Everything I Needed to Know in Life I Learned As…
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
1/28/06 & 1/29/06

 

Reading

“On A Tree Fallen Across The Road” by Robert Frost

 

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood

Throws down in front of us does not bar

Our passage to our journey's end for good,

But just to ask us who we think we are

 

Insisting always on our own way so.

She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,

And make us get down in a foot of snow

Debating what to do without an ax.

 

And yet she knows obstruction is in vain:

We will not be put off the final goal

We have it hidden in us to attain,

Not though we have to seize earth by the pole

 

And, tired of aimless circling in one place,

Steer straight off after something into space.

 

Reading

“Different Plans” by Brian Andreas

 

I don't know how long

I can do this, he said.

I think the universe

has different plans

for me

 

& we sat there in silence

 

& I thought to myself

that this is the thing

we all come to

& this is the thing

we all fight

& if we are lucky

enough to lose,

our lives

become beautiful

with mystery again

 

& I sat there silent

because that is not

something

that can be said.

 

 

Sermon

 

The day I first met the Savick family, I was wearing an orange plaid suit.  I met them at Cedar Point, an Ohio amusement park where I had been hired for the summer to wander around “frontier trail” and interact with customers as “Doc Marcus,” a snake-oil salesman.  I had a whole routine worked up that I would let loose on confused park goers for a few minutes at a time for several hours a day. In the briefcase I carried as part of my get-up were little bottles of things like “Keeps-You-Dry” elixir, which I claimed was better than a raincoat on the water rides, and “Get Away” spray which I joked would enable people to zoom to the front of the lines with just a few carefully located squirts.

 

Despite my earnest attempts at humor, most people didn’t want much to do with me.  Cedar Point was a blue-collar kind of park.  It wasn’t high-brow like Epcot or Walt Disney World.  Most people came to Cedar Point to ride roller coasters, eat junk food and drink beer…not to interact with dorks in orange plaid suits…except for adolescent boys…who liked to throw things at dorks in orange plaid suits.

 

Since most people were not all that interested in hearing my shtick, I would tend to glam on to the few families who did give me the time of day, and I’d keep the banter going as long we could tolerate it…especially if I were getting laughs.

 

On the afternoon that begins this story, I was having a particularly fun conversation with the Savicks, a three-generation family who had welcomed me over to the picnic table where they were eating. Once I ran out of my routine lines, we started talking about real-life stuff. They were tired of walking around the park and I was trying to burn the last twenty minutes or so before my break so we made good conversation partners. Just as I was getting ready to head back to the dressing room, the matriarch of the family surprised me by asking me if I wanted to be a part of the family business. 

 

Thinking she was kidding, I said in my Doc Marcus drawl “Well sure, what is it?”

 

She pulled a cassette tape out of her purse and asked me to give it a listen sometime soon.  “It will explain things better than I could,” she said.

 

 

Looking back, I can conjure up all kinds of explanations to describe why I accepted the Savicks’ offer to learn more about their business: they seemed nice…I had very few commitments at the time…I had not yet settled on anything resembling a career direction…I wanted to be open to opportunity…to take what I thought might be the road less traveled by.  Then again, more than anything, I was probably driven mostly by my curiosity.  For what business could they possibly want a guy working in an amusement park…especially a dork in an orange plaid suit?

 

That night, after work, I listened to the tape.  It was a perfectly cryptic description of a business approach called network marketing and it was just enticing enough for me to be willing to hear more.   

 

A few days later, the patriarch of the family and one of his sons paid me a visit in the tiny apartment I shared with Susan.  [In case you are wondering, Susan also worked as a character on Frontier Trail, though she didn’t have to wear a plaid suit.  She had it worse. She played saloon owner “Lusty Lil” (think fishnets and feathers)…a role that made her even more vulnerable to adolescent boys than I was. I still don’t think she has forgiven me for roping her into that job!]

 

The day the Savicks arrived at our apartment, I looked out the window and watched them making their way from their car to our door. Dressed in suits, they were carrying briefcases and a dry erase board, and looked as uncomfortable as I was starting to feel watching them approach. 

 

I thought about pretending I wasn’t home, but figured if they went to the trouble to put on suits, they probably wouldn’t be deterred that easily.  After I invited them in, they asked Susan to join us in the kitchen, which incidentally was also the dining room, the living room, and the spare bedroom. I could tell Susan wasn’t happy about being included, but she was too nice to be rude and the apartment was too small for her to hide.

 

The presentation, led by the elder Savick, was awkward and unprofessional…so much so that I couldn’t help but be charmed by the guy. His son would chime in occasionally, pointing out things that Dad may have forgotten, which made Dad blush and nervously chuckle to himself.  They were quite the team…despite themselves.

 

At the heart of their sales pitch were the recurrent questions:  “What is your dream? What do you want out of life?  Where do you want to be in ten years?”

 

I acknowledged these were good questions but I told them I didn’t have very many solid answers.  I guess at the age of 25, I really hadn’t thought about life that seriously…or at least my aspirations for material possessions. I could tell this was frustrating to them.  “Everyone wants nice things,” they tried to convince me.  Since I was weak on articulating my financial dreams, they decided to share some of theirs:  the father wanted to be able to leave his trucking business, which was getting less profitable all the time.  The son wanted to have a fancy sports car and money to travel.

 

The best Susan and I could come up with was to earn enough money to be able to afford our acting careers…and maybe health insurance.

 

They told us all about the network marketing concept, about how we would simply purchase products that we would use every day anyway…products we would purchase from ourselves rather than a conventional store…and then we would invite other people to do the same.  They talked about all the great soap and vitamins we could buy and all the great people we would get to meet and all the great money we could make.  And then, near the end of the presentation, they shared the name of the parent company…almost wincing as they did:  “Amway” they said.

 

They seemed to want to apologize, but I had not been around the block enough to know why I might be looking for an apology.  The whole thing sounded OK to me.  Very little commitment was needed. I could do the business on my own time. These nice people were doing it. What was the big deal? 

 

After thinking it over for a few days, I decided to take the plunge and become an Amway distributor myself. 

 

I started slowly, just trying out a few products and occasionally bringing the business up with folks when I could. I should have known something was wrong when I found that telling people I was an Amway distributor had the same effect as the “get away spray” I hawked as Doc Marcus.  I remember one guy I spoke to in particular who said with heartfelt disgust, “Wait a minute.  Is this Amway?  I don’t talk to people in Amway…and no one I care about talks to people in Amway.”  I still think the guy was overreacting, but he wasn’t the only person who had strong feelings about and against the business I had chosen.

Many people gave me a hard time, but I was OK.  My acting career had given me plenty of experience in dealing with rejection.  I just kept applying the maxim I learned from one of the Amway training tapes I had heard…a little zen-like wisdom that I still carry with me:  “Some will, some won’t, so what?” 

 

For the record, you should know that Susan tolerated my interest in the business but didn’t really share in it beyond attending a couple of meetings with me.  I respect that she stayed out but I’m glad she came to a few meetings, because an Amway meeting, particularly an Amway rally, is a cultural experience not to be missed.  We still occasionally share the memories of what we experienced there. Imagine thousands of people filling a convention center dancing to inspirational music, viewing professionally produced videos on big screens above the stage, and listening to down-home testimonials from people who never thought they’d make it but who, lo and behold now had the life of their dreams.   It was like a mega-church for the trinity of God, America, and Free Enterprise.

 

One image in particular stands out from these rallies:  people literally standing on chairs, jumping up and down, shouting “Go Diamond” (which was the term for someone who has really “made it” in the business).  Even as I giggled to myself about the scene at the time, there was something hypnotic about this ritual that couldn’t be denied.  And yes, I was standing right there, jumping up and down with everyone else.  It was fun to be so far afield from where I had ever thought I’d be…fun for a while, at least.

 

I also must admit that the testimonials were inspiring to me. I enjoyed hearing stories from the speakers’ lives and their emphasis on the need to develop community…community that felt true and meaningful to them, even if it was ultimately based in a desire to make a buck.  While I wanted to be a part of that kind of inspiration and motivation on a regular basis, and I yearned for a similar sense of community, I always felt a little odd attending what really amounted to worship services and pep rallies for capitalism.

 

Around the time that the rallies started to grate on me, I started to question the wisdom of my participation in the business at all.  The quality of the products was often disappointing to me, the prices were not as economical as the marketing had led me to believe, and the amount of time needed to make my venture successful was surpassing what I wanted to give.  My Amway business, in short, was going nowhere fast.

 

Also, the more higher-ups I got to know, the more uncomfortable I became. I remember a fiery guy named Bill Black (he had reached the designation of ruby on his way to becoming an emerald…on his way to diamond).  Bill flew to Chicago to lead meetings on my behalf for a couple of days. I hadn’t scheduled many meetings for him, so we ended up spending lots of time in conversation.  He stayed in our apartment for the weekend and drove Susan nuts with all of his Amway chatter.  We went to church together on Sunday, to a progressive Catholic service.  Afterwards flyers were being passed out promoting a new service geared to those Catholics who were not heterosexual.  When Bill got the flyer, he ripped it up in disgust, his eyes blazing with hatred and fear.   Susan and I exchanged confused glances.  What were we doing hanging out with this guy anyway?  What was I doing as an Amway distributor?

 

The incident that put the final nail in the coffin of my Amway career was when one of the higher ups left a message on my answering machine “reminding” me to vote for a particular pro-business candidate in an upcoming election. 

 

I didn’t really like the products, I didn’t like the higher-ups, and now it seemed evident that I would not like the politics, too.  Other than the Savicks and the idea of community, I acknowledged that I didn’t like any of it.

 

So what was I doing sticking with it for as long as I did?

 

And here we come to the questions of the day:

 

Do any of us really know why we end up going down what we might view later as the absolute wrong path?  And why we might stay on that path even when we know it is the wrong one?  Don’t we all have our own versions of my Amway story, where we have found ourselves cheering for things we don’t believe, or working toward goals that have very little to do with what we really want or need…or what life might be asking of us?  We may say that we were tricked or deluded or we can plead simple ignorance…but do any of us really know for sure how we ended up doing these things…particularly the things that seem so obviously wrong for us now, in hindsight… those choices that seem so wrong that they may continue to torment us even many years after the fact…leaving us regretful…even ashamed. 

 

All sorts of choices we have made and risks we have taken can do this to us…and we often would prefer these memories just go away.  My Amway experience, for example, is not something I trumpet…well, at least not until this weekend, anyway.  I have just been too embarrassed to mention it. And yet, the reality is, my foray into Amway is and always will be a part of my life…whether I like it or not, whether I talk about it out loud or not,  whether I face up to it and learn from it…or not.  Sure I stayed in Amway longer than I should have. But my trip through the world of network marketing also taught me a lot about myself…about what is really important to me.  I learned that increasing my material possessions is not all that important but that being a part of community is.  And I learned that I want to be around people who are interested in supporting others and bettering themselves, not to just to get rich, though, but because it is the right thing to do…because, I have come to believe, it is how we grow our souls.

 

When I really think about it, I know that the trailhead of my current path of ministry, the path that led me to you, probably could be found in the midst of my six-month foray in Amway nearly 15 years ago, even if it took me 5 years or so to know I was on it.  My current path is in some significant ways a direct descendent of my experiences in something that was completely wrong for me.  Looking back, I think maybe I needed to give myself to something so wrong so that I could find for myself something so right.

 

I feel that way about some of my past relationships, too.  For example, if I hadn’t lived through four years of an immature and unhealthy love relationship in my teens, I may not have known that I wanted as much from my marriage as I ended up pursuing and…thankfully, getting.  The list of these kinds of examples is really endless, you know.  Struggles with abusive relationships or addictions or career mismatches that have eventually taught us something about ourselves…something about what we really want for our future.  Don’t we all, when we look back at our lives, have memories of mistakes we wish we hadn’t made…even as we know that those mistakes are what can eventually lead us toward better times and wiser choices…as long as we open our hearts enough to be humbled…and to learn from what we have experienced?

 

As we are gathered here today, some may be struggling with a current situation…afraid to make a change or take a bold risk for fear of making a mistake…even as we know from past experience that making mistakes is not only inevitable…but valuable. We can never know enough to always choose what’s best.  So we must settle for what we can, drawing from past experiences and reminding ourselves that despite the choices we make and the outcomes that result, we will still gain access to what is important for us to know. 

 

In the first of today’s readings Robert Frost describes a tree that has blocked a runner’s way…almost for sport it seems…much as life can sometimes seem to throw down obstructions to our journeys toward understanding, obstructions thrown down if only to help us realize who we are.  In these moments we may feel out of control, as if any choice is merely a random grasping towards the unknown, but this is an illusion, I think.  We tend to have more control than we are willing to acknowledge…and more wisdom than we are willing to trust. After all, we have made it through tough times before and have lived to learn from those experiences…to carry on despite all we have lost or screwed up or misjudged.  As Frost says, it’s not as though we have to “grab the earth by the pole…and steer straight off after something into space.”  We have far more direction than that.  Direction lain down by our past choices and what we have learned from those choices.  And one day, if we let ourselves, we will be able to look back at this moment of decision and say, “I did the best I could with what I knew and who I was at that time.”   And in the end, isn’t that enough?  Doesn’t it have to be?

 

For if we are waiting to achieve some sense of certainty about our choices, we will be waiting a long time…too long to actually do much…too long to actually learn much….too long to actually live much.  Life does not have a lot to do with certainty, beyond the fact that we will one day die and leave our present form.  Rather, life strikes me more as an endless string of educated guesses…some more educated than others…but educated guesses nonetheless.  And my point today is that our mistakes…especially those humbling mistakes…are the events that can educate us the most, if we can let go of our disappointment or anger or regret or bitterness and simply open ourselves to what these mistakes have to teach us…

 

“…if we are lucky

enough to lose,

our lives

become beautiful

with mystery again”

 

Whatever you want to call it…this skill, this practice, this luck that enables us to lose once in a while…to lose who we thought we were or who we thought we would be and to learn from the unknown that follows…is the way to freedom…the freedom that says we don’t have to know what is coming next…the freedom that leads us to forgive ourselves for all our screw-ups, wrong turns, and flubs…the freedom that can transform our careers, our families, our relationships…our very lives.  The freedom to live, and to lose, and to live once again.  What a blessed freedom it is!