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September
2001 Sermons
September 16, 2001 Sermon
Rev. Nancy D. Dean
September 16, 2001
The Inhumanity of Humanity: Following the attack on the United States,
September 11
I return to be with you this Sunday following the attacks that can only be
described as a national tragedy of epic proportions because I needed to be with
you, for in such times one longs to be with one’s own people. We long to be
with our own because we need to mourn together, to grieve, to be angry together,
and to feel loved together.
Like all of you, I have been glued to the television: four jet planes, loaded
with jet fuel, two plowing into the two tall World Trade Center buildings, one
into the Pentagon, and one apparently diverted, heroically, from its course,
plowing into a field south of Pittsburgh.
Like all of you, I will locate this time in my life by this tragedy, as I
find my life marked by other tragedies. We will always remember these tragic
events as many of us remember other national tragedies: Pearl Harbor; the
assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr; the bombing of
the Murrah building in Oklahoma; earthquakes, floods and storms--all that which
uproot and destroy what we think is so very secure. Yet, we also, in some
mysterious way, forget the horrors in the ordinary days of our living and go on.
Surely this is as it must be, but today we are still stinging. Stinging with all
the pain that arises within us as the children, men and women we are now, filled
with so many raging and often conflicting emotions that we can hardly sort them
all out. And we want something to be done to make things right. We do not like
what we see, hear, feel with all our senses as we are variously touched by these
events, and we want justice, or revenge, or peace, but we want something to make
all these thousands of senseless deaths to make sense—even though they never
will. We want something that takes away this horrible reminder that there is a
beast that lies low in the human community, a dragon hidden in the depths that
arises unbidden to wreak havoc on humanity: this beast in inhumanity. The
inhumanity of humanity.
Our responses are shock, fear, despair, grief; our reactions are variously,
anger, hatred, and a desire for revenge, or peace.
Shock: Where were you when you heard? I know that everyone of us will
remember all the days of our lives where and what we were doing when we heard. I
was at my daughter’s house, sitting on the sofa holding my one of my
grand-daughters, Haley, when the phone rang. It was her mother-in-law, who said,
"I am afraid." My daughter, miming to me what was being said,
responded, "Why? What’s wrong." "Haven’t you heard? Turn the
television on. We’re being attacked!" My daughter, holding the other
baby, grabbed the remote control and turned the television from the weather
channel we had been watching, considering a walk with the babies, to NBC just in
time to see a replay of the second plane slamming into the second World Trade
Center building, and we were in shock. My chin was surely on my chest, disbelief
coursing through me, when the baby wiggled and I looked down into the face of my
grandchild, who was looking up at me with her big open-mouthed grin as if to
say, "Hey Nana, you are not paying attention to me!" I looked from her
face back up at the television and felt an infinity between the two, and anger
that any baby, any one, had to live in a world where such horrible things
happen.
Fear: Is it over? What else is going to happen? Are we being attacked by a
known enemy? My daughter’s in-laws are in their seventies, perhaps visions of
World War II, or III, filled their thoughts. They had been traveling to see
their son, my son-in-law, and babies and were in Rochester, where they stayed
put for a couple days, fearing a greater invasion that I had even considered.
Many people reacted this way, and many of us continue to be afraid that some
further acts of terrorism are in the making at this time. We are afraid, for we
do not know what might be yet to come that we have not imagined, for we did not
even imagine this!
Despair: This cannot be happening; cannot have happened. Please don’t let
this be happening. Don’t let my wife, husband, son, daughter be among the dead
or helpless among the ruins. The sense of something surreal happening, but at
the same time knowing that this terrorism is all too real, and despair that we
have been so helpless.
Grief: When we recognize we have lost someone, as so many have in all these
senseless acts of terrorism, or some thing, such as our sense of security
because those welcomed into our country used our hospitality, our resources, our
freedom to kill and maim, and thereby caused us to lose our sense of freedom in
the process of making us lose so many we loved.
Our immediate responses are coupled with our reactions which are variously:
Anger: We feel violated and in great opposition to those who have harmed us.
We have no immediate sense of well-being, all good feels become remote and
inaccessible. We lash out hoping to free ourselves of this most unwelcome
emotion. Anger of this magnitude, depth, on-going duration is not natural to us,
and makes it all the more violent within us.
Desire for revenge: Hope once lost, hope that this was all a bad dream, hope
that the people we love and care about, our countrymen, are alive, unharmed,
loss of that hope, the anger that replaces that hope, the need to lash out, all
turns toward a desire for justice, and just as often for revenge. That the
killers died in their mission only removes this desire to those who aided and
abetted them in their awful, horrible acts of murder.
Peace: Even as we are experiencing all these tumultuous feelings of hurt,
anger, despair, vengeance, we still, even in these moments long for peace, long
for some time when all this will be behind us and not staring us in the face.
What is often difficult for us to accept is that not everyone moves through
these feelings in the same way, or the same pace, or to the same degree. We as
people of faith are called upon, first, to be compassionate, for our losses are
all real, but they are not the same losses. Where any one of us stands today in
dealing with all these emotions has everything to do with how directly we have
been affected by the deaths, how immediately close we are to the places and how
much we need to grieve all that has happened. We must be patient, if we are ever
to find our way to peace.
What this national tragedy means to us as a congregation of Unitarian
Universalists at such times is important to our understanding of freedom, faith,
and hope.
We are here to care for one another, to grow together, to mourn together, to
continue to build a community of safety together. What comes home to most of us
is that these acts of terrorism, indeed most acts of terrorism, are done in the
name of God, with the venue of religions that claim to have God on their side,
and to own the only righteousness that exists. We know this is not true, but we
show this is not true by our existence.
What you and I proclaim as Unitarian Universalists is that no one knows who
or what God is, but we do know what God is not. We know that that the words
hatred, killing, revenge as acts to commit on others with God’s approval, do
not belong in the same sentence with the word God. God is not the arbiter of
these most inhuman of our feelings and behaviors. I believe as I believe few
things, that the only real power that lives and breathes throughout humanity and
throughout all time is love. If God is love, God will not hurt us, not any of
us.
Recently, in the News Journal, a column noted that the cartoon show
"The Simpsons," as one of the most critical commentaries of human
behavior, and which seems to give religion a great deal of attention. While
giving all religions a bit of the thumb to the nose, it seemed to be hardest on
we Unitarians. They quoted Homer Simpson, the gluttonous, irreverent, boob who
constantly runs in walls of his on fallibility through his greed, envy, and
general shameless self-interest, and so forth, saying: "Unitarian! If that’s
the one true faith, I’ll eat my hat." What the writer of that column
clearly missed was the comedy writer’s sense of irony, for, after all, we are
one of the very few religions that do not claim to be the "one true
faith."
We UUs are needed precisely because we are the balance to all those
fundamentalisms, at home and abroad, who do believe that they own all truth, all
knowledge of God. We stand in direct opposition to that way of being religious
people, for we believe just as fervently that we are all spiritual beings, all
creatures of the most remarkable of creations, and that we all need to be
treated with the dignity and respect that our existence calls for. Our First
Principle is our constant reminder of this.
As I read my colleagues reactions to this national and personal tragedy, I
note that we react as the population does at large from a desire for immediate
action, for war, to the desire for peaceful means of finding justice. We do not
all agree. My belief is that we as a country must protect our family of
citizens, as you or I would protect our own families--it is an act of caring and
love to provide for welfare and defense of our nation. How that is done is the
hard part. How much are we willing to sacrifice of both our personal, national
and human resources? You must come to that answer for yourselves.
I heard a woman say just yesterday: "I want us, meaning (we the United
States government military), to go over there (meaning the Middle East) and
blast them all to kingdom come, but I don’t want my son (meaning her
20-year-old son) to be there in the battle." She was speaking the truth of
her immediate feelings (recognizing as she spoke the contradiction), and in the
process trying to find the balance that is always so sorely needed in all times
of stress and strife.
My son Adam, who will be twenty next month, has just joined the Air Force,
like so many other young men and women who are rushing to the defense of our
nation. I understand his desire to serve his country for I am a deeply patriotic
person, and must have sown that seed far deeper than I knew, but I do not want
to see him in a war. I want him back in college. No thinking person or people
wants to see their children in war.
Make sure you do not reserve your voice at this time. Speak out and be part
of the process, for while our lives will never be quite the same after this
attack on our land, but we do not want to lose the essence, nor the democratic
process that has been our enduring greatness.
We are individuals filled with great emotional strife right now, we as a
congregation, and we as a nation must work hard to seek the balance that both
protects and defends, but, equally important, one that does not move us to acts
of violence that in the end only justify the killers, and never, never brings
justice.
Closing Reading: W.H.Auden’s poem "No Time" written in 1940 after
the beginning of WWII:
No Time
Clocks cannot tell our time of day For what event to pray,
Because we have no time, because We have no time until
We know what time we fill,
Why time is other than time was.
Nor can our question satisfy
The answer in the statue's eye.
Only the living ask whose brow
May wear the Roman laurel now: The dead say only how.
What happens to the living when they die?
Death is not understood by death: nor you, nor I.
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