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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
April 11, 2010
Reading:
The Prison of Our Provincialism
A. Powell Davies
(This reading is an excerpt from one of A. Powell Davies’
sermons. In it he refers to his childhood, growing up in England of
Welsh parents in the early 20th century.)
When I was a boy in an English school, I made the following
agreeable discovery: that by immense good fortune I had been born
into the finest home in the finest city in the finest country in the
world; yes, and I attended the one true church and heard sermons by
the one best preacher precisely at a time when churches were truer
and preachers better than they had ever been since life began.
Moreover, this was only the beginning of the matter. For it was also
revealed to me that in all contests, struggles, quarrels, and wars,
the English had always been right—except where they had been opposed
to the Welsh. In this latter case, I found that everything was still
all right, because the Welsh, although frequently defeated by the
English, had invariably turned defeat into a subtle kind of victory,
so that it was better to be Welsh and defeated by the English than
to be of any other stock and undisputed conquerors.
It was furthermore disclosed to me that people who spoke English had
been appointed by God to rule the world. The appropriateness of this
arrangement was indisputable since wherever English was spoken,
justice was exalted and respectability enforced. Who could deny—the
evidence was everywhere conspicuous—that English-speaking suzerainty
had ended the dark night of the past and ushered in a universal
morning of enlightenment...
It was also pleasant to be told that across the ocean, traversed by
great British liners—and by a few other ship of no account, except
that, not having been built in Britain, they were dangerous to
travel upon—there was another nation that spoke English, even if
imperfectly, namely, America. It was true that these other
English-speakers had made a little trouble for the home country from
time to time, but this was all within the family and entirely for
the best. Just as it was certainly a good thing that the American
had killed off most of the wild Indians and put their territory to
so much better use than when the Indians had it. Indeed, I was not
at all surprised to learn than the Indians had been rather glad to
have been killed, once they understood the matter properly, and that
the few survivors, far from wanting things the way they used to be,
begged to be placed under the protection of their exterminators and
put on display at national festivals and wild west shows.
It also seemed natural that, second only to the British, the
Americans made excellent merchandise. “Goods” manufactured elsewhere
were not good and those manufactured in Germany were particularly
poor....Curiously enough, people like the Germans and the French
composed good music and painted famous pictures, and they even had
railway trains, but of course, they did not run them on time and
some of them were far from safe. As to more remote peoples, like
those of India, China, or Japan, they were just naturally
queer—queer in the sense of being incomprehensible and...comical.
Gradually, all these queer people were being made more normal, and
it was for the purpose of hastening this beneficent process that, in
Sunday school, we took up our weekly offering for the foreign
missions. We English-speaking, Christian, white people were going to
make the whole world good: That is to say, we were going to make
everyone else almost as nice as we were.
Such was the world of my childhood. And such, dear friends, with one
variation or another, such was the world of your childhood. Even if
you were so fortunate as to have been born into a more cosmopolitan
environment..., the advantage is barely worth mentioning. It is only
by unceasing effort, strenuous from first to last, that any of us
breaks down the prison of our provincialism.
Sermon:
Who Was A. Powell Davies and Why Does He Matter?
I came into this sermon knowing quite a bit about A. Powell Davies.
I knew about his tenure as minister of All Souls Church in
Washington, the most dynamic period in the almost 200-year history
of that congregation. I knew about his role in desegregating
Washington, D.C., efforts that had national implications when the
Supreme Court outlawed segregation. I knew of his unswerving
opposition to prejudice and bigotry and discrimination, wherever it
was found. I knew that he was both an outspoken anti-communist but
also an early critic of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his hate-driven
campaigns to quash opposition in this country. I had heard the story
of how the United States State Department, bowing to pressure from
McCarthy, had banned the books of A. Powell Davies from American
overseas libraries
I was aware of his efforts to send food and clothing to Europe after
WWII and of the aid he sent to children in Japan orphaned by the
American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I knew of his concern
about the threat of nuclear weapons and his efforts to put those
weapons under civilian control. I knew about his support for family
planning and the work of Planned Parenthood at a time when most
clergy looked the other way.
I knew about his role in helping articulate Unitarianism for post
World War II America and how that spoke authentically to a new
generation: young people looking for a religious outlook that was
inclusive, that sought to bring people together, and that drew upon
the discoveries of science as well as the wisdom of tradition. And,
of course, I knew about his role in creating suburban Unitarian
churches in the Washington area, which became the Unitarian
Universalist churches of today. I knew also about the people of
influence who crowded into All Souls Church on Sunday mornings when
Davies was minister—senators, congressmen, three Supreme Court
justices, high government officials and decision-makers in the
private sector. There has likely never been so star-studded a
congregation in the Unitarian or the Unitarian Universalist
tradition as what A. Powell Davies assembled at All Souls.
It is hard to be a Unitarian Universalist minister and not keep
running into A. Powell Davies. He was a towering figure. But I
didn’t have a good sense for him as a person—as a man. And I really
did not understand the deep sense of connection people felt to him
and his ministry.
In the new suburban Unitarian congregations that A. Powell Davies
helped start—like this one—Sunday morning church involved gathering,
singing hymns, reciting readings, and then listening to a broadcast
of A. Powell Davies speaking from All Souls Church in Washington.
Essentially, they came to church to listen to the radio.
When you think about it, that’s pretty remarkable: people went
through all the fuss and bother to come to a church where the main
event was listening to the radio. True, it was the 1950s, and maybe
there wasn’t that much else going on, but still, why would anybody
do that?
I also wondered if his message would speak to me now. Sermons are
bound by the times in which they are presented. They aim to address
situations in which we find ourselves right here/right now. They are
not intended to be timeless. Granted, A. Powell Davies spoke to his
age with uncommon success. But now, some sixty years later, does he
have anything to say to us?
With those questions in mind, let’s listen to an excerpt from a
sermon presented by A. Powell Davies on January 13, 1957. The title,
“People Ask About God.” It was on a record (remember those?)
produced by All Souls Church after the death of A. Powell Davies in
September of 1957. As we listen to this brief excerpt, it will be
like old times, when the newly-established suburban Unitarian
congregations gathered to listen to the voice of A. Powell Davies
piped in from downtown. My point in sharing this is not just the
content of his message—but to give us all a feeling for what he
sounded like: as a minister, as a person.
• • •
According to the famous logician, William Stanley Jevons, there was
once a Frenchman who, after taking a few lessons in logic, suddenly
exclaimed that he had been using logic all his life without knowing
it. What he had expected was that the formal study of the rules of
correct reasoning would take him into an entirely different world
from the one in which he did his ordinary thinking. He would come to
possess, he thought, unusual skill in dealing with unaccustomed
subjects. For was it not the case that philosophy ventured forth
into remote territories of which the average mind had no knowledge?
And was it not essential to the understanding of philosophical
argument that one should first be well versed in the science and art
of logic?
How great was his disappointment, therefore, when he discovered that
philosophy was nothing more than ordinary thinking, rather more
carefully pursued. And that logic was just the way he had always
tried to reason, but now somewhat more strictly carried out. Instead
of finding himself in an entirely different world, he was compelled
to see that the only world there is is the one he had been living
in. And instead of encountering new and unheralded intellectual
experiences, he was forced to admit that he was just thinking over,
in a more thorough going way, experiences with which he was already
familiar. Thus he came to recognize that logic was just the name
that had been given to the effort he had been making all his
life--an effort to observe accurately and draw correct conclusions
from whatever it was he thought he saw.
It would be a wonderful thing for religion if those who approach it
as though it were exclusive territory could undergo a similar
experience to this Frenchman's. If they could, they would realize
that religion covers the same areas of thought and experience that
everything else covers. It is not something separate and apart from
ordinary life. It is life--life of every kind, viewed from the
standpoint of meaning and purpose: life lived in the fuller
awareness of its human quality and spiritual significance. At any
rate, it is that to begin with. Any other beginning is likely to be
an unfruitful one.
This is what people should have in mind when they ask about God.
(The full text of this sermon is available online at dmuuc.org. In
“Search” enter “People Ask About God.”)
• • •
I’m going to let you in on a little secret about ministry.
Specifically this is a secret about preaching: what I’m doing
now—and what we just listened to as practiced in 1957. This is not
something they tell you in theological school. It’s not something
most of us know when first starting out. My hunch is that some
ministers never do quite get this, but you’re going to know this
secret because I’m about to tell you.
This has to do with the question of the audience, that is, who the
minister is addressing when giving a sermon.
One answer to that question—Who is the audience?—is obvious: the
congregation. The people right here/right now. That’s what a sermon
is: an ongoing conversation with a specific congregation about
matters of worth. In my own process of writing a sermon, I find that
I cannot do it in the abstract. It would be useful during the summer
to write a few, have them in my back pocket, just in case. But I
can’t do it. I have to imagine a specific group of people in a
specific time and place. Without that, I don’t have anything to say.
Others would give another answer to that question of who the
audience is. They would say, yes, the congregation is certainly part
of it. But one is also preaching to and for God—or whatever sense
for the highest that the preacher has. Because preaching is not just
engaging an audience, it’s also reaching toward something beyond,
something more, something that might change all of us in the
congregation for the better.
So who does the preacher preach to? The congregation on one hand,
God on another. But there’s a third participant in this audience.
This is the part they don’t teach you in theological school but I
think it might be the most important, that is, the preacher is
always addressing himself or herself. Preaching is talking to
oneself, with a bunch of other people listening in. Maybe, then,
what drives my preaching is a weakness in myself that I’m trying to
overcome, maybe it’s a fear, or maybe what’s revealed is a deeply
held conviction about what really matters.
Yes, you talk to the congregation and, yes, you reach beyond just
what the congregation wants and expects. But moments that are
memorable are often those times when the preacher encounters
something deep inside himself or herself and addresses that. When
it’s not style or technique anymore and it’s not a demonstration of
learning and it’s not just cajoling the congregation to do
things—now it’s something of the preacher’s soul showing through.
• • •
I read and I listen to the sermons of A. Powell Davies, and I
encounter a lot of soul. When he addresses the effects of our
provincialism, that is, our tendency to segregate ourselves apart
from each other, we know that it’s both an issue with which he
himself struggled and also that he has seen and experienced
personally the damage that creates. And his conviction that if there
is ever to be human progress, we must find ways to break down the
walls we create by our assumptions of the superiority of our own
way.
Or when he talks about religion as intricately interwoven throughout
all the experiences of life. As he put it in the excerpt I just
played for you, “Religion is not something separate and apart from
ordinary life. It is life—life of every kind viewed from the
standpoint of meaning and purpose: life lived in the fuller
awareness of its human quality and spiritual significance.” When he
makes that statement, I have the sense that it comes out of
something deeply held within himself, from his own soul.
In one of his sermons, A. Powell Davies addressed what he considered
the essential challenge of his time, what he called “an age without
a soul.”
“If Jesus had lived in my time,” he said (and maybe you can hear his
voice in your mind now) “If Jesus had lived in my time, every effort
would have been made to persuade him to get rid of his soul. He
would have been given the best of psychiatric counseling and told to
go back to Galilee and take life more quietly.”
He continued, “We are afraid of great souls. We are afraid, even, of
any soul at all. We hear that what we must do to get peace of mind
is to get rid of our conscience. For guilt feelings are not examined
to discover whether they indicate the presence of a soul; it is
taken for granted that they indicate the presence of a neurosis.”
What does he mean by “soul”? I think it’s a solid core of conviction
in a person, built over time by experiences of joy and pain, of
suffering as well as happiness, of frustration and failure but also
glimpses of what could be.
Davies addressed a new age—the 1950s, a time of what he called
faceless people, “who could think but who had renounced wisdom,
people who were intelligent but cared nothing for reason: people, in
short, who had minds but no souls.”
“I remember traveling one evening from Washington toward a
Midwestern city,” Davies wrote, “when there came into the dining car
a member of Congress who had recently achieved notoriety because of
something rather savage that he had said. He had been drinking, and
he went on drinking. He interpreted to those of us who sat near him
some of the scenery through which we were passing—reminded us of its
historical significance. It was evident that he was well-informed
and that he had a fine mind. Presently, his mood changed and he
turned from the scenery to his political antagonists and,
alcoholically, he demolished them. Then, he talked of himself—how
persecuted he was because of his courage and honesty. But when the
porters came to help him stagger back to his room, his mood had
changed again. The torment in his soul looked out at us from his
eyes. I have never seen a man more torn by inner anguish. ‘God!” he
said, ‘how I hate myself! How I hate myself!”
Such was the human condition A. Powell Davies found in his time: we
have intelligence, we have learned how to do many things, we have
compiled vast knowledge, but we are restless, agitated inside,
lacking a center, a core, a soul. The challenge of the age, then, to
grow a soul—for each of us and for the civilization itself. To
create a solid core of conviction that grounds us amidst the seas of
challenge and change.
A prayer that he called upon goes like this, “Eternal Spirit, who
givest wisdom, show us how much of what we pray for in the world
about us is waiting to be found in ourselves.”
• • •
“I was once at a party where there were a large number of guests,”
Davies wrote, “...I was talking to my hostess when it happened that
a lady joined us who told us that she had recently become a member
of the Oxford Movement (which was a popular Christian evangelical
movement)...She went on to tell her hostess that in the past she had
rather hated her, but that now, in her transformed condition, she
loved her with a Christian love.
“Knowing my hostess, I was apprehensive and wondered whether it
would be all right to walk backward in the direction of somebody
else! But chivalry prevailed and I remained. There was a quick flush
on my hostess’s cheeks, and her eyes were very bright. ‘Well!’ she
said to her guest who now loved her with a Christian love, ‘I want
you to know that I liked it better as it was before!’”
Davies reflected upon that encounter and concluded that the woman
who considered herself transformed by Christian love would have done
better by making the effort to find something about her hostess that
she liked. Something about her that she understood, something about
her that she respected. Seeing everyone through the gauzy view of
Christian love is easy. What’s harder is to make contact with the
actual person in front of you.
“This is a quieter, gentler feeling,” Davies observed. But it shows
the kind of concern and caring that our relationships too often
lack.
He said further, “If we know what it is that makes other people
speak or act as they do, if we knew it vividly by carefully
imagining all that may lie behind it, we might not quarrel. We might
understand. Often we could heal the wounds. But even where that is
not possible—and of course, we have to admit that it is not always
possible—even where fuller understanding only leaves us rather sad
and helpless, it would still give us the power to be kind—to act,
yes, but still to be kind—to go on being kind. And in a harsh world,
God know that even that is something—to go on being kind.”
And there we have what I find to be the essential A. Powell Davies.
A sharp mind and an acute social conscience, without question. But
what made him stand out then and what captures my attention today is
a gentle humanity, an understanding of the struggles we encounter in
our lives and how often we come up short, how often we fail. Rather
than chastising us for our transgressions, he views them with
compassion. He assures us that the pathway to wisdom and truth often
takes us through hard times.
He wrote, “The most alive thing about us is what we are when thought
breaks off and our minds can go no further—for that is where our
yearning begins, our inconsolable yearning, and the loneliness that
begets compassion, the forlornness that prepares the heart for
love.”
• • •
A. Powell Davies was proud of his Welsh heritage. He said of the
Welsh, “They are highly sensitive, passionate, emotionally finely
balanced; poetry is natural to them. They are full of eagerness for
knowledge and seem to have a natural faculty for finding the essence
of things.” The same words could have been used to describe him.
But as proud as he was of his Welsh heritage, A. Powell Davies was
an American, deeply committed to what he saw as America’s founding
principles: freedom of thought and conscience, commitment to human
dignity, to fairness, to regarding each person as having rights that
must be respected. The United States, he said, “not only began with
a revolution; it is a revolution, and its faith in human freedom is
the only faith which can unite the world.”
A. Powell Davies was Welsh in heritage, American in commitment, and
Unitarian in his faith. He was attracted by the freedom in
Unitarianism, a freedom to examine life’s meaning and significance
without being hampered by creeds or teachings of an outmoded church.
The promise of Unitarianism, he believed, lay in its openness and
expansiveness: its ability to address the real concerns that people
live with. He wrote, “What a shame it is that there is anything in
churches that shuts people out! For what is a church but dreams and
hopes and yearnings? And what is worship but the longing of the
lonely human heart?”
There are many people who speak to the great social issues of the
day. There are many people who are learned and can articulate their
ideas clearly. A. Powell Davies did both. But what I find sets him
apart is that he seemed governed by a simple sense of humanity: his
own and everyone with whom he came into contact. In trying to
account for his own success, he said, “People come to hear me
because they are hungry for a religion that makes sense, that does
no violence to the spirit. I say as simply as I can what I have to
say, and that is why people listen.”
And in a television interview two days before his death, he said, “I
prefer to preach about personal religion, the true meaning of love
in human life. But when I see what I believe to be unrighteousness
all about me, I turn to that. Religion is many-faceted. It’s as
large as life and it should go into all parts of life, claiming
truth everywhere, righteousness everywhere. So it starts with the
individual and goes out to the utmost ends of the earth.”
A. Powell Davies died suddenly of a heart attack in September of
1957. Four months later, in January of 1958, one of the
congregations he founded changed its name from the Southeast
Unitarian Center to Davies Memorial Unitarian Church. In so doing
this church took on a legacy, a commitment to honor and extend the
witness of its namesake.
In its obituary, the Washington Post observed, “Powell Davies was at
once the spiritual leader and goading conscience to his
congregation—and to the whole community.” That’s who he was. It’s
who we can seek to be as we look to our future: a spiritual leader,
a goading conscience, and a place of simple humanity.
For indeed, “The world is now too dangerous for anything but truth,
too small for anything but brotherhood. Our neighbor whom we must
love as we love ourselves is anyone whatever and everyone whatever
throughout the world.”
(A. Powell Davies quotes in this sermon from Without Apology:
Collected Meditations on Liberal Religion by A. Powell Davies,
edited by Forrest Church. Boston: Skinner House Books, 1998.)
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