by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given November 18, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

OPENING WORDS

Welcome! Welcome to all of you on this beautiful autumn day.

It is good to come together again in this place

to remember who we are,

to remind ourselves how to live,

to restore our faith,

and to renew our hope.

Come, let us worship together!
 

They say that ministers have only one theme, and we keep preaching that theme over and over again in different forms. No matter what the subject, that one theme we have chosen—or that has chosen us—keeps turning up. It is the truth we live by, the grounding that undergirds all else. I believe that about myself. And my one topic is "redemption." That is to say, that no matter what hard turns of Fate we encounter, we can redeem, or "buy back," these experiences, can turn pain and loss into blessing.

On the other hand, I hate it when people tell me what great spiritual rewards will be mine while I’m in the midst of suffering. Maybe you’ve had that happen: you have a serious illness, and someone says, "This is your opportunity to deepen spiritually." Or your boss is making your life a living hell, and someone says, "He has been sent to you as your teacher. What spiritual lesson do you have to learn from this man?" Please! This may ultimately be true—but I don’t want to hear it.

With the terrorist attacks we have all witnessed, the horrific images of the buildings themselves imploding and crashing to the ground, followed by the bombing of Afghanistan, followed by a campaign of germ warfare, followed by yet another plane crash—every one of us in this country has endured, is enduring, a kind of collective trauma, and a collective grieving is taking place. As Dorothy Stafford, widow of the late poet William Stafford, put it, "We have joined the suffering of the world."

Like all of you, I am not whole, I am broken. And I think we feel more broken than usual right now, more vulnerable. I need a place where I can come in my brokenness, in my unfinished state, and be enfolded. Here at this church we have come together once again, come together with others who are struggling, who have come to acknowledge along with us what is real and urgent in our lives, a place where we can hold one another, and speak our truth, whatever it may be. It is Thanksgiving, and we find that current circumstances have made us all pilgrims, all pushed to our knees in penance and newly thankful for life, for love. It is good to be together.

I don’t know how you are handling your feelings just now, for each of us is different. My symptoms, acute at first, have eased a bit. I have been at least partially released since that first week or two after the attack. Ongoing, however, are the classic symptoms of grieving, classic symptoms of response to trauma. I am spacey, more that usual, I can’t concentrate well, my sleep is disturbed by unsettling dreams. The stress is settling in my back and hurting me there. And I have an anger that simple rises up, sometimes when I’m the least aware of it. The other day I was walking in the neighborhood, and a driver was about to go through a stop sign as I crossed the street. So I’m shaking my fist at him and saying, "You jerk!" (Actually, I did not say "jerk," but what I did say, I cannot repeat in this sanctuary.) "Who is this person I have become?" I’m thinking. "This is not like me." Then about ten feet along I pass this woman in her yard. She looks at me and says, "Hello, Dr. Sewell."

Let me tell you a little story. A man went to visit the farm where he had grown up as a boy. There he saw that a piece of pasture was fenced off with barbed wire, and young trees had been used as the fence posts. Some of the trees had accepted the barbed wire and in fact had grown around the wire so that the wire looked as if it had been threaded through the tree. But for some reason, other trees resisted the wire and through the years showed considerable damage as the wire continued to cut and scrape them and make them bleed. This barbed wire is at us, cutting and scraping at our very souls. We have to find a way to grow around it, for it will ever more be a part of us. No vengeance, no punishment of those responsible, no bombing, no military victory will make this injury disappear, will make us forget September 11. We’ve been changed, qualitatively changed.

We live in fear, more than ever before. Some magazines advertise gas masks for the whole family, and thousands upon thousand of people have taken Cipro for a possible anthrax infection. Some of us—people like you and me, who have had a multitude of advantages and consider ourselves highly competent--are all of a sudden asking ourselves, "Competent at what? And so what? Why is it important?" If fear, if terror, is to be our ready companion, then, we must look for the antidote, and we learn that the only antidote to fear is love. It is all we have in the face of death.

Many people are pouring into our churches, saying they know they need to have a spiritual home. Some churches in New York are seeing two or three times the attendance they usually have. On the first Sunday after the attack, we had 1,500 adults in church—about twice the usual number--and we have continued to have around 100-150 more folks in the Sunday service than usual. At my last orientation session for newcomers, I had 62 participants. The usual might be about 20. What answers do these people seek? What blessings are they coming for? As one writer, a self-described agnostic, put it, "I definitely feel jealous of religious people right now. I feel like I’m missing out on something. Starbucks and Barnes and Noble just don’t really do the trick anymore." And what about ourselves—just how have we been changed? What could possibly be redemptive about this on-going tragedy that colors our lives just now?

First of all, there is the blessing of vulnerabililty: we know now how vulnerable we are, both as a country and as individuals. We have indeed joined the suffering of the world. An American journalist traveling in the Soviet Union just before the collapse noted that people were staring at him on the street. He asked his Russian companion, "Why are people looking at me? Do I look so different from everyone else?" Whereupon the Russian answered, "You don’t look afraid."

Americans have been in our adolescence for far too long, believing that we are invulnerable, having the strength and optimism of the young, but not the knowledge of suffering that would mature us. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes: "Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,/ You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing,". Our national exuberance has turned to reflection. Our careless cynicism and flippant irony--a mode of being that sets us apart from others, that allows us to objectify people, to find fault--has shifted more toward open-hearted engagement and a more honest looking at ourselves. Our reflection pushes us deeper into the mysteries of life and death. We stand a chance, at least, that that reflection will move us toward compassion and wisdom.

Humility would be another spiritual gift of our maturation. As an adolescent nation, we wondered how we could ever be wounded. But now we have a felt knowledge of death, and we know that death could come for us at any time, without warning—we have learned to count our days. As Bob Dylan put it in a recent interview, "Every day above the ground is a good day." I am newly thankful every morning for the gift of the day, the golden leaves on the ground, the sweet rain on my face, and I ask to be blessed that I might use that particular day well.

With this sense of humility, we thankfully lose the arrogance that kept us "above it all." Suffering and death have at last connected us to all the people of this world. Janitors as well as stock brokers were running down those stairs at the World Trade Center, trying to escape certain death. What we have in common overshadows differences—our politics, our color, our social status, our sexual orientation. People in New York—strangers--were weeping openly and hugging one another in the days following the attack. Here in Oregon, the responses were not so acute, so overt, perhaps. Some of us, however, have noticed that we are more fully present to the people in our lives—not just our partners and friends, but the grocery clerk, the neighbor raking leaves, the boys playing a pick-up game of basketball in the street. Our souls have been scoured out, that they might receive. We are making space for the Holy, opening for blessing.

With me, I know my sense of calling has intensified. What is God really calling me to do, and how will I do it? I’m reading the obituaries of the victims of the World Trade Center collapse, their lives cut off, mostly without even a goodbye. The months, the years, are ticking along. I will not live forever. What am I doing as Mary Oliver suggests, with "my one wild and precious life"? I’m asking now, with more urgency. For now, I couldn’t be more connected with you, my people, and have been since September. There was no transition time coming back from my sabbatical. Woosh! I was right there. I knew I was your minister, and I felt so close, so bonded to you. I wanted to somehow protect you from the grief and pain, and I could not, but it was clear to me that I would stand with you.

And what about our nation and her people? We are not just people living our own individual lives: we are also citizens—so what have we learned as Americans? We have been jarred loose from our assumptions and called to look at ourselves as the rest of the world sees us—a country of great wealth and opportunity and freedom for the individual, and also a people driven by money and status and a people both insular and arrogant. It was no accident that the target of the terrorist attacks were the twin towers of the World Trade Center—a clear rebuke to our consumer culture.

Consider the message about patriotism that we been given for years in this country, and what has only intensified now: "Go out and buy things! Get ye to the shopping mall!" Patriotism calls not for sacrifice, as it did during WW II, but rather for rabid consumption. What’s wrong with this picture? Somehow with all the killing going on, some of us don’t have the stomach to go look for a new fridge or to buy that stylish watch we’ve had our eye on.

This is the first time that some of us, in our innocence and naivete, have come face to face with the knowledge that many peoples of many nations actually hate us. Do they hate us, as some have suggested, because we’re just so great? So powerful? So free? Think again. They hate us because we have used our economic power and our military power to bend others to our will and to exploit the resources of other countries. We have shamelessly supported dictatorships in countries that were friendly to our business interests, we have trained terrorists who sometimes have then turned against us—one being the self-same bin Laden we’re chasing now.

If we need to re-think our own lives, if we need to repent as individuals, then surely the same thing is true for this great nation. We need to repent as a country, we need to acknowledge our interdependency with other countries, and as a nation, we need to act with integrity, to seek justice and to be just. We need to stop moralizing to others and get ourselves straight and be the true moral leader, the exemplar, of the free world.

I regret to say that the world is still solving its differences with violence, and I have to say that I am no pacifist—though pacificism is perhaps a "purer" position, spiritually speaking, and I may be there one day. I don’t know. In regard to the war effort, I kind of relate to a bumper sticker that you see sometimes in Oregon: "I’M A MILITANT AGNOSTIC. I DON’T KNOW, AND YOU DON’T EITHER." Right now, I’m too much of a fighter. So I support our efforts to go after bin Laden and his terrorist cohorts. But as much as I hate the endless cruelties of the Taliban, as much as I like seeing this regime fall, it should be it be said that our bombing of the country of Afghanistan is a violation of international law, which says that no country should attack another unless that country attacks first. Capture bin Laden, yes, if we can—but we should be doing other things, too: we should be getting food to the refugees; we should be working on peace as least as hard as we work on preparation for war, building institutes to study peaceful solutions to conflicts, instead of soaking billions into instruments of death; we should use our considerable influence to seek justice in the Middle East, for without justice, we will have no peace. What we can never do with bombs, we can do with a devotion to caring and to justice.

Galen Gingrich, our colleague at All Souls in New York, tells of seeing a TV interview with singer k.d. lang. She talked about some of the difficulties she has faced, including being a lesbian in an extremely traditional culture in the heart of Canadian cattle country. Near the end of the interview, k.d. lang was asked how she arrived at her unusually well-developed musical texture and the surprising spiritual depth of her work. She answered, "I believe you are only as deep as what has been carved into you."

I thought about that. I think perhaps she means that life itself is the sculptor that brings the beauty of the stone to the surface. We have been cut deeply now, our country has been grievously wounded. What will we learn? What is the beauty that might emerge? May we birth from this terrible tragedy, may we pull from the bloody body of it, more self-knowledge, new spiritual depth, and a renewed passion for the good.

We sing "Spirit of Life" as the doxology every Sunday at our worship service. The singing brings tears to many eyes. I am deeply moved by the words, the music, too. "Roots, hold me close." I think of my grandparents and sitting and rocking on the front porch of the house in Louisiana where I was raised. I think of the prayers at the dinner table, and I think of the good earth where good things grew, the apple tree under whose branches I sat when I needed to be alone. "Roots hold me close." And I am thankful. "Wings set me free."

Set us free! Let us not be bound by fear. We hear more death every time we turn on the radio. Anthrax, bombs, kill count. Keep us from despair. Let us learn what we need to learn. Rooted in who we are and where we’ve been—the ugly and the hard and the sweet and the good—now wings set us free to love as we never have before, in spite of it all, perhaps because of it all.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we didn’t ask for this pain, but here it is, thrown at us when we weren’t looking. We know we will never be the same, but let us not be changed into a fearful people, closing in on ourselves. May we be thankful for the light, and may we also be thankful for the dark. Help us to be open to the carving of the Spirit, that we might be humbled and merciful, that we might grow in compassion for all who walk this difficult path called life. Amen

BENEDICTION

Go now and notice the gifts of your life, and give thanks in all humility for what you have been given.

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Copyright 2001, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.