Rod & Sylvia
Sermon | October 16, 2022 | Lisa Jebsen
The place is here. The time is now. The journey is into UU history. Lisa Jebsen. Age: fiftish. Occupation: UU minister. She will attempt to weave two stories together including an introduction involving a very bad impression of one of the subjects. Are you at 3301 Neely or actually in The Twilight Zone?
Alright – sorry about that. I just couldn’t resist.
Welcome to the latest in my “Famous UUs” series. A quick preface… If you already know about Sylvia Plath, then you know that the topic of suicide will come up. I hope that isn’t triggering for anyone. Also, while I’m aware of the merger of the Unitarian and Universalist churches during the timelines explored today, for simplicity’s sake, I will be defaulting to Unitarian Universalist.
Rod Serling and Sylvia Plath are at the top of most google searches for famous UUs. You could make the case that they are among the most famous! Nevertheless, I don’t want to assume that everyone is familiar with them, so let’s start with some of the basics – thank you wikipedia!
Rod Serling was born in Syracuse, NY on Dec 25, 1924 and Sylvia Plath was born around 8 years later on October 27 in Jamaica Plain, MA. They both died relatively young – Rod was 51 when he passed away during open heart surgery and Sylvia was only 30 when she died by suicide at her home in London.
They both earned degrees from private colleges: she went to Smith in Massachusetts and he went to Antioch in Ohio. During their studies, they each met their future spouses. They both were married to those college sweethearts and each had two kids (he had two daughters and she had a son and a daughter).
To call them both accomplished writers would be a comical understatement. Sylvia wrote poems and fiction and Rod wrote television and screenplays. Their impact on western popular culture can still be felt to this day. There is a strong argument to be made that without Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” series you would not have shows like “Black Mirror,” “Westworld” or movies like The Sixth Sense. And you could also argue that without the works of Sylvia Plath, you would not have Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or any number of Alanis Morrisette songs.
They each received prestigious awards: Plath went to Cambridge with a Fulbright Scholarship and was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer (she is the first poet to receive a posthumous pulitzer!) and Rod won a Peabody, a Hugo, a Golden Globe and 6 Emmys.
And of course, they both identified as UUs.
Although Rod was raised in a Jewish home, he was profoundly influenced by these words written by another famous UU, educator Horace Mann, the first president of Antioch College: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
I like to think of Mann cheering Serling on as he lived up to the challenge of these words while serving in the army during WWII and looking over his shoulder as Rod wrote scripts that artfully expressed his
…thoughtful morals and liberal values … disseminated through the disguise of sci-fi and horror fantasy. Story after story, The Twilight Zone urged caution and empathy. It’s for that reason that episodes like The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street find their way into the classrooms of American middle schools. Serling’s messages of tolerance and acceptance are vital, and perhaps depressingly, just as relevant now as then.
Serling’s fiance Carol was raised a protestant but by the time she met Rod, she no longer identified with that church. The couple decided to convert to Unitarianism partly as a compromise to their families – neither of whom were happy with the union from the sound of things. Rod’s parents hoped he would marry a jewish woman and in one article I read, Carol’s dad was clearly an antisemite. After relocating to California for Rod’s career, they were active members at the Santa Monica UU church.
The minister of the church was Ernest Pipes whose humanist preaching suited Serling’s outlook and with whom he corresponded on politics and the state of humanity. Serling was an ardent supporter of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Santa Monica church, and the American Civil Liberties Union. He supported these and other organizations by accepting speaking engagements and with monetary donations.
While Rod found the UU church as an adult, Sylvia was raised in the UU faith from an early age. Her parents were academics and the family attended the Wellesley UU church while she was a youngster. However, a move took them too far away to continue so they attended a Methodist church for a period. It was after her father passed away when she was only 8 years old that she and her mother rejoined the UU fellowship in Wellesley and they were quite involved: Sylvia’s mom taught Sunday School and Sylvia joined the youth group. During this time, she and her friend wrote a piece that appeared in the Chrstian Science Monitor entitled “A Youth’s Plea for World Peace” which stemmed from their fears of nuclear war.
And as you can tell from this bit from the Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, she was disappointed to not have a UU community during her later years in England.
In 1956, while studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship, Plath married Ted Hughes…. Although they were married privately by special license from the Archbishop of Canterbury, she planned a second, public, wedding ceremony in the Wellesley Unitarian Church (which did not…take place). While living in England she attended a parish church for a few months during the winter of 1961-62. Although she thought of herself as “a pagan-Unitarian at best,” she enjoyed the ceremony and the music. She was driven away from the church by a sermon praising the hydrogen bomb as “the happy prospect of the Second Coming.” When she read an American Unitarian sermon on fallout shelters it moved her to tears. She wrote her mother, “I’d really be a church-goer if I was back in Wellesley. . . .the Unitarian Church is my church. How I miss it! There is just no choice here.”
I think the one of the sadder similarities in their lives is the fact that they both died very young and, one could argue, rather needlessly. David Allen reached out to me this week to share that he’d been a student of Rod Serling’s in college – he had the opportunity to take a few of his screenwriting courses as an undergrad. It made my heart happy to hear Serling described as “a nice guy. Approachable and funny.” However, it was also sad to hear that Serling brushed off concerns for his health regarding his chain smoking, insisting that he was living on borrowed time after a heart injury he got while serving in the army. It was not long after that that he suffered two heart attacks and he passed away during open heart surgery.
Throughout her life, Plath struggled with depression. Details about her death by suicide are well documented from the alleged abuse by her husband and the shortcomings of the mental health care she received (or did not receive) – so much focus is given to her death that her work is often overshadowed by her sad end. And while we can’t live in “what ifs” – it’s only human to mourn their deaths and wonder what work of Rod and Sylvia’s we might have enjoyed if we had them with us a little longer.
Despite that there is also space for gratitude. Gratitude for their lives and their works. There’s also space for pride in calling them members of our beloved community and how you can draw a direct line from their art to our UU principles like these that I’m about to share with you. If you’re familiar with the darker themes of her more famous works, I love the contrast that is shown in her poem “Mushrooms” that I read earlier and this journal entry from 18 year old Sylvia in New England.…
On a relatively unfrequented, stony beach there is a great rock which juts out over the sea. After a climb, an ascent from one jagged foothold to another, a natural shelf is reached where one person can stretch at length, and stare down into the tide rising and falling below, or beyond to the bay, where sails catch light, then shadow, then light, as they tack far out near the horizon. The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth’s crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonymous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity.
From this experience I emerged whole and clean, bitten to the bone by sun, washed pure by the icy sharpness of salt water, dried and bleached to the smooth tranquillity that comes from dwelling among primal things.
From this experience also, a faith arises to carry back to a human world of small lusts and deceitful pettiness. A faith, naïve and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.
No doubt in this regard Rod Serling is a fellow human being. Although I could find no evidence that he ever met Plath, I like to think that they would have gotten along and that their writings would have moved each other. I like to think that this quote of his would have been as moved by these words, in a similar way that she was moved by the sermon from the American UU church that I mentioned earlier. This clip is from “The Obsolete Man” from season 2 of “The Twilight Zone.”
You enter this room at your own risk because it leads to the future. Not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a New World. It is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever laid a ripping boot print on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the superstates that proceeded, it has one iron rule: logic is the enemy and truth is a menace…
The chancellor, the late chancellor was only partly correct. He was obsolete but so is the state, the entity that he worshiped. Any state, any entity any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under M for mankind.
I must admit that while the subjects of this sermon today excited me, I struggled to complete this talk. It took many fits and starts to weave their lives together and while I’m happy with the parallels I’ve been able to draw, I’ve come up short with a neat and tidy ending. So much so that I gave up trying. Perhaps that is fitting though. While they may no longer be with us, their writing lives on and continues to inspire. I encourage you to explore their work and proudly claim Sylvia Plath and Rod Serling as members of our beloved community.
Sylvia Plath | Poetry Foundation
Sylvia Plath: Matter and Spirit – Siege of Words
THE SHORT, UNHAPPY LIFE OF ROD SERLING | Latest Headlines | buffalonews.com
8 Ways The Twilight Zone Influenced Modern TV and Film
19-Year-Old Sylvia Plath on the Transcendent Splendor of Nature