by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given August 25, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! Welcome!

Holy and beautiful is the custom which brings us together this day;

Three unseen guests attend—

Faith, hope, and love:

Let all our hearts prepare them room.

Commissioner Ken Holden, head of New York’s Department of Design and Construction, was on his way to a meeting at City Hall, and he didn’t want to be late. The agency he ran did the thankless work of building and repairing sewers, sidewalks, station houses, and so forth. As he headed to his meeting, one of his staffers came up to him and told him that the World Trade Center had just been hit by an airplane. Holden rushed outside to where his official car was waiting, and he saw the North Tower burning. This is the way William Langewiesche of the Atlantic Monthly tells the amazing story.

Holden’s driver was a short, muscular Dominican immigrant named Apollo Hernandez, a bodybuilder who flew small planes in his spare time and liked to drive fast. They raced through Queens to the Center, listening as they went to the radio, and they soon learned that a second plane had come in, and had hit the South Tower. Hernandez launched into an explanation of the fuel capacity of small airplanes; Holden for once was silent. Though he had been raised in an observant Jewish family, he was no longer in any way religious, and so he did not evoke the name of God that day, but reacted by thinking "Holy shit!" as the car sped downtown. They parked beside City Hall, about 4 blocks from the burning towers. Holden jumped out and said, "Don’t move. Wait here. I’ll come back." Later, after the buildings fell, he was haunted by those words. What if Hernandez followed his orders too faithfully and died? When the North Tower fell, Holden heard it as a growl.

After a few hours, Holden found a functioning phone and called his wife. She kept saying, "We’ve lost our innocence!" Holden told her to try to relax, and that he probably wouldn’t be home for dinner. He was finally able to contact Hernandez who had remained loyally parked through both collapses, but who was unscathed. He had watched the towers fall from close by, and had been hit by the successive debris storms. "You go into that alert, that automatic alert," he reported later. "You’re just waiting to do the right thing."

To him the right thing was to turn on all the flashing lights on the car. In case somebody needed help, they could come to the car. Two women rushed up to him, terror-stricken, hugging each other and sobbing. Hernandez calmed them down. They walked away. He spotted a couple of policemen on their hands and knees, one bleeding from the head. He got them into the car and gave them a blanket to wipe their mouths and eyes. They called him their guardian angel. The dust cleared. Attracted by the flashing lights, a woman approached. She was shaking all over and could not speak. Hernandez found help for her and then went back to his car.

Ninety minutes had passed since Holden had asked him to wait, and he realized that he need not wait longer. He drove the policemen to a first-aid station. Eventually his cell phone began to function, and he got through to Holden. Holden was at the police headquarters, where he was trying to marshal the DDC’s resources to help. Hernandez wanted to help, too. He was not tired or bored. He was patient and proud. He felt love for his adopted country. Heavy smoke was rising in the sky.

The events of September 11 forced us—for a time, at least—to live with eyes wide open. For me, I know, there was a certain aliveness and presence to everything I did. There was no such thing as business as usual that day, nor for many days after. Workers had the immediate task of sorting through the debris of the Trade Center and of the Pentagon, looking for survivors—and we had the personal, bodily trauma of sharing the suffering of thousands and thousands. We had had forced upon us hard political questions: we had to look at ourselves as a country and ask, "Why? Why did this happen here, in our country, in New York and Washington, these two great seats of power?" We were forced to ask spiritual questions that perhaps had never occurred to us before—what is my life about? What’s worth living for? What’s worth dying for?

We were rudely, painfully jolted out of our passivity into a new world of sorts. And then gradually we adjusted. Over this past year, the vast hole in the sky in New York became just the sky. We went back to worrying about how to get our children to eat organic peanut butter instead of MacDonald’s hamburgers. We thought about our losses in the stock market. We worried about fashion and automobiles and sports once again. What? Another baseball strike? And we put September 11 largely behind.

It’s good, it’s healthy that we did not remain in the trauma that we all experienced to one degree or another on that fateful day—on the other hand, when our days seem relatively ordinary, it’s so easy to begin to forget. To forget the profound and give ourselves to the petty. To involve ourselves with the petty. To allow ourselves to move obediently, dispassionately, through our days. To sleepwalk through our life.

And why is that so? Well, for one thing, it’s simply more comfortable to be asleep. There’s that thing about the pleasure/pain principle—that all creatures move toward pleasure and away from pain. And since there is some distinct discomfort in risking new ways of being, in confronting ourselves, we avoid that discomfort and just continue along in our known, but not necessarily satisfying, rut. My cousin Geri from Boston was just here for a visit of several days. She is beautiful, talented, bright, compassionate. She has it all. She was recently named one of Boston’s Outstanding Young Women. Yet she confessed to me that she had stayed in a job that she hated for 6 years. Her values were not supported there; she was not treated respectfully; but she stayed on. Now she has her own successful business and can’t understand why she didn’t act sooner.

You know, there’s stuff in our lives that simply distracts us. Our daily work is there to do, and so we simply do it. To think about another path, to plan a different life—hey, just to try a different breakfast cereal—well, that takes enormous energy and courage. So we stay put. And then there are the family and friends. More stuff. Dinner to fix, the niece’s wedding this weekend. Stuff to do, maybe good stuff, but stuff that distracts. How can we dream of a new way when there’s the grass to cut? Better cut the grass and dream tomorrow. And so it goes, day after day.

Another reason for our going through our days only half-alive is that we think we are not going to die. Death is always for somebody else, and it’s always later. "I’ll always have time," we think to ourselves. And then one day—and usually this happens very suddenly—we look into the mirror, and, oh my gosh, the old body is giving way. All of a sudden the arms look like rising loaves of bread, all puffy and white. I have a friend who went to the barber one day, and the barber said to him, "Now if we cut your hair this way, the bald spot won’t show so much." "What bald spot?" he said.

We do everything we can to stave off aging, because the message of aging is that this process called living ends in death. Plastic surgeons are getting rich helping people deny death, encouraging people to believe that aging is a disease. They speak of the "repair" of wrinkles, the "correction" of sagging skin. It’s good to exercise, it’s good to eat right. But as I heard one health-food enthusiast say, after being on a regime of 4 oat-bran muffins a day, for cleansing of the colon, "OK, that’s it—I’d rather die than eat another oat-bran muffin." Aging is a process that lets you know that you are not essentially flesh, you are spirit. That is the gift of aging. Paradoxically, when you make peace with your own death, you will not find it so necessary to run from life.

Sometimes living with eyes wide open means breaking the rules. Rules are general codes of behavior, not made for the moment and not applicable always to the situations they are meant to address. When the World Trade Center came down, someone got on the phone and ordered some scaffolding, to protect people on the ground from falling debris. Other people heard an order—who knows from whom—saying that everything was fine, to stay put there in their office cubicles. They died. All rules were off that day.

There was a moving story in the Oregonian last Friday. Jacquelynne Vu, a Vietnamese immigrant, got married yesterday here in Portland. She knows, though, that she would never have lived to see this day if Al Bell had not broken the rules. In June 1982, at the age of seven, Jacquelynne found herself in a fishing boat with her family and 45 other Vietnamese refugees. The boat was half-filled with water, and a storm was approaching. Jacquelynne and the others prepared to face the end.

But the USS Morton, a destroyer under Bell’s command, spotted the boat on radar and headed for it. Bell and his crew rescued the refugees and took them to a camp in the Philippines. In February 1983, a great-uncle sponsored the Vu family’s move to Portland. Bell’s order to save these people was against regulations. "The military had already picked up tens of thousands of refugees, and the countries we were turning them over to didn’t want any more people," says Bell, now 61 and retired from the Navy. "But a lot of people weren’t making it. There were bodies all over the South China Sea. I knew this boat would probably sink, and everyone would die."

Bell had more or less forgotten about the incident until a year ago, 20 years later, when Jacquelynne Vu posted a thank-you message on a Web site featuring the now-decommissioned ship, the USS Morton. The Vu family and Bell exchanged e-mail and phone calls, and they met for the first time since the rescue this last Thursday night. They hugged and looked at old photographs of the USS Morton. And yesterday Bell attended Jacquelynne Vu’s wedding to Loc Nguyen in Vancouver.

The Vus might never have met Bell had it not been for the death of Jacquelynn’s little brother Peter Vu. On Dec. 2, 2000, the 18-year-old went to a rave in Portland, where he took the drug Ectasy and later collapsed and died. Going through her brother’s personal belongings, Jacquelynne found a postcard of the USS Morton that prompted her to post the thank-you message.

"I figured that you never know when you’re going to die, and I wanted to say thank you before I was gone," she says. "Our family has always been so grateful. Al Bell went against rules and regulations. He saved us."

It’s important to not be passive in our personal lives—to open our eyes, see clearly, and to move in a way that has integrity for us. And the same is true in our civic lives. As citizens we cannot idly stand by and allow injustices to continue. Some people might say, "Why is the church so—political?" As a religious people, we cannot separate our spiritual lives from our caring for others. And the fact is that our government makes the rules that divide the resources, that allocate the power, the rules that very much affect both the country and individual lives. We should remember that laws are all too frequently made by the powerful, in the interests of the powerful. When some child in Portland goes hungry—and many do—this is a spiritual and a political issue. So how can we, as a religious people, not be involved politically? As a church, we are not partisan, but we are and must be political.

I have a great concern right now about the present administration’s plans to attack Iraq. I’m amazed that I have heard few voices in the media, even on NPR, pointing out that such a war would be a violation of international law, which holds that one country is justified in attacking another only when it is under attack or about to be under attack. This is not the case with Iraq. And there is no justification for such a move by connecting Iraq with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There is no evidence of such involvement. Yes, Saddam Hussein is a dangerous, nasty man, but the real reason that our leaders are planning this war is a simple three-letter word, OIL. The Bush administration wants to depose him and install a leader who will stabilize the region and give us easier access to oil. This country has already made extensive preparations for the war on Iraq, and every morning’s paper heralds the next step, preparing us for the inevitable. Strategic plans of some detail have even been published in the New York Times. We need to mount a heavy campaign of education to help people understand that there are alternatives other than a war that will be costly not only in money, but in blood. How much are we willing to pay for this oil? The price is way too high. But with Bush enjoying an incredible 70% approval rating, we will have to be ever vigilant, else he will drag us into this war. We cannot afford to just drift passively along and let it happen. And we won’t. There’ll be many of us in the streets to tell Bush that no, we will not let it happen.

Living with eyes wide open requires so much courage, so much tenacity, so much compassion. How are we to do this?

Don’t let your life—your personal life or your civic life—overwhelm you. Keep that balance that you need. Your first responsibility is to continue to ask the big questions in your own life, and to live out of the wholeness that you find by asking these questions. As far as your civic responsibility goes, remember that you don’t have to take up every issue, you don’t have to feed every homeless person—you can’t. Simply do what you can do. What calls you? What particularly makes your blood run faster? Pick an issue. Focus there. It all leads to the same thing, anyway—at least it seems to me that the center is human greed and power-seeking. Whether it’s environmental concerns, or medical care, or racism, it boils down to a few, a very few, people who seek short-term gain for themselves, not considering the planet, not considering others who may be suffering. Don’t try to save the world. When you think you can, your ego gets caught up in unhelpful ways with the very problem you’re seeking to solve. Just do what you can, and leave the fruits to the Spirit. The only thing you can save for sure is your own soul.

If you feel that you’re in a rut, do something to get out of it. Travel, engage new people, go to a workshop, a class, or a retreat, take some time off and just dream. Go where your assumptions will be challenged. Maybe the questions that you’re asking are not even the right questions. But don’t just sit there and let your life wash over you, doing your little routines, playing your little games, saying the expected. You could go through life like this, and one day you will wake up dead.

I heard a story on National Public Radio this past week that I want to share with you. The story begins in Vienna during the Nazi regime. A Jewish child, Lisa, was sent by her mother into the city by train every Sunday for a piano lesson. She loved these days and began to develop her skills beautifully. But then one day the sign on the train read "No Jews and No Dogs." The time had come when the Jews could no longer move about freely—but as the pressure mounted, children were allowed to leave the country on a kindertrain, and so Lisa was told by her mother that she must go, to save her life. She had time to pack only a small bag, and just as she left her home, she looked around the room as if to keep it all the same, and to remember it, and then she grabbed the sheet music for "Clare de Lune." Her mother made her promise one thing: she said, "Hold on to your music, Lisa, because that is what will save you."

Lisa made her way to London, where she became a kitchen maid at a residence called "Peacock Manor." On the second floor of this mansion was a grand piano, but she was only hired help, so she was not allowed to play. One day, when the family was gone to church, she quietly slipped up the stairs and opened the piano and looked at the gleaming keys. Afraid to actually touch the keys, she put her fingers in the air over the keys and silently played a Chopin prelude. She decided she could stay in this home no longer, so she ran away and ended up in a Quaker orphanage. There she was allowed to play a piano, and the children there, who had lost everything, were greatly moved by her music. She kept her promise to her mother.

One of Lisa’s daughters has written a book about her mother’s experience, called The Children of Williston Lane. Both this daughter and her sister are concert pianists, thus fulfilling their mother’s dream.

What is the music you must keep hold of? What is it in your life that gives you wholeness and joy when you touch it? If you are to live with eyes wide open, something must sustain you. Is it prayer? Is it climbing a mountain? Is it dance? Is it the people you love? Stay in touch with what gives you life, and like Lisa, run from that which does not. It’s a simple question, really. Does this person or this activity give me life, or not? Know what gives you strength, joy, hope—and go there. Play your music, so that you might live. So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, forgive us when we shut down, close our eyes, and drift through, squandering the only thing we really have—our time, our precious lives. Through your grace, lead us to the people and places that would keep us truly awake. Help us not to be bound by habit, by practices that are not life-giving, but help us instead to reach out for joy, that we might taste the juice and sweetness of life each day. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now, and remember how precious your life is. Live it with joy and with passion, and let it be crowned with goodness. Go in love and go in peace.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.