"How Ya Doin', Sunshine?: Friends as Cheerleaders"

Rev. Tony Lorenzen

First Parish Church in Weston, MA

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Copyright, © Tony Lorenzen, 2007

Lesson: Ruth 1:6-18

Gospel: Mark 1:4-8

Responsive Reading: Isaiah 40:1-8

Minister: Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

People: and cry to her that she has served her term,

That her penalty is paid,

That she has received from the Lord's hand

double for all her sins.

Minister: A voice cries out:

"In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,

make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

People: Every valley shall be lifted up,

and every mountain and hill be made low;

the uneven ground shall become level,

and the rough places a plain.

Minister: Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,

And all people shall see it together,

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken."

People: A voice says, "Cry out!"

And I said, "What shall I cry?"

Minister: All people are grass,

their constancy is like the flower of the field.

The grass withers, the flower fades,

when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;

People: Surely the people are grass.

The grass withers, the flower fades;

but the word of our God will stand forever.

"How ya doin', Sunshine?" She asked me every morning as I walked past the open door of her classroom on the way to mine. She was twenty-two, just out of college and in her first year of teaching and I was a grizzled veteran of thirty-six in my eighth year. We were colleagues in the Theology Department of a small inner-city Catholic high school. It wasn't a fancy B.C. High type prep school -- it was a tough place, but good kids. We both loved it, although it could be trying. And starting the day at 7:30 made it even more so. I do not drink coffee, at least not the high-test kind with caffeine. So, her daily "How ya-doin', Sunshine," was my morning cup of joe. It was her tone as much as the word sunshine that did it. Every day her voice asked this question in a manner that said, "and I really want an answer." Her voice had a quality to it that demanded more attention than just any other twenty-two year old rookie. Maybe because being a two-time cancer survivor adds a quality to your voice that others can't pinpoint, but can feel, and feel compelled to answer, even at 7:30 in the morning. And every morning, more or less, I answered and we cheered each other on.

This is the second in a four part series on friendship as a spiritual calling based on the work of Pastoral Psychologist Robert J. Wicks. Wick writes that friends play four basic spiritual roles or speak with four spiritual voices in our lives. He calls these roles or voices the Harasser, the Cheerleader, the Prophet and the Spiritual Guide. These names are generally self-descriptive. Last week I spoke about Harassers -- friends who positively harass us, or harass us back when we get too full of ourselves, calling us to true humility. Next week I will of speak friends as Prophets -- the friends who call our attention to what we need to see and hear about ourselves, but don't want to see and hear. I'll finish in two weeks by discussing friends as Spiritual Guides. These are friends who call us to holiness by reminding us of our deepest beliefs, pointing a way out of darkness and towards light. This morning I will speak about Cheerleaders -- friends that prop us up, encourage us, tell us we're o.k. and cheer us on.

In Chapter VIII of The House at Pooh Corner, "In Which Piglet Does a Very Grand Thing", Pooh and Piglet go off to wish every one a very happy Thursday because, well, Pooh's that sort of bear and that's a cheerleader-type-of-friend thing to do. While visiting Owl, a great gust of wind blows Owl's house over, and they can't get out by the front door because something's fallen on it.

Finally Pooh says to Owl, "That it just might be helpful if you tied a piece of string to Piglet and you flew up to the letter-box with the other end in your beak, and you pushed it through the wire and brought it down to the floor, and you and Pooh pulled hard at this end and Piglet went slowly up at the other end."

Piglet worries about the string breaking.

"This was not very comforting to Piglet, because however many pieces of string they tried pulling up with, it would always end with him coming down ..."

"It won't break," whispered Pooh comfortingly, "because you're a Small Animal, and I'll stand underneath, and if you save us all, it will be a Very Grand Thing to talk about afterwards and perhaps I'll make up a song."

Piglet felt much better after this.

"Up we go!" said Pooh cheerfully.

Of course the plan succeeded. [1] Piglet's Cheerleader friend Pooh had helped him muster the courage of a very large animal once again.

Ruth the Moabite would have liked Piglet and Pooh. She understood the role of the Cheerleader. After all her name comes from an ancient Akkadian root word meaning friend or companion.

When Naomi is left without a husband and without sons, her daughter-in-law Ruth becomes her Cheerleader and says to her:

"Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you stay, I will stay.

Your people will be my people" -- remember Ruth is a foreigner, a Moabite, not an Israelite -- "and Your God will be my God."

Ruth leaves no doubt that Naomi need not worry about being left alone in the world. Noble enough in our day, but in their time for woman to be without a husband or sons or male relatives was truly to be cast adrift at sea. Naomi was -- and Ruth jumped on the raft.

But friends do that, especially Cheerleaders. First they tell us there will be a raft -- "heck, we'll build one if necessary," says the Cheerleader, and then they jump on it with us and keep our spirits up until the raft is rescued by a passing boat. That's the role they play in our lives. Thank God for them. Just as the Harassing voices in our lives keep us from getting too full of ourselves, the Cheerleaders in our lives keep us from getting too down on ourselves or too down about ourselves.

Robert Wicks points to student athletics as the place to really get a hold on the idea of the friend as Cheerleader in his book A Circle of Friends. He speaks of watching the cheerleaders at a college basketball game and being struck by three things: 1. They always smile, even when the home team is down 40 points, 2. They do tricks such as somersaults and back flips -- anything that works to get you to pay attention, and 3. They're really good at getting you to repeat what they say, Gimme a W ... same thing as "you know you're a good person, don't you?" [2]

I like this analogy. As a person who spent almost a decade as a high school teacher I even want to extend it a bit. The Cheerleaders in our lives have much more in common with scholastic cheerleaders than with say the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Nothing against these folks, but they're professionals. A childhood friend of mine was a New England Patriots Cheerleader for a while. I'll wager she was much more invested in the game when she cheered for her high school squad.

Not only does the smile and energy not diminish from the high school cheerleader, that cheerleader is invested in the game. The high school cheerleader knows the players and also doesn't have to be super-model pretty to get the job.

Wicks is cognizant of the fact that Cheerleaders who only cheer for champions and never know defeat need to be balanced by other voices, but so do other voices need to be balanced by our Cheerleaders. "Some might say that to encourage this type of friend," Wicks writes of the Cheerleader, "is to run the risk of narcissism and denial. However, to balance the prophetic voices and to let us see the reflection of the loving face of God more readily in the world, we also need unabashed, enthusiastic, unconditional, acceptance by certain people in our lives." [3]

After all, you can only be harassed, even positively, so much, and prophets are cool, but not all the time. We need all the voices of friendship to help us on our pilgrimage through life. On my pilgrimage, I have been fortunate to run into a great Cheerleading squad.

I met Margarita Delgado while working for New England Farm Worker's Council. I was running an after-school tutoring program for 8th graders in Fitchburg, MA learning to speak English called the English Institute. Margarita, co-captain of my Cheerleading Squad, was the guidance counselor in the junior high school.

Part of my job involved recruiting students to be involved in the program. I'd need help. I knocked on her office door.

"Ola!"

"Ola. Mi espanol no es bueno, pero espero mi entiendes. Me llamo Tony. Soy el nuevo professor de insitituto ingles."

"Ah, muy bien."

She went on for about ten minutes. To this day, I have no idea what she said to me. At some point I had to interject and say in English that my Spanish wasn't that good.

"Nonsense," she told me, "you did just fine. And the kids will appreciate that you try. They will also make fun of you. Mercilessly."

Great.

Margarita helped me recruit students and translate forms and she kept my spirits up when kids dropped out. She encouraged me to attend meetings of Latino parents at the high school. She taught me about Asian cultures. She listened to my dismay and anger and kept me going when a gang invaded our program space in the basement of a church. Years later she wrote a letter of recommendation for me to the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the UUA and did a reading at my ordination, cheering all the way from her seat in the front pew.

I would not be preaching today without mi amiga Margarita. It's not just nice that she's been part of my life, in a very real way, it's been required. Robert Wicks puts it this way: "So while having buoyantly supportive friends may seem like a luxury, make no mistake about it, it is a necessity that is not to be taken lightly." [4]

Nowhere in our friendships is the adage "to have a friend you must be one" more true than it is with the role or voice of the Cheerleader. No matter how positive a person our Cheerleaders are, if you can't return the favor, the pom-poms will eventually be put away. If the cheering section isn't cheering, the cheerleaders move on to another section of the bleachers. "Warm friends ... remind us in the words of Paul Tillich, that faith is best defined as the courage to accept acceptance." [5]

When I worked as executive director of Family Lifeline Volunteers, an independent affiliate of the Little Sisters of the Assumption, an order of Catholic women religious, the program had one other employee, my administrative assistant, Sister Adell Harvey. Sr. Adell, or Frances as her friends call her, is one of the most quiet and shy -- strike that -- IS the most quiet and shy person I have ever met. Frances and I got along well from the start, but I had no idea -- and I mean no idea -- what a cheerleader I was to her. I brought her flowers and vegetables from my garden. I encouraged her and helped her as she learned computers and applied for a second part-time job. I took her out to lunch once a week -- it was our staff meeting -- a salad, a slice of pizza, a sandwich and a brief walk in the park near our office. I thought I was doing my job. She was helping me with a lot of work and lot of it taking up a lot of hours for which she wasn't getting paid or recognized by her religious order. She deserved to know she was appreciated and to have her contribution recognized. Sometimes you never know that no one else is speaking with the Cheerleader's voice in someone's life or how much it might be appreciated.

Frances and I only worked together for one year, but we've remained each other's Cheerleaders. Notes, cards, emails, small gifts that say God loves you and so do I. I love sunflowers. Frances wanted me to have sunflowers all the time in my ministry, so she gave me these.

My favorite Cheerleader of all time is probably Sam Gamgee in the Lord of the Rings. Frodo knows what he's getting into when he accepts the task of taking the great ring of power, the One Ring, into the heart of the The Dark Lord Sauron's land of Mordor in an attempt to destroy it by casting it back into the fires of Mt. Doom where it was forged long ago. He knows he may very well die in the attempt and that the longer he possesses the ring, the more it will possess him, making it harder to give up the ring and thus making his task more difficult. And there's his oldest friend Sam at his side. Putting his life on the line to save him. Encouraging him when he just can't go on, literally carrying Frodo on his back when the evil weight of the ring, physically and psycho-spiritually makes it too much for Frodo to go on. That's a Cheerleader!

How many of us have had one in our lives? Who among us has been such a person? The person who calls you in the morning to make sure you're out of bed and the kids are off to school and you're off to work because the Dark Lord of divorce, or the death of a family member, or illness or debt has you feeling like an evil spell won't let you get out of bed in the morning? The person who calls you at work and at supper time telling you that you will get through this and reminds you to make and/or keep an appointment with the pastor and/or the counselor and/or the doctor and then listens to you cry for God knows how long before telling you how wonderful you are for a half hour. The person who kindly smiles or gives you a hug at any mere mention of how you'll repay any of this kindness because the pom-poms just come with the job. Yeah, being a friend is a sacred calling, a holy office. No one ordains you or lays hands you on you or even gives you a team uniform and megaphone -- but they should. Yeah, you've got a friend, don't you know it. You'd better believe it.

And by the way, Sunshine -- You CAN do it. You WILL be okay. And You ARE a wonderful person -- Each one of you.

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[1] Milne, A. A., The House at Pooh Corner, pp. 279-283.

[2] Wicks, Robert J., A Circle of Friends, pp. 61-62.

[3] Wicks, Robert J., A Circle of Friends, pp. 62-63.

[4] Wicks, Robert J., A Circle of Friends, p. 68.

[5] Wicks, Robert J., A Circle of Friends, p. 69.