First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, June 15, 2008
On this Father’s Day, we remember and honor our fathers and grandfathers, stepfathers and foster fathers, godfathers and uncles, and all the father-figures in our lives who gave so much and taught so much. My sermon this morning is necessarily somewhat personal, as I share with you some of the lessons I learned from my father. I hope my story resonates with yours, and stimulates you to reflect on what you learned from the important father-figures in your lives.
Despite the title, my father was not much of a singer. He did not have a great voice, but he could carry a tune and his voice was pleasant to hear. But he did love to sing, and he seemed to have in his head an inexhaustible repertoire of songs from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and pop songs from the Depression and World War II. Everything I learned from my father is connected in my mind with a song, or series of songs. Indeed, all major events in our family had a kind of soundtrack, and even today, the strain of a familiar song will bring back the sound of my father’s voice and a flood of memories.
Just now, listening to me tell the children about how my dad got his nickname from the comic character Barney Google, you might get the impression that Barney Morel was a frivolous person, that he had no serious concerns – but that would be wrong. The reason we began this service with some old labor union and civil rights songs is because my father was active in both, his paying job being union representative for the United Steelworkers, and in his free time he worked with the NAACP and the Urban League on school desegregation and other civil rights issues for African-Americans and people of color. His dedication to human rights for all people was deeply rooted in his humanism. When I asked him why he first got involved in the then-dangerous work of organizing unions, he replied with quiet passion, “Because I couldn’t stand they way they treated people.” Early on, I learned from my father was that there are some things in life worth risking your life for, things far more important than security or money – things like justice and equality for all people. My siblings and I were raised on a steady diet of union and civil rights songs, and they were more than just songs to us – they were marching orders for a life well lived, in service to those in need.
As I told the children, one of the first lessons I learned from my father is that each person is special and unique. He gave each one of his children our own “theme songs” which he would sing with gusto whenever we asked. We kids called them “our songs” and they were among the very first songs we learned to sing. Where other children were probably learning nursery rhymes and lullabies, we Morel children knew and sang “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” for my sister Bonnie, “Hi Lili Hi Lo” for my sister Lili, and “My Funny Valentine” for my brother Val and my sister Denise Valentina, named after my father’s middle name, Valentine. [“My Funny Valentine” played and sung here.]
I couldn’t pronounce my own name when I was a little kid and ended up with the nickname Mimi, which was the best I could do with my 3-syllable name. Thus, “Mimi,” an old Rodgers & Hart tune from a forgotten movie musical, became my signature song. Long after everyone else had stopped, my father still called me “Mimi” or “Meem.” When he sang my song to me, he used to roll his eyes and wink at me at certain lyrics, imitating Maurice Chevalier, the song’s originator, clearly conveying the opposite of the song’s words, which say at one point, “You funny little good-for-nothing Mimi.” He made me feel special and loved and good for quite a bit. [“Mimi” played and sung here.]
My father taught us to love the give and take of democracy, the play of elected politics. You might say it was in his DNA – by virtue of being a 4th-generation New Orleanian, where politics is considered a blood sport, and by family. Both his father and his grandfather had been elected to that useless minor New Orleans office, Registrar of Conveyances. As a young adult, my father became a union organizer and was trained at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, receiving the Eleanor Roosevelt scholarship in order to go. My father lived and breathed politics and would talk, discuss, or argue issues of the day at the drop of a hat. He was a die-hard, old-time, Roosevelt-style, feel-good Democrat, and I guess it’s in my DNA too. I can still hear him at the Democratic Convention, where he was once a delegate, singing along with the party’s theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” [“Happy Days Are Here Again” played here.]
My father also taught me that it’s important to have a sense of place, to know who you are and whose you are and where you come from. It was my father who taught me to love this city the way you’d care for a beloved person – cognizant of all the faults, but loving deeply and truly despite or even because of those imperfections. My father’s love for New Orleans was legendary; he loved its architecture, its history, its wild and fabled past, its neighborhoods, its unique and special culture, its great food and wonderful music, and he passed this great love on to me. Over the years, my father had had many opportunities to accept jobs in other cities but he refused them every time – he could never be away that long from his beloved city. He taught me the song, but he himself never wanted to experience the pangs of knowing what it means to miss New Orleans. [“Do You Know What It Mean to Miss New Orleans?” played and sung here.]
In one short sermon, I cannot tell you everything I learned from my father – this is not even all the songs he taught me! I wish we had time for more, so I could regale you with “The Old Lady Was Chasing Her Boy ‘Round the Block” – an old family favorite. But I’m sure that from this brief sampling, you get the idea of who my father was and how grateful I am for all he taught me.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to convey that directly to him in his lifetime. Open displays of “mush” were not tolerated in my family. The cards we exchanged for birthdays and Christmas were expected to be humorous, even sarcastic, and never, ever sentimental. In August of 1990, just 10 months before he died, I came across a poem in The New Yorker magazine that seemed to say everything I wanted to say to my father – but couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t face giving it to him in person, so I mailed it to him with a post-it note that said, “This is how I feel about you.” Typically for my family, when I asked him about it when I saw him next, all he said was that it was “nice.” But after he died the following May, my mother found the poem and the note in his desk, and she gave them back to me.
“Even If You Weren’t My Father”
by Camillo Sbarbaro, translated from the Italian by Shirley Hazzard
(published in The New Yorker magazine, August 6, 1990)
Father, even if you weren’t my father,
were you an utter stranger,
for your own self I’d love you.
Remembering how you saw, one winter morning,
the first violet on the wall across the way,
and with what joy you shared the revelation;
then, hoisting the ladder to your shoulder,
out you went and propped it to the wall.
We, your children, stood watching at the window.
And I remember how, another time,
you chased my little sister through the house
(pigheadedly, she’d done I know not what).
But when she, run to earth, shrieked out in fear,
your heart misgave you,
for you saw yourself hunt down your helpless child.
Relenting then, you took her in your arms
in all your terror: caressing her, enclosed in your embrace
as in some shelter from that brute
who’d been, one moment since, yourself.
Father, even if you weren’t my father,
were you an utter stranger,
for your innocence, your artless tender heart,
I would above all other men
so love you.
The most important thing that my father ever taught me was to treat every person with love and respect. In the last moments of his life, as he lay dying in Ochsner’s ICU, his final thoughts were a concern that he might have hurt the feelings of his nurse. Coming up from the anesthesia, and seeing a long-haired nurse with dangling earrings bending over him, he had mistakenly called the man “honey.” This “faux pas” as he would call it, had my father upset, uncomfortable, and embarrassed. My sister knew just what to say; she assured Daddy that everything was OK by telling him, “Oh Daddy, don’t worry – your nurse is gay – he just thought you were flirting with him.” This made Barney laugh and he relaxed; he died about an hour later. I can never forget that even as life slipped through his fingers, my father never stopped caring about other people and their feelings. Even at the end of his life, my father never ceased to love. May we too never cease to love. [“If Ever I Cease to Love” sung here.]
BENEDICTION
Each of us has grown and learned from the life-lessons taught to us by the important father-figures in our lives. On this Father’s Day and every day, let us honor them, extend to them our gratitude, and strive to pass on the gifts of love and understanding and compassion that were entrusted to us.
