Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
June 11, 2017
OPENING WORDS
My first year in college, in Tennessee, I would get up while it was still dark in the mornings to drive with a group of other young women out to a lake to get in a boat.
I was in an “eight.” That meant that if we got out there – a 20-minute drive – and found that one of us had slept in, we couldn’t practice. We’d have to turn around and go back to our dorms. The same thing would happen if we arrived only to find that the lake was too foggy to see one another across the oars. But if we were all there, and the fog had lifted…it was beautiful.
…out on the quiet lake at dawn, rowing through the cool water, getting that boat moving together.
I remember the older athletes in the varsity boats, talking about that elusive experience of “SWING.”
Swing is the term for when all eight rowers are moving in such graceful, perfect unison that the boat slides through the water with almost no resistance. It requires that each oar hit the water at the same angle at the same time at the same speed, each of the 8 bodies folding and unfolding just so, each wrist turning in the same way – all actions mirroring each other.
These older kids’ descriptions of SWING were so rich and reverent that I can picture it almost as if I myself had experienced it: the water whistling along the sides of the boat…the steady, even pull of the oars…the flawless, fluid movement through the water.
In SWING, rowers say they begin to feel like one body…together with each other and the boat and the water.
Come into this space, where this morning we consider the challenge and the gift
of moving as one body, charged with a vision of generous community.
SERMON
It was the Olympics of 1936. The United States was still in the midst of the Great Depression. Germany was hosting. Hitler was in power. The Olympic games were his ultimate propaganda tool. He sought to Prove Aryan supremacy through superior athleticism. And to show the world that Germany was beautiful, pure, peaceful, unified … while in reality they were preparing for war behind the scenes.
One of the most closely watched events in Berlin was rowing. The German team was dominant. Rowing teams were government sponsored in Germany. The oarsmen were given scholarships so they weren’t distracted by jobs.
Rowing was a fitting sport through which Germany could highlight its idealization of strength and discipline. Rowing demands that you use almost every muscle in your body while simultaneously maintaining sufficient balance and grace to keep the boat at an even keel. “Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race—the Olympic standard—takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes.” ((all quotes in this sermon come from The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (2014) by Daniel James Brown. You can also find their story in the PBS documentary, The Boys of ’36: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/boys36/))
Into this environment of the 1936 Olympics arrived the American team.
They came not from one of the elite and wealthy Ivy League schools, but from the University of Washington. They were a scrappy bunch of young men, nearly all working class.
Joe Rantz was one of the eight.
Joe’s mom died when he was three years old. His stepmom didn’t like him, so when the depression hit, his family abandoned him when he was 15. He lived by himself in an unfinished house in the woods of Washington, scraping by all alone by foraging for mushrooms, fishing for salmon, gathering berries – and working any job that was available during those difficult times – all hard, dangerous labor. He stayed in school, and luckily his brother took him in for his last year of high school.
One day in gymnastics practice, Joe caught the attention of the University of Washington’s rowing coach, who gave him his card and told him to enroll. Most of the other boys on the rowing team were also from difficult backgrounds, but Joe was one of the poorest.
He took to arriving early to practice so he could change into his rowing clothes before the others showed up and made fun of his tattered, rumpled sweater, the only one he owned. “How’s life down in Hooverville?” they’d say. Directly after practice he’d rush to his job in the student store, where he worked until midnight. Then he’d walk to the YMCA, where he worked as a janitor in exchange for a tiny room in the basement.
Joe had immense potential as a rower. But he was erratic. His coach couldn’t figure him out.
Joe had long ago, during his childhood, decided that in order to survive, he could rely only on himself.
But it doesn’t work that way in rowing – or in life.
This is how Joe’s biographer describes the demands rowing made on Joe:
(Apologies for a very long quote here, but I think it beautifully describes the requirements of any common effort. As you read it, I invite you to think of the communities you have been a part of.)
…No other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength …but they have no stars. The team effort — the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes — is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.
The psychology is complex. Even as rowers must subsume their often fierce sense of independence and self-reliance, at the same time they must hold true to their individuality, their unique capabilities as oarsmen or oarswomen or, for that matter, as human beings. Even if they could, few rowing coaches would simply clone their biggest, strongest, smartest, and most capable rowers.
…if they are to row well together, each of these oarsmen must adjust to the needs and capabilities of the other. Each must be prepared to compromise something in the way of optimizing his stroke for the overall benefit of the boat…
And capitalizing on diversity is perhaps even more important when it comes to the characters of the oarsmen….Good crews are good blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to pick a fight, someone to make peace; someone to think things through, someone to charge ahead without thinking. Somehow all this must mesh. That’s the steepest challenge.
Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and accept the others as they are. It is an exquisite thing when it all comes together in just the right way.
The intense bonding and the sense of exhilaration that results from it are what many oarsmen row for, far more than for trophies or accolades.
This ability to trust, to compromise, to let go…was difficult for Joe Rantz.
He thought it was all up to how hard he worked, how well he performed.
How often are we like Joe?
…We venture into communities carrying with us the individualism so worshipped by our culture – THERE ARE SO MANY MYTHS!
The myth of self-reliance
The myth that we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
Even that overly spiritualized belief that we must heal ourselves before we heal the world (As if we are separate from the world? As if we could heal ourselves without engaging in the world?)
So, like Joe, we venture into communities carrying with us not only this individualism but also this fear and distrust. …This fear and distrust which represent the scars from too many wounds at the hands of others. Why would we trust again?
We have been taught very well by our culture how to work hard; not very well how to trust.
Why would we put our faith into something beyond ourselves, beyond our control?
This is what Joe’s mentor said to him:
Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you’ve ever imagined.
Eventually, it happened, but not without first experiencing many races lost because they could not get in sync, not without many times Joe or other boys sabotaged themselves out of fear.
But gradually, with encouragement, through their continual commitment – through getting hurt and then sticking around to repair that hurt…their boat came together.
They beat all odds to qualify for the Olympics, and this scraggly group of working class boys, who had never seen anything but lakes and rivers, crossed the Atlantic Ocean to compete in the Olympics against Nazi Germany.
The odds continued to be against them.
Hitler was at the race course looking on, and the Germans had won gold in the first five races. The American’s stroke oarsmen, the one who sets the pace, had become very sick on the journey across the Atlantic. He worked in a pulp mill growing up and had become very susceptible to respiratory illnesses. He wanted to go on, but the morning of the race, the coach had moved to put in an alternate. The team said:
No – we won’t row without him. If he’s feeling shaky, we’ll make up for him.
The coach relented.
Then, despite qualifying with the best time, they were given the worst lane in the race – windy and choppy. The Germans were given the best lane, and of course already knew the course. Then, they didn’t hear the call to start – they started late and thrashed around in the water.
But they were used to working in tough conditions. They had been through this before.
Joe’s biographer describes Joe’s experience when it all came together:
Immediately after the race, even as he sat gasping for air in the [boat]…, an expansive sense of calm had enveloped him. In the last desperate few hundred meters of the race, in the searing pain and bewildering noise of that final furious sprint, there had come a singular moment when Joe realized with startling clarity that there was nothing more he could do to win the race, beyond what he was already doing.
Except for one thing. He could finally abandon all doubt, trust absolutely without reservation that he and the boy in front of him and the boys behind him would all do precisely what they needed to do at precisely the instant they needed to do it. He had known in that instant that there could be no hesitation, no shred of indecision.
He had had no choice but to throw himself into each stroke as if he were throwing himself off of a cliff into a void, with unquestioned faith that the others would be there to save him from catching the whole weight of the [boat] on his blade.
And he had done it. Over and over, forty-four times per minute, he had hurled himself blindly into his future, not just believing but knowing that the other boys would be there for him, all of them, moment by precious moment.
These scrappy, humble boys from a place the world had never heard of, won the gold on one of the world’s biggest stages. As one historian says:((From The Boys of ’36, PBS http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/boys36/))
I love the fact that they spoiled the script.
In a moment we will have our annual volunteer recognition ceremony, lifting up the ways all of you pull the oars of this vessel and power us along through the waters of our vision.
So let us celebrate the ways that we, too, spoil the script:
By working against the tendency toward individualism, the tendency toward fragmentation and isolation.
By giving of ourselves, by trusting in one another, by putting our faith in something larger than ourselves.
In doing so, may we all experience that elusive, beautiful SWING that results when we move as one.