“Blowin’ in the Wind”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
July 22, 2007
SONG LYRICS:
“Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan:
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it's washed to the sea?
Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.
READINGS:
The first reading is from the ancient text of the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tsu, translated by Stanly Rosenthal:
BEGINNING AND COMPLETING
Act without contriving;
work naturally, and taste the tasteless;
magnify the small; increase the few,
and reward bitterness with care.
Seek the simple in the complex,
and achieve greatness in small things.
It is the way of nature
that even difficult things are done with ease,
and great acts made up of smaller deeds.
The sage achieves greatness by small deeds multiplied.
Promises easily made are most easily broken,
and acting with insufficient care
causes subsequent trouble.
The sage confronts problems as they arise,
so that they do not trouble him.
The second reading, by Dorothy Day, is from our hymnal and is entitled Commitment. Dorothy Day was a cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, an organization grounded in a firm belief in the God-given dignity of every human person. Today over 185 Catholic Worker communities remain committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and forsaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms. Dorothy Day wrote:
People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.
SERMON:
First of all, just in case anyone is still laboring under the impression of a rumor spread around back in the early 60’s, Bob Dylan really did write the song, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Snopes.com and several other sources, including the originator of the myth, assure us that it was not a Millburn, NJ high school student who wrote and sold it to Dylan, as the story claimed, for $1,000, allowing Dylan to pass the song off as his own. That would be just a little too bitterly ironic for the song, which marked a generation of peace and justice seekers, to have been stolen.
Most of us first heard the song in the version recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary. Not only did the lyrics ask the penetrating questions of the time in that rendition, but they did so with the beautifully harmonized voices of the trio who could have sung to us from the pages of the telephone book… and we’d have loved it. I remember the first time I heard Bob Dylan singing it himself. His voice was an acquired taste that my young ears had not yet developed. That would come in time, but my first reaction was to want to run for cover, for the cover of the Peter, Paul and Mary rendition.
It would be many years later that I would eke out a living by singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and many other songs of that genre in bars and clubs. My club singing days ranged from the mid-70’s to the early 90’s and my repertoire ranged from the 1950’s up to the 90’s with an emphasis on the late 60’s-early 70’s. In those days I could sing a four to five hour gig without repeating any songs.
There is a lot of material to choose from in such a broad a span of years, and one of my criteria for song selection was that I had to believe in the message of the song. It may come as a surprise, but for a number of years I struggled with the message of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It wasn’t because of the gender exclusive language in it; I wasn’t aware enough at the time to be conscious of that. And it wasn’t because the questions posed by the song weren’t emphasizing the issues of the day, issues that needed to be raised. The questions posed in it were profound enough to still be pertinent questions for this day, over 40 years later.
The problem for me was in the resolution of those questions, or in the lack of one. “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” I would usually only perform the song if it was requested. Eventually though, I developed an introduction to it that allowed me to feel comfortable in performing it. In my introduction I would say that I agreed to play the song as long as there was a certain understanding. I would recognize the great artistry of the song and, for the time in which it was written, the novelty of the questions being asked by it. I would cite the validity – when the song was written – of not knowing the answers, but hoping that there must be answers, even if they were just… blowin’ in the wind.
But, I would go on, saying that we have learned some things since those questions were first asked. From the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, from the Women’s Movement and the Environmental Movement, we had learned or should have learned that the questions posed by the song had answers, that they were not blowin’ in the wind. The questions had answers that could be found and must be found inside each one of us. So I’d say I would sing the song if everyone understood that at least I meant that it was up to us to gather in that wind, take it into our sails, so to speak, because if we wanted to find the world of our dreams and aspirations, we were going to have to be the ones to build that world.
Gandhi said it only a little differently. “We must be the change we want to see in the world,” he said. Our treasurer, Collin Minert, gave me a coffee cup with that quote on it. It’s up in my office here and I get to drink from those words every day. “We must be the change we want to see in the world.”
Anyway, I don’t know how my audiences felt about my little sermonizing back then, but they seemed to go along with it okay. And I felt much better about singing the song. Maybe now though, the words could be something more like:
The answer my friend
Is inside you and me,
And if we want things to be so,
Then, we’ll have to make them be.
The answer is inside of you and me.
Whether our theological bent is theistic or atheistic, agnostic or Gnostic, Christian or Jewish or Buddhist, as Unitarian Universalists at least a portion of our theological perspective is humanistic. Classical Humanism was defined by the Italian monk Erasmus in the 16th Century. He pragmatically noted that the only knowledge humanity can have of the divine is limited to human knowledge. Modern humanism was born following WWI with the signing of the Humanist Manifesto in 1933, which claimed that no God could have ever caused or even allowed the horrors of that, “war to end all wars.” Such a calamity was a human-caused catastrophe, and if humanity was/is to save itself from destruction it must learn to rely on itself and not some external Deity that might or might not step in to save us in time, from our own follies.
For me, to say that the answer is blowin’ in the wind, is much like saying, "God will take care of things." While I believe that the universe is connected in a very spiritual and loving way, I find it impossible to believe that there is a superhuman like God that would or even could intervene, or contravene, in its own processes in order to take care of things.
Caring is a human capacity. If caring is going to occur – caring for our planet and all its creatures and environments, caring for our fellow human beings, we are the ones who are here to do that caring. If caring is going to occur in Palestine and in Israel, in Iraq and in Darfur, if caring is going to occur in New Orleans, Louisiana, and in the toxic waste dumps across the country, in the flooded low lands and in the flaming forest wildfires, we are the ones who are here to do that caring.
Besides being overly available to the warmongering, self righteous among us as justification for aggression, the idea of God is far too often used by those who would just as soon sit by and do nothing in response to the world and its various needs. It's in God's hands, right? It's blowin’ in the wind, right? Am I my brother’s, my sister’s keeper?
How many roads must a man walk down?
How many times must the cannonballs fly?
How many years must some people exist?
How long until there is freedom for all?
How many deaths will it take until we know that far too many people have died?
The answer my friend
Is inside you and me,
And if we want things to be so,
Then, we’ll have to make them be.
The answer is inside you and me.
Dante, the 14th Century Italian author of The Divine Comedy, wrote, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.” I don’t believe there is such a place, with such a climate. I do believe though, that Dante’s contempt for those who would do nothing is well worth noting.
And yet in times such as these in our own era, what are we to do? The challenges seem so massive. The wheels of industry and government – and at times those wheels appear to be quite synonymous –so often seem to be turning the machinery of progress in the wrong direction. They turn it towards corporate gain and personal greed, towards militarism and war, towards endless racial oppression, and the abuse and depletion of our natural resources. The challenges are massive and it's so easy to feel helpless in the face of them, so much easier to do nothing.
If we are determined to avoid roasting by Dante's fiery words, if we are willing to acknowledge that the answer is not blowin’ in the wind, if we are willing to claim our responsible and rightful place in the co-creative process that fashions this world, where can we turn in order to know what to do? Where can we turn for direction? Where can we turn for hope?
Retired Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon tells the story of touring in Calcutta with Mother Teresa years ago, visiting her “House of Dying.” This is a place where sick children are cared for in their final days, and it's a dispensary, where the poor line up en masse to receive medical attention. Watching Mother Teresa minister to these people, feeding and nursing those abandoned by others to die alone, Sen. Hatfield was overwhelmed by the utter enormity of the suffering she and her co-workers faced daily. “How can you bear the load without being crushed by it?” he asked. Mother Teresa replied, “My dear Senator, I am not called to be successful, I am called to be faithful.”
We are not called to be successful either, we are only called the faithful. Mother Teresa said a few other things on our subject here. She said:
“Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.”
“Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary.”
“What we need is to love without getting tired.”
“Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.”
“Good works are links that form a chain of love.”
“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”
Fred Craddock is widely acknowledged as one of the great preachers, and great teachers of preachers, of our time. I’ll invite you ahead of time to keep from letting his Christo-centric theology get in the way of your appreciation for the underlying truth of his message. "To give my life for Christ appears glorious," he said. "To pour myself out for others. . . to pay the ultimate price of martyrdom – I'll do it. I'm ready, Lord, to go out in a blaze of glory. We think giving our all to the Lord is like taking $l,000 bill and laying it on the table – ‘Here's my life, Lord. I'm giving it all.' But the reality for most of us is that he sends us to the bank and has us cash in the $l,000 for quarters. We go through life putting out 25 cents here and 50 cents there. Listen to the neighbor kid's troubles instead of saying, 'Get lost.' Go to a committee meeting. Give a cup of water to a shaky old man in a nursing home. Usually giving our life to Christ isn't glorious. It's done in all those little acts of love, 25 cents at a time. It would be easy to go out in a flash of glory; it's harder to live the Christian life little by little over the long haul."
Being saved, even Unitarian Universalist style, isn't something that can be done all at once. It's done little by little, 25 cents at a time, day by day – “poco a poco, se va lejos,” the Spanish say – little by little one goes far.
Being saved Unitarian Universalist style is to engage our lives in the world around us, to recognize the goodness and value in our own lives and so to recognize it in one another and in our world. It is to be seekers after the largest visions of goodness we are capable of finding, and then being guided by those visions in our efforts to create a beloved community here on earth. It is to recognize that we are capable of reaching through our own pain and suffering and limitations towards joy; to recognize that our joy is interdependently connected from our innermost, soulful selves with the well-being of all beings. Salvation Unitarian Universalist style, is accomplished with the help of grace, step-by-step, day by day.
There is a paradox in all of this. The enormous challenges that face our world make it impossible for us to simply set them right. They're enormity guarantees their monolithic invincibility. And at the same time, life calls upon us, not once or twice, but with every breath and on every day to be true to life, to have integrity in our actions and in our inactions, to affirm and promote ourselves, one another and our world, to be our brothers and sisters keepers, to build the kingdom of heaven here on earth.
If all we can see is the big picture, then the answer might as well be blowin’ in the wind. Our access into that big picture though, is in being faithful to the small things because, indeed therein lies our strength. Therein lies our integrity. And therein lies our ability to find and to make meaning of our lives, and to promote love in the world around us. "Good works are links that form a chain of love," said Mother Teresa.
The answer my friend
Is inside you and me,
And if we want things to be so,
Then, we’ll have to make them be.
The answer is inside of you and me.
Keep in mind the thought of Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Dr. Lon Ray Call who said, "Prayer doesn't change things; prayer changes people and people change things." So then let us strive not to be so arrogant as to pray for success, nor to be left alone by the world, but let our prayer be instead for faithfulness.
And may we find ourselves gaining comfort, being affirmed in the paradox, loving until it hurts, until there is hurt no more, only more love. The answer my friends is inside you and me.
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