The Gospel According to the Wizard of Oz

As requested, here is a version of my 'Wizard of Oz' address delivered in services at Newcastle-under-Lyme, Macclesfield and Chester.

Part 1: There's No Place Like Home

Many years ago I wrote a play based on The Wizard of Oz and with a group of university friends I took it to the Edinburgh Fringe festival which was very exciting for everyone except the poor audiences that sat through it. It was not a play that deserves to be remembered but the process of researching that play developed an interest in the Wizard of Oz that remains strong to this day.

The Wizard of Oz is really America's only successful fairy tale. It was the first feature film ever shown on American television and for many years on public holidays normal programming was suspended so the film could be enjoyed again. The only other films TV networks did that with were religious films.

In writing a play about The Wizard of Oz one of the questions in my mind was why it was so successful.  Some would argue that it resonates deeply with the American experience. In this analysis, Dorothy represents the generations of immigrants from other countries who made America great. She arrives in the east of Oz at the Munchkin village (which represents early settlements in the eastern United States) and then like so many people in the United States she heads west, meeting the scarecrow as she travels. The scarecrow represents Thomas Jefferson's notion of American as a country made great on the achievements of gentleman farmers. It sounded idyllic but it was never going to happen. The scarecrow lacks a brain much like anyone who thinks America can grow on the strength of agriculture alone. Dorothy and the scarecrow travel west and meet the tin woodsman who stands for the industrialisation of the United States in the later nineteenth century. He has no heart, much like those who exploited workers in factories, mills and mines but if only he could find his heart he could make the world a better place. The cowardly lion can be seen as US foreign policy at the end of the nineteenth century, demonstrating a strong aversion to 'entangling alliances'. The Emerald City announces the arrival of the great American city and the Wizard of Oz is the American Dream. He may turn out to be a fake, but belief in him gets people what they want. Some have also equated belief in the wizard to belief in God.

However if I were to pick out the most important aspect of The Wizard of Oz, it is its attitude to home.  Most of Dorothy's adventures focus on her desire to find a place where she belongs, a place to call home. In this it is following precedents established thousands of years earlier.  For example, if you think about it, much of the Old Testament deals with an epic struggle of real estate, a battle to find and hold onto a place that the "chosen people" can call home. Home is an important biblical theme with both positive and negative connotations to this day.

The Wizard of Oz was first published in 1899. It was a time of great upheaval in American life.  In the last years of the nineteenth century a very large proportion of people in America had moved house, some from other countries to the United States, some within the United States looking for new work opportunities elsewhere. It was a nation on the move and yet in this time the favourite home decoration was a simple sampler with the words 'Home sweet home' written on it. Many people in America were homesick and even as they struggled to make homes in unfamiliar places there was a suspicion that home was either something they had left behind long ago or something to which they aspired in the future.

This sense of dislocation also existed in this country. Between 1800 and 1850 Britain became an industrialised nation. In 1851 Great Britain officially became the first nation on earth where more people lived in towns than in the countryside.  Economic realities forced people out of the countryside and into towns where many ended up in overcrowded slums and worked long hours in factories and mills in grim conditions. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz they may have longed for the homes they had left behind.

It is no coincidence that in this era, home was also a very popular theme in evangelical hymns and songs but it was usually portrayed as a state of being after death:

I am a stranger here; heaven is my home!

Earth's frowns I will not fear; Heaven is my home!

Grief may now be at hand,

Foes may my soul withstand,

Heaven is my fatherland! Heaven is my home.

I have come across hundreds of hymns like that and whilst I think it's good that people found comfort in them, I find it sad that so many portrayed life in the here and now in such negative terms. Also, I am not so comfortable  with such notions of a literal heaven  (not least because of the implication of a literal hell) and find myself closer to a more transcendent idea of eternity as hinted at in these words by Richard Jefferies which I think also have at the centre a strong sense of what it means to belong:

It is eternity now.
I am in the midst of it.

It is about me, in the sunshine; 
I am in it; as the butterfly in the light-laden air.

Nothing has to come,
 

It is now.

Now is eternity,
 

   Now is the immortal life.

The desire to find that elusive thing called home, the need to belong, not someday but now, not somewhere over the rainbow but right where you are, is powerful within every person. Research demonstrates that it is the number one reason that people are drawn to religious communities, they want a sense of belonging, a felling of being at home. With that in mind, I want to read short list of some of the definitions of home that Shelter provides and as I read the list I invite you to think about the different ways this church community might reflect these qualities of being at home:

A home should provide adequate privacy and space

A home should provide security

A home should provide a healthy environment

A home should provide links to a community

Robert Frost once noted that 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.' It's an interesting line that challenges us to stretch ourselves to new practical understandings of what it means to be an inclusive, loving community. I want to spend a few minutes shortly thinking about why we don't always feel at home in the here and now – but to end this section a reading that gets to the heart of what a church community that feels like home should feel like:

“What I want in a church,” she told me, “is a place where there are suppers on Sunday evening, and they serve you mashed potatoes.”
Never have I heard the comfort role of the church community expressed more succinctly. Mashed potatoes are warmth and nourishment and safety and support. Nobody can be lonely in a church basement eating mashed potatoes and homemade pie. 

This comment came up in a conversation I had with a person new to our city, who had responded to a mailing we sent to new homeowners. She mailed the card indicating that she would like a call. Theologically, she’s not sure if she’s a Unitarian. 

She’s not even sure if she has time in her life right now for church. She has more basic concerns, like finding her way around her new community and meeting people and making this new place a home. Yet, she identified a need, and I honor that. 

I remember this conversation as I see new people coming into our church. They may look puzzled or awkward or amused or critical, but I think I know what a lot of them are looking for.

It would be a shame if our lives become so busy and important that we don’t take time to offer each other: mashed potatoes.



From Taking Pictures of God
By Bruce T. Marshall

Part 2: Somewhere over the Rainbow

I want to think for a couple of minutes about what I will refer to at the Dorothy dilemma because whilst I am drawing from an American fairy story I think it has something useful and practical to say to all of us. In the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz Dorothy is at home when she sings 'Somewhere over the rainbow way up high, there's a land that I heard of once in a lullaby,' but at the end of the film we find her clicking her heels together and repeating 'there's no place like home, there's no place like home.' Similarly, in the original 1899 novel, Dorothy begins by dreaming of being somewhere other than where she actually is:

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

Despite such a negative early view, by the end of the story Dorothy wants nothing more than to be back at home, back among the familiar with Uncle Henry and Auntie Em.

Perhaps one of the reasons The Wizard of Oz strikes such a chord with people is that many of us identify with Dorothy's dilemma – that sense of belonging and not belonging all at the same time. How do we deal with that often simultaneous sense that home is both something you want to run away from – somewhere over the rainbow - and a place where security, belonging and meaning might be found?

A lot of people have these kind of mixed feelings about religion and churches. They associate religious belief with narrow ways of thinking and prejudice. They want to run away from churches but they are also interested in engaging with those deep questions of life that we constantly revisit in church – what does life mean? Is there a God? Where is peace? Like Dorothy they want to be somewhere over the rainbow for meaning surely can't be found here.  Or can it?

I heard a sermon recently in which someone mentioned how hard it can be sometimes to feel at home and connected to people when you are visiting a church for the first time. How hard it is when a preacher is talking about the great web of life and the need to love everyone and you're sitting there thinking 'but I don't even know these people. I can't love them. I'm British.' Or maybe you have belonged to a church for a long time and the preacher is talking about the great web of life and the need to love everyone and you're thinking 'Well I know these people a bit too well,' and that also makes it difficult. Somehow whether you're sitting in a church congregation for the first time or sitting there for the thousandth time you can feel you don't belong, you are, in some sense, an outsider.

Well here's a peculiar point. In a sense we all belong because we all feel outsiders! As the Reverend Ann Peart put it 'each life contains both centrality and marginality,' all of us feel at different times and in different ways a sense of belonging and a sense of aloneness. Collectively that is the story of Unitarianism as I understand it but it is also the story of each one of us. Perhaps accepting this is a good first step. We can empathise with other people, we can share with others because we share the same vulnerability, the same shifting sense of belonging in the middle of things and feeling on the fringes. That's part of the human condition. It's how we're built.

At the end of The Wizard of Oz Dorothy learns that to a large extent being 'at home' is a state of mind. She is whisked off by the tornado and has a series of often terrifying adventures but at the end of the story she is able to appreciate home for the first time.  She comes to value the simple, familiar, everyday surrounds of the farm house where she lives. Suddenly she understands the depth of her family's love for her.  For years she has lived in a house but suddenly she knows and is able to celebrate what it means to be home. It's an idea that was expressed eloquently by T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from our exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Every life has its share of metaphorical tornadoes, times when it seems like things are turned upside down and in such times who doesn't need the safety, belonging and love that is home?

With this in mind it is my hope and prayer that this church community will continue to be a place that people can call home and will want to call home. May we, like the scarecrow, find the brains to come up with new ideas about how to move forward and be an effective church community; may we like the tin man find the heart to care for one another, our community and the world; and may we, like the cowardly lion find the kind of courage that dares to treat each person who comes here as a valued member of the family, the kind of courage that says to a person, whether they're here for the first time or the thousandth time, 'Welcome Home.'