First Parish Unitarian UniversalistIn the Wake
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
September 30, 2001
The book of Lamentations in the Hebrew Scriptures is thought to be a psalter of communal laments over the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 B.C.E. The grief, the anger, the blame, the desire for revenge.in the wake of the attacks on September 11th, it all sounds familiar, doesn't it? It might as well be a lament over the destruction of Lower Manhattan or the Pentagon. It ends with these despairing lines,
"But you, O Lord, reign forever, your throne endures to all generations.
Why have you forgotten us completely?
Why have you forsaken us these many days?
Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored;
renew our days as of old-
unless you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure."
Few of us, I suspect, are seeing God's punitive hand in the attacks on September 11th..even if we see how American wealth and power may have set us up for it.
Few of us likely think of the perpetrators of those attacks as being God's emissaries, letting us know he is angry about our transgressions.even if we know U.S. actions in the Middle East have not always been just.
Few of us are expecting God to pay the terrorists back.even if we hope our government will.
And, with all that we have learned in recent weeks about the history, politics, religions, and living conditions in the Middle East, few of us see our present world situation as a simplistic "us versus them" conflict the way the Hebrew scriptures seem to present Israel's ancient struggles.
Yet, I imagine we all are looking to be restored-if not to the days of old (we are too realistic to hope for that!) then to some semblance of normalcy, some equilibrium, some security, some way of making sense of it all.
One of my sisters is a kindergarten teacher in Upper Manhattan. She told me that "working with children at this time means dealing with children drawing the Twin Towers with fire and flame and cannons. It means hearing a child use the word `terrorist' in normal conversation. It means dealing with a child's play when he shouts in our dramatic play area, `The U.S. is under attack! The U.S. is under attack!' It means hearing a child say in the block area, `Let's build the Twin Towers and knock them down like in the explosion.' It means waiting for the phone call from a parent in my class whose child was downtown when the building exploded and saw much more than she should have. She said, `Mom, what is it snowing?'"
Knowing how wonderful a teacher my sister is, I know that five-year-old witness to horror and the rest of her classmates will be helped to process the terrible event that beset their city on September 11th. By expressing themselves with crayons and building blocks and in dramatic play, those children will come to know their feelings-sadness, anger, fear. Thoughtful questions and comments from their teachers will help them name those feelings using words, and then remind them of the love in their lives that provides security more powerful than sadness, anger and fear. Somehow--and we wish it were not necessary, but we know it is-- they will begin to integrate their experience of the attacks on the World Trade Centers into who they are and how they view their world. They will make meaning. They will find hope.
In the past nearly three weeks, how many of us adults have had the chance to color with crayons on nice big sheets of that cream-colored drawing paper we remember from our own kindergarten days, with its slightly rough texture and that familiar rich fragrance? How many of us have been free to yell with abandon "We're under attack!" and scamper with our friends to the safety of the space behind the bookshelf? How many of us got out our wooden blocks and built a fortified tower able to withstand any attack, or knocked one down only to have the re-assuring experience of building it back up again?
I gave some serious thought to setting the sanctuary up like a kindergarten room this morning. Blocks over there; the dramatic play area here; paper and crayons here and there! We could just be together coloring and playing. being the scared, lonely, angry children we've got inside ourselves.being the kind and loving kindergarten teachers each other needs.just being together.it would be fun, wouldn't it?
What have you been doing these past few weeks to help you name your feelings, center yourself in love, and integrate your experience of the attacks on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon into who you are and how you view the world? What meaning are you making of it all? Where are you finding hope?
For those who know God, where do you find God in the events of September 11th and since? For those who know love, where do you find love? For those who seek a right path, where do you find yourself going?
A colleague reminded me of a story from Martin Buber's "Tales of the Hasidim." Rabbi Barukh's grandson Yehiel was once playing hide and seek with his friend. He hid himself well and waited for his playmate to find him. After waiting a long time, he emerged from his hiding place to discover that his friend had gone home. It was then that Yehiel understood that his friend had never even bothered to look for him and he cried to his grandfather over his friend's faithlessness. Rabbi Barukh cried as well. "Even God cries," he said. "God says, 'I hide and no one wants to find me.'"
Let us not be like the friend who didn't even look for meaning, especially now. Let us not give up and go home to sadness, fear and anger. Let us look until we find meaning. For then, we regain hope.
It is in times such as these that many of us feel our faith is hiding. Some of you have shared with me that you have felt immobilized by fear at times these past few weeks-fear of future attacks, fear for personal safety, fear of pain and death, fear of the future in general.
Others find our faith coming to the rescue. Some of you share that your experience of God's love for you, or your awareness of the Spirit of Life, or your appreciation of the beauty of the natural world and the bonds of human love. buoys you so that you aren't overtaken by fears and regard death somewhat matter-factly as just what's coming at the end anyway.
Still others doubt that faith can make a real difference. A lot of us aren't even sure "faith" is a helpful word. Some are convinced it isn't.
When it comes to traditional religious language-like "religion" or "holy" or "worship" or "faith"-I like to get out my dictionary, as regular attenders here already know. I hope you don't tire of it. It's just that I'm curious about how words evolve and why certain of them came to have meanings so abhorrent to religious liberals that some of us can't tolerate the sound of them.
The roots of the word "faith" are in the Latin for "confidence,' and "to trust." For Unitarian Universalists-whose historic characterizing principles have been tolerance, reason and freedom-those roots of the word "faith" (confidence, trust) are much more appealing than the dictionary's first definition of it as "unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence."
I think of faith as "what gives me confidence" rather than as "faith in something" where the "something" is implicitly questionable from the standpoint of my reason and experience. If we think of faith as "what gives confidence," we may not be using the word by its dictionary definition, but we're using it in a way that might work better for us as religious liberals.
From a Unitarian Universalist perspective, faith, or what gives us confidence, could include personal spiritual experience (such as with a higher power or with our inner resources), the moral values we live by, our ideals, the practices we engage in (called spiritual disciplines by some) that keep us in touch with that higher power or inner resources, and the ways in which we apply any and all this to our daily life.
In a UU congregation, the faiths among us are very diverse. One person's is not the same as another's. You can be a Humanist or a Theist, a Christian or a Buddhist, a Pagan or some combination of these or others, and some how we all get along. Well, our theological diversity has been a sermon topic before and no doubt will be again, but it is not germane for today. What is germane is how we can, together, increase our individual and collective faith, our confidence, in these trying times.
Eleanor Roosevelt said that we gain confidence from what we've survived. "You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
I believe that being together in religious community can help us survive the horror our country has faced in recent weeks. What's more, being in religious community together can do more than just help us survive; it can help us grow in faith, or grow spiritually, as a result of the horror. Being together, we can support each other in naming our feelings, centering ourselves in love, and integrating our experience of the attacks on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon into who we are and how we view the world.
Being together helps us grow spiritually, if we are open to it, no only in times. In fact, back in August, when the Parish Committee discussed its goals for the coming church year, we identified two priorities and one of them was dubbed "in-reach," "to increase the opportunities for fellowship and caring in the congregation." By the way, the other was "outreach," to increasingly make a difference in the world around us through service and advocacy. With our country and even the world now in crisis, I think there is an even greater need for both of these priorities, but especially for opportunities for ongoing support and spiritual reflection in the coming weeks and months.
Along these same lines, at the First Parish Leadership Retreat a week ago yesterday, there was a strong consensus around the need for First Parish to develop what we called "nurturing ways"-nurturing ways with present leaders many of whom feel overburdened, nurturing ways with people who want to connect more meaningfully with others in the parish, and nurturing ways with members and friends who have needs for support and caring in times of personal troubles.
I will be working with the Committee on Ministry to come up with plans for how to develop these "nurturing ways" in First Parish life. I imagine the whole congregation will be consulted somehow. There are so many possibilities.
For example, I hope we'll figure out a way to find out how to better organize ourselves to provide support and caring for our members in need due to illness, death in the family, or other kinds of crisis. If we knew who among you would be willing to make an occasional dinner for a household under stress, invite a lonely person for supper, drive someone to a medical appointment, visit a shut-in, provide child care when a parent is in (or needs to visit someone in) the hospital, and if there was a rotation of coordinators to do the calling when needed, we would be able to be so much more nurturing of our own parishioners in need.
I also hope we'll develop new ways for those who are interested in regular meaningful conversation with other UU's. We could try what some congregations do: they schedule as many of their committee meetings for the same one or two nights of the month with voluntary supper preceding it for all the committee members and anyone else looking for fellowship, with supervised homework time after supper for the children and even youth group meetings. Similarly, other congregations hold multiple Adult Religious Education classes on the same night of the week preceded by supper and followed by homework time for children. Neither of these approaches increases anybody's evening commitments; they simply are nurturing ways to organize the commitments for a larger purpose of building community.
Even our brand new Sermon Circles on Sundays and the First-Saturday-of-the-Month Work Parties announced last Sunday by our Buildings & Grounds Committee may be nurturing ways to build connections and create community within our growing congregation, even though who sits in the circle will vary from week to week and who shows up to work will vary from month to month.
Still another way to build connections and create community, and one I hope we will consider (though it would add a once-a-month commitment to participants' schedules), is the creation of small groups-some congregations are calling them "Covenant Groups"-of six to twelve adults who want to meet regularly for intentional fellowship. They follow a format that includes opening reflection, personal check-in time and a longer time for facilitated discussion on meaningful themes of the group's own choosing. I think these small groups, or some variation on them, would meet an unmet need many of you express for a consistent, regularly meeting group of fellow UU's with whom to explore life's bigger questions and/or our most timely topics. Some of our congregations are finding that even their busiest leaders are in Covenant Groups because they find them to be so personally and spiritually rewarding.
With a bit of intentionality, any of these approaches could be an opportunity for interested First Parishioners to discuss the evolving U.S. response to the attacks on September 11th and related issues. If we successfully develop more nurturing ways by either using existing opportunities differently or creating new ones, this congregation can truly be a place where we help each other to name our feelings, center ourselves in love, and integrate our experience of the attacks on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon into who we are and how we view the world. We will make meaning. We will find hope.
There's a poem that tells a true story of meaning and hope. It's about Yitzhak Perlman who overcame polio to become an acclaimed classical violinist, and never learned how to lament, it seems to me. Written by Harold M. Schulweis, it's called "Playing With Three Strings."
We have seen Yitzhak Perlman
Who walks the stage with braces on both legs,
On two crutches.
He takes his seat, unhinges the clasps of his legs,
Tucking one leg back, extending the other,
Laying down his crutches, placing the violin under his chin.
On one occasion one of his violin strings broke.
The audience grew silent but the violinist did not leave the stage.
He signaled the maestro, and the orchestra began its part.
The violinist played with power and intensity on only three strings.
With three strings, he modulated, changed and
Recomposed the piece in his head
He retuned the strings to get different sounds,
Turned them upward and downward.
The audience screamed delight,
Applauded their appreciation.
Asked later how he had accomplished this feat,
The violinist answered
It is my task to make music with what remains.
A legacy mightier than a concert.
Make music with what remains.
Complete the song left for us to sing,
Transcend the loss,
Play it out with heart, soul, and might
With all remaining strength within us.
--from Dancing on the Edge of the World, Miriyam Glazer, Ed.
In the wake of horrific events, we Americans are called to "make music with what remains." To "complete the song left for us to sing, transcend the loss" and "play it out with heart, soul and might." Here at First Parish, will do it together! Amen.