[In 1982] the last-ever passenger tire was built in Akron by a man named Richard Mayo, who paused afterward to look into a newspaper camera, a sturdy man in a V-neck T-shirt, thirty years on the job, his gloved fist perched on his hip, the other against his forehead, hands unsure what to do with themselves. The furrowed brow, the narrowed eyes, the strain at the corners — this was a look shared by men across a vast and hard-to-harness region, one defined ultimately and elliptically by water, by the Great Lakes and the Wabash and Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, routes of entry and departure to and from cities where the certainty of old factories was sagging and imploding.
Until then, for as long as anyone in my city could remember, Akron had been known as “the rubber capital of the world.” Like most manufacturing cities in the industrial Midwest, this was plenty enough identity, and the reputation carried far enough and wide enough for the people here not ever to feel obscure or irrelevant, and this reputation rested on a civic infrastructure that provided solidity and security. Akron was the birthplace and the center of the world’s tire industry, the most singular and therefore the most overtly significant supplier to Detroit’s auto industry. Which, yes, represents a stature something akin to being the Ralph Malph of the American industrial belt, and also a civic identity that requires being inordinately passionate about radial tires. (In defense: the profoundly intertwined, ultimately tragic histories — personal and corporate — of the Ford and Firestone families would have sent Shakespeare positively apeshit.) Anyhow, what more did we need to know? All the major American tire company world headquarters were here. Much of the production. Virtually all the high-tech research and development. The headquarters of the international rubber workers’ union.
Tire-building was the city’s defining profession. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands had made a good living at it, generation after generation. And then, one afternoon in August 1982, suddenly and completely that was gone.
What Richard Mayo…Akron…the Rust Belt from Pittsburg to Detroit experienced in the early 1980’s was an utter loss of security. Not only was Mr. Mayo out of a job, but so were all his friends that he’d worked with, some for 30 years. His skill set matched their own, and there were no more jobs in his trade in his hometown.
We have all felt lost at times in our lives.
Individually, and as a nation, we have felt lost at times in the past. Perhaps right now, this is how you’re feeling.
I would love to be able to stand up here and tell you “Just do these five things, and everything will be better/make more sense and like a sitcom, in just 27 minutes we’ll all be hugging and laughing at the lessons we just learned.”
I could tell you that, but I promised that I would never lie in the pulpit.
I mean, trust me, if I knew what those 5 things were, I would share them. My favorite aunt and I used to ask each other were the operator’s manual for our lives was. “Have you seen my manual?” she’d ask me, and I her.
I’m afraid that moving away from that feeling of being lost is going to take some effort, and the path itself may be less than direct.
So what can you do when you feel lost? You can have faith.
Now, aren’t you glad you came to church today? We’re all done, let’s go have coffee!
There are different kinds of faith, of course.
There’s blind faith, which is supposed to be a type of faith that never questions. Often we like to think that we’re above that kind of thing here, after all, we’re Unitarian Universalists, but we too practice blind faith.
That chair you’re sitting in right now, did you wonder, before sitting in it, if it would hold you? Were you concerned that it’s structural integrity might be compromised? Probably not, you just sat down in it, believing without knowing, that all would be well.
One of the great gifts of this congregation is our Director of Lifespan Development, Rina Shere. Today is Rina’s one Sunday off a month, during the week she and I were talking about this topic and navigating it. During our discussion, she said something wonderful, which I’m going to share with you in a moment.
When I was younger I had a friend named José, and he was one of the few other Latinos in my high school. Toward our senior year he and I had a couple of classes together and began to hang out quite a bit. In the fall of the next year José started school at the University of Michigan, and his new roommate was a born-again Christian.
Upon their arrival for classes in their freshman year, this roommate began to really work hard on bringing José to Jesus, and even back then, this sort of freaked me out. But since José and I were friends, I tried to get along with this guy. He tried to tell me about Jesus, too, and I told him that I frankly wasn’t interested in his Jesus, but I was glad it worked for him.
José was less successful at resisting this guy’s charisma, of which he had plenty I might add. I was sure he’d end up as some kind of televangelist with a very own sex scandal of his own some day.
So José and I began to drift apart after a while, because like many new converts, his new faith became the center of José’s life, and it became increasingly important to José that I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior.
Aside from the sadness of losing my friend to his new faith, there was one burning sadness within me about the whole thing.
It was kind of a jealousy, really, but it wasn’t an angry jealousy, more of a sadness.
The more José believed in his Jesus, the more José was convinced that Jesus was with him, his constant companion through thick and thin, that José was never truly alone to face the world.
I have to admit that there are times when I feel alone. When I feel like I could really use a boost of energy to deal with some thing, or event, or person. When I wish that I had some extra or additional source of strength that I could tap in to for a moment when facing seriously unhappy or upsetting events.
I wonder if you also have these moments….
José has Jesus for this, and I don’t.
I don’t because I don’t believe in the same kind of God that José does. My faith is not the same kind of faith.
On Sunday mornings, in most every church in our nation, the pastor tells people about the friend they have in Jesus. I can’t tell you that.
What I can do, for today, is quote Rina Shere. When Rina and I were talking about this topic, she said to me that she often relies on what she calls “The Reservoir of Human Caring.”
She and I agree that we humans have each other to turn to, to rely on, to inspire us to be the best person we can be, and to bolster us up in times of need. And it is for us, not to turn to a theology that we would LIKE to believe, but rather for us to turn to a theology that resonates with both our hearts and our minds.
For you, that theology might well and honestly be, a theology of The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and if that is so, that is fine. But yours might also be a theology of “I believe in what I can experience with my five senses,” or “the scientific method of proof.”
Here in this church we strive to make meaning in our lives, and in this pursuit, we look to many sources of inspiration.
This morning is the Autumn Equinox, the place of balance between Summer and Winter. Today there will be as much sunlight as there is moonlight. It’s a time of turning.
What new leaf have you been waiting to turn over?
Today is a terrific day to turn that leaf over.
Wednesday begins Rosh Hashanah for our Jewish friends. It is the beginning of a new year. There is forgiveness sought and offered, and there is sometimes a tradition of casting stones into water to symbolize the letting go of things from the past.
This morning I shared with you the story of the last tire ever made in Akron, Ohio. It was thirty-two years ago. Mr. Mayo worked thirty years making tires, so he was probably approaching fifty years of age when he pulled the last tire off the line, looked at his empty hands and wondered just what the Hell he was going to do.
Perhaps you’ve had a moment or two in your own life when you looked around you and wondered what you were going to do, too. Where you wondered how you’d get through.
There are times when you have to do something extraordinarily difficult for many Unitarian Universalists. You will need to go to the Reservoir of Human Caring and ask for a little sustenance.
I’m not sure why this is so hard for us, as a people. I have some theories, though.
One of them is that we are a proud group of individualists. We love to offer help! For us, helping others makes us feel good, makes us feel like we’re making the world a better place.
But to need the help, that makes us uncomfortable.
One of the great advantages of being a minister and getting the great privilege of writing and offering sermons to a congregation is that while you’re all looking at me, I’m looking at all of you. And the great thing is that I get to see you almost each week.
I see you when you come in all happy and you sit up very straight and there’s an air of happiness swirling around you.
I see you when you walk in, somewhat slowly, shoulders bent forward under the weight of some problem you have.
I see when I preach something to you and it strikes a chord with your spirit or your mind.
I get to see you.
And deeper we get to know each other, I’ll be able to see you even more clearly.
But I know that in this church, like the one I last served in California, and the ones I served before, I know that there are people who are in need of help.
That, because of who we are, rugged individualists who like to help more than be helped, I know that we shy away from asking for the help that we need that might make our lives easier.
On this day of balance between the warmth and the cold, between there being more light than dark and soon more dark than light, I’m asking you to turn over a new leaf.
Come to the Reservoir of Human Caring. Come not just to deposit caring into it, but come also to rest near it, and to have someone offer you kindness.
This community cannot solve all problems, or even all your problems, but it is filled with caring people who, like you, get a deep sense of well-being by helping others.
So, sometimes you help others, and sometimes you ask for a little help.
This, not a unified theology, a unified belief system that we all, to varying degrees believe in, this coming together in mutual aid, this is our covenant.
This is why we come here.
We come here because we are and are striving to be a sanctuary for all who enter, to reflect the diversity of the local community, and to work toward a more just and sustainable society. We see ourselves as a joy-filled gathering of people banding together to make the world better.
But we are also here for when life is difficult.
We are a people who are grieving, a people who are dealing with serious illnesses, a gathering of people who are trying our best to find our place in this world.
We have struggles around jobs, either the one we have, the one we lost, or the one we’re hoping to find. We struggle with depression, anxiety and for some of us, downright poverty.
But here we also have each other.
I like to imagine that Richard Mayo, our hero from the tire story, went home that night, after the photographers left, after the lights in the factory were turned out for the last time, I like to imagine that Richard went home to his wife, and in the privacy of his own home, she held him to her, and said “We’ll figure it out.”
In times of trouble, we have our common humanity.
Come into this circle of caring. Offer the help that you can, but also ask for help when it is most needed.
We may not have a supernatural force to ask for help, to turn to in times of despair, but we have each other, our community, our covenant.
May we all be so wise and brave as to ask for help when it is most needed.
© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and delivered to
The Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland
September 21, 2014
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