About Face

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
	May 14, 2000

I had planned to talk today about motherhood, but something else came
up, and it came up right at the place where my mother's day sermon was
to be delivered from, which is also the location of most of the other
interaction between my inner self and the outer world, a location
which might be described by the word "interface," if that word were
not itself a derivation of the basic name for this mediating membrane,
this portal to the self.  I refer to my face.  Something happened to
my face, and I felt that not to address that this morning would not
only be distracting, but would also miss the opportunity for some
potentially useful reflection on the state of the human condition.
Not that motherhood is not important, or that mothers don't deserve a
lot of credit and honor; they do.  It's just that my attention has
been focused elsewhere.

It's worth taking a minute at the outset to consider the question in
general of what is worth preaching about.  The old school of ministry
education said that you never mention anything personal in your
sermons, you never preach about yourself or anyone you know.  In his
famous Divinity School Address of 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson complains
about a preacher of such a school:

I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to
church no more.  Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else
had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon.  A snowstorm was
falling around us.  The snow storm was real, the preacher merely
spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and
then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the
snow.  He had lived in vain.  He had no one word intimating that he
had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended or
cheated or chagrined.  If he had ever lived and acted, we were none
the wiser for it.  The capital secret of his profession, namely to
convert life into truth, he had not learned."

In my preaching I try to get as far as possible from this pole.  Maybe
sometimes I dwell too much on the matters of my own life.  You have
all heard, perhaps more than you want to of my children, my divorce,
my family history, my stories, my relationship with Jacqueline, my
plans, hopes and dreams.

If ministry is turning life into truth, as Emerson said, I have to
work with the life I have.  I can use examples from your lives or the
lives of great people, but the raw material is life, and my life is
the one that is closest to hand.

Now there are limits.  Not every issue that I wrestle with is
appropriate for preaching.  The point of the ministry is not to
benefit me but to benefit you.  Conventional wisdom is that you don't
preach about anything that you're still talking about with your
therapist.  This generalization, like any generalization, has a kernel
of truth but is hard to apply in practice, for indeed most issues of
interest get cycled and recycled through the therapy conversation and
to rule all subject of that conversation off-limits for preaching
would be to impoverish the preaching.  A better test is, who is this
good for?  If delving into a subject is most basically to aid the
preacher, then it's not worthy of preaching.  But if lessons can be
drawn out of the preacher's own experience that may give insight,
wisdom, comfort or inspiration to those in the pews, if the cogs of
the minister's own human predicament might turn some gears in the
lives of the parishioners, it's worth doing.

By this light, it is still questionable whether I should preach on
what happened to my face, for in fact the odds are pretty good that
this specific syndrome will not happen to any of you in your
lifetimes.  But my hope is that in this experience I can paint the
outlines of something larger.

With this introduction, let me get to the basic story.  On the morning
of Tuesday May 2, I woke up and saw that the right half of my face had
quit looking like the left half.  It basically sagged, and I had no
power to make it do anything.  I couldn't grin on my right side, blink
my right eye, whistle or spit.

My first thought, and worst fear was stroke.  Just the previous day I
had been calculating and figured that I was now a year older than my
father had been when he had the stroke that drastically affected the
rest of his life and led to an early death by his own hand.  If I was
having a stroke, maybe this was fate's way of punishing me for
gloating the day before about my escape from my father's fate.

However, as soon as I reached the emergency room at Mt.  Auburn
Hospital, the assured me that it wasn't a stroke.  It was a condition
called Bell's palsy, which is an inflammation of a certain nerve,
called cranial nerve seven.  Poetic name, don't you think?  Old
cranial seven works like this:  it starts at the base of the skull,
comes through the skull and out the cheekbone into the face about
here, and it controls the muscles of one whole side of the face.  So
my brain has lost its messenger, and can no longer tell my facial
muscles to smile, frown, blink etc.

Most people stricken with Bell's palsy recover completely in a few
weeks or months.  Some never recover.  A very few recover and then
have relapses.

Nobody knows what causes it.  One school of thought says it's brought
on by wind on the cheek.  Modern medical thinking tends to suspect a
virus, like herpes.  In the week I've had it I've accumulated a lot of
folk wisdom about it, and the folk wisdom is that it is brought on by
stress.

That certainly would ring true for me.  Some of you have pointed out
how common it is for people to come down with stress-related
conditions in the time leading up to their wedding.  It is almost as
if all the trials of the marriage are prefigured in the time just
before it officially begins.  But beside the wedding, in the week
before I came down with this, I had the stress of planning and
carrying off my first Easter service (a sort of theological high-wire
act for a UU minister), the landlord's major renovations to our
apartment on one days' notice, a major new criminal case at the law
office, and planning and carrying out our church's first May Day
celebration.  On top of all that, having preached the existential
necessity of dancing in the face of death, I insisted on practicing
what I preached, getting up at 5:30 on May 1 to bring in the summer in
true pagan fashion on the banks of the Charles with 300 of my nearest
friends, and spent the rest of that morning in revelry.

Perhaps fate had listened to my sermon and decided to give me a little
taste of the face of death to go with my dancing.  I certainly had
some wind on my cheeks that day, and perhaps I picked up a virus as
well.  But I'm less interested in what caused this condition than I am
in how it has made me think about my face.

We all probably learned this limerick as children:

For beauty I was never a star, There are others more handsome by far,
But my face I don't mind it For I am behind it, It's the people in
front that I jar.

But this is not true; it puts too brave a face on the situation.  What
has surprised me is how much I do mind it that my face is not
symmetrical.  The fist Thursday after office hours I was planning to
take a walk around the lake, but I got out on the street and decided
in my usual dressed-down mode and this oddity of my countenance I just
looked too much like a bum to be a proper representative of this
church on the most public promenade in town, so I went around the
block and came back to the office.

The condition, in other words, was introducing me to my vanity, in a
negative way.  I decided to go ahead with the planned trip to
Washington to accompany Jacquleine on several music and dance events.
On Sunday, I was at a small private folk dance, meeting a lot of new
people.  I found myself explaining to everyone I met within the first
30 seconds about my Bell's palsy.  I would say something like, "look,
I don't want you to think I'm frowning at you, I have this condition
of my face that I hope is temporary."

I had gotten the idea from a lawyer in my office who said that he had
met the actor Ed Asner at a party in Brookline when Asner had been
stricken with Bell's and this was the rap that Asner was giving
everyone.

Well, it's one thing for that talk to come from someone who is already
a celebrity, whom everyone will be curious about.  It was quite
something else for me to be volunteering this information in the same
breath as my name.  I started to wonder where that was coming from.

I decided that it came basically from my fear, and it was an attempt
to reassure myself by reassuring other people that I was basically
"normal" despite temporary appearances to the contrary.  Now "normal"
is a very loaded word.  I have a relative, a militant gay activist,
who holds that "normal" is the most destructive word in the English
language.  It certainly can be used to establish a tyranny of the
majority over anyone who is different, as it has been used against
gays.

At its root, the concept of "normal" points the way to deep fears.  We
all yearn to be accepted in social life, and one of the deepest fears
we can have is that we are somehow out of step.  The very definition
of shame, as I laid it out in a sermon a few weeks ago, is the
question "what's wrong with me?"

I know all this intellectually, but I realized after the experience at
that party that the fear had me quite firmly in its grip.  There was
quite visibly something "wrong with me," and I had this urge to shout
it down, to say, "please understand, I'm really normal like you."

At the same time, I realized that I had been trying to make my face do
what it didn't want to do anymore.  In English dancing, part of the
refinement of the dance is eye contact and face expression.  The
dances for the most part are gentle and graceful, and the facial
interaction is a large piece of the pleasure.  So I found myself
trying to make up for the immobile right side of my face by smiling
even larger with the left.  Jacqueline pointed out that this gave me a
cockeyed look which was much stranger and more off-putting than if I
let both sides relax.

So on the last two dances, Monday and Wednesday night, I adopted a
different strategy.  I didn't talk about my palsy, and I didn't try to
make faces.  I felt a lot more relaxed, and I think the others did
too.  And it didn't really matter whether they wondered about whether
something was wrong with me.  If they were curious enough, they could
ask.  I didn't owe them any explanation.  I didn't owe me any
explanation.

Now another piece of this whole experience for me is how something
like this brings out the best in everyone you know.  I have been
overwhelmed with love from this congregation, from my friends and
family.  I have gotten phone calls out of the blue, e-mails galore,
and even a post card or two.  Everyone who knows someone who had
Bell's palsy has given me all the details, so I've heard stories about
the many who recover as well as the few who don't.  One woman came up
to me at a dance and, smiling broadly and symmetrically, told me that
she had come down with it in early March and look at her now.  That
was quite comforting.

One of you responded to the news by going right out on the Internet
and getting information, which convinced me to discard the dashing
black eye patch that I had bought and try some other means of keeping
my eye moist.  Others have offered their own wisdom or advice.

Jacqueline and mine will be a mixed marriage, since she puts her basic
faith in what are loosely termed alternative remedies where I look
first to Western medicine to cure conditions such as this.  I
submitted to a course of steroids and antiviral crugs even though
there is no assurance that this will actually improve the chances of
healing or speed the process, and even though it meant I had to give
up alcohol for 10 days.  But I am open to other possibilities, and if
the condition hasn't cleared by this Tuesday I am going to see
Jacqueline's acupuncturist to see what she can do for me.

The most amusing advice I got was from my dentist, a Pakistani woman
who tells me that Bell's palsy is quite common in Pakistan.  My
dentist consulted her mother, a traditional herbalist who happened to
be visiting, and her mother recommended that I procure a wild pigeon
and cook it up in a stew.  After consuming the pigeon stew, I was to
stand in front of a mirror willing my paralyzed mouth to move until it
did.  I filed this remedy away for use if all else fails.

In short, this condition has allowed me connections to other people
that I wouldn't have had otherwise, and the blessing of these
connections will far outweigh the irritations of the condition if it
proves temporary.  And it should not be a surprise to me that a
condition of the face allows these connections, for the face is
itself, as I said at the beginning, our most powerful connection
between our inner and outer selves.  I have preached at least four
sermons in my ministerial career having to do with faces, the last of
them two weeks ago.  We recognize the centrality of faces in some of
our expressions; if there is something problematic in our relationship
with another person, we don't know whether we can face them.  It takes
courage to face the music, to face our responsibilities, to face the
facts.  If we are dishonored or embarrassed we may say we lose face.

The passage from Isaiah that I read this morning, which I also chose
to be read at my ordination, is the last theophany, or appearance of
God, in the Hebrew Bible.  What is not stated in the passage but is
clear in the commentary is that there was a strong idea in Judaism of
the time that if one ever saw the face of God, one would perish
immediately.  In order to be admitted to the Holy of Holies in the
temple once a year, the high priest had to go through an elaborate
ritual of purification, and in the passage, the prophet wails that he
is certainly doomed because he is in the presence of the Lord without
going through the purification:  "Woe is me!  I am lost, for I am a
man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my
eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts."  But the prophet is
saved, and the way he is saved forms one of the most arresting images
in the Bible:  one of the angels carries a burning coal in a set of
tongs, and touches the prophet's lips with it.  With this adjustment
of his face, the prophet is ready to be enlisted in the service of God
to deliver the divine words to the people.

Now I'm not saying I'm a prophet, or that this palsy is the equivalent
of having my lips touched with a burning coal.  But it is my hope that
this experience has yielded some religious insights.  This is why I am
preaching to you about these things.

Moreover, the fact that the face of God is so powerful in religious
imagination can be seen as a reflection of human psychology, and here
we can touch on a Mother's day theme.  For the first object of sight
of which any of us becomes conscious, the first object which has any
coherence amid the bloomin' buzzin' confusion of the first weeks of
life, is the face of our mother, or other caregiver.  We learn quickly
that that face is associated with pleasant things like food and warmth
and changing of diapers.  Later, we learn to read that face, to find
out whether it is conveying pleasure or pain, approval or disapproval,
welcome or prohibition.  Later still, we will learn to read all other
faces in this way, and will learn to use our own faces to communicate
information of such complexity that I'll bet they haven't even started
working on a computer program to try to duplicate it.

Think about the difference between a chat with a friend face to face
and a chat on e-mail or telephone.  The voice on the phone conveys
more emotion than the cold words on e-mail, but neither of them holds
a candle to the face.  The face is the window of the personality.

So this impairment, which I certainly hope will be temporary, has
given me a new appreciation for the miraculous organ we call the face.
It has also taught me that symmetry is overrated, that my own vanity
can get in the way of connecting with people, and that a lopsided
countenance can lead to a new perspective on the world.  I even admit
the possibility that it may be trying to teach me to slow down -
remember that old saying, "death is nature's way of telling you to
slow down"?  It may be saying I've been trying to keep too many balls
in the air and I need to figure out a way to put some of them down.

Now I don't want to sound like a Pollyanna.  It's not been peaches and
cream.  Let's face it, this condition is a drag.  I wouldn't wish it
on any of you, but I hope that whatever greater or lesser suffering
you may have to face in your life, you can pay close attention in your
own way, to what it may be able to teach you.

Amen.