LIVING ON THE EDGE

Kenneth Torquil MacLean

February 27, 2005

Lena Horne is one of the most beautiful women who has become a great star in American movies and on Broadway. I remember some years ago paying more for a ticket to Lena Horne: the Lady and her Music than I had ever paid for a ticket that did not get me on an airplane. It was the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history, and I was transported for two and-a-half hours. Her background story is interesting. Her mother was an entertainer and her father was a gambler and a racketeer. Her grandmother wanted her to be a teacher, but her mother wanted her to follow her into show business, and so she did. She describes what was like for her when she went to Hollywood. “They didn’t know what to do with me. I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.” In the 1940’s she could not have a leading role or be a romantic interest, so usually they would put her against a post and have her sing. She says that it took her years to be able to sing, because she was not a natural singer. “I could carry a tune, but that was about it.”

So, “it was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world.” She battled to be herself, to be with black people, as she performed in theaters and clubs. She would not play any place which did not admit black people, and there were plenty of those in the thirties, forties, and fifties. And gradually she was able to be herself and go anywhere and cultivate a black, as well as white, audience. All it took was looks, and talent, and guts.

Paul Tillich wrote a book called On the Boundary, and it is a slim memoir about his life experience of living on a number of boundaries: his father’s family was Lutheran, and his mother’s was Reformed; he came out of his First World War chaplain experience so traumatized by what he had seen that he had two nervous breakdowns; he had to leave Nazi Germany in 1933 and came to Union Theological Seminary in New York, at the invitation of Reinhold Niebuhr and had to teach theology in English; his theology was considered very radical by many American Protestants; and he had to adapt to a whole new culture, which was significant, because his whole theology was an attempt to correlate the questions of Western culture and philosophy with Christian answers.

After a few years at Union he went to Harvard and taught for a few years. Think about what it means to earn one’s living in a second language! Especially when one’s work is giving learned lectures. I think it took great courage for him to accomplish what he did, turning out three volumes of his own Systematic Theology, and a number of other books. I also think that he achieved much greater depth in what he had to say because of the range of his experiences: from war chaplain, to Christian Socialist, to refugee, to great scholar in a new and very different country. His choice to come to America was not really voluntary, but he made the most of it, living on the edge of a new way of life.

Golda Meir was born as Golda Mabovitch in Kiev, Russia. In 1903 her father decided to go to America, and five years later he sent for his family, and off they went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Against her parents’ wishes, Golda was determined to become a teacher, instead of training to be a secretary, as they wanted. Then, in 1921, she and her sister announced that they were going to Palestine, but Golda had fallen in love with a gentle man named Morris Myerson, so she persuaded him to go with her to help build a new Jewish state. She was not quite nineteen. For three years they lived in a kibbutz, and she did very well in their farm life, having two children and planting wheat and raising poultry, but Morris was not suited to the life of a farmer, so they moved to the city, first to Tel Aviv and then to Jerusalem. They were poor and had to struggle, but Golda had plenty of energy, and she threw herself into the general federation of Jewish labor, and then became the executive secretary of the Women’s Labor Council. She rose quickly in the labor movement and agitated with the British Mandate Authority for a Jewish state; once she fasted for 101 hours along with some colleagues, until the British gave in and let in a shipload of refugees. She served as Foreign Minister, then was retired when she was asked to head her political party and become prime minister. Kiev to Milwaukee to the kibbutz and Jerusalem—what a life journey: from immigrant to teacher to immigrant again to farm worker to politician and Prime Minister! Her pilgrimage was propelled partly by circumstances and partly by choice, but her energy and adventuresome spirit always found her ready for the next stage.

Barack Obama and his mother were left behind when his African father finished his Ph. D. at Harvard and returned to Kenya, and Barack grew up in Honolulu, Jakarta, and Chicago. He went to Harvard Law School and did community organizing in Chicago for a while. Later he was elected to the United States Senate, and of course he is now one of

the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States. We are hearing more about him all the time, but I go back to the time when he published his first book, DREAMS OF MY FATHER.

I found the most intriguing part of his book his account of his first visit to Kenya, in Africa, where he would meet many of the relatives of his father’s family.

His father had died some years before, but Barack had maintained contact with some of his siblings. I read one section in which he described his turmoil in going to Europe first and feeling totally out of place and then following his ambivalent feelings about his father to meet his half-sister and the rest of a large and diverse and tangled-up family. He did not know what to expect, but he found himself relating to aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother. I wondered what had prepared him in his vagabond earlier life to fit in so well in very different situations in Africa. I could identify strongly with his wish to know more about his father, whom he had met just once when he was ten years old; my father died when I was seven, and I know what it is to deal with the ghost. Barack refers to his father as “the Old Man,” and one feels that he has some success in unspooking “the Old Man.” Then he returned to the United States, gets married, delivers the keynote address at the Democratic Convention, and gets elected to the Senate. Is he still living on the edge? The only black Senator? Though he is totally caught up in the Presidential campaign these days, he might still be seen as living on the edge, when one realizes that he has moved very quickly from being an unknown outside of Illinois, where he was in the state legislature, to the position and spotlight of a serious Presidential candidate. I suspect that he will be living on the edge for some time.

It might be hard to think of Eleanor Roosevelt as living on the edge, but consider that all the early stages of her public life were based on her husband’s positions, as Secretary of the Navy, then as Governor of New York, then as President. She was always in the spotlight, but she really was on the edge of power, active, energetic, involved and informed, but always through her access to her husband and through his support of her travels and her involvements. Until her husband died, and until President Harry Truman asked her to accept his appointment of her to the United States delegation to the United Nations. Another member of the U. S. delegation, John Foster Dulles, strongly advised against the appointment, but Truman went ahead, and Mrs. Roosevelt finally accepted. She was appointed to what was thought to be the least important committee, which included, among other things, human rights. For several years she operated on a world stage, shepherding the Universal Declaration on Human Rights through a morass of conflicting values and prejudices until it was fully accepted and stands today as one of the highest statements of the aspiration toward the kind of world we would all like to have. By the time she had done that, she was no longer on the edge, the boundary of power; she had become a force to be reckoned with.

What do all these people have to do with us and with our lives? It seems to me that there are many ways of living on the edge, and I strongly suspect that most of us, in some aspect of our lives, are living on the edge. There are so many ways of living on the edge: because of race, or gender, or language, or age, or sexual orientation, or financial worth; there are also subtler ways of discovering that we don’t fit in: my son grew up a Dallas Cowboys fan in suburban Washington, D.C., which is Redskin country; there are vegetarians, and non-dancers, and non-bridge players, and welfare mothers, and such strong individualists that they are only in the center if they are dominant. Some of the ways of living on the edge are thrust upon us; we have no choice in the matter; while other ways are sought out and achieved. My suggestion this morning is that a great deal of the richness and variety of our lives comes from the ways in which we are on the edge, existing on the boundaries of society, language, culture, religion, and place in the world. Part of it has to do with attitudes toward change; we all know persons who live in resistance to change, who fight it off with all the defenses at their command, while others embrace it for the freshness and vitality it brings to their days. Actually, that is too simple; we may all embrace some kinds of change and resist others.

I believe that the discussion is particularly important for those of us who are Unitarian Universalists, because, by definition, we are situated on the fringes of the Judeo-Christian world; whether we are in that circle of out of it, we are always close to the edge. What does that reality mean in your life: does it give you greater freedom, or does it make you nervous about who you are and what your commitments are? Perhaps the greatest gift of a free faith is that confidence that we can be who we are, that the resources within us are greater than we have ever had to expend, and that we have reserves of courage to deal with whatever comes. If we can really feel that, and I think we can learn to feel that, then out here on the edge is not a bad place to be.