“Gifts” is the theme for the Southeast Winter Institute in Miami between Christmas and New Years. I will be the Chaplain for SWIM this year, so I have been thinking a lot about gifts. I will be returning to Miami after 30 years. This invitation in itself has been a gift to me. I have many memories of my ministry in Boca Raton, FL in the ‘70s.
As I return to Florida I will be thinking about Mim Rhea Turner the first Unitarian Universalist lay person I met in 1973. Mim was a member of the Boca Fellowship and also the UU congregation in Poughkeepsie, New York. On her way to New York she stopped to meet me. I was serving a Methodist Church in Richmond, VA and had made the decision to transfer to Unitarian Universalism.
After our conversation, Mim contacted the Search Committee from Boca and recommended me. Two months later I would accept their call. After I served the Boca congregation for six years, I moved on to PA, then NC. Mim continued to follow my ministry. She attended my Installation in Raleigh with her daughter Shirley.
Years later I would be invited to preach in Boca and guess who was still playing the piano. Mim was in her 90’s. She died at 101 and I was asked to write something for her service. Mim was a friend I will always remember. She supported me even when I divorced, but was always honest with me, and always stayed in touch. She was the essence of a good friend. I thank Mim for the gift of her friendship.
Saul Bellow, in his book, Humboldt’s Gift, writes about the gift of friendship. The friendship is between two writers, one a mentor for the other. Von Humboldt Fleisher is a great poet who dies a pauper, who never in his life succeeded financially. His mentee and friend, the narrator in the book, Charlie Citrine, becomes a very successful playwright, makes a pile of money, but then squanders it on a luxurious lifestyle.
At the time of Humboldt’s death, Charlie is at a low point in his life. He goes through an acrimonious divorce, gets involved with a woman who in the end he asks to marry him, but she marries another more financially successful undertaker. Bellows refers to the “unnecessary comedy of history.” Citrine says,
. . . human beings are far too deep in that false unnecessary comedy of history—in events, in developments, in politics. The common crisis is real enough. Read the papers—all that criminality and filth, murder, perversity, and horror. We can’t get enough of it—we call the human thing, the human scale.
But what else is there?
A sub-theme in the book is whether or not humans have souls. Citrine says,
The existence of a soul is beyond proof under the ruling premises, but people go on behaving as though they had souls, nevertheless. They behave as if they came from another place, another life, and they have impulses and desires that nothing in this world, none of our present premises, can account for. On the ruling premises the fate of humankind is a sporting event, most ingenious. Fascinating. When it doesn’t become boring. The specter of boredom is haunting this sporting conception of history.” (p. 479)
The friendship of Humboldt and Citrine is, indeed, an odd one. Yes, they are united by their love for literature, and their love for each other. But along the way they do some strange things. Early on, before Charlie makes his money, they both sign an unlimited check that can be cashed at any time. Late in the story Humboldt fills in the check for $6,000, and cashes it. Can you imagine? It was a blood-brother check he cashed in anger because his friend didn’t come to visit him in Bellevue “as a loving friend should.” With the money Humboldt bought a car, an Oldsmobile, which in the end, he loses.
Before he dies, Humboldt gives Charlie a gift—the gift of a story that potentially can make Charlie rich again. It is the gift of “imagination and vision” of which he dreamed, the outline of a screenplay written long ago. In his last letter to Charlie Citrine Humboldt writes the reason for his gift:
I wasn’t really strong enough to bear the great burdens. I haven’t made it here, Charlie. Not to be guilty of a final failure of taste, I will avoid the heavy declaration. Let’s say I have a leg over the last stile and I look back and see you far back laboring still in fields of ridicule. (p. 347)
In the end, Humboldt gives Charlie, his friend, some final advice:
“Help my Uncle Waldemar all you can. Be sure that if there is a hereafter I will be pulling for you. . . You are lazy, disgraceful, tougher than you think but not yet a dead loss. In part you are humanly okay. We are supposed to do something for our kind. Don’t get frenzied about money. Overcome your greed. Better luck with women. Last of all—remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings.”
Lovingly, Humboldt”
Here is the gift of friendship—words of wisdom from the grave, a poet, to his friend, competitor, lover of literature, failure, and in the end success, for others but not for himself. “Overcome your greed; remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural.”
Humboldt’s Gift is a prayer of sorts. It is putting into words one’s admiration and struggles with a friend, but also one’s struggle with life. Richard Rayner describes “Humboldt’s Gift” as like a Kaddish (a prayer for the dead) that’s run out of control—gorgeous, funny and sad. This is the writing of Saul Bellow—a great storyteller. His stories, novels, are about real life—friendship, rivalry, humans searching for meaning in a world that is often in conflict.
How many people are like Charles Citrine, gifted, but living life in shambles, totally in disarray. Citrine had life by the tail. His mentor taught him well. He had written a hit for Broadway, dined in the White House and flown in a helicopter with Bobby Kennedy. He had all the money he needed, beautiful women within reach. But he threw it all away. He refers to himself as a “higher-thought clown.” His ex-wife reflects on the life of Charles Citrine. She says:
I just can’t believe the way you are. The man who’s had all these wonderful insights, the author of all these books, respected by scholars and intellectuals all over the world. . .You’ve lectured at the great Eastern universities and had grants and fellowships and honors. De Gaulle made you a knight of the Legion of Honor and Kennedy invited us to the White House. You had a successful play on Broadway. Now what the hell do you think you’re doing in Chicago! You hang around with your old Chicago school chums, with freaks. It’s a kind of mental suicide, death wish. (p. 41)
Humboldt’s Gift is at heart a book about lost friendship and lost success. Citrine writes of Humboldt: “Ah. Humboldt had been great—handsome, high-spirited, buoyant, ingenious, electrical, noble. To be with him made you feel the sweetness of life. We used to discuss the loftiest things.” But there is another side to his friend.
Citrine also writes of Humboldt: “Poet, thinker, problem drinker, pill-taker, man of genius, manic depressive, intricate schemer, success story, he once wrote poems of great wit and beauty, but what had he done lately?” (p. 25) If Bellows were alive this year he could have been writing about Michael Jackson.
Let us not obsess with Jackson or Bellows, but rather look at the potential gift of friendship. There are many in UU history: Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Priestley, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They became friends when Thoreau was at Harvard. He became a disciple—but also one who lived Emerson’s “self reliant” life. Emerson was a guide, a father figure, and a friend to Thoreau.
The Encyclopedia Britannica summarizes the contributions of Thoreau and Emerson: They combined romanticism and reform which begins with the individual, celebrated the individual rather than the masses, nature rather than man, conceded two ways of knowing: through the senses and intuition, and affirmed the reality of spirit which transcends matter. These two friends will always be linked with Transcendentalism, through their writings and their experiences of nature, especially Walden Pond.
Emerson wrote an essay titled “Friendship” in which he said:
I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine. – a possession for all time. . .
What we must remember about friendship is that it takes time to ripen, and that there will be ups and downs. As Emerson says,
Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. . .But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to such a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the lowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen.
Also, in this essay Emerson writes;
We overestimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every thing that is his, his name, his form, his dress, books and instruments, fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger than his mouth.
As Charles in Humboldt’s Gift learned: The object of our friendship, the god of our making, is human after all. Yes, “Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.” They do not exist in real life.
One cannot understand Emerson’s view of friendship without also looking at “Self Reliance” and “The Over-Soul.” As Russell Goodman writes:
Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance” that “we are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.” In the “Friendship” essay this fear is depicted as insincerity: “We parry and fend the approach of or fellow man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs.” For their part, our fellow men and women avoid the little we have to say or give by requiring that we humor them. Each person, Emerson complains, “has some fame, some talents, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him.
With a real friend, in contrast, one may be perfectly sincere, as one is with oneself. (p. 11, “Emerson and Skepticism: A Reading of “Friendship”)
Emerson often writes of paradox. He writes of “Self Reliance” but also of “Friendship.” He writes of our “aloneness” but also our unity with all—“The Over-soul.” He affirms our need for friendship but then calls it hypocrisy and an impossible dream.
I choose to affirm the former, an affirmation of friendship, but not the latter. Other than my relationship with my wife, I think most fondly of my relationship with my best friend, Skip. Skip was my college roommate who died of lung cancer in his forties. After college I moved from St. Louis where Skip continued to live and work. Whenever I would visit my family I would visit Skip. Wherever I would live Skip would visit me and we would share vacations together. We shared our love for the St. Louis Cardinals and baseball.
Skip named his son, Robert Morris, after his brother and me. Twice in my careers, I have written in a sermon about a person I have not seen in many years, then the next morning I receive an email from that person. Just this week I wrote about Robert Babel, Skip’s brother, then received an email from Robert. He said he wanted to be my friend on Facebook. I usually keep my Facebook friends to my family. Robert is an exception. I look forward to visiting him in St. Louis.
When I transferred from Methodism to Unitarianism, my friend Skip did the same. He was an active member of Eliot Chapel in St. Louis. I have preached there and when Skip died I was asked by their minister to participate in the service and help bury Skip’s ashes in one of the rivers Skip loved to visit on vacation.
I remember fondly my relation with Skip. Yes, I “chide society, I embrace solitude” but I also honor the “lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understand me, becomes mine, --a possession for all time.” Yes, often our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, but not because “we have made them a texture of wine and dreams” but because they become “the tough fibre of the human heart.”
Let us be thankful for the gift of having friends-- their understanding, support, honesty, and love--a possession for all time. So may it be.
