Document Actions

How, Then, Shall We Live?

by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given September 23, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

This past week life seemed to get a little closer to being back to normal. At least it seemed that way to look at things—back into the usual routine at work, not quite so preoccupied with the events of the world, professional sports returning to television, the sound of airplanes once again flying overhead.

But there were other signs that we weren’t quite there. At least one other person I know shared my experience of almost getting run over while on the daily walk in the neighborhood. Usually I find that people are very courteous to pedestrians. But it did not seem to be the case last week. I’m not sure if this was anger manifesting itself, or simply a higher level of absent-mindedness—but something was happening.

And I noticed that tensions around the office were running a little higher than usual.

And I was surprised to see that still at the end of last week, every time I went by the flag shop in my neighborhood, there was a line of people coming out the door.

Things weren’t quite back to normal.

And I noticed that I was looking at things a little differently. I walked by a hotel one morning and I saw an unattended briefcase sitting there on the sidewalk. The immediate thought that goes through my head, of course, is that it is probably a bomb. My heart beat picks up and I wonder what I should do. It is not more than 10 seconds later that a person came by and quickly picks up the bag—and continues on with their day. I continued walking and realized that everything is going to be OK, and that things aren’t quite back to normal.

Things have not been the same since the terrible events of September 11. We have been changed by these events—we have been shaken up. And we have been forced to take stock of our lives.

These are the high holy days in the Jewish tradition. The days begin with the sounding of the shofar—the Ram’s horn—a loud, eerie, even a little scary, sound. It is a sound that gets our attention, it awakens us and it asks us to take stock of our lives. It asks us to look at where we have been, and where we are going. As we come into a new time, it asks us to atone for our sins, to make up for wrongs we have done to others. It is a call to us to get our lives in order, to get our priorities in order.

That has happened for many of us these past few days. We are moved to spend more time with our children and grandchildren and with other family members. We find ourselves no longer taking a friend for granted. We eat a salad like we’ve been doing every day for years and we suddenly see a beauty in that salad that we have never seen before.

And we also notice things that before September 11 merited a whole lot more attention than they do now. Suddenly they don’t seem all that important. The priorities in life are now a little more clear.

Our lives have been changed these past few days. Only the future will tell us to what extent that has happened. In the first couple days after the attacks, I found myself glued to the television and the radio. I wanted to hear all the details that I could. But after a couple days I realized that I really couldn’t do that anymore—it all seemed like too much. The images were just overwhelming.

Since that time I’ve been reading more—trying to pace myself. I’ve found myself the last couple days drawn to page 2 in the front section of the Oregonian. That is the page with all the short pieces about people dead or missing from September 11. They tell the stories of ordinary lives, ordinary jobs, ordinary quirks and all those people and things considered most important by the people dead or missing.

And in this reading we see the human face of what has happened, and we imagine all the people who are grieving mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, children, colleagues and friends. And in these stories, I’ve also been better able to see myself in the story.

When such an event happens, we are reminded of our own grievings—some recent, some far away—and how we are all part of a human family. We are reminded how we are all mortal beings.

Dorothy Stafford, the widow of the great Oregon poet William Stafford, was quoted by her son in last Sunday’s paper as saying: "Now we are part of the suffering of the world."

I don’t think I realized the magnitude of the events of September 11 until I sat up front here last Sunday and felt the grief people brought to this place. Last Sunday we had what I think was an all-time record attendance at the church. Seeing the images of suffering on TV all week, I thought I got it. But then we all gathered here and I got it in a different way. Grief and human connection have a way of doing that.

And I came away from last Sunday knowing—really knowing—that things would not be the same after this event. I knew that it would forever mark us as a people. It was as if the strange cord of the shofar had been sounded and that we had been summoned to take stock of our lives.

And as I felt the depth of the grief last Sunday, I was also reminded of something that I’ve known for a long time: That there is power in coming together, that we see that we are not alone in this. That in coming together we know we are part of the human community.

These past days, we have seen some remarkable images of people around the world coming together to offer prayers of support for our country. A friend sent me an e-mail message with over 60 photos from around the world showing the shrines people put up at U.S. embassies and in other places. There were mounds of flowers, banks and banks of candles and many faces full of tears. I found myself scrolling through the images with tears in my eyes.

One of our members who was traveling in Poland when the attack occurred told of making the trip to the American Embassy in Warsaw and witnessing an entire block of flowers and candles in memory of those who died in our country. She turned to the friend she was traveling with and asked, "So what are you going to do?"

It is hard to know what we’re going to do. It is not always clear. We start to figure it out by telling the stories, by listening, and we learn from them, even when they are hard to hear.

We have seen how everyone from movie stars to average folks lined up to give blood.

We hear stories from the day of the attack: A Muslim man tells how a Hasidic Jew helped him. "He said, ‘Brother, if you don't mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us, grab my hand, let’s get the hell out of here.’ He helped me stand up, and we ran for what seemed like forever without looking back."

We hear the stories of the New York firefighters and police officers as they rushed in to save people and perished themselves.

We hear the amazing story of the men on the airplane that went down in Pennsylvania, and how they knew they were going to die, but took out the hijackers in order to keep the plane from destroying something more.

And we hear from all over the place how people were affected by all that happened.

The front-page news last week from my hometown in Wisconsin—a small town of 250 people—was the story of a local couple who were vacationing in Washington, D.C. when the attacks happened. They were planning to go home that day, but they were stranded. They did not know what to do, but then they met a person who was driving back to Chicago. He offered them a ride and not only did he give them a ride back to Chicago, he took them all the way home, an extra three hours away.

Now to put this into some context, in my small town, it is a big deal to say much of anything to a stranger, let alone when you are visiting in a place like Washington D.C. Imagining accepting an invitation to ride a car back all the way to the Midwest seems pretty amazing. In its own small way, it too is front-page news.

In these stories, large and small, we start to embrace the fullness of the events. They tell the very human side of what has happened. Through them we see the story in all its sadness and also all that is called forth from people just like us at times like this.

On the day after the attacks, an elderly couple brought a bouquet of flowers to the church office with a note that said something like, "We are shocked by what has happened, and we know that all of you will have a lot do to these coming days, we’re thinking of you." I was graced by that note and those flowers every time I came into the office this past week, and it made a hard week a little easier.

And I’m moved by the very human responses I’ve seen here. Tears are reminders that we are connected and that we see in the suffering of so many our own lives, that indeed we are connected to all of this. And not just in the tears. We are connected in the anger and in the calls for justice and in the prayers for peace. In all of these ways, we are connected.

Events on the scale of this one take some time to digest and to develop some perspective on. And over time the fullness of what has happened emerges. And it is from this fullness that we are forced to ask some of the most difficult questions: How could people do such a horrendous thing, and how is it possible they could so hate our country to do it? How do we deal with evil in the world? How are we called to respond?

These are questions we face as a country and also as citizens of this country.

Just as we are called to find the goodness that has come in response to the attacks, we also have to at least try to know what has caused a group of people to do these horrible things.

One of the awakenings for me has been how we as Americans are so terribly isolated from the rest of the world and these attacks have been a wake-up call to see how at least some people in the world view us. We are seen as the big rich bully with all of the power. Our actions in the past have played a part in what is happening now.

We have to be able to face the reality of evil in the world and somehow respond to that evil. We need to find a resolution that will hold the people accountable for what they have done but not unleash a cycle of retribution and violence that will only lead to more violence and more death.

We may never know all the reasons why this has happened, but we need to at least try to get to some of the answers. I fear that if we strike out in fury in a way that mirrors what has happened in the country, we will simply be planting seeds for more terrorists in the world. There is a fine line here, and I pray for wisdom for our leaders as they make decisions in the days and weeks ahead.

In whatever response we make, we need to hold fast to the principles we live by in our lives. In times like this they become even more important. If we truly want to honor the lives of those who have gone before us, it is up to us to live by the principles we uphold as a country and as citizens of this country.

And it is imperative to honor the democratic process that governs us. When anyone’s rights are taken away, we must ask why.

It is important to hold up the rights we so very much celebrate in our country. When some of our own religious extremists spoke out after the attacks, blaming gays and lesbians, feminists and the ACLU, among others, for the attacks, I was deeply insulted. But after that I found a strange satisfaction in hearing it. Somehow knowing that they had the right to say such things—even though they very awful and hurtful—was reassuring. It seemed to say something about our country at such a time. And I knew that it was my responsibility to support their right to say such things.

As people of faith, we must remember the principles we dedicate ourselves to live by. It is important to remember how we honor all people and extol their worth. It is important that we stand with those who are being persecuted not because of anything they have done, but simply for being who they are.

And it is important to remember how we are all interconnected, and how it is through this interdependence that change for the good can happen. And it is important to hope—and to imagine a world that is different from where we are today. We must be steadfast in our beliefs, even when we are discouraged.

Words again of Seamus Heaney:

So hope for a great sea change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles and cures

and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:

the utter, self-revealing double take of feeling.

If there is fire on the mountain

or lightening and storm