"Carry the Fire "

READING

"The Road" is Cormac McCarthy's bleak narrative of a post-apocalyptic world in which the people left compete with each other for survival. In this excerpt, a vigilant father keeps watch over his sleeping son. Their relationship is really all they have left.

 "With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.

"When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

"When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep. He'd pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets. He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.

"I'm right here.

"I know."

SERMON

Imagine that "a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions"[i] change everything about the world in an instant. The clocks stop, the lights go off, and all that is left is a weakening inchoate desire to live. Many choose to die. But some keep going, even though there is neither safety nor joy, only the bond between them.

A father and son roam this landscape for years, and in the time they have together the father teaches the son one lesson. "This is what the good guys do," says the father. "They keep trying. They don't give up."[ii] Even when they are starving.

Father and son live in a frightening world. People are desperate; they eat anything that moves. The difference between good guys and bad guys comes down to where you draw the line about that.

For the father, what is important is to stay on the good side of the line. Even if you are starving. He tells his son, this is what it means to "carry the fire."[iii] Fire is the goodness that one generation passes on to the next. In this stark environment, fire is elemental and essential to life, and so is goodness, but you must choose it; it is not given.

It's a harrowing story. We wouldn't want to live in the world McCarthy depicts, except that in a way, we already do. People in Sudan - and Iraq - are struggling from day to day without their homes, their villages, or their livelihoods. The alley behind my Santa Monica home is a thoroughfare for the lost and the hungry. It doesn't take an apocalypse to make a survivalist of any of us. Anything can strip us back to basics at any time.

I have an indelible memory of Wilshire Boulevard, the morning after the Northridge earthquake. I'd been living in Los Angeles for only six months; I didn't know what an earthquake was like. I came over to the church that morning to see the damage here.

Later on, I walked out to Wilshire looking for food. There wasn't any - at least not that I could see. Cleanup hadn't even begun, and stores weren't open. I saw a roof that had fallen in on a luxury car showroom, flattening a few cars. Broken glass was everywhere. It looked like the apocalypse had happened here.

Before I went home that day, I filled a bottle of water from our water dispenser. The water at home was not safe to drink, they said. I felt like a scavenger.

I can easily conjure up the strangeness I felt during the earthquake time. Yes, there was also great fellow-feeling and generosity. Church members who were lucky enough not to have damage at home came here to clean up together. It was a mess. They were a jolly crew.

Around the city, a phenomenon known as "earthquake love" caused people to talk to strangers, and ask each other how they were. Drivers yielded to each other at intersections, rediscovering both courtesy and caution. Many of us wished we could hold on to that way of life forever.

Beneath the surface friendliness and camaraderie, however, the earthquake triggered depression and anxiety. People suffered for months until their lives slowly returned to normal. Many of us were in "survival mode" for better and for worse.

So it is not too much of a stretch to picture Cormac McCarthy's world. Years of deprivation and isolation would bring out the worst in anybody. "There were times," McCarthy writes, "when [the father] sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn't about death. He wasn't sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all."[iv] Except by telling his son to carry the fire.

"Where is it?" the son asks. "I don't know where it is."

"Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it."[v]

An impossibly sad predicament - the near extinction of humanity - offers a glimpse of redemption. You can hold on to goodness. But it takes an act of will. What is left of it may be only a fragment, or a spark. It is the fire. Don't let it go out.

I read "The Road" in Egypt this summer. The days were so hot that after getting up early in the morning to look at the antiquities, there was nothing to do but go back to the hotel and cool down. It wasn't just because we were delicate southern Californians, unable to withstand extreme temperatures. The Egyptian Ministry of Health had issued a warning about the ultraviolet rays.

"You must not go walking outside," the doorman at our hotel told me my first day in Cairo. I was planning to explore the neighborhood. When I asked why, I expected to hear the worst - terrorists. But it was the sun.

So I read this book about people struggling to survive while I sat in an air conditioned room far from home, knowing full well that I couldn't last more than a few hours in the desert just steps away. It made McCarthy's scenario that much more believable. That brought me back to the basic questions about what my life and our community were really all about.

Whenever I go far away, I see the church in a new light. Just being in exotic surroundings is enough, but there is also the time to reflect on it without the immediacy or the emotional tug of its day to day life. This summer I asked myself why we needed the church anyway. There I was in a country where nobody knew anything about Unitarian Universalism, although I did valiantly try to explain it over tea one evening. It was as if we didn't exist - and that called into question why we ought to. So why do we do it? Coming to services on Sundays, keeping our volunteer commitments mixing it up with each other, giving our hard-earned money, spending precious time. We ask a lot of ourselves to keep all this going. I'm sure every one of us, including me, has asked, is it worth it? at one point or another.

I find the answer over and over again, and in various ways, but this summer I found it in "The Road." Why are we here? To carry the fire.

It takes intentionality to keep goodness alive in the world. Humanity can go either way - and does. If you want your children to live in a better world some day, teach them to carry the fire now. This congregation is a group of people who have decided to carry the fire together. We believe that you can create institutions, such as this one, to teach and sustain the values that nurture human goodness. And we do it on our own.

Just as McCarthy's post-apocalyptic world gives its struggling inhabitants no help with survival, we take nothing for granted either. The world would go on without us. But we care enough about it - and about ourselves - to hold on to goodness, to teach it and talk about it and live with it until the day we die. And when we die, others will carry the fire after us.

Survival is not the same thing as being alive, at least not fully alive. To be fully alive is to tend to our humanity. It is to nurture the bonds that bring out the goodness in each other. It is to see the fire in each other. It is to build communities to carry the fire together. Does it save us? Nothing saves us. That's what McCarthy makes us see. But it doesn't matter, as long as we have the ability to carry the fire for each other, in acts of tenderness and love. Our goodness can keep us safe.

As they are going to sleep one night, the child asks the father, "We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa? Yes. We are. And nothing bad is going to happen to us. That's right. Because we're carrying the fire. Yes. Because we're carrying the fire."[vi]

[i] Cormac McCarthy, "The Road" (New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 4-5
[ii] Ibid., p. 137
[iii] Ibid., p. 129
[iv] Id.
[v] Ibid., pp. 278-279
[vi] Ibid., p.83