Sermon: With a Little Help from Our Friends

This is a sermon that I delivered at Two Rivers Unitarian Universalist congregation on November 3, 2019. It draws on both a column about the Carbondale Age-Friendly Community Initiative that I wrote for the Sopris Sun and experiences I had in the San Francisco UU church back in the 1980’s.

Back then, Mason and I often chauffeured Lucille Lockhart to Sunday service. Lucille was a four-and-half-foot-tall powerhouse who walked by dragging herself along on two arm-brace crutches, It was Lucille who shamed the City of San Francisco into making wheelchair cuts into the sidewalks that line the city’s 1,260 miles of streets. That’s thousands of sidewalk ramps! Years before the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law, Lucille had warned everyone, “You had better care about disability. Because if you live long enough, you’re going to have one.”

Back then, the church’s Access Committee sponsored a Sunday service that focused on the spiritual challenges and lessons taught by disability. I wrote a reflection for that service and it got a huge response. I was urged to submit my essay to Newsweek. After it was published, the postman brought me a huge sack of mail — letters from all over the country! My essay, entitled “Hearing the Sweetest Songs”, was later republished in a textbook. Then later used as part of an English language test in a college entrance exam in Japan.

It has to be the most famous thing I’ve ever written, and I read that reflection as part of this sermon.