by Rev. Leela Sinha

A sermon given May 27, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Opening Words

We come together this Memorial Day to lift up grief and celebrate life, to mourn and to sow seeds of possibility

to seek a future in the midst of struggle.

We honor the dead and we cry out for the living

and we renew our bonds each to the other.

Come, let us worship together.

There’s nothing like the military to teach you about teamwork. 

Years ago, my supervisor was a reserve officer who had served in Desert Storm, and I learned more from him about fierce loyalty and protecting “my” people than I had learned from anyone anywhere else.  The thing was, it didn’t matter who you were.  It didn’t matter what you thought, or what your theology was, or who you went home to at night.  All that mattered was that you were on his team—that made you his first priority until he went home to his wife.  No one else I knew offered me that kind of unflinching, unwavering, unconditional support.  No one.  He stood as a buffer between us and the rest of the company, between us and people’s fatigue and fear and illogic and unreasonableness.  He was our leader, and he led.

In exchange we offered him a staunch loyalty most ethically upright nonprofits can only dream of.  Nights, weekends, short notice, extra hours—even after I decided I was leaving, it was never just a job.  I could only imagine what it would be like to follow him in a war, but I understood why it would work.

Whatever else they teach, whatever else people learn, in the military depending on your buddies can be the difference between life and death, or between mission success and failure, and cultivating a justifiable loyalty makes all the difference.

So when I finally quit stalling and saw Saving Private Ryan, there was something oddly familiar about it.  If you’ve seen it you probably remember the opening beachhead scene before anything else: it’s Omaha Beach, it’s 1944, and people are dying everywhere.  The plot that gets us there is perfect for a peacetime war movie: eight men are sent to rescue one soldier whose brothers have all died; eight soldiers who lived through that bloody Omaha Beach invasion are expected to risk their lives to bring one man home.  The command comes through right before D-Day—so we watch an essentially humanitarian mission in the context of the European invasion, blood and guts right there on the screen, tears and fatigue and cowardice and courage unfolding around this one goal, this one man who has to be found and sent home before he’s killed.  The soldiers who end up trying to make it happen end up wondering what make’s Ryan’s life worth more than any of theirs, even as they move heaven and earth and each other to get to him.  They are solidly behind each other, but their devotion to the mission relies on their devotion to their leader and to each other.  Unfortunately, they’re asking a reasonable question under unreasonable circumstances, and it sticks, even after the credits roll.  How do we weigh one life against others?

On about.com’s atheism site (http://atheism.about.com/library/weekly/aa093098.htm) the host (Austin Cline) suggests that if one person’s life isn’t worth the lives of eight, then no society composed of such people can be worth the sacrifice, either.  It’s an interesting point—are we making a judgment about the value of life, or about the volume of life?  In a country conflicted over war, Private Ryan’s plot strikes a delicate balance—a mission about saving life, even in the context of war, is something nearly everyone can get behind.

But what about a mission that’s jeopardized for a life?

***

When I was in elementary school, I found a book in the discard section of the library.  Written in 1956, it was called Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint.  Unlike most discards it wasn’t shredded from years of reading; it wasn’t badly written; it wasn’t a bad fit for the library’s collection—in fact, they had most of the other Danny Dunn books, and I’d already read them: Danny Dunn on a Desert Island, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine , Danny Dunn and the Automatic House, and so forth .  The Anti-Gravity Paint was actually the first in the series, and since I always tried to read things in order, I was perplexed by the library’s choice.  I got it home and read it with relish: in it, Danny finds out about a top-secret project to develop an anti-gravity paint, which eventually leads to the first space flight—with four people on board.  I thought it was good although I thought the school punishments were strange—at one point the teacher makes Danny write, “Space flight is 100 years away” 100 times.  No modern teacher would have done that, it wouldn’t have worked on any of the kids I knew, and it didn’t make any sense…but I still liked the book.  It took years before I realized why it had been discarded: Danny Dunn was science fiction.  In 1956, space flight was still fiction, just barely.  As far as anyone knew for sure, space flight was 100 years away.

If I’m right about discard choices, Danny Dunn and the Automatic House is probably next to go—things change fast—but Miss Pickerel Goes to Mars is probably not far behind.  When I was reading about the anti-gravity paint (I was born in 1975), trips to the moon were a done deal, but trips to Mars were fiction—and presumably 100 years away.  Now we’re talking about when and how long, and with those answers come the inevitable harder questions: if we’re out there for years, far from everything, what if someone gets sick?  What if someone dies?

***

Here in the States, we talk a lot about “nice round numbers”.  Anything ending in zero is a nice, round number.  More zeros make for more roundness, so numbers like 100, and 100,000 are very nice round numbers.  They are complete.  They are self-contained.

In India, at least in my family, it has been different for generations, although it is changing.  In that context, a round number indicates a kind of finality.   It calls the image of death.  We don’t give a “nice round number” amount of money as a gift for anything except bereavement because it’s too final.  Traditionally you give 99, or better yet, 101 (dollars, or rupees, or coins, or whatever).  Recently I got a check from an Indian family member for $100—that’s how I know it’s changing—but I like the tradition.  The one is a new start, an opening, a nice new beginning.  The one indicates future and hope and possibility.  Ninety-nine has potential.  Add only one, and completion makes for stagnation, for stillness.  But add two, and you can regain hope.  One makes the difference between death and life. 

We like to think the question of the 99 and the 1 is easy: of course we always go after the one, the lost sheep, the straying lamb.  Of course we always include everyone.  Of course we save every life—every one is precious.

In Islam, there is a tradition which mentions the 99 names of God.  They are characteristics, mostly: merciful, powerful, holy, subduer, restrainer, abaser, exalter, creator, forgiver, preserver… But what I like about the 99 names is the one that appears to be missing.  If we can speak 99, then there is one unknown and unknowable, one unrecorded, one unspoken and unspeakable—one heartfelt-alone name of god.  There is one name of the holy that cannot be articulated, and in that name is implied all of the mystery that is too great for us to know.  That unspeakable name makes infinite space in what looks like a finite theology—it opens a wormhole to the vastness of an unknown universe—and in so doing, it opens up the possibilities between the potential of 99 and the completeness of 100.  In this case that one is the most precious of all.

***

So as I watch the conversations about travel to Mars, I wonder what we will really decide to do.  This question of life is a bigger question than logistics and timing and calculations.  Those are strategy questions.  This question brings us back to Private Ryan: When does the welfare of the one outweigh the welfare of the many—and when should it not? 

An article from CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/05/01/death.in.space.ap/

index.html) reports on NASA’s recent explorations of the possibilities.  Until now, we have not made missions that take us far enough from earth to pose a health risk.  If astronauts at the international space station get sick, they can come back.  But even our robotic probes take 7-10 months to get to Mars when the planetary alignment is ideal—which only happens once every two years (http://www.quest.nasa.gov/mars/events/webchats/4-24jh98.html).  An astronaut on a Mars mission would have to wait months or longer to arrive back on Earth, even if the resources were available to come back.  But with one spacecraft, one crew, one set of mission goals, would NASA abort for the sake of one crew member?  Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who has advised NASA since 2001, says this, “There may come a time in which a significant risk of death has to be weighed against mission success.  The idea that we will always choose a person’s well-being over mission success, it sounds good, but it doesn’t really turn out to be necessarily the way decisions always will be made.” (CNN article)

If we are willing to trade life not just for other lives but for simple mission success—for knowledge—what implications does that have for our values and our future?  Would we consider human sacrifice for medical research?  It’s a vast and complex question, and a frightening one.  What if the research could save tens of thousands of lives?  What if it would save just one life?  What are the scales we use to judge fitness or rightness or value of one human being or another?  Can we possibly make those judgments?  Do we want to?  Does our current technology give us a choice?

Right now our standard seems to be viability and certainty: a certain life should not be sacrificed for a mere chance at a life.  That’s not just the test for astronauts—that’s where the “for the health of the mother” abortion arguments start, too.  A bird in the hand is a person, alive—a human, living, breathing, looking us in the eye, human.  How can we say no to that in favor of the vague hope that somewhere behind enemy lines a single inexperienced soldier has not yet caught a fatal bullet?

[How do we justify Private Ryan?]  We can’t.  And yet, at the moment when that general makes that decision, when he finds out that Ryan’s mother will receive three death notices in one day and is determined that it not become four, our hearts leap for the compassion, for the hope that someone like that can make that decision and promote some kind of nobility in the mess of war—and then we see the repercussions…but we still want the mission to succeed.  There is something very basic and human about responding to hope.

We want that one, as much or more than we want the 99.  Because in each of our hearts, we have a piece that believes that no matter how well-loved we are, we are the one astray.  Each of us has a part that is utterly alone, no matter how strong our community, and we know what it is to be wandering in the darkness, and we are terrified that when that aloneness becomes visible, we will be left to die, because we are one, and we are not 99.

PBS recently did a series of interviews with military personnel about the mental health issues faced by soldiers returning from war.  Studies have shown that the worst impact on the women and men who return is from killing other people.  It’s counterintuitive—shouldn’t it be harder to watch someone you love die? –but one mental health counselor put it this way:

I think it is a very important thing to understand that when your friends are wounded or dead, it’s a real loss. It’s a loss of your friend that you trusted and you loved in a very intense way. When you personally take another life and you go up to that lifeless body with a hole in it and you look down on it, and you say, “I did that,” I think it is a loss of yourself at the same time. And I think that [once] they understand that, they can’t go back again. They can’t say that it didn’t happen, or [that] maybe somebody else did it.

--Jim Dooley, mental health counselor, US Dept. of Veteran Affairs (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heart/themes/prep.html)

It’s a loss of yourself.  And whether that loss is for right or wrong reasons, it doesn’t lift.  It doesn’t go away.  Soldiers are haunted.  Andrew Pomerantz, chief of mental health services for the VA in Vermont, said,

I think it’s one of the most powerful pieces for most of the people that I’ve treated who have been in close combat situations. I had one World War II veteran—to the day he died he could still describe the face of the man he was about to kill. He was that close, that personal, that he felt like he could read the man’s entire life just in his eyes, and he was in a situation where he had no choice but to kill him. I hear this frequently.

I think the loss of faith, both in the safety of the world and the loss of faith in one’s own humanity, is threatened when people kill other people, which is what we train them to do in war. I mean, it’s how you win the war is you kill people, but you take somebody off the street who spent their whole life learning not to kill other people, not to harm other people and put them in a situation where it’s his job to kill somebody else. I’ve not ever met a person who killed others who was not affected by that.

(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heart/themes/prep.html)

When they come home, a piece of these people has been irreparably changed, and that change makes it hard for them to live, hard for them to breathe, hard for them to wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night.  They are hurting, and it doesn’t matter if they thought that the war was justified; it doesn’t matter if they thought they were doing the right thing, unless their community is behind them.

David Grossman, a retired Lt. Col. with the US Army, describes part of the process that military training uses to prepare soldiers for combat, and specifically to kill:

… [at the moment] the human being looks another human being in the face, a profound and powerful physiological process sets into place. One of the most devastating, catastrophic effects of all is forebrain processing shuts down. And the mammalian brain, the mid-brain part of your brain that’s the same as your dog, begins to take over.

… So inside the mammalian brain of most healthy human beings is this powerful resistance to killing your own kind. We can see it throughout history.…We saw it in World War II when only 15 percent of the riflemen would fire their weapon at an exposed enemy soldier…And the only way to get the mammalian brain to do the right thing is to train it, train it, train it, train it. …

He continues to explain what the long-term impact of acting on that training might be:

in a normal human being, at the moment when you want to fire, the forebrain is shut down, the midbrain takes over, and you slam head-on into a resistance to killing your own kind. The only way to overcome that resistance is through operate conditioning, to make killing a condition[ed] reflex. And we’ve done that.

…But if we haven’t prepared ourselves emotionally for the act ahead of time, and we just tricked you into killing, the magnitude of the trauma can be significant, because we’re having to live with something that your body says is not right, that you didn’t want to do, and you were simply tricked into killing.

Now, if you’re convinced that what you did was right, if your society says, “But you were right,” if everything’s peachy keen and you come home, you’ll probably be fine. But if there’s any doubt about it, if you’re killing without conscious thought and there’s debate, the potential’s there to be devastated and psychologically destroyed by that act.

--David Grossman, Lt. Col. US Army, Ret. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heart/themes/prep.html)

…and when the interviewer asks person after person what the military does with the knowledge of that potential, it boils down to nothing.  Right now, for whatever reason, the military mental health structures are not addressing this problem.  And regardless of whether this war is right or wrong, these people do not deserve to be treated this way.

They are so carefully trained to function in community, to function as part of a larger whole, and yet in this case, in these times, they struggle alone.

When communities come together, when we gather for worship, or for meetings, or for making change, the power of numbers makes us the 99.  We are the masses, we are the mobs, we are the wolves in sheep’s clothing and the sheep in committees, we are the voices of the survivors, we are the voices of the many, we are the soldiers wondering if one life is worth this much effort.  And which one life is it, when we come together as Unitarian Universalists?  Is it a UU Christian, or a Muslim guest, is it a person of color, is it a theist, or an atheist, is it an institutionalist or a fierce individualist, is the person you have  set aside young or old, sitting in a wheelchair, carrying a child, mentally ill?  Is the person you abhor an activist?  Is she a soldier?

Every one of us can be among the 99 and every one of us can be the one, and the difference is a breath of wind or a split second’s hesitation, and we can no more condemn one or the other than we can condemn those we know and love the best.  Condemnation will not make change.  Condemnation will not make a better world, a wiser world, a more peaceful world.  Dividing the world will not make us more whole.

Perhaps nothing will make us more whole.  Perhaps we are hopeless, unsalvageable, beyond even the reach of our own struggling grace.  Perhaps we are not who we wish we were, and perhaps we cannot make any change, but I know we can try.  I know we can try.  I know we can open up our arms and our doors, open our congregations and our committees, I know we can open our hearts and our hopes to the possibility that we are all worth every last drop of effort and as we squeeze hope and possibility out of each of us the paradox of the many and the one comes down to one thing.  It comes down to the potential.  It comes down to the potential that vibrates in every life.  Every single life. 

And every life together.  Every life is stronger with other lives.  Every life is called to account by the lives around it.  Every life is called to connection by the very living that makes it life and that connection makes the 99 and the one a false dichotomy.  It is a false choice, it is a false separation.  The decision is not between staying with the 99 or going to the one.  The challenge is not to weigh the value of one against the value of many.  The challenge is to find a connection so strong and wisdom so deep and beautiful and true that the sheep go of their own will to find their companion; the shepherd will follow.

There is no division.

We are a hundred.

We are a hundred and one.

And we are still seeking our companions.

Let us join in hope and peace.

PRAYER

Will you pray with me?

Oh we pray for peace,
for healing,
for wisdom,
for strength.
We pray for greater love
and greater understanding.
We lift up our voices and call out our grief.
We lift up our voices and call out our hope.
Our life together is precious
and every. one. of. us. is precious.
May we find balance.
May we live in balance

and may we find peace.
Amen.

BENEDICTION

We are all people.  We are all strong and vulnerable, wise and foolish, let us all care for each other, that we may find peace.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Leela Sinha.  All rights reserved.