TENACITY

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 29th, 2004



Opening Words:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, 'Press on,' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” --Calvin Coolidge

*****

Five Sundays in a February is a rarity: it only happens once every twenty-eight years, which means that this is the first time it has ever taken place in the time I’ve been a minister. The last time it happened was in 1976 -- I was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Washington, living in the closest thing to a garrett I could afford -- an ancient dorm room in Hansee Hall that was, literally, smaller than a lot of walk-in closets I’ve seen -- and working day and night on a manuscript that I was certain would win me fame, fortune, and literary immortality: a one-act play with the working title “Faust: the Musical.” And it won’t happen again until 2032, at which point I will be 75 and hopefully retired...although perhaps still available to fill a pulpit now and then for a colleague confronting an extra Sunday, and thus supplement whatever meager Social Security benefits may still be available to those of us who have the good fortune to live so long.

I’ve actually been thinking quite a bit about Time this past week. Like many of you, I imagine, I grew up thinking of time as something that could be neatly divided into three discrete components: Past, Present, and Future -- What Was, What Is, What Yet Shall Be. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to see that Time is not nearly so tidy as once I thought. Take the Past, for instance. As a historian I quickly learned that because human memory is imperfect, and even the most meticulous records likewise contain selective inclusions and omissions, our recollection of “What Was” never truly represents “What REALLY Was” -- it’s always some combination of “if memory serves” and “what might have been,” as hindsight and human imagination combine to filter out regrets and uncomfortable details, minimize embarrassment, emphasize the pleasant and admirable, or sometimes cling to feelings of anger and resentment, even exaggerating their importance as they fester, over time, within a bitter heart. We know that the Past has happened, and that it has made us what we are today...that it can’t be changed, that it is gone forever, that it is useless (even dangerous!) to dwell there for too long...and yet, what passes for history is often simply an imaginary re-creation of a time that never was, on which (often times) not even those who were there can agree on all the details.

Likewise, those who complain about “revisionist history” are often really saying “that’s not how I remember it” or “that’s not what I was told.” But the truth of the matter is that all GOOD history is to some degree revisionist, as time and distance give us a better perspective on the past, allowing us to “look again” at the evidence -- to gather together and RE-vision divergent experiences and recollections, and reconcile them based on our superior hindsight and knowledge of “what happened next.” Just as the news is the first draft of history, history is in turn the final draft of the news. And as any writer knows, the difference between a terrible first draft and a superb final draft is revision.

Of course, predicting the Future is even worse. What Yet Shall Be sounds so determined, so fatalistic. The Future embodies our Destiny, which cannot be predicted or controlled. And yet the Future inevitably contains within it both a wide range of possibilities and an element of choice: we can always imagine an entire panoply of possible alternatives (some of which are always more realistic than others, of course), but at most we can only choose to pursue a relative handful, and the choices that we make shape and limit the range of future, Future Possibilities, while at the same time revealing unforeseen new ones. As with the Past, we experience the Future as an amalgam of imagination and decision -- a dynamic combination of dreams and plans by which we hope to make our aspirations real.

Which brings us at last to the Present. Is “here and now” merely something which lingers for a moment and then passes in an instant, or is there more to it than that? And why do we have such a hard time living in the present moment; why do we spend so much of our lives, our mental and emotional energy, reminiscing about what has gone before, or trying to anticipate what will happen next? And this is not to discount either the pleasure or the importance of nostalgic daydreaming about “better days” both behind and before us. But do we even have a word to describe someone who lives their entire life completely focused on the here and now, on “What Is” in the present moment? I sure can’t think of one. If anything, what images I do have are pejorative: a person who never thinks about the past or the future, but who only “lives for the moment,” is generally considered stupid and short-sighted, or at best somehow lacking in vision and perspective. And yet, you would think that “living in the moment” would be a positive thing, since this moment is all we can really count on in life, it’s right here in front of us, and once it is gone it is gone forever, and will never come again.

The word “tenacious” means, literally, to hold tightly, but in common usage it is often simply a euphemistic synonym for “stubborn.” During the waning years of my marriage, this was a frequent topic of discussion in our household: whether it was the tenacity of our mutual love that was holding us together, or our respective individual stubbornness that was driving us apart. I’m not sure whether we ever really arrived at a satisfactory answer to that question, but in the process we did discover that there are at least two different styles of stubborn, which I came to think of as “bull-headed” and “pig-headed.” Bull-headed is relatively straight-forward. When a bull sees red, he puts his head down and charges, and whenever this happens it’s a pretty good idea not to be standing in his way. Pig-headed is a lot more subtle. When a pig smells a truffle, she will go to great effort to root that truffle out, but if for some reason her initial efforts are frustrated, she’ll try another way, and then another, and another, until she finally wins her prize. Both critters are persistent, but pigs are also patient, and this provides a special resilience to their stubbornness. And just so no one is left confused by the pronouns, I was the pig-headed one in my household (which, I’m sorry to say, often make my partner see red).

And then, just to round out the barnyard, there is always your good old-fashioned Missouri Mule, who simply digs in his feet and refuses to budge whenever he encounters something that doesn’t suit him. The mule, of course, is the poster-animal of stubbornness, but tenacity (it seems to me) entails quite a bit more than simply digging in one’s heels. Patience, Persistence, Resilience -- not just a refusal to give in or let go, but also a refusal to give up...a sense of direction and purpose which one retains even in the face of obstacles and adversity. It’s the attitude of a survivor, who stubbornly clings to both life and hope even as those around them lose first one and then the other. It’s the attitude of success, which is persistent enough to build upon its failures...not by stubbornly attempting the same thing again and again, in the vain hope of a different result, but rather by patiently learning from mistakes and moving forward along a new path, never losing sight of the ultimate goal, never losing confidence that it will someday be achieved.

Tenacity is also differentiated from mere stubbornness by its Vision. The stubborn personality often refuses to give in simply for the sake of not giving in, but the tenacious personality always has a goal in mind. It knows when to let go in order to get something back, and it recognizes when its own inflexibility is getting in the way. Stubbornness is about pride; Tenacity is about Purpose. Stubbornness is a contest of wills; but a tenacious competitor can appreciate a tenacious opponent, and both potentially grow stronger through their struggle together. Stubbornness is a character flaw, blind to its own shortcomings, and thus ultimately self-destructive. But Tenacity is a virtue, which builds character by empowering an individual to overcome both personal frustration and personal discouragement, in addition to whatever external obstacles they may face, in order to achieve a worthy goal.

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, 'Press on,' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” For someone with a reputation of being a man of few words, Silent Cal sure said a mouthful when he said all that. And the great irony, of course, is that the Coolidge administration is probably best remembered by historians for doing nothing, for having NOT been the terribly corrupt Harding administration which preceded it (quite likely the worst administration in U.S. history, with the possible exception of Ulysses S. Grant’s) or the Hoover administration which followed, and ushered in the Great Depression. While occupying the White House, Coolidge averaged about 11 hours of sleep a day: rising late, retiring early, and napping for up to four hours every afternoon, a habit which inspired H.L. Mencken to write “Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but Coolidge only snores.” Much of the rest of his day he spent sitting in a rocking chair on the White House porch, smoking cigars and trying not to encourage those who came to speak with him to overstay their welcome by showing any sign of interest in what they had to say. When Groucho Marx spotted Coolidge one evening in the audience at a performance of the Marx Brother’s vaudeville show “Animal Crackers,” he reportedly cried out “Isn’t it past your bedtime, Calvin?” And when Dorothy Parker heard the news of his death, in 1933, she is said to have remarked “How can they tell?” For his own part, Coolidge is known to have quipped that all this shut-eye was in the national interest, since while he was sleeping it was impossible for him to initiate anything new. In Coolidge’s view, “the chief business of the American people IS business,” and the business of government was to stay out of their way.

Equally ironic is the fact that it was Coolidge’s energetic successor, an orphaned, self-made millionaire technocrat whom Coolidge sometimes refered to as “the Wundah Boy,” who ended up lending his name to the shantytowns that sprang up in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, and the 25% unemployment which followed that, and whose reputation has been tenaciously linked with the Great Depression ever since. Herbert Hoover tried everything he could think of to turn the economy around; unfortunately, his mind ran more to optimistic platitudes and a stubborn ideological preference for encouraging private, local inititives than it did effective federal intervention and direct public relief. Herbert Hoover believed that the Great Depression was the result of global economic forces beyond his effective control, and that like a hurricane or some other Act of God, individuals needed to rely upon their own resourcefulness to weather the storm until it passed. “Every time we find solutions outside of government,” he told an audience of struggling farmers, “we have not only strengthened character, but we have preserved our sense of real self-government.” But when voters went to the polls in 1932, they turned him out in a landslide, and supported instead a candidate who insisted that “the country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

Patience. Persistence. Resilience. Vision. More than talent, more than genius, more even than education, these are the qualities which empower individuals to “press on” in a determined way, and thus eventually overcome whatever obstacles stand between them and their desired goal. And these same qualities can also be found in tenacious institutions, or a tenatious society, where individuals come together to work towards shared and common goals. In his “Maritime History of Massachusetts,” Samuel Eliot Morison described New Englanders as “a tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race...materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion...a race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.” And this same “restless tenacity” is what animates our aspirations as well as our ambitions -- that introspective, at times passionately emotional, religious desire for righteousness which we “hold tightly” in our hands and in our hearts, and which ultimately gives our lives a larger meaning....