verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора
Kurt Vonnegut, RIP
Sermon by Steve Edington
May 6, 2007
Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua
Back in 1991 Kurt Vonnegut published a collection of his essays and speeches under the title Fates Worse Than Death. He included among them the talk he gave, as the annual Ware Lecturer, at our Unitarian Universalist Association's 1986 General Assembly, which was held in Rochester, New York that year. The Ware Lecture is the "celebrity event" at our GAs, where someone whose name recognition goes well beyond UU circles comes in. Vonnegut included his Ware Lecture in the book I just mentioned, and he introduced it - in this text, not at the GA itself - in this way: "In order not to seem a spiritual quadriplegic to strangers trying to get a fix on me, I sometimes say I'm a Unitarian Universalist. So that denomination claims me as one of their own. It honored me by having me deliver a lecture at a gathering in Rochester, New York."
So, there you are; among the various roles our liberal faith has played and accomplished in the larger American society, we saved of our country's more prominent novelists and essayists from the fate of being a spiritual quadriplegic. Who knows, maybe Vonnegut considered an absence of a spiritual component to one's life as a fate worse than death. Indeed, some of his writings do seem to suggest that even though he was an avowed atheist throughout his life.
"...Was an avowed atheist throughout his life..." I've made numerous references to Mr. Vonnegut and his work from this pulpit over the years, and this is the first time I've had to refer to his life in the past tense. Mr. Vonnegut died this past April 11 at age 84. I've been out of the pulpit here for the past couple of Sundays, but did not want to let his passing go by without offering a tribute to him because he has had a marked influence upon how I generally tend to look at life. It was also of interest to me to note that Vonnegut, and another of my literary heroes - Jack Kerouac - were born in the same year of 1922. Kerouac, largely thanks to a tragically self-destructive life-style, died nearly 40 years ago and has been long relegated, rightly or wrongly, to another earlier era. Vonnegut, on the other hand, remained remarkably contemporary right up to his death a little over three weeks ago.
My one and only encounter with Mr. Vonnegut was at that General Assembly to which I've just referred. It was held on the campus of the University of Rochester, which is only a few blocks over from where I went to theological school in the late 1960s and where I first discovered Vonnegut's writing. Seeing him in that locale in roughly the same place where I'd first met him by way of his work did have the effect of closing a circle.
Vonnegut had just published his novel Galapagos at that time, and he did a signing at the U. of R. student union. I waited patiently in a long line with my newly purchased copy of his newly published novel. When I finally got up to the table where he was signing I thanked him for providing me with a lot of sermon material over the years. His response was to look up at me, raise one eyebrow slightly, and say, "Well, that stuff is all copyrighted material you know." Yes, I know. So just to keep this sermon on the up and up, all literary references henceforth made this morning from this pulpit - unless otherwise noted - come to you courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut and his publishers.
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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора
