Rev. Joe says: I sometimes call the blues artist and songwriter Chris Smither my favorite philosopher. Today, we’ll use his song “I Am the Ride” to help us explore what it is that makes a song or a text sacred or religious. We’ll also plumb it for insights into the spirit and into human nature.

Sermon audio

Sermon

What It Is To Be

Rev. Joe Cleveland

July 23, 2023

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Saratoga Springs

 

The situation is something like this.  

[Get crowd to clap 3 times and then clap 3-over-2 with them.]

When I first thought about focusing on particular songs for our summer service this year, mostly what I was thinking was, oh, this will be some light, fun, summery fare.  But it’s turning out to be a little more serious than that.  Hopefully, what’s happening is at least a little like the three against two rhythm that we just clapped out—interest and excitement can be created by setting two different thoughts or feelings next to each other.  So here we are in peak Saratoga summertime party-mode and we’re going to delve into existential anxiety and faithful agnosticism.  This will be fun.

Chris Smither is a songwriter and blues musician who has been performing and writing songs for more than fifty—going on sixty—years.  And I got to know his music late last century.  “I Am the Ride” is a song from his album Up on the Lowdown that he released in 1995.  

The lyrics to it are pretty opaque.  It’s not just that they you don’t know what the song is about after you hear it the first time through.  I’ve been listening to this song over and over for 25 years and I’m still not sure what the song is about.

What amuses me the most about this song is that it got me my first ever Unitarian Universalist job. 

The May Memorial UU Society in Syracuse had put a committee of people together who wanted to start an alternative style worship service on Sunday evenings.  Something a little more interactive.  They were looking for someone to coordinate the music for it.  They interviewed me for the position, but I also auditioned for it.  And the song I played was “I Am the Ride.”  I figured that if this was a community that would hear this song as a sacred or spiritual song, that would be a community that I would interested in becoming part of.  

I think that one of the reasons that I like this song so much is because I don’t think I have it figured out.  In an interview, Smither once had this to say about this song:

“I’ve never had a song come to me quite the way that one did. … The lyrics happened in three separate bursts, and in each case I wrote the verse so quickly it was as though I was taking dictation from some other side of my brain.  The song means a great deal to me—but when I was through I thought, I’ll play this and nobody’s gonna get it.  And yet it’s turned out to be one of everybody’s favorite songs!”

It’s certainly been for me one of those songs I keep coming back to, asking questions, leaning in to the images and things I don’t understand.

A religion has the most potential to become dangerous when it thinks it has everything figured out.  There are jokes about Unitarian Universalism being a religion about following the question mark rather than the cross, but one of the most important things for a faith tradition to do is to encourage openness to mystery and wonder and doubt and questions.  

The first verse of the song is maybe the least interesting one because mostly it is saying exactly that: we should be suspicious and anxious about a faith that leads people like a drum instead of encouraging us to sympathize, to be open.  We live in a world of uncertainty and it makes sense that falling in line with the drum beat could be comforting and attractive.  But that way lies ruin.

The other two verses of the song start with the singer being asked questions.  In the second verse, the singer wakes up and gets asked “if all my dreams and visions had been answered.”  Instead of just answering yes or no, the singer takes the question as an opportunity to reflect on how he lives.  He says

I don’t know what to say,
I never even pray,
I just feel the pulse of universal dancers.
They’ll waltz me till I die
They’ll never tell me why
I never stop to ask them where we’re going.

Does that mean he’s just going with the flow?  Or does it mean he just tries to feel the pulse of life and tried to catch its rhythm?  For some reason, he isn’t worried about the destination, he’s not thinking about salvation or an afterlife or the end times, he’s just dancing, waltzing.  Trusting.  He doesn’t need to know.  He says, “The holy, the profane / are all helplessly the same / Wishful, hopeful, never really knowing.”  For a second at least, let’s leave aside how the holy and profane can be the same.  They are about being wishful, hopeful, never really knowing.  Maybe the difference between the holy and profane is the relationship they have with not knowing.  Maybe the difference between the holy and profane is about how comfortable they are with not knowing.  If the wishing and the hoping is about getting to the end of all the questions, is that profanity?  If you want to have it all figured out, what you’re wishing and hoping for is the end of wishing and hoping.  Could it be that the holy isn’t about an end to wishing and hoping.  The holy is in the wishing and the hoping, the never really knowing.

The last question is about believing in angels.  

They asked if I believe,
And do the angels really grieve,
Or is it all a comforting invention?
It’s like gravity, I said
It’s not a product of my head
It doesn’t speak, but nonetheless commands attention.

I wonder if there isn’t some frustration coming out here.  Do any of you have people in your life who keep asking you if you believe?  It’s such a leading question.  Do you believe? is bare a question at all.  It’s a question that thinks it already knows the answer.  Because even if I don’t believe, the answer is that I should.  Listen for the difference between these questions:  Someone asking “do you believe?” feels different than someone asking “what do you believe?”  That second question is about interest and curiosity.  The thing about belief is that it isn’t an either/or thing.  It isn’t all or nothing.  It isn’t a comforting belief or nothing.  Pay attention to the pulse of your living and the pulse of the living that is happening around you.  Instead of either/or believing, let’s just pay attention to gravity.  Let’s try to let go of our attachment to our own creations.  Let’s try to get outside of our own heads.  Pay attention to gravity.  It is gravity that commands attention.  

Let’s get out of our own heads.  The last four lines of the song: 

I don’t care what it means
Or who decorates the scenes
The problem is more with my sense of pride
That it keeps me thinking “me”
Instead of what it is to be
I’m not a passenger, I am the ride

Instead of solving the questions about the meaning of life or the existence of God, the one who decorates the scenes, the singer admits that the real issue to deal with is something else.  “The problem is more with my sense of pride / That it keeps me thinking “me” instead of what it is to be…”  I’m not going to dwell on this, but let’s stay with pride for just a moment.  Just long enough to remember at least one of the ways that you’ve been stuck in thinking “me.”

And let’s just pause for a moment and consider how brave Chris Smither is being here.  To me, that line feels honest and vulnerable.  The easy choice here would be to assign a problem to others.  The problem is how some people just think about themselves.  He could have written something like that.  Instead, Chris sticks with his own experience, and chooses to admit that this is something that has tripped him up in his own life.   

If we can get out of our own way, we can pay attention to what it is to be.

What is it to be? The insight offered by the song is “I’m not a passenger, I am the ride.”  What is it to be the ride rather than the passenger?  This is the koan to meditate on from this song, and maybe the thing that people like the most about the whole song.  In this drive down the road of life, you are not a passenger.  You are the ride.  I’m not a passenger.  I am the ride.  I’m not here to be carried along through the world, through my life.  I am the ride.  I am the getting there.  I am not in the arriving there.  I am not in the journey’s end.  I am the ride.  I can help carry others along the way.  What kind of a ride do I want to be?  What kind of a ride could I be?  What kind of a ride are we together?

Maybe it’s just that it’s summer, but I’m thinking of the rides at a fair.  The tilt-o-whirl and the ferris wheel, the roller coaster and the flume.  What ride are you?  What kind of ride would you like to be?

I pray:  May we all be brave enough to let go of thinking of ourselves as passengers.  May we hear the universal dancers and enter into the dance.  May we not be prideful.  Instead, may we be wishful.  May we be hopeful.  May we be at ease with the discomfort of never really knowing.  May we be at ease with what it is to be.  May it be so.

 

Topics: Being, Belief, Hope, Truth, UU Theology