A story sermon by Rev. Dennis Daniel from the Unitarian Universalist Church in Reston, Virginia, given at UNMC on November 2, 2008
Since 1995 HBO has run a weekly program called “Taxicab Confessions,” in which unsuspecting people tell the cabbie about their most moving experiences. The show has won several Emmys and is still popular thirteen years later. I thought the premise would be good sermon material, so I wrote my own version. I hope you find it worth the fare.
We’ll start with a couple getting into a cab at JFK in New York. Their destination is a midtown hotel, near Lincoln Center. The driver asks what they are in town for. It turns out they are celebrating their tenth anniversary. They are great opera buffs and have purchased tickets for a week’s worth of performances at the Met, the City Opera, and the Amato. They have also arranged to attend a rehearsal at the Met and to observe a master class at the Julliard School next door. They are full of excitement at the prospects.
The cabbie is interested in the human story. She doesn’t ask them about their favorite opera or their favorite opera singer. Instead, she asks how they came up with idea to spend their anniversary sitting in darkened theaters listening to other people sing. Most people celebrating an anniversary prefer to go dancing, she says. And thus she gets their story.
Both of them had grown up with opera. His father had brought hundreds of opera recordings, 78s, with him from Italy. Every Sunday afternoon, the entire family used to sit in the living room of their home in San Francisco and listen to arias – lovely melodies, poor sound quality, lots of scratches and pops, and every three and a half minutes a new record had to be laid on the Victrola. So all through his growing up, he never heard a complete opera, just separate pieces sung by different artists and drawn from different operas. The old man had his favorites, and that’s what they listened to. So his son could recognize a singer’s voice after just one or two notes, knew the lyrics to the songs by heart, and had no idea how the pieces fit together.
The cabbie interrupted: Sounds like modern life, says she. I sometimes watch TV when I’m not driving, and I have the same problem with the commercials. You know, after 9:00 o’clock they tie seven or eight of them together and run them one after the other. So we get someone trying out a new sports car somewhere in Arizona. Then suddenly a suburban housewife is upset because her kids don’t eat right; then we see a bunch of beautiful teenagers dancing and posing in a department store; then another car comes along, but this one has dozens of secret compartments and stuff keeps appearing and disappearing, like clowns in a VW; then James Earl Jones comes along and drops a pin or does the two-step, and I’ve never been able to figure out how all those stories and characters fit together. But it sure feels like the way life hits you sometimes.
The passenger doesn’t know quite what to make of this, although he thinks the driver may be pulling his leg, so he returns to his own story. Sometimes the singing on those old records was so lovely, he felt swept away. “It was almost a religious ecstasy,” he ventured, “I would feel for a few moments as though I were in a state of grace. I think for my dad each one of those arias had a spiritual quality, even with all the surface noise. That’s what’s like modern life, as I see it – lots of surface noise, but if you can somehow filter it out; there is great beauty and richness. You can lose yourself.
“But you know,” he continued, “those moments are always fleeting. Come and gone in a couple of minutes.”
Turns out the first time he ever saw a complete opera was when he discovered that San Francisco had its own opera house. By this time he was in college and he asked a girl he liked if she would go with him to see La Boehme. Well, the girl didn’t care for opera and maybe didn’t care all that much for him, but she had a friend who was crazy about opera, so she fixed them up. They had such a good time together that they started dating and eventually decided to get married – which they did ten years ago tomorrow. Every year on their anniversary they go to the opera, but for their tenth they decided to do it up big.
So, did you grow up listening to old records, too? the cabbie asks the wife. No, her story was different. She loved to sing and in high school her voice teacher told her she might have a good enough voice to sing opera, so she started training. She stayed with it for a few years, performed in some student productions, but found that she didn’t like the competitions, the auditions, the endless exercises, and the many disappointments. It didn’t take her very long to figure out that her heart wasn’t in opera singing, although she sings with a church choir as a paid professional and she still performs in amateur musicals when she can, and she always feels the lure of the footlights.
“But I found that at my level of accomplishment the rewards of freedom outweighed the rewards of artistic life, which for a singer means constant discipline. These days music is more an avocation for me. In fact, I’ve found a way to build a career out of it. I’m the cultural affairs advisor to a state senator in California.”
“So nothing could lure you back into an operatic life”, asks the driver. “No,” she says, “I’ve been tamed away from it. I love my work, I’m paid well, and I have the respect of important people.”
“Sounds great,” says the driver. “No regrets?”
‘Oh, sometimes,” she replies. “I see a fresh new face appearing in some well-known company and I think, that could have been me. But you know, my talent hasn’t died. I still get to sing as often as I want to, but I do it for fun. I don’t have to put up with all the stress.”
“I’d have thought that being a politician would be pretty stressful,” says the hack.
“Sure, it is,” she allows. “But it’s the stress of trying to keep up with the endless flow, rather than the stress of putting yourself in front of a group of producers every few days and having to cope with constant rejection. And the buzz I get from politics is pretty strong. I’m in a supporting role in Sacramento, but I’d be singing in supporting roles at the Met as well, if I ever got that far.”
“Anyway,” says the cabbie, “it sounds as though you know opera in a very different way from your husband. Do you two share insights?”
“Oh, yeah, of course. But it’s kind of odd. Steve has this voluminous knowledge of how particular singers interpreted a piece. So he critiques from the perspective of how it used to be done. I know the music in my body, so I’m aware of how the singers are doing their work. Steve may hear a passage that lacks color or verve, but I hear a breath taken wrong or a misplacement of the head on the neck or a hesitation in the palate. And when someone is singing well, I’m right there with them. I can feel the adjustments in my throat and the tension in my chest. I can even feel the vibrations in my sinuses. It’s a different kind of knowing. I have those moments of musical ecstasy too, but I experience them with my whole body. For me it’s less a feeling of being swept away than of having everything come together just right.”
“So, Steve, do you have any musical talent? Play an instrument?”
“Only the phonograph,” says Steve, “or these days the CD player. I don’t even listen to my dad’s old records any more. He had quite a collection, most of it his own father’s, back in Italy. Dad came here after the war, but when he was a young man Italian opera was the national music. Every town of any size had its own opera house. The productions weren’t very good for the most part. Not like La Scala or Rome, but the people loved them. On their way home from a performance, the young men would lock arms and saunter through the streets singing the arias they had just heard. They knew them all by heart.
“When my grandfather heard that the Germans were coming into Italy during the war, he crated up his fragile records and stored them in the cellar. My dad brought them with him in the same crates on the boat when he came to America. I guess he kept listening to those old recordings because they reminded him of the home he had left behind. The carried that whole tradition with him across the water.
“He used to tell me, my heart is in Firenze. There were times I know he would have liked to peel away the decades and go back to those green years before he left home. But you know, that part of him was always there. It grew right through his middle years and wrapped around his old age – he could sit and listen to one of those records and I could see in his face that he was back with his friends, walking home from La Pergola, before all the destruction and all the changes. Music can do that – although I guess any strong memory will do as well.
“And even though I don’t listen to those old recordings any more, I still have them all in my head. Sometimes an odor or a certain slant of light or seeing someone who reminds me of my father will trigger the memory and I’ll suddenly have Caruso or Björling singing inside me. It’s kind of weird, but I love when it happens. It’s something my father gave me that I am forever grateful for. The whole time we were making plans for this weekend, I was remembering Dad and trying to get tickets to operas I knew he would love. So it turns out that this trip isn’t just about our 10th anniversary, it’s also about the gift of music my father gave me and his father gave him.”
“Speaking of gratitude,” the cabbie pipes up, “we’re just about to your hotel, two more blocks, and I want to tell you folks how much I appreciate hearing your story. I don’t do much more than push this hack around the city all day long, but I get all kinds of experiences from my passengers by listening to them talk about their lives. Every day, I talk to people who have come here from other countries or from every corner of the USA. And they come from every walk of life, Politicians and artists, but also labor organizers and dentists, Mary Kay sales reps – you see women in red suits everywhere when the Mary Kay convention comes to town -- stock brokers, models, advertizing people, shop owners, high school kids, sailors when the fleet’s in, and because this is New York, a lot of show people and a lot of folks who work at the UN. The variety’s pretty amazing. And the world we all create is pretty complex.
“Sometimes I get all swimmy inside when I consider how many people are doing so many different things and dreaming so many different dreams, and they all live here in this one city. It’s as though a whole river of humanity had pooled here and backed up in every direction. And then I feel gratitude for being allowed to live here myself and get the special window into people’s lives that driving a cab allows. You two have helped me get in touch with those feelings. So, thank you. You’ve enriched my life with grace as well as paying for a few minutes of my time. I hope this week goes well for you. And may you have many of those moments of complete enjoyment during your stay in New York.”
Benediction
We have great depths within us which we have never plumbed, great insight and intuition, great reservoirs of love. The path to them leads through places of emptiness and fear, risk and challenge. Let us pray for courage and perseverance as we seek the treasure of our own hidden places. May we learn the wisdom of trusting the integrity and creativity of our innermost selves. And may we use that courage and wisdom to find ways to work for good in the world beyond our walls.
Reading I - Joshua 3: 7-17
7And the LORD said unto Joshua, This day will I begin to magnify thee in the sight of all Israel, that they may know that, as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee.
8And thou shalt command the priests that bear the ark of the covenant, saying, When ye are come to the brink of the water of Jordan, ye shall stand still in Jordan.
9And Joshua said unto the children of Israel, Come hither, and hear the words of the LORD your God.
10And Joshua said, Hereby ye shall know that the living God is among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites.
11Behold, the ark of the covenant of the LORD of all the earth passeth over before you into Jordan.
12Now therefore take you twelve men out of the tribes of Israel, out of every tribe a man.
13And it shall come to pass, as soon as the soles of the feet of the priests that bear the ark of the LORD, the LORD of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of Jordan, that the waters of Jordan shall be cut off from the waters that come down from above; and they shall stand upon an heap.
14And it came to pass, when the people removed from their tents, to pass over Jordan, and the priests bearing the ark of the covenant before the people;
15And as they that bare the ark were come unto Jordan, and the feet of the priests that bare the ark were dipped in the brim of the water, (for Jordan overfloweth all his banks all the time of harvest,)
16That the waters which came down from above stood and rose up upon an heap very far from the city Adam, that is beside Zaretan: and those that came down toward the sea of the plain, even the salt sea, failed, and were cut off: and the people passed over right against Jericho.
17And the priests that bare the ark of the covenant of the LORD stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan, and all the Israelites passed over on dry ground, until all the people were passed clean over Jordan.
Reading II - from “Wild Turnips,” in Roofwalker, by Susan Power
I have five Sioux daughters, but not one of them lives Indian Way. If they did, I would be living two months out of the year with each one in turn, and then two months back on the Standing Rock Reservation with some of my old friends who are still alive and kicking. But I am never angry with their choices or directions because when the time came I blew them from my hand the way you blow the seeds of a dandelion.
They pay for me to stay in this place where I am the only Sioux, although there is one other Indian – an old Assiniboine man who calls me “Little Sister” and tells me I should set my beautiful long hair free of the heavy black hairnet the nurses catch it with each morning.
“And what would that do?” I ask him, reaching out to pinch the loose skin at his wrist.
“It would put me back,” he says, straightening in his wheelchair and looking over my shoulder right into the sun.
I think if you peeled him like a hard-boiled egg and found the green, smooth, sapling piece of him, that piece would stretch, and rise, and his whole life would start all over again. There is a beginning inside him, lodged with his middle-life and tangled with his last days. One long string winding around and around like a yo-yo’s.