Doobies and Newbies

This is a brief homily I delivered at the UU Heartland District’s annual meeting this past Saturday. The meeting was great. The emphasis was on the living tradition of the district.

Working in a steel factory wasn’t my first choice of summer jobs. As I would soon find out, some days the temperature inside the plant rose to 130 degrees. Sitting on a forklift, sweat stinging my eyes, I longed for the relative cool of the 90-degree heat and 80 percent humidity outside. But I needed the money.

One evening at my college, the University of Evansville, it was announced that there would be a meeting for those interested in spending a semester studying in Europe. My furthest travel at that point in my life had been to a Pentecostal youth camp in Arkansas. A semester in England sounded so exotic. I imagined there would be pubs and fog and people in knit hats who called me ‘love.’ When I learned that Harlaxton College in Grantham, England offered three-day weekends every single weekend, I signed up immediately.

All I had to do was raise the travel costs. When I told my Dad, he said, ‘why don’t I get you a job at the factory?’ That sounded good to me. They paid pretty well. And ever since I could remember, my Dad came home in his work uniform, dark blue pants and a light blue shirt with patches above each pocket. One patch bore the name of the factory. The other sported his name. He came home sweaty and dirty and I thought it was just so…. cool. Not only would I make money. I would spend a summer learning what my father had done for years and years. It would be great.

Or so I thought. Right up until my first day on the job. I woke up when it was still dark, something no college student should do between May and August, and I drove into town. This factory made steel tanks, like the one that holds the gas for your gas grill. They had machines to roll the steel and welders to tack on the caps for each end.

“It’s not so hard,” one guy told me that morning. “Nothing to it.” Then he talked a while longer and meandered into a story about a guy who had gotten his fingers stuck in the roller. He left three of those fingers in the machine. I was happy when the supervisor interrupted him.

“Andy,” the boss told me, “you’ll be working on the big tanks.”

Great, I thought. At least when one rolls over me and my life comes to an end in this horrible, hot, dirty place, I won’t suffer much. See, these tanks were huge. 10 feet tall, some bigger. Large enough for two welders to climb around inside. And my job was to fill these enormous metal tanks with water, seal them with a large metal plate and pressure test them for holes. Then, I would lift them with a crane, take them to the next station and lift a new one into place. The supervisor took me to my station, talked for a few minutes, and asked me if I understood what I was supposed to do.

“Yep,” I lied. “I’ve got it.” In reality, I didn’t even know how to turn the hose on, or how to get the hose all the way up to the hole in the tank in the first place. Thank goodness for Doobie.

Doobie was a veteran on the big tank line. They called him Doobie, I’m told, because of the shape and content of his smoking materials. But for all his extracurricular activities, Doobie knew everything there was to know about the big tank line. He knew the different types of tanks, he knew all the welders and their strange habits, he knew the perfect time to take an unscheduled break and when to avoid the supervisor. He showed me, by doing it first, how to fill the tanks and pressurize them. He corrected me when I was about to drop a tank from the crane and onto my head, by saying something along the lines of “Hey, dummy, don’t take those tanks over your head!” Might not have been dummy, I don’t remember.

It’s odd. I had lived for all my life with a man, my father, who worked in that factory. I knew a few things about what went on there. But until I was shoulder-to-shoulder with someone, doing the work, I wasn’t a part of the culture of that place. I couldn’t do the job until a real human being who had been a part of that work, that culture, showed me the way and helped me do it myself.

Angus MacLean said it this way: “We are not merely the bellhops of history, passing the baggage of one generation to another. Yet culture makes it possible for human relations to bridge the grave, for individuals who are so short of days to live with a wisdom derived from the dawn of time. Our job, however, is not to worship history and culture like fetishes, but to feed them into our living, creative stream of personal life for spiritual and intellectual reprocessing.”

History, tradition, is alive. Tradition is you and me, this morning. It is what happens when I, a newbie, hear about the way things used to be, and that story informs the way I do things going forward. Tradition is a living, holy anthology of stories that is continually being written.

What a joy it is to be becoming this tradition with you. Whether you’re a Doobie or a newbie, may you, as you go about Heartland’s work this day, be conscious of the writing of our living tradition.