Martin Buber and My Brush with the Law

Breakfast with the Minister Sunday

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

8/18/02

 

Meditation for 8/18/02

Creative Spirit, Spirit of Life

That which is greater than all but present in each.

In this world of turmoil

Where a stock market and its hawks

Lulled investors to forget that we were always just gambling.

Where an apparently war-hungry president can be so outspoken in his rhetoric that pundits claim there may be no way to turn back from an invasion of Iraq.

In this world of turmoil

Where countless go hungry and homeless

Where children can be abducted from their yard
and television networks can air weekly entertainment programs featuring murder investigations.

Where millionaire sports figures can threaten to strike even as their average salary is more than most of us will make in our lifetimes… combined.

 

In this world of turmoil

It is easy to forget

That this is also a world of beauty.

 

A world of beauty

Where gardens overflow with tomatoes and zucchini;

Where stars too far away to measure can shoot across the sky reminding us of our insignificance;

Where the early morning sun can warm the backs of deer and squirrels and geese practicing their flying maneuvers.

Where children are dancing their final happy summer vacation dances before returning to the classroom.

 

A world of turmoil

Where we wait with our arms folded for answers that will only arrive when we stretch out our arms.

 

A world of beauty

Where there is so much to embrace, so much to believe, so much to encounter.

 

Let us be silent for a time.

Amen.

 

Sermon

Susan and I spent the latter part of June at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly, which this year, was held in Quebec City.  General Assembly is a yearly event during which a couple thousand UUs descend on a locale to attend workshops and worship services, discuss the history and future of Unitarian Universalism, and have a good time.  After considering the high price of plane tickets and the prospect of having to endure two layovers in big city airports, we determined that driving would be the way to go. Never having had a big budget for travel, Susan and I are accustomed to driving long distances together, so making the decision to drive was simple. By driving, we could see generous portions of the US and Canada, and we could visit family along the way. And, we calculated, by the time we returned home to Des Moines, the overall cost, including the price of a rental car, would be about the same as flying. So, we rented what was priced as a “standard-sized” car--a big, fat, Buick that seemed bigger than both of our old Toyotas put together—and set off for some highway adventure.

 

As it turned out, driving was a great way to go.  For the most part, the drive proved to be relaxing and pleasant.  We did spend time with family: brothers in Iowa City and Pittsburgh and my father in Akron.  And we did see some beautiful scenery:  the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, the vineyards of Western New York, the wide expanses of Canada, and the sharply-arced bridges near the US-Canadian border that left me weak-kneed and awe-struck.  We enjoyed the expected benefits of our drive: we had many hours together to talk, to play word games, to listen to audiobooks.  We had a good time.  There was one unexpected reward from our decision to drive, though: it led to the fodder for this morning’s sermon.

 

Knowing that this sermon has a title that includes “my brush with the law”, you are no doubt wondering what your minister got himself into during his travel to Quebec.  Well, I didn’t run into trouble at the border, though with all of the security concerns after 9/11, the only thing that could have surprised me when we crossed into and out of Canada was what actually happened—nothing.  A clean-cut fair-skinned couple driving a big, fat, Buick with Iowa plates doesn’t warrant much attention.  We didn’t even have to show our passports.  I felt a little guilty at our simple passage, knowing that those with darker skin and longer hair would probably not have it so easy.

 

You might guess that my run-in with the law was a result of my feeble attempts to speak French. But, I was not, in fact, apprehended for my dusty and indecipherable Francais.  Not surprisingly, tourists are freely welcomed to butcher the sole language of over 80 percent of the people who call the province of Quebec home…particularly when those tourists are spending money in the boutiques and restaurants that fuel the local economy. 

 

No, my brush with the law occurred in Ohio, the state of my birth, on the interstate that I have traveled countless times in my life.  Nearing the completion of our Quebec adventure, Susan and I had just spent two days with my father and his wife.  We had been away from Des Moines for ten days at this point and were anxious to get home.  We had considered making a pit stop in Chicago for the night, but knowing the traffic well in and around the Windy City, we decided to just “put the pedal to the metal” as they say, and get home.  Actually, I had been putting the “pedal to the metal” over much of the trip: on the open roads the speedometer rarely dipped below 80.  I don’t share this fact with a sense of pride.  I share it to let you know that despite whatever I may imply later in the sermon, I got what was coming to me.

 

Somewhere between Akron and Toldeo, Susan and I were having one of those complex conversations that always crop up after an extended visit with extended family…you know what I’m talking about, the conversations where you start to analyze your family and you can’t help but wonder aloud, “Is that why I act the way I do?”  Deep in thought, I turned off my internal trooper scanner, the one that encourages me to carefully examine every underpass and turn-around for the dreaded state-owned sedan that my paranoia insists is always waiting for me…particularly in Ohio.  You see, I once had an ongoing relationship with the highway patrolmen in my home state.  In my early driving days, I had many brief encounters with them.  Well, it seemed like too many to a young male driver who was convinced he could never catch a break.  I was never so habitually unlawful that I had my license taken away, but I did get my share of tickets.   Far too frequent were the times I was driving the highways of Ohio when suddenly, in my rearview mirror, those flashing lights have appeared that always seem directly wired to my stomach. Then come the embarrassing questions, “Do you know how fast you were going?” or “I clocked you at 82, will you please come back to my car?”  Filled with a mixture of shame and disappointment over having been caught I have always clammed up and taken my medicine.  What else could I do? 

 

Once I moved from Ohio, my ticket problem went away.  Well, I did earn one speeding citation in Chicago, but that was during my singing telegram days when I was flying down Lakeshore Drive, late for a scheduled appearance at a child’s birthday party.  The officer that pulled me over did not seem impressed by the purple gorilla costume I was wearing or the 24 balloons blocking my back window.  Again, I had little choice but to accept my punishment.

 

Over the years, when I have told others of my bad-luck string of speeding tickets, the less-than-empathetic responses are usually along the lines of, “Yeah, I got pulled over once.  But he let me off with a warning.”

 

He let me off with a warning.  Those words have always pierced me through the gut.  Who gives out these “warnings” anyway?  For years I waited for my opportunity to get off with just a warning.  It finally happened one day on Interstate 88 east of the Iowa border, when I had the audacity to pass a trooper.  Never mind that I was going the speed limit and he wasn’t.  He pulled me over anyway.  I guess he just didn’t like being passed.   Since I wasn’t in fact speeding, he really couldn’t give me a ticket.  But he did issue a warning.  Somehow it seemed like a hollow victory.

 

A friend once told me that she has provoked herself to tears to get out of tickets.  “You’re kidding,” I responded.  “No, I can cry on command.  And it works,” was her proud response. 

Crying on command.

Somehow I don’t think manufacturing tears would have gotten me out of any tickets.  If a purple gorilla costume didn’t do it, what would?

 

Not too long ago, I saw a story on a “Dateline”-type TV “news” show in which the reporter claimed that when you get pulled over and simply engage the officer in basic conversation, you are less likely to receive a ticket.  The report said that officers who pull drivers over are used to a wide variety of unpleasant responses.  To hear some pleasant small talk from a driver who has been stopped is so refreshing to an officer, that he or she will most typically issue a less stringent penalty…if one is administered at all. 

 

Obviously curious to try out this approach to ticket evasion, I had been waiting for my opportunity…which brings me back to my recent drive through Ohio.  As I mentioned earlier, Susan and I were deep in conversation and I wasn’t looking out for troopers with my usual vigilance.  We were traveling behind a pack of cars and so I wasn’t keeping an eye on my speed, either.  After you have been traveling over 80 mph for a couple thousand miles, anything less seems slow…particularly in a big, fat Buick.  As we passed the trooper (who had been sitting in an obvious spot, by the way), Susan said, “Uhh, he’s coming after us.”  This seemed to be an unlikely place to get caught speeding, what with all of the other cars in front of us, but knowing my luck in Ohio, I wasn’t all that surprised.  Being pulled over wasn’t all bad, though.  I saw it as a chance to prove to Susan how unlucky I am in my home state.  I’ve been telling her about it for years. Even better, now I had an opportunity to try out my TV-taught wisdom. 

 

When the officer approached the car I smiled (a new expression for me after being pulled over by a state trooper) and said, “Hi! How are you today?” 

“Doing pretty good.  I clocked you going 78.  I need to see your Driver’s License and insurance.”

“Sure.”

“I need you to come back to the car with me.”

 

It had been a while since I’d been in an Ohio highway patrol car, but it seemed familiar.  I looked out the window and noticed a storm was brewing the distance. As he busily worked to write out the ticket, I started making conversation.  “I’m trying to make it back to Iowa today; how’s the weather looking?”

 

He gave me the report on the weather and asked me where I was coming from.  I told him we had just visited with my father in Akron, but that we had spent the week in Quebec; had he ever been?”

 

“Not to Quebec, but I go fishing with my buddies in Canada all the time.”

 

I imagined the trooper with his buddies, downing a few beers maybe, sitting out on a tranquil lake, away from his job of pulling over law-breakers like myself.  I wondered if he was thinking about it, too.

 

He asked me what had taken me to Quebec and I confessed, somewhat reluctantly, that I was a UU minister and had been attending a conference there.  I was not certain that admitting I was a minister would help my cause, but it was the truth, and I was enjoying our conversation.  Soon I had forgotten my “cause” all together.  Maybe I forgot because he seemed determined to write me a ticket anyway.  Or maybe I forgot because it didn’t really matter.  The reality was that I had been speeding and it was his job to punish me.  After a few more minutes of dialogue, he handed me my ticket with a smile.  I smiled back, and even said “thank you.”  He wished me luck on the rest of my trip and we bid each other farewell. 

 

I walked back to my big, fat Buick without the shame or anger I had remembered feeling in similar situations.  I was soon to be out 80 dollars for my transgression, but I quickly wrote it off as an extra toll on our highway vacation.  I didn’t feel dehumanized by the exchange.  In fact, I drove back onto the highway feeling pretty good.  So having a conversation with the trooper didn’t get me out of a ticket.  That’s ok.  It got me out of myself. 

 

My exchange with the trooper that day was another reminder of what Martin Buber was writing about 80 years ago.  Martin Buber was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher influenced by Hasidic mysticism.  His philosophy, perhaps most memorably expressed in his book I and Thou, is sometimes described as Jewish existentialism, but Buber himself referred to his work as philosophical anthropology—he saw himself as an investigator of the problem of humanity.[1]  Buber claimed that there is a basic difference between the way people relate to an inanimate object (what he called the I-It relationship) and the way they relate to other people (the I-Thou relationship). He observed, though, that we sometimes relate to other people not as people at all, but as objects…We view the other not as a Thou—a thinking, feeling, creature much like ourselves—but as an It. Indeed, we can see evidence of these I-It relationships everywhere we turn, from the ways we destroy our natural resources to the ways we destroy each other.  Our corporate-driven economy has been reducing people to objects for years.  Our current foreign policy seems to be clinging desperately to the “I” that is the United States while ignoring the “Thou” that is everyone else.  Buber claimed that this tendency to reduce the other to an “it”, this tendency to flee from the risky and life-giving world of encounter toward the objectifying of others and the seemingly insatiable desire to accumulate more things, would lead people toward a dogma of doom, including an emphasis on God as object, instead of God as the living center of all true relationship…the eternal Thou which is greater than all but present…and accessible… in each.

 

What does my brush with the law have to do with Martin Buber?  In a small way, my exchange with the trooper helped me transcend my own need to objectify the relationship.  I began the dialogue in an attempt to manipulate the situation, but found myself truly present to another in a way that opened the door for something unexpected, something real, human, and life-giving. 

 

Yes, I got a ticket.  But I was present to something much greater.  I was present to life itself, the life that is only accessible through encounter…encounter with the Thou that is always before me…the thou that is always before each of us…the thou that is always present and waiting.… 

 

So I got a ticket.  But I got something else, too.

And I didn’t even have to make myself cry.