Religious Responses to Terrorism
by Therese Baumberger, Intern Minister
Mt. Diablo UU Church, Walnut Creek, CA
When Gina asked me to speak today about religious responses to terrorism,
I heard her ask for three types of response. The first type of religious
response is a theological explanation of how such a bad thing could
happen. How do we get our minds around it? Another is pastoral, asking
how we can deal with the grief and anger we feel about this terrible
event, in ways that are both creative and affirm life. How do we get
our hearts around it? The third issue is spiritual, how we can derive
strength and insight from this event. How do we get our spirits around
it?
Now there is much that I could say, much that I did say in a sermon
at Mt. Diablo a couple weeks ago, about addressing, theologically, the
twin existences of good and evil in our world, but I don't want to go
into all that today. The essence of what I want to say is this. First,
the theology that says bad things happen because of divine retribution
for our wrongdoing, because of God's righteous anger about our sinful
actions, is an ancient theology that grew out of a particular historical
context. It is certainly not the only theological response to the existence
of evil that one can find in the Bible. In fact, it is the oldest and
the least evolved theology concerning evil, and I believe it is damaging,
has outlived its usefulness, and should be left behind us.
This means also putting behind us the self-blame I've heard liberal
religious people express about the terrorist attacks. I've heard people
say they feel that we as a nation somehow caused the attacks
through our greed, our arrogance, or our foreign policy decisions. I
cannot agree with that approach. I see it as humanistic variation on
the theology of divine retribution. I'm not saying that we as a nation
have not acted with greed or arrogance, because I think we have. However,
I also believe that the terrorists had choices about how to respond
to our greed, arrogance, and foreign policy, and they chose to respond
with acts of terrorism. In other words, I do not think a religious response
to the attacks should in any way include blaming ourselves for them.
What it should include, I think, is compassion based on deep understanding
of our selves.
Please Call Me By My True Names by Thich Nhat Hanh
Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.
Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who,
approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his
"debt of blood" to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full
it fills up the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughs at once,
so Ican see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
This poem, by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, captures what I believe
is a deep intuition that we have about ourselves, the intuition that
we have it within us both to do bad things, and to do good things. For
example, I believe I am basically a good person, capable of doing good,
helping people find healing, loving deeply my sweet child, speaking
a kind word to someone who looks sad or lonely, or lending a hand to
a stranger. We Unitarian-Universalists have a history of emphasizing
this positive aspect of ourselves, the divine light within us, which
is a real and true aspect of our lives.
One thing that we as a religious movement have sometimes neglected,
perhaps because we are afraid to look at it, perhaps because we have
been injured by the religions we grew up in, or perhaps because ours
is such an optimistic faith, is the other side of our selves. I know
that I see within myself the capacity to do evil, in anger to say hurtful
things, to lose my temper with my child, to look past people who are
lonely or sad, to act out of my own selfish interests. It is indeed
as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, I have it within me both to do good and to
do evil. For me, a religious response to the terrorism must include
both aspects of myself as a religious person, both the good and the
evil that I am capable of doing. I can see the potential for
that kind of violence, that kind of rage and hatred, in myself. This
does not mean that I am personally guilty for their actions, but it
does help me to open the door of compassion for those who are guilty
of them.
Another religious response that I think works is to examine our own
consciences to find ways we have failed ourselves, each other, our principles,
and the web of all existence, and then to work toward building a better
world, a world in which such attacks do not occur. This means committing
ourselves to turning around and walking the other way, a concept captured
in the Hebrew word teshuvah. This leads us out of a static state
of guilt about our own actions, into a growing sense of right relationship
with our religious principles, with what is best about our humanity,
and with the interconnected web of all existence. Salvation is acting
in ways that bring wholeness and healing to each other, to our selves
as a religious people, to our world. We can respond religiously to the
attacks by acting in accordance with our principles, by respecting the
web, by being our best selves, in other words, by being in a state of
grace, by being both saved and saving.
A religious response to the terrorist attacks of last month also involves
helping people to deal with their grief and anger about them. I am a
poet, and for me creativity, spirituality, and religion are practically
inseparable, so creativity is a key means for me to cope with my feelings.
During my religious work as a hospital chaplain this past summer, I
wrote poetry to record and to work through my experiences with helping
people through loss. One thing that happened in the process was that,
as one of my colleagues put it, "I became more religious."
This next poem I wrote after my first response to a code blue in which
the patient died unexpectedly, a tragedy of smaller proportions than
the terrorist attacks, but a tragedy nonetheless.
Shaken
Shaken, shaking, after witnessing
the woman's scaling grief mount up upon
the news of her husband's sudden dying.
Shaken not by her visceral bodily reaction
to having him so violently torn from her aching life,
by seeing severed nerve-ends of love, raw and bleeding.
Shaken not by her abundant sounds of mourning,
dove sounds strangely cooed from breast of grieving,
by her confusion, by her shock, by profusion of tears.
Shaken, rather, by how clearly God was there,
by how her every expression evoked God's face,
by how God's body happened in her every moment.
Shaken by how deeply God held her in divine embrace,
by the apparence of God's grace in great surround of death,
and by the certain implication that God had been as evident
at my own father's expected, unexpected, death sixteen years ago.
Shaken by the realization that by the time he died,
God had been wrapped around me for so long,
that my eyes had grown so used to God's face,
that my body had become so adapted to God's touch,
that in sorrow's soul, I could no longer sense God's presence.
Shaken by how strongly God, just now, showed Her self through me.
Shaken to see God shining through my hesitant fingers
as I held that woman's tender hand, plump and pleading,
to see God warming through my arm around her soft but shaking shoulders.
Shaken to hear God's voicings on my own faltering words,
to sense God's subsistence in my throat as I searched for words to soothe
her,
to feel my tongue and teeth and lips somehow forming thoughts of God.
Shaken that God might also stammer, stand bewildered
by suffering so written on a face,
by mourning so molded by a body.
Shaken that God might be so shaken.
I was startled to find myself facing the divine in the midst of tragedy.
It was not my tragedy, and maybe that is why I could see it so clearly.
I saw the divine not in the tragedy itself, but in the very human response
to it, and that was true of the terrorist attacks last month as well.
The sacred lay not in the tragedy, but in the kindness and altruism
of people around the world in response to it. It is important to know
that all of our emotional responses to the attacks, fear, anxiety, sadness,
shock, numbness, grief, even anger, are normal, adaptive, and partake
of the sacred. The following poem, which I wrote shortly after the attacks,
includes some of my initial anger.
How dare the sky be blue today
How dare the sky be blue today
instead of weeping red blood tears,
filling itself with purple clouds,
and thundering its grief
against keening heart of earth?
How dare the sun shine bright today
instead of hiding its yellow face,
vowing not to reveal rampant horror,
not to shine where it can no longer
warm the innocent dead?
How dare the mirror sea reflect traitor sun
instead of shrouding itself with black,
declaring a watery day of mourning?
How dare birds continue to sing?
How dare the spinning universe not pause?
How dare the world have beauty
instead of consonanting itself
with the so ugliness of now?
At least Manhattan had
the grace to anoint itself with ash.
My six-year-old son has also been affected by these attacks, and so
together we drew and painted pictures about them, which seemed to help
him and I know helped me. He drew a picture stained with red and orange
of the World Trade Center, and I painted one as well. There are many
ways to express creatively our grief, sadness, outrage, and we can use
any and all of them to help our selves and each other through this difficult
time.
Finding creative ways to work through all of this anguish, the anger,
the pain, is an individual response to the tragedy. I ask you to think
about what sorts of creative religious work can we do in response to
it, as a religious body. What creative things could we do here in the
next few weeks to express our religious response to terrorism?
Next comes the grief
Next comes the grief,
shock and anger having passed.
Now comes the wondering
how life will ever be again
in the heart-dragging absence
of everything it once was.
Old familiar garments now are rent,
no new threads yet on the loom.
The third aspect of a religious response to terrorism is spiritual.
How do we gain strength and insight despite, or maybe even as a result
of, these attacks? As far as insight is concerned, I wish I could tell
you what it all means. I wish I could hand you a nice prettily wrapped
package that had all the answers in it, but I cannot do that. I am only
a finite human being, but I believe that together we finite human beings
can share what within each of us points to the infinite, a wisdom beyond
what each of us can see individually. We can share what religious responses
have arisen in us individually, and in doing so put new threads back
on our collective loom.
The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and clear pebbles of rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
"Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine."
Finally, religious response to terrorism necessarily includes, I believe,
coming together in religious community to talk about our despair, our
fear, our anger, our compassion, even our moments of joy. It may not
seem right even to discuss joy at a time like this, but recall that
I believe we need to include all of who we are religiously in our responding.
That means including our joy, our visions, our hope, our faith, our
goodness, and our loving presence. It means that even in times like
these, maybe even especially in times like these, it is necessary
for us as religious people to laugh, to dance, to sing, to celebrate
all that is our lives, the passion, the pain, and the joy of being human.
