Dancing through Life

UU World: The Magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Nov/Dec 2004 by Whittelsey, Frances Cerra

Ric Masten responds to cancer the way he knows best: turning 'a line of language around a pain or puzzlement'

THE SIXTY MEN, ALL MEMBERS OF A prostate cancer survivor group in Thousand Oaks, California, were used to hearing speakers talk about the practical problems of coping with their disease. But when the Rev. RIC Masten came to speak, he led them on an emotional and spiritual journey, his itinerary formed by personal experience with the disease: In 1999, the Unitarian Universalist minister had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.

His vehicle, as always, was his poetry. In his soothing and expressive voice, Masten read "Poor Devil," which recalls old western movies in which a sentry would be discovered dead, an arrow in his back. It could be the sergeant, says the poem, who would deliver the classic line: "Poor devil, he never knew what hit him."

There had been a time, the poem relates, when Masten had liked the idea of death taking him by surprise. But since he received his terminal diagnosis, he has thought differently:

"Poor devil"

never used an opening

to tell loved ones he loved them

never seized the opportunity

to give praise for the sunrise

or drink in a sunset

moment after moment

passing him by

while he marched through his life

staring straight ahead

believing in tomorrow

"Poor devil!"

how much fuller

richer and pleasing life becomes

when you are lucky enough

to see the arrow coming

Masten feels lucky. He says his life "really began" when his oncologist promised him a "graceful end": He saw the arrow coming.

Because he holds this conviction so sincerely, his effect on the cancer survivors was like a shaft of sunlight angling through storm clouds. Harry Pinchot, who runs a prostate cancer helpline, said Masten took "guys who don't cheer up easily from emotions of crying to joy back to very serious thought. Ultimately, we had a room of people singing 'Let It Be a Dance.' It was remarkable."

Most patients, continued Pinchot, "are almost entirely focused on 'have you heard about this drug, or that drug?' and it's very hard to bring up the psychological issues because no one wants to face their mortality. Ric is able to get them to face that."

FINDING A WAY TO PUT HIS UNIQUE GIFTS TO use in a ministry for people living with cancer is but one more example of Masten's remarkable ability to, as he puts it, "do selfish things that benefit others."

Since the mid-19605 he has made his living singing songs and speaking his poetry, getting "a line of language around a pain or puzzlement" that has challenged his intellect or come to trouble his life. After he performed at the General Assembly in 1968, the UUA assigned the self-described peacenik the Vietnam-era task of "taking the spirit of liberal religion to college campuses and churches around the country," in the words of the Rev. John Buehrens. Masten estimates that he has performed worship services in 500 UU congregations.

Unitarian Universalists who have not experienced Masten the performer have, most likely, risen to their feet to sing his signature composition, "Let It Be a Dance." The UU standard has been recorded by a number of artists and appears not only in Singing the Living Tradition, the Unitarian Universalist hymnal, but several other hymn books as well.

College English professors have largely spurned his poetry. One told him after a performance that he was more a vaudevillian than a poet. But invitations from departments of psychology and theology have taken him to 400 colleges and universities. He has spoken at high school commencement exercises, at civic and business clubs, and at the White House Conference on Children, among other venues.

In a recent book of poems and line drawings titled after his well-known song, Let It Be a Dance: Words and One-Linen (Carmel Publishing Co., 2001), celebrities like Bill Moyers, Ruby Dee, and Ossie Davis, as well as artists, poets, and religious leaders like Buehrens, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, pay tribute to him. They call him a "people's poet," "a priest and a preacher," a "poet and a philosopher." He is recognized today, at 75, as the creator of a unique genre of inspirational and spiritual poems meant to be spoken rather than read.

Highly dyslexic, he flunked out of five colleges. But as his ministry grew he sought, and in 1971 was granted, fellowship as a minister by the UUA-the first who had never attended a seminary. His ordination represented an early recognition that Unitarian Universalist ministry need not be primarily about serving the needs of one congregation. That idea received formal recognition twenty years later when the General Assembly legitimized fulltime community ministry as an official category of ministerial fellowship.

Masten's ministry has always been about moving people to confront life's major philosophical questions. But the focus of his ministry changed when he faced his own mortality, learning that his cancer had spread beyond his prostate. Instinctively, he began chronicling his cancer journey from diagnosis through continuing treatment both in poems and an on-line journal (www.ric-masten.net). Becoming one of the new kind of cancer patients who is not cured but lives on with treatment for a chronic disease, he endured surgical removal of his testicles, chemotherapy, radiation, and a hip replacement made necessary by the effects of the radiation.