The ‘Peter Martin’ in Us

“Beats and Beatitudes”

3. The ‘Peter Martin’ in Us

Matthew 5:1-16

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

July 6, 2008

The “Beats” of the 1950s got into trouble with some of the people of their day because they refused to give their country, our country, a free moral pass. They called their country, our country, to account for its deeds and were not at all hesitant to point out actions they believed to be morally, ethically, or socially vacuous. Because they were not willing to conform to someone else’s definition of what it meant to be a good American, and because they were not willing to acquiesce to the idolatrous melding of God and Country, they got labeled by some, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and others, as anti-Americans.

The prophets of ancient Israel had the same problem, of course. Any time the prophets dared to chastise their own nation for actions of dubious morality, they were subjected to venomous vitriol and hateful harangue spewed by those who thought the prophets unpatriotic. Those who could not abide the prophets did not understand that God will not be mocked and that being an uncritical lover of one’s country is tantamount to signing its death warrant. Empires built with the bricks of arrogance and the arrogation of power eventually, but always, collapse which is why, according to the Bible, that the truest patriots are never the ones who wave their nation’s flag the highest but who call it into complicity and compliance with the God who loves the world that has many different families in it, all of whom God favors and adores.

Sixty years ago, Jack Kerouac, who generally is regarded as the “father” of the beat generation, said that “In America , there is a claw hanging over our brains that must be pushed aside, else it will clutch and strangle our true selves.” (1) I engaged on the 4^th of July in a conversation, if you could call it that, with a couple of very smart people who updated the fearmongering phrase of the 1950s, godlesscommunists, always spoken as one word, to islamicterrorists, and who insisted vociferously and vehemently that “they want to kill your children” and therefore the United States is justified in doing anything, taking any action, to quash and quell that heinous threat.

In the midst of such wild claims and presumption, it seems to me imperative for us, as a nation-state and as citizens in it, to cultivate and to grow our spiritual natures lest, as Jesus said, “we gain the world but lose our soul.” I do deeply believe that “loss of soul” is the greatest danger presently facing America and, in these perilous and anxious times, the greatest threat to our own well-being. The Beats were seeking to restore and to nurture “soul” – their country’s and their own – and we do well to do similarly. As I said last week, the “beats” in their own ways were seeking a beatific life – trying to love all life, practicing kindness, endurance of heart, hope, justice. There was a soulfulness to beat culture reminiscent of the beatitudes, the beat-i -tudes of Jesus, who insisted it is

the poor in spirit who are blessed…

those who mourn who are blessed…

the meek who are blessed…

those who hunger and thirst for righteousness who are blessed…

the merciful who are blessed…

the pure in heart who are blessed…

the peacemakers who are blessed…

those who are persecuted for their loyalty to God’s way of life who are blessed…

Today we embark on a closer look at the beat-i-tudes and begin, fittingly, with the first of the beat-i-tudes of Jesus: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…”

Early in his novel called The Town and the City, author Jack Kerouac introduces us to the central character of the book, a young man by the name of Peter Martin, who also represents Kerouac’s own persona. The town in the story Kerouac names Galloway and is modeled on Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell , Massachusetts . The city in the story is New York . Much of the book revolves around the often stormy, but nevertheless loving, relationship between Peter and his father, George Martin. Peter loves Galloway but finds he no longer can live there, just as he loves his father but still has to leave the Martin household. He goes to live in New York City where he finds a life for himself within a close circle of friends.

But Peter is restless wherever he is. He needs both the town and the city, but cannot remain long in either one. Near the end of the novel, George Martin, Peter’s father, dies and is buried in the family plot in a small town in New Hampshire . With his father dead now, and freed from his father’s expectations, Peter Martin sets out on his own, still seeking and searching. The book says it this way:

Peter was alone in the rainy night. He was on the road again,

traveling the continent westward, going off to further and further

years, alone by the waters of life…looking down along the shore

in remembrance of the dearness of his father and all of life…

When the railroad trains moaned, and river-winds blew, bringing

echoes through the vale, it was as if a wild hum of voices, the

dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: “Peter, Peter,

where are you going, Peter?”

Through Peter Martin, Kerouac tells of his ongoing spiritual struggle, his need for a sense of place, and yet his competing need to hear and to respond to the call of the unknown. Kerouac intends for Peter Martin to be any person of any age who finds himself or herself twisting between the need both for roots that the town represents and wings, represented by the city. Stephen Edington, who writes about Peter Martin in his book entitled The Beat Face of God says of himself, “Even in the sixth decade of my life, I have not ceased being Peter Martin. I still move between the town and the city: the security and predictability of the town, the adventure and open-endedness of the city, and the call of mystery and the unknown. These are components of any journey of the spirit.” (1)

It is my contention that what Jesus means by being poor in spirit is coming to know and to embrace the Peter Martin in us, and that holds true whether we are talking about our own lives or our nation’s. It means letting go of an all-planned-out-in-advance life. It means living serially while foregoing certainty. By living serially, I mean that we have regularly to be asking ourselves, “Tom, Tom, where are you going, Tom?” (filling in your own name, of course.) In an election year, Peter Martin reminds us that our country also is at its best not when it engages the world dogmatically or doctrinally, but when it routinely ponders the question, “ America , America , where are you going, America ?”

Being poor in spirit means being available moment by moment to respond to the Spirit’s call in and on our lives even when that call may ask us to defy custom and our own and other peoples’ expectations. Being poor in spirit requires a willingness in us to venture into places and circumstances we never imagined ourselves going, but going anyway if the Spirit so beckons us. Being poor in spirit means considering the needs of others in addition to our own, and the effect on others, of our desires and actions. Being poor in spirit means trusting God whom we cannot see more than we trust the apparent appearances of things right in front of our eyes and the conventional wisdom in the forefront of our minds for, as Paul says, “…what we can see is temporary and is passing away, while what we cannot immediately see is eternal.” Being poor in spirit means allowing the ways and means of God to usurp in us the pomposity of pride and prejudice.

Jesus often asked himself, “Jesus, Jesus, where are you going, Jesus? Are you going simply to follow the lead of popular opinion or the path of least resistance or the way of self-interest? Or am I going to take “the road less traveled by,” the one on which I decide to “love my perceived enemies” and to “do to others as I would have them do to me” and to “extract the log from my own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else’s”? Am I going to demonize those who are different from me and my group, those who are called outcasts, sinners, and evil-doers, or am I going to go to dinner with them and talk to them and seek to understand more than to be understood? Am I more afraid of losing face than losing my soul?”

The way Jesus answered those questions is the reason we still gather in his name two millennia later. The way he embodied his answers in his life and living are what we have come to identify with the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a prolific “beat” writer, still writing, whose twin poems entitled “Dragon’s Teeth” and “Speak Out!” that he wrote at the beginning of the war with Iraq still stand, in my opinion, as the quintessential indictment of it but are, perhaps, a little impertinent for a 4^th of July weekend sermon in church. His books of poetry have sold over a million copies. He has a poem called Christ Climbed Down that appears in his collection called A Coney Island of the Mind. It goes, in part, like this:

Christ climbed down

from His bare Tree

this year

and softly stole away into

some anonymous Mary’s womb again

where in the darkest night

of everybody’s anonymous soul

He waits again

an unimaginable

and impossibly

Immaculate Reconception

the very craziest

of second comings.

The idea that the second coming of the Christ is the rebirth of the spirit of Christ “in everybody’s anonymous soul” right now rather than some cosmic and cataclysmic event denoting the end of the world is at the heart of the first beat-i-tude. The Peter Martin in us has us asking of our own lives, “Tom, Tom, where are you going, Tom?” and of our nation’s, “ America , America , where are you going, America ?” The answer, I suggest, is: wherever the Christ of God is leading us. And, if we allow them to, Jesus, the “beats,” and the beat-i-tudes will be our spirit guides along the way…home.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Amen.

(1) Stephen D. Edington, The Beat Face of God, Trafford Publishing Company, 2006.

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