First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

1 Corinthians 15

“The Softness That Proves Stronger”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

April 8, 2007

            This time of year the wind comes from the East. It comes from the desert and is called a Santa Ana. The Santa Ana winds clean everything; it is a kind of bath. All the smog and dust is blown out to the sea. The clarity of sight achieved is akin to a painter's light which photographers love to capture in places like Greece. As a teen standing atop a foothill of the San Miguel with no obstructions, the Santa Ana literally focused the landscape. It is as if you were turning the knob on a pair of high powered binoculars and all became amazingly clear.

            I think a friend of mine has grown a bit weary of all my romanticizing about the west and its flora and fauna. He handed me a book by a man named Stegner. I got the picture when I saw the subtitle of the book, "Living and Writing in the West." It was as if he said, "You should talk to him about these things for a while. 

            Wallace Stegner wrote of rocks and water, brush and booms- all things western. As I read his descriptions of childhood landscapes of the west in the 1920s and 30s, I couldn't help but see my own in the 1970s and 80s. I knew what he meant about the approaching desert and the absurdity of millions living where there is no water. I found myself nodding in agreement when he distinguished the absolute power and grandeur of the western landscape which almost completely conceals its amazing fragility. 

            Yet, the real flashback was not of landscapes and water, the real connection came when he spoke of the dying words of his mother. His mother died when he was a young man and fifty some years later he wrote of her death and her final words. As she was dying she looked to him and said, "Wallace … you are … a good … boy."

            From time to time in my life as a pastor where I minister to people of so many generations I've heard these very words. The first time was in the home of Dessie Conway. Dessie was homebound and suffering from a very progressed stage of Parkinson's, so she would tremble and halt as she spoke much like Stegner's mother. After a visit, with my hand on the door, Dessie hollered out, "Be a good … boy." And while I did pause to consider my status as a married man with four children as somehow a bit out of sync with the notion of being a boy, I said, without further pause, "I will. I promise."

            Just this last week as the reception line was winding down, a member shook my hand and said the same thing. I won't divulge the source yet suffice it say it came with enough seniority that I said, "I will. I'll do my best." Again I could have made a case that ten more years, another child, another degree and a few mortgages in between have put me outside the boy category, but what I felt like saying instead of arguing the point was, "I will if you will."

            The essay where Wallace Stegner recorded his mother's dying words was composed as a letter to her. Granted she had been gone at this point for fifty plus years and Stegner was now and octogenarian, but you could hear the voice of a boy commingle with his now older voice as he spoke of her with all tenderness. His letter was in part a lament, and the lament is unique enough to mention.

            His lament was that in a novel where he wrote of his childhood and focused on his father as the main character, a novel called The Big Rock Candy Mountain, he let his wildcat, fortune seeking, transient father overshadow the goodness of his mother. He tried to convey the restless search that is the west. I know this feeling. It was something of an instinct in me and it lends itself to tales, some true and some enhanced shall we say. I know what he means by "boundlessness" and I also know how often this shapes my day both for good and for ill. 

            Yet, what Stegner was trying to say in the letter was that he was sorry for letting his story of the west and his father overshadow the goodness he now sees in his mother. And he expressed this in a rather roundabout sentence whose twists and turns mad me come to rest. This is what he wrote. He said, "I am afraid I let your selfish and violent husband, my father, steal the scene from you and push you into the background in the novels as he did in life. Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger that what it seemed to yield to." 

The softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to. That is the line. It made me stop and be in awe. Perhaps it is just being a westerner who is so easily enticed by the obvious grandeur that I tend to miss the softness of life, but I want to say I have grown to see this other side in nature. Years of walking in canyons taught me to look and see; pause and be patient and you will find the minute spring flowers that bloom in the thin soil amongst the chaparral.

            Just this last Sunday, my youngest, David, and I were on the banks of the Black River hunting for birds. And I figure it was all those years of seeing the softness amidst the grandeur that helped us find a flock of cedar wax wings. Neither of us had knowingly seen them before, and so there was a rush of delight as we tromped through the brush to stand beneath cedar trees on the bank of the river and try to fix our binoculars on the tips of their wings to be sure they were what we thought they were. 

            Yet, I think what Stegner is saying is that there is a softness that is stronger in us that can be hinted at in nature, but can only truly be seen in revelation. It was a moment of revelation for him when he realized how easy it was to portray the ferocity of his father and to gloss over the tenderness, the abiding, the patience of a mother, who, in his words, "became love."

            It is easy for Easter to be grand, to be big. We sing "Hallelujah" and there are lilies which are really big flowers compared to the tiny asters you can find along western trails. There are shouts and acclamations and a sense Henry Emerson Fosdick called "the triumph song of life." Yet Easter morning is also, or perhaps is, in essence, a softness that proves stronger than what it seemed to yield to. 

            The Apostle Paul said, "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ we are most to be pitied," and then he went on to try to explain, grasp, prove the resurrection for the church at Corinth. His exasperation which can be heard in the notion of being pitied is a theme we tend to overlook in the marching and the victory of the empty tomb. Today Christ conquered death and Paul makes this point by saying, "As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ." Yet what if this being made alive is a kind of softness that proves stronger than what I yielded to? 

            This was Stegner's intent in his letter, to find the power of the resurrection which isn't about death, but life. Where before he had pitied his mother, the abuse, the seeming powerlessness, the shadow in which she dwelled. Yet, in resurrection, in the life that is to come, what seemed like weakness emerges as strength, what seemed to yield actually was greater than what once overshadowed her.

            This is the great risk of the resurrection. In Jesus Christ death has been conquered, the power of sin has been overcome by the righteousness of the one who gave his life. Yet, the glory of this gift, the joy of this victory, the life which comes from his death, is not imposed; it is not a demand or even a requirement. This is the risk, it is an act of love, it a softness that proves stronger.

            In the twentieth century there were many very serious people who felt compelled to reject the plausibility of the resurrection. They were debunkers, rational people who felt it was their duty to demystify our faith. Virgin birth, atonement, walking on water, the healings and the transfiguration all stories meant to inspire surely, but not to be accepted as fact for there is no way of proving them.

            To these well intended and very serious, science was made an unwitting accomplice in their failure to see the softness that proves stronger. In declaring there was no proof, thus no validity, they failed to find the proof where it could be found. For the proof of the resurrection of Jesus is not for us, but for him. The proof of the resurrection we must seek to find and to abide in is in us; it is what we have become. Have we come to live our lives believing in love instead of hate, to believe in redemption instead of violence? Have we opened our heart to the life of Christ or are we most to be pitied for this life is truly all we see?

            Emily Dickenson tried to answer these questions. She, like Stegner, was struggling to find peace with those she loved and lost. One of her poems comprising her answer begins "Arcturus is his other name - I would rather call him star." Line after line she suggests that the proof of science, while helpful, does not satisfy the need of her heart, with each stanza she is grasping for a softness that proves stronger than grief and death. 

            In the last stanza she finds it; she describes heaven. Her talk of heaven begins with fear - the fear that once she arrives, the children will laugh at her for being old fashioned. And then, in a moment of sheer tenderness she writes, "I hope the father of heaven will lift his little girl, old fashioned - naught - everything - over the stile of pearl."

            On this Easter day we celebrate the victory of Jesus over death. For this we must rejoice. Yet, if this is where we begin and end, we are most to be pitied. Unless the softness that proves stronger has won our hearts, until the hope of a heavenly father reaching out to us to take our hand has captured us, we strive in vain. And we need not. As Christ conquered death, let him be the Lord of your life. To conquer death is a moment of grandeur, to see this life as a gift to be lived in all humility and faith, trusting in him is the softness that proves stronger and it is not a pity.

            About this time of year brown hills turn green, they are a sea of wheat grass which grows to about two feet before it dies. When the Santa Ana winds blow through they cut rivulets and it looks like the fingers of God running through the grass. Delicate vines lace the tops of the field and yield white trumpet jasmine. For the novice, it would appear as if this is rich and fertile land. Yet after many years I would come to see it as a tender moment of glory whose beauty is ever balanced and intertwined with fragility. Come June the grass will yield to the heat and the absence of rain and it all dies. Yet, there is a softness in this that proves stronger and rises again.  Amen.