kneecap was so badly damaged that the doctor doubted if she would ever walk again without a cane, let alone dance. My family and I visited Barbara in the hospital where I made a bet with her. I wagered that she would come dancing up our Big Sur dirt road exactly one year from that day. And what’s more, I would write the music that she would be dancing to. “The following week, while working in my garden, the entire song arrived. I ran to the house and wrote the lyrics down as fast as I could type. Better still, the words came along with a melody. Barbara Brussell, now a well known cabaret singer in New York City, did come dancing our country road exactly a year to the day after the accident, with me singing and playing, Let It Be A Dance. Barbara was limping, it’s true—but DANCING!” And so was born the essential metaphor for Ric’s ministry: we dance. Even when things don’t work out as we want them to, even when there is tragedy, even in the face of death, we dance. In defiance of whatever would compromise our spirit, in affirmation of life itself, we dance. “Through the good times and the bad times too, let it be a dance.” ● ● ● Ric’s ability to dance his own life was severely challenged in 1999 when he was diagnosed with advanced, inoperable prostate cancer. Characteristically, he addressed this new unwelcome reality in his life through poetry. Elephants is the name of one such poem. upon diagnosis i was informed i was “inoperable, incurable, terminal” blunt lumbering thoughts immense as elephants and “Don’t go there!” is like being told not to think about elephants while lying among them trying to sleep so like the five blind men describing an elephant “a tree, a rope, a kite, a spear, a hose” just so i ran my shocked and frightened mind along the big “C” beast to understand what i was feeling Gleason, PSA, neuroendocrine, carcinoma, palliative mysterious aspects of the monstrous thing the Prostate Cancer Self-Help Group meets the first Wednesday of the month and why i didn’t go at first who knows i only know that till i dragged my butt through that door and joined my compatriots i was utterly alone and it was elephants elephants elephants night after night all night long i must say it seems absurd that it took so long to learn about strength in numbers and in gathering together the elephant herds are driven away Before being diagnosed, Ric had written a poem in which he defined how he wanted to die. He called it the “poor devil” death, drawn from countless westerns in which the victim gets caught by a bullet or an arrow from the side and goes down immediately. Bystanders gather around and say, “Poor devil. Never knew what hit him.” That is, Ric hypothesized that the best death was one that cut you down while doing something else—dancing, perhaps—sparing you the knowledge of what was to come. But when confronted with the slow long walk that was to be his fate, Ric changed his mind. He came to consider himself lucky. He said that his real life began upon diagnosis with terminal cancer. In one of his poems he observed: how much fuller richer and pleasing life becomes when you are lucky enough to see the arrow coming He observed further, “This is a culture where everyone knows they’re going to die, but too few believe it, because if they did, they wouldn’t treat each other the way they do.” Now he added a new congregation to his ministry: the congregation of men afflicted with prostate cancer. He went on tour, bringing his songs and poems and message of hope, which was not necessarily that those hearing him would be cured but that they would live their lives to the fullest in the time that was given to them. In recognition of Ric’s contributions, the National Prostate Coalition named him the “Poet Laureate of Prostate Cancer.” This poem is entitled Me and Pancho Villa approaching 80 with a life-threatening disease the conversation with my peers often steers itself toward death not morbidly but with a natural curiosity of course everyone works it out in their own way “Whatever helps you through the night” I always say “Just as long as you don’t come after me with it!” true believers are off to roll around heaven all day the reincarnation bunch have round-trip tickets which is okay as long as I don’t have to remember this one the eternity that preceded my conception is moot so why fret about a return to that non-threatening state? the anxiety I do have around death has more to do with being forced to leave the movie while it’s still playing considering my demise brings to mind a photograph of the bandit Pancho Villa sombrero pushed back—posing for the camera cartridge belts crossing his chest here and there a round missing how did he spend them were they put to good use on a hunt—in a fight or fired aimlessly into the air? the concern here is my bandoleer the shells I have left to fire before I retire to that long, long dark I fear I might spend these precious days missing the mark ● ● ● Let It Be A Dance is #311 in our hymnal. There’s an error in how it is printed. Why don’t you take a hymnal and turn to 311. This is a four-page hymn; you have to go to the third page. Down at the bottom, third verse, bottom line. “Share the laughter, bear the pain.” That’s where the error is: anybody spot it? The word, “bear,” is a misspelling. It’s grammatically correct: “bear the pain, endure the pain.” But that’s not what Ric meant. He wrote it as “bare the pain,” B-A-R-E the pain. That is, disclose the pain, reveal the pain, let it show. Because that’s where the healing comes: don’t just endure it, express it. In Ric’s words, “We must learn not to bear (b-e-a-r) the pain—not to keep it bottled up inside. Rather we should bare it (b-a-r-e)—share it, bring it into community, unburden ourselves of the sorrow and pain that come with life.” When Ric appeared at a congregation, he would point out the error in the hymnal and ask people to take pen in hand and correct the mistake. That way, not only would it be right, but there was evidence that he had visited that particular congregation. Now, I’m just an interim minister; I can’t advise you to deface your own hymnals. But if any of you should choose of your own volition to make that correction, I am certain that the spirit of Ric Masten would smile upon us all. ● ● ● |
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