The serendipity of today's sermon title, that I chose over a month ago, is more than a little scary to me. Let me assure you that there was no prescience here. When I chose the title, I wanted to talk about our Unitarian Universalist principles of affirming and promoting the “inherent worth and dignity of every person” and “justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.” ---
And I still do.
But this week has changed everything. In fact, I would have to have changed the sermon title if it hadn't fit.
As this week wore on, I began to be concerned with what I could possibly say today that would help us make some sense of all of this. If you came here today expecting some great wisdom, you may be disappointed. All I can share is my thoughts and fears and hopes and those of others about the seemingly incomprehensible act of terrorism that changed our lives on Tuesday morning.
It reminds me of the day that I heard about the assassination of JFK. Where were you when you heard that news? And some have compared the event to Pearl Harbor. That happened before I was aware of such things. But, according to many who were old enough to understand that horror, there was at least some warning about what might be happening then and some clear enemy to face.
But this week, we have been sharing our stories, trying to make sense of the unexpected, the inconceivable, the unknown.
My story began at 6:15 a.m. on Tuesday morning with a call from our daughter who works for U.S. Naval Intelligence in Maryland, telling us what was happening -- She has now lost 7 of her colleagues who were at the Pentagon on that fateful morning.
Later, I went to a previously scheduled Interfaith Ministers´ meeting where we shared our hopes and fears and plans for helping our congregations through the crisis. I was glad to have those colleagues to lean on for awhile.
Then, I went to the dentist where, while my mouth was numb and filled with dental paraphernalia, the hygienist exultantly shared the news that we had just bombed Afghanistan. If any of you have the name of a good dentist, I would be very interested. It is probably a good thing that my mouth was full.
When I got home, I put in a call to the Islamic Center to share my concern for them. But the usual message was gone, and the phone rang for a very long time with no answer. Fortunately, I was able to get in touch with someone later via e-mail to express my support.
That evening our Lay Ministers gathered and planned for a vesper service to be held on Thursday night and the way we would get the word out via e-mail and telephone. I am sorry if you didn't get the news.
We had a thirty minute worship moment before the Board meeting on Wednesday night to allow us to focus on our agenda.
And the next day I went to my class at Claremont, a class called "Pastoral Care and Bereavement" where we spent at least half of the class sharing our stories and our grief. It was an important time for all of us - reminding me that there are many forms of loss and bereavement.
Then, on Thursday night, a group of over thirty women and men and children from this congregation joined together at my house to speak our love and concern. It was a rich time - with the husband of one of our members - a Muslim - sharing his feelings in a place where we could all feel safe and nurtured. At the end of the service, we went outside with lighted candles and joined in words and song - a beginning of the healing process.
And so we continue - whatever the purpose of the gathering, we will inevitably end up talking about the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Tuesday morning for some time to come.
In my pastoral care class, the professor shared the common levels of stress in situations like this: Confusion, Denial, Anger, Feelings of loss of control and predictability, Chaos, and Anxiety (not fear which allows specific action). The result in extreme cases, he said, was regression - ultimately ending in a person's reverting to a fetal posture (perhaps similar to our curling up in front of the TV this week?) And while I was glad to know that I was having “normal” reactions, that didn´t help me to deal with reality of the situation.
What I kept coming back to me was: “Why do they hate us so much?” There are lots of rational reasons why that might be true, of course:
None of which give us a course of action to pursue in this time and this place with an illusive enemy that no “war on terrorism” can erase. As a British commentator aptly pointed out - war is on countries, not individuals.
We've heard a lot this week about retaliation against those who are the supposed perpetrators of these terrible crimes and those who are protecting them.
As a counterpoint to that message, I would like to share with you a letter that was written by Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an Afghani-American writer, and this is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in.
"I've been hearing a lot of talk about 'bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.' Ron Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but 'we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?'Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we 'have the belly to do what must be done.'
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan.
When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think 'the people of Afghanistan' think "the Jews in the concentration camps."
It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban?
The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering.
Level their houses? Done.
Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done.
Eradicate their hospitals? Done.
Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs.Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs.
But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time."
So what do we do? We gather as we did on Thursday night, as we are doing now, as others have done in other houses of worship all through the week, and as they did at one of our UU churches - All Souls - in New York on September 12 at a Candlelighting Service where our minister, Rev. Forrest Church said (and I echo):
"If religion is our human response to being alive and having to die, the purpose of life is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for. Over the past two days, all of us have lived with a heightened sense of life's preciousness and fragility. . . . (But) Blessedly, the same thing that makes us more attentive to death can also bring us to life. This saving opportunity matches the danger we have witnessed and now feel. And we are just entering the period of crisis.
The survivors in this city, every one of us, has been changed and will continue to be changed by the decisions we make. We can decide to be angry, vengeful, hateful, becoming like our enemies and poisoning the one well. We can also decide that we can't do anything-that the world is hopeless-and go back to our trivial pursuits as if tomorrow were no different than the day before yesterday. Or we can rise to the challenge and pledge our hearts to a higher calling. We can answer to the better angels of our nature and join in a shared struggle, not only against our foes-who are the world's foes-but also on behalf of our friends and neighbors. We can listen more attentively for the voice of God within us than ever before. We can heed its urgings with acts of kindness and deeds of love.
This is already happening. It is happening here this evening. It has been happening on every street corner of this great and newly compassionate city, from sacraments of self-forgetting valor to the redemptive mingling of tears. Though our minds have been singed forever by imprints of horror, our hearts join in deep admiration for the ordinary courage and simple goodness of our neighbors, made one in shared suffering, reminding each other of how splendid we can truly be.
Never forget this. Never forget the e-mail sent by a doomed employee in the World Trade Center, who, just before his life was over, wrote the words, 'Thank you for being such a great friend.' Never forget the man and woman holding hands as they leapt together to their death. Pay close attention to these and every other note of almost unbearable poignancy as it rings amidst the cacophony.
Pay attention and then commit them to the memory of your heart. For though the future as we knew it is no longer, we now know that the very worst of which human beings are capable can bring out the very best. From this day forward, it becomes our common mission to be mindful of both aspects of our nature: to counter the former while aspiring to the latter; to face the darkness and yet redeem the day."
And What Do We Tell Our Children?
We do what Rev. Meg Riley, the Director of our Unitarian Universalist Association Washington Office, shared on September 11.
"We listen. We hold them. We tell them, 'I love you.' 'Love is forever.' . . .
(We) tell them that a small group of individuals did this - not a religion, not a country, not a person who looks a particular way or has a particular kind of name.
We listen. We hold them. We tell them, 'I love you.' 'Love is forever.'"
So what else can we do?
We can talk after the service in our Buddhist Dharma group or with me personally. We can contribute blood or money to the Red Cross.
We can use the insert in order of service to contribute to the UUA and UU Service Committee fund to help the victims of this tragedy.
We can contribute next week during our UUSC Sunday service - Unfortunately, the need will not be over this week.
I still believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person and in justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. And I encourage each one of us to act out of those high principles as we find ways to face our fears in the days ahead.
In conclusion, I would like to share the following response written by our member John Trickett, who was an eyewitness to the tragedy in New York on Tuesday, and is, when last I heard, still trapped there by the lack of airline transportation.
Now evil knows no boundaries.
yet neither does the sun.
It rises and sets upon us all.
Hold hands my friends and remember that even in our darkest hour it will rise and cast light within our hearts and even the deepest despair of night will find peace.
Hold hands my friends (hold hands) and know that against
this touch nothing can prevail, nothing can break us.
For as long as it is there
while we stand together
while we care
while we love
there are no lines between us.
Blessed Be