YESTERDAY’S NEWS

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

August 6, 2006

SERMON

It amuses me now to recall that when I was asked once by a student in a friend’s college journalism class why I got into newspaper work I turned, of all places, to a quote that popped into my head from the Bible. I couldn’t have given you the citation then, though I know it now: John, chapter 8, verse 32. “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

I entered journalism, like ministry, later than most. Having left college with a philosophy degree and tried out enough graduate school in the field to salvage a master’s degree, I returned to my parents’ home, unsure what I wanted to do, but knowing that I felt stifled in the cloister of a college library.

Journalism emerged as a passion for me like one of those tropical diseases that begin with the bite of a bug so small you can hardly see it and before you know it has consumed your body in a raging fever. I was curious about newspaper work and the biweekly in my home town was always on the look-out for free-lancers. So, I suggested a couple of stories to the editor. He said he’d be willing to give them a look, and I was off.

There may be someone in the world who is not at least in some small way thrilled to see their name in print, though I haven’t met that person yet. And to see your name as a by-line: Well, I don’t want to draw invidious comparisons, but it’s pretty good stuff. So, let’s put that on the table and acknowledge the ego gratification that at some level drives every writer.

But I’ll also say that if that’s all that drives you, it won’t get you far. No, there’s something deeper. I won’t claim to speak for others, but for me it was a way to come to terms with the world, with the interweaving of joy and woe and our place in it, to take in what is, however it may come to us, as truly, as accurately, as faithfully as possible and give it context, seek out its meaning, and weave a story that opens the way for sympathy and understanding.

I had my first glimpse of the realities of life as a journalist at a graduate program in journalism at Columbia University in New York City. I’ve heard the program described as a kind of boot camp, and in many ways it was. I got experience chasing fire trucks down the canyons of Manhattan, frantically trying to stick a microphone into a sea of reporters surrounding a DA leaving a courtroom, holding a camera to photograph the grandmother of a murder victim and getting elbowed out of the way by TV cameramen. There were also more high profile opportunities, like joining a presidential press conference or listening in on debates at the United Nations. Then, after struggling over how to tell all that I’d seen, receiving back the story that I had written covered with red marks and the kind of tough questions you heard from David Tucker in our reading.

There is a kind of leathery hide that one grows in this work to endure the endless peppering of editors’ questions, a product of the drive for speed, the press of daily deadlines, and the demand for the truth. Nearly every reporter I know has had experience that resonates with the motto of the one-time City News Service of Chicago: “Your mother says she loves you. Check it out.”

School, of course, was one thing. Daily newspaper journalism was something altogether different. Arriving at my first job in Charleston, West Virginia, I spent the first few weeks chasing random assignments the city editor came up with until one evening when the managing editor approached me with a project. The editor’s buddy, who happened to be the chief justice of the state supreme court, had come over to interest the editor in his latest campaign: keeping teenagers out of adult jails. A boy had recently hanged himself in the jail and the justice decided to go over to there with media in tow to express his outrage.

So, a photographer and I were assigned to walk over to the jail with the chief justice and his aide. He was a flamboyant type, making broad jokes with us until we reached an anteroom to the jail. The justice announced to the jailers that he wanted to enter the jail. His idea was that we would accompany him to the cell where the boy had died and he would say something dramatic about what a terrible shame it was. The jailers, though, weren’t about to play ball. They insisted that the justice wait and called the sheriff, who, as you might guess, was no friend of the justice.

We waited awhile until the deputies emerged again to say that the justice would have to wait until the sheriff came. The justice, though, didn’t intend to wait. He pushed forward, beckoning to the photographer and me to follow. We were astonished, though, when he and the deputies started to tussle. With the photographer’s motor drive snapping off photos as fast as it could, we watched the deputies physically haul the chief justice into the jail. The struggle continued after they entered and through the tiny window to the jail I could see a deputy pound the chief justice with his fist while others held him.

It was quite an introduction to West Virginia politics, and needless to say gave me my first big page 1 byline. It probably won’t surprise you to learn, though, that after a lot of legal back and forth the episode ended with charges dropped against all parties involved in the struggle. Close contact with the machinations of government teaches who and what drive it: whose concerns are answered and whose are ignored, and what gets worked out behind closed doors.

There is good reason for the cynicism that people attribute to journalists. After all, they get a ringside seat to some of the worst scheming, lies and foibles of which humans are capable. And yet, one doesn’t stay in the work for long without some sense that there is a better way to be. The best journalists I know are distinguished by personal integrity and a strong moral core. They live with a commitment to the craft, to getting it right, getting it fair, in no one’s pocket, on no one’s side.

Reporting gives you a window on people’s lives, their strengths and weaknesses, their wisdom and folly, and the blessings and tragedies that attend their lives. And so I came to know the West Virginia man whose right arm was torn off by a continuous mining machine and won a $4 million judgment, only to be shot to death in a bar fight; and, on the other side, the man who surprised his family by giving up plans for a career in accounting to take a shot as a junior high school math teacher.

The deeper you look at the world, though, the more you see systems at play, systems that frustrate the mightiest efforts for social change. In West Virginia, for example, I followed a lawsuit that sought to equalize the vast disparity in funding of public schools. It was a system where the high school in the wealthiest county was able to boast shining new computer labs and a radio station, while elementary schools elsewhere were serviced by outhouses.

I crowed at getting the tip that gave me a page 1 story breaking the news that a judge had found the state’s school funding system unconstitutional and ordered brave new educational standards for all schools. And yet even today, I am told, nearly 30 years later with many of the players in litigation gone, little in West Virginia’s poorest schools has changed. In Milwaukee, 25 years after I wrote a series documenting that the city’s black residents die far earlier, get sick more often and get far less benefit from health care services than whites the disparities still remain.

I entered newspaper work when investigative journalism was at its high tide, after Woodward and Bernstein were said to have brought down the Nixon White House and crusading journalists across the country touted the corruption they had uncovered. Today with the mainstream media scaling back its efforts, with reporters besieged by government secrecy and under attack at a level unseen for half a century or more, I am struck with how fragile the search for truth can be.

Not all interests are served by the truth. The light of day can expose uncomfortable facts about cherished things. Even the most noble of folks often turn out to have feet of clay.

The truth is it can take a strong constitution to open the newspaper each day, to let the parade of war and death, of hard times and hopes dashed, of politicians’ preachments and the arid process of government wash across your consciousness with your morning coffee. And yet I do, and from my standpoint it’s part of a discipline that we all should cultivate: learning the fortitude to take what life gives, to attend to what the world teaches, to open our hearts to world’s suffering without drowning in the sorrow it brings us. In the end, this discipline makes us stronger, more resilient people, people who can spot the fanciful dressed up as fact and prejudice posing as principle, people of wider views and deeper insight because we have stayed engaged in the broad story of human life.

My family can tell you that even now that I’m out of the game I’m still a newspaper junkie. I stick with it, even if I am frequently disappointed by it. I am disappointed by stories that leave me asking for salient facts that are missing, for crucial questions apparently unasked with assumptions interjected instead, for artfully crafted words, rather than pedestrian prose.

And I think that’s because from an insider’s viewpoint with a quarter century of this work behind me I think it’s too important not to take seriously. I’m not willing to settle for a rough approximation of the truth, for what’s convenient or comfortable. I want to know that the reporter pushed as hard as she or he could to get at what was really so and sweated to find the right words to lay the truth out in all its glory.

And it is glorious. I was lucky enough to spend the last several years of my reporting career covering science, and I can think of no experience that did more to cultivate my sense of awe of the universe. Whether it was reporting on the findings of interplanetary space probes or on the sequencing of genomes, it left me with an impression of the world as an endless onion with layer upon layer of intricate, interwoven piece after piece.

Part of what makes me so impatient and dismissive of the creationists and intelligent designers is the lack of imagination, insight and curiosity that that way of thinking implies. The universe has no need of a clever custodian to tell DNA when to unravel or stars to burst into supernova. The deeper we peer into the way of things, the more it is plain that it’s all there. However it arose, we have every reason to believe that the universe contains within it enough to explain itself. Whether that will turn out to include cosmic wormholes or tiny strings vibrating in 10 dimensions or any number of other bizarre phenomena posited by human minds remains to be seen. But the process of science alone, not the fancies of theologians, will discover it.

Now, let me focus back in on the question I promised to answer today, how my career in journalism has informed my ministry with you. From what I’ve said so far I think you can gather some hints as to the answer to that question, and it centers on this word, truth, that I’ve been using rather freely. I mentioned at the beginning how in describing to that journalism class why I got into newspaper work my mind turned to that quote from the Bible: “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

I think I’ve given you a flavor of what that meant for me from the standpoint of a newspaper reporter: principled, untrammeled journalism serves not only to inform people but to disabuse them of prejudice and conceit, to make them wiser and more worldly, to broaden their sympathies and open their minds: in short, to make them free.

My ministry, too, is centered in a deep respect for truth. Not truth with a capital “T” contained in any one prophetic figure’s proclamation or one tradition’s holy writ, but the more difficult truth that emerges day by day in human living.

As a minister I want us to wrestle with all the dilemmas with which living in the world presents us: the meaning of our lives and deaths, our place in the universe, how to live rightly and how to answer this spiritual longing that echoes through our days. And I am not satisfied to settle for what is convenient or comfortable and call that truth.

The Unitarian Universalist minister Alfred Cole put it this way, “Touch not my lips with the white fire from the glowing altar of some peaceful shrine. Thrust not into my hands the scroll of wisdom gleaned through the patient toil of the centuries; give me no finished chart that I may follow without effort or the bitter taste of tears.” Instead, he says, “Let me feel the clean gales of the open sea, until the creative life is my life and my joy; one with the miracle of spring and the blowing grain, the yearning of my fellows and the endless reach of stars.”

Life for all of us is an interweaving of joy and woe, full of hope and yearning. In the end, we each work to weave a story as true as we can make it that tells how things are for us and what matters, and we do our best to live that story in a way that is as faithful to our best hopes and best selves as possible.

We gather in churches like this one to support and encourage each other on our journeys, to winnow through what the world gives us and identify the truths that emerge, to follow the ways that open us all to sympathy and understanding. Like the printing of a newspaper, ours is in the end an imperfect enterprise. We struggle with our own foibles and limitations. We overreach, stumble, try too hard. But we come back, gain new insight, try again. Religion for us is no finished chart. We are ever discovering new routes and new landmarks.

Out of our hopes and passions it rises, pushing us beyond our limitations, our delusions and despair, opening our hearts to a deeper beauty and abiding gratitude for the illimitable wonder of life and love.

So be it.