The Maytrees

NOVEL SERMONS: The Gospel in Literature and Life

9. “The Maytrees”

1 Corinthians 13

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

August 23, 2009

Not that I am at all defensive about the relative brevity of my novels this summer compared to Don’s, but I want you to know that I read an interview with Annie Dillard about her novel on which I am preaching this week called The Maytrees, and she said that, though the book ended up being 216 pages, her first draft was over 1200. That has to count for something! Actually, that pruning of a thousand pages is one of the reasons why her novel is so good. Every word matters. The writing is spare but so elegantly textured. Exquisite.

Dillard sets the novel on Cape Cod in the years just after World War II. The story focuses on a married couple who are part of the bohemian Provincetown crowd of that time: poets, artists, musicians, writers, intellectuals. Tall, reserved, and perceptive, Lou Bigelow is at the heart of the story. She falls in love with Toby Maytree, a veteran whom Lou simply calls “Maytree.” He is a “wannabe” poet and supports himself by doing handyman jobs. Lou and Maytree get married and, in the house Lou inherited from her mother, the couple and their son, Petie, live a simple, happy life.

Dillard writes: “For a long time they owned no car, no television when that came in, no insurance, no savings…Nothing about them was rich except their days swollen with time.”

In the fourteenth year of their seaside reverie, Maytree inexplicably falls for a woman named Deary, a friend of both Lou’s and Maytree’s. Maytree breaks the news to Lou and the next day heads off with Deary to make their home in Maine .

This is where the story surprises. Dillard refuses to succumb to the temptation of writing another book of acrimony, recrimination, and hostility. Lou, having witnessed her own divorced mother marinate in bitterness, determined in time to pursue a more contemplative and generous path. Dillard, in an interview about the book, said that “what is cool about that is that Lou comes to realize that her feelings of rejection were not caused externally; they were hers, she was responsible for them, and they were optional. She could change.” Listen:

One cold June morning (her friend) Cornelius appeared. – Say Lou, I wish you’d stop poisoning yourself. She did not whine or voice any grief or anger. Did it show?

So (Lou) climbed the steep street to Pilgrim Monument . She mounted the monument stairs in her camel’s hair coat and red earmuffs. From the top she looked at flat sky, flat sea, and flat land. She was ready to want to stop this. Thereby she admitted – barely – that she could choose to stop it. For one minute by her watch, she imagined liking Maytree impartially. For only one minute by her watch she saw him for himself. That day, having let go one degree of arc only, for one minute, she sighted relief. Here was something she could do. She could climb the monument every day and work on herself as a task…Their years together were good. He already was gone. All she had to do for peace was let him go.

Within a month she figured that if she ceded that the world did not center on her, there was no injustice or betrayal. If she believed she was free and out of the tar pit, would she not thereby free herself from the tar pit? What was this to, say, losing Petie? Why take personal offense if two fall in love? She knew they reproached themselves. Maytree was party to fits of enthusiasm. Loving was Deary’s nature. What would any of this matter two hundred years hence? She had many more decades to live. Whether she lived them or not was her call.

To drive her mental cylinders Lou climbed to and up Pilgrim Monument daily in every weather. Sometimes she entered fog. From the monument’s top she loosed Maytree like sand. She saw the sand drop onto roofs and yards. After only seven or eight weeks’ relinquishing Maytree, she saw the task would take practice, like anything else. She planned to work at it for a year, shedding every grain of claim. After seven months she had what she called “a grip on letting go.” When anything unwise arose in her henceforth, she attended to it by climbing the monument, at those top she opened her palm.

So she pulled her own stakes in the matter, stakes she herself pitched. That she could withdraw them was news…It was then Lou began to wonder: If overcoming self-centeredness was the goal, then why were we born into a selfish stew? And who even studied this question?...For she meant to keep this cast of mind and renew it.

Meanwhile, Maytree and Deary live a good life in Maine for twenty years. But then Deary contracts cancer and, having fallen on ice and broken myriad bones in his arms and wrists, Maytree cannot provide the care his fading wife needs and so he asks Lou if she will take them in. One reviewer writes of it this way: “The lives of Lou, Maytree, and Deary intersect once again when a desperate Maytree brings the dying Deary back to Cape Cod , where Lou cares for the couple. And the reader understands why.”

Indeed, we do. We understand because Dillard helps us to see that what often passes for love is really self-interest in disguise. If Lou really loves Maytree, will she not continue to will and want his happiness, no matter what? Will she not hope for his well-being? Does not love bear, believe, hope, and endure all things?

One of the impediments to love and loving in our lives is that our egos get in the way of it. Love becomes something we broker rather than something we freely give. We make love conditional. We put ourselves at the center of things. We love as long as the one we love conforms to our expectations and needs. But let those expectations or needs be transgressed, and we take it as a personal affront. So then we begin to judge, disparage, turn away. No one could begrudge Lou her initial anger at Maytree or even some lingering hurt and bewilderment. But if Lou loved Maytree before he left her, why should she not continue to love him? Did not Paul say that love is kind, that it is not resentful, and that love never ends?

That is why the prodigal’s father was able to keep his heart open to his son. The father never stopped loving his boy. The prodigal surely transgressed the father’s hopes and expectations for him; the prodigal disgraced and embarrassed his father in front of his father’s friends; the prodigal ladled out a heaping bowl of pain and worry for his father to eat. But the father knew that his son’s journey was not about him, the father, but about his son. The son had to do what he had to do to work out his own path and life. So the father overcame the temptation to respond out of his own self-centeredness and just kept loving his son, and it was good for his son and it was good for him.

Maybe, too, that is why Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, in direct contravention to the conventional wisdom of the day, told his followers to love their enemies and to pray for those who persecute them. Someone becomes an enemy to us because in some way we believe that person has hurt us or is a threat to us. We make our own interests the heart of the matter and, in so doing, we turn off the spigot of our love and open the floodgate of our hate. And then the fruits of love are lost and there is peace for no one.

Love is not devoid of feelings but love is more than our feelings. Love is also courage and commitment and decision. It calls for a conversion from self at the center of our lives to the well-being of others or, as scripture says it, “We love, because God first loved us.”

Here is the way poet Mary Oliver says it:

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.

Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.

That was many years ago.

Since then I have gone out from my confinements,

though with difficulty.

I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.

I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.

They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment

somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.

I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.

I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,

I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?

Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world. (1)

A Celtic rock band named The Waterboys sings a song called “Love Anyway” whose lyrics in part say:

So you crashed the plane/and there’s hell to pay

I’m making it plain/I love you anyway.

You made a fool/out of me today

I’m breaking the rule/I love you anyway.

You threw the blame/What a role to play

My story’s the same/ I love you anyway.

I think of you/as a child of clay

Whatever you do/I love you anyway.

That old New York Yankees catcher-cum-philosopher, Yogi Berra, once said that when you come to a fork in the road, take it. Well, the gospel always sets up a fork in the road. If you follow one of the branches of the fork, the one that calls for doing the usual thing, making the typical response in a situation, going along in order to get along, taking into account your self-interest first of all, you then will embark on the road usually traveled and people will understand you and maybe even be sympathetic to you. You will be able to nurse your hurts, nurture your grudges, justify your actions. But if you take the other branch, the one to which the gospel points, the road less traveled, it will be a harder journey and it will cost you more and people sometimes will not understand you at all, but it is the road that will lead you to life and peace, contentment, and finally even joy. Lou Maytree took that latter road and she, and those around her, those whom she loved, were much the better for it.

We can find the gospel almost anywhere – in novels and songs, stories and poems. But the gospel of God is meant to be lived in real life and so it makes a difference in us and to the world that we live it in our lives, that it comes alive in us in all of its hard and beautiful, costly and compassionate glory.

For if we speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, we are merely noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. If we have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and we have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, we are nothing. If we give away all of our possessions…but do not have love, we gain nothing…Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Add Lou Maytree to our cloud of witnesses who teach us how to live and love. May her and their tribe increase!

Amen.

(1) From a poem by Mary Oliver entitled “To Begin With, the Sweet Grass” found in her book Evidence published by Beacon Press in 2009, pages 38-39.

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