A Reflection for Trinity Sunday All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern
Shores, NC
May 22, 2016 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
The
Wisdom of Rivals
What
is the nature of wisdom? The Book of Proverbs lesson for today reflects on
Wisdom, portraying it as a feminine attribute of God. Most of the time when the
Biblical authors refer to God, they use masculine pronouns because they lived
in patriarchal societies, and the Bible reflects the bias of the authors who
were somewhat nervous about women. There is a power in women that unsettled
their male culture; therefore they placed their women under strict controls.
While they acknowledged the necessity of having women around, many of their
myths had bad things happen to the male heroes if they listened to, or fell
under the spell of, women. They were afraid of things that went outside the
traditional male boundaries for they were terrified that women might want to
control them. Looking through the lens of the Myers-Briggs Personality
Inventory, the personality types that did well in Hebrew cultures were “Sensing”
people who looked to the external world for information and the “Thinking”
person who followed logic in making decisions, as opposed to “Intuitives” who
got their information from going deeper into the internal world and imagination
and the “Feeling” person who made decisions based on emotion. Other religions
of the region had feminine deities which demanded obedience, and the Hebrew Scriptures
spent a lot of their time condemning those gods. The male Hebrew leaders spent
a lot of their time promoting the following of laws and fighting wars of
dominance.
There’s
a phrase I often use which I stole from the old British television series, “Rumpole
of the Bailey” and which they stole from H Ryder Haggard's book and later
movie, She. I use the phrase when I refer to my wife - “She who must be
obeyed!” I laugh - she doesn't, because
she has had more than enough patronizing by men covering up their fear of
strong women. The character, “She”, is an alluring monster, but what attracted
me to Pat was her strength and passion.
Part
of becoming whole human beings is for each of us to claim those parts of
ourselves that reflect the denied parts of ourselves - women to claim their
masculine and men to claim their feminine, the sensate to claim the intuitive, the
thinker to claim the feeler, and so on. So it is with God; a God of law and war
is one-dimensional and must be seen as also a God of love and peace. The
claiming of wisdom as an attribute of God is part of that grown-up view of God
for wisdom is not about following the rules, but about looking deeper into
ourselves to find what God might be whispering into our souls. Jesus has this
habit of quoting the law and then pointing out that the law was not enough, and
he urges us to go behind the law to find the love, to go beyond the usual and
to enter into life of the Spirit in order to claim what it means to be fully
human.
If
wisdom is an attribute of God, then the way we enter into wisdom is to listen
to the inner musings of God. Wisdom is not about following the rules or developing
our own talents, but about understanding how everything fits together through
the eyes and mind of God.
Last
week I was thinking about how I might make more money since this preaching gig
is not making me rich, and I thought about writing a play after I retire. I
realized it might take me years to write or as Browning reminds us, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his
grasp/or what a Heaven for?” I started blocking out how it might work. There is
a very popular musical in rap by Lin-Manuel Miranda on Broadway right now about
Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, and his rivalries with
others like Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Burr. There is even a song about
Hamilton debating Samuel Seabury, a minister who is a Loyalist to the British,
and winning the argument. Seabury will later become the first Bishop in the
American Episcopal Church. Hamilton’s song with Seabury has Hamilton exclaim:
“My dog speaks more/ eloquently than thee!” That is his paraphrase; let me read you what
Hamilton wrote in response to Seabury’s article on February 23, 1775:
I resume my pen, in reply to the
curious epistle you have been pleased to favor me with, and can assure you that
notwithstanding I am naturally of a grave and phlegmatic disposition, it has
been the source of abundant merriment to me. The spirit that breathes
throughout is so rancorous, illiberal, and imperious; the argumentative part of
it is so puerile and fallacious; the misrepresentation of facts so palpable and
flagrant; the criticisms so illiterate, trifling, and absurd; the conceits so
low, sterile, and splenetic, that I will venture to pronounce it one of the
most ludicrous performances which has been exhibited to public view during all
the present controversy.
I
started to think of how I could take historical figures and play on the tension
between them, and I thought of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Andrew
Mellon, who was Secretary of the Treasury before Roosevelt won the election. The
men hated each other and both of them were seen as wise men by their followers.
It might be a comment on how we see wisdom
in our culture.
You
may need more information on Andrew Melon. He was of the same generation of
Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin’s older cousin and Eleanor’s uncle. Melon was
Secretary of the Treasury under three Presidents from 1921 to 1932 and had been
hailed as the wisest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton.
Unlike
Hamilton, who was an illegitimate child who the Church of England would not
allow to be a member, you can see where the vitriol came from against Seabury,
a Church of England Minister. Both
Mellon and Roosevelt were born in good, well-off Episcopal families. They both were
born and moved in privileged circles and belonged to the right clubs. Both went
to college, and Roosevelt graduated from Harvard and went to Columbia Law, but
dropped out after he passed the Bar. He worked in corporate law before he went
into politics. Mellon went to a hometown college in Pittsburg but never
graduated because when he was 17, his father set him up as the head of a coal
and lumber business which he made a success. When he was 28, he took over
control of the family bank. Mellon was already a power in the economy when Roosevelt
was born. Roosevelt would never had heard of him because Franklin led a
sheltered life away people outside his own social circle until he married early
at 23 to get away from his mother’s influence, which he is never really able to
do. Mellon, on the other hand kept his focus on working and making money. When
he was 45, he married a beautiful young heiress 25 years his junior. She was an
heiress of Guinness Beer and part of Mellon's later job as Secretary of the
Treasury is to oversee the Prohibition enforcement, which I think would add a
nice scene in my play…
I
am thinking about another scene where Mellon is upset over Teddy Roosevelt’s
busting up the monopolies and trusts and Mellon being distrustful of the name
of Roosevelt. The outline of the first scene I have between Franklin and Mellon
is when Mellow is meeting with some lawyers and they decide to interview
Franklin, one of the young tony New York corporate lawyers, for a possible job.
In this time of their lives, both are married and there is a party of surface charm
between them, but Mellon is fed up with Franklin’s lack of sharpness about the
law, and Franklin makes a couple of comments about how he would not really be
sure he would be happy in faraway Pittsburg without his friends on the Hudson.
An argument ensues and in revenge, Franklin makes an only partially unsuccessful
pass at Mellon's wife. She tells Mellon, and so begins their mutual hatred.
Pure fiction of course, but fun.
Mellon
continued a phenomenal success as a banker and financier before he was
appointed Secretary of the Treasury with the election of Warren Harding.
Harding had overwhelmingly won the election against the ticket in which
Franklin Roosevelt, the Vice Presidential candidate, had been badly beaten. The
next year Franklin would come down with polio, which would put his future in
doubt, while Mellon is at the top of his game. Mellon pushes for loose
regulation over the stock market and is able to cut the highest income tax rate
from 77% to 24%. In the 1920's, he was the third highest income tax payer
behind John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford, and people saw his wealth and
declared him wise. His art collection would later form the core of the National
Gallery in Washington where I spend some of the best moments of my life appreciating
his taste in art. He was a well-known philanthropist and helped to build up
universities and charities.
He
was also the Secretary of the Treasury leading up to the Wall Street crash and
into the Great Depression. After the crash he was declared the worst Secretary
in American history, and hearings were held to have him impeached until Hoover
appointed him as Ambassador to the Court of St. James to save him that
humiliation. In the Depression, Roosevelt's allies held Mellon up as a
malefactor of wealth and remembered that he had been a member of the club that
owned the earthen dam that was allowed to be in such disrepair that its
collapse caused the Johnston Flood, killing over 2000 people. The families of
those killed could not sue the club because the club founders made sure that
the members were never foolish enough to be liable. His marriage to his young
wife had ended after 12 years with a bitter divorce after his wife's flagrant adulteries,
and Roosevelt’s Justice Department kept investigating Mellon for tax evasion
until he died. After his death it was announced that there really was no
evidence of tax evasion
In
their times both men were seen as wise, but I think they were clever, aware of
their own agendas, rather than wise. They were both very successful in their
fields of work but not in their personal intimacy. They were well-mannered and
charming and, for both of them, charm had a purpose. They went to church and
listened to preachers, but neither of them seemed to have time to do a lot of
listening to God. They didn't really seem to spend much time trying to figure
out what God would want; rather, their public words seem to suggest that being
a Christian meant that you ask God to help you in doing what you felt the
country needed and you wanted. They both loved and appreciated beauty. They
both worked for what they saw as the common good, and they were good at it.
In the final song of Hamilton, Washington raps:
Let me
tell you what I wished I known
When I
was young and dreamed of Glory
You
have no control
Who
lives
Who
dies
Who
tells your story.
I
think that they were like the rest of us who arise each day to capture fleet
glimpses of wisdom when we become fully human in the fullness of God’s vision of
living as God’s images on earth. In the play I see two redemptive scenes of
wisdom: The first is for Mellon, who stands before a piece of art which he loves
but knows he cannot buy, he cannot own. Yet it is in his inability to own it,
to control it, that he finds the greater awe. He makes a decision to give his
art collection to the National Gallery and refuses permission to name the
Gallery after him, for it is a gift and it no longer belongs to him. He sees
the divine wisdom that all of our gifts don’t really belong to us; they are to
be used for others. The other scene is for Roosevelt, when he has children with
polio with him at Warm Springs, and he finds the wisdom of joy even when he
cannot fix, he cannot control; he cannot use this for his own agenda, he can
only love.
I
am reminded of the second verse of Kipling’s poem Recessional
The
tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient
sacrifice,
…An humble and a contrite
heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with
us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we
forget!
The Wisdom of
Rivals
Hating in you what I dread seeing in
myself
You become villain mine own enemy worst.
I want be seen as priceless Dutch blue
delft
Yet you remain as a cracked mirror cursed.
Oh if you could only see me and I you
As God’s child showing full love true.
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