The Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt
The Fourth Universalist Society
New York, NY

Being Prepared

The Rev. Rosemary McNatt

The night before the war began, my older son Allen sat down at my husband Bob's computer to do some homework. On the screen was the homepage of CNN, which featured headlines about the growing crisis in Iraq. As he looked at the screen, then began to type in the address of the website he needed, Allen looked up at me and said, "We're all going to die, aren't we, Mommy?"

I wish I could say I was horrified by that question, but those days are over. Since the Sept. 11th attacks here, my sons have asked me that question many times, in many different ways, and I have learned to answer it with a calm and matter-of-factness that I almost feel. "Eventually we will," I told him. "But I don't think anytime soon." And then I changed the subject.

And yet the subject can't really be changed, can it, because death and war and killing and bombing and destruction are, once again, the stuff of our days. The morning Pentagon briefings are an organizing principle of Wall Street's working day. There is no taxi, no bodega, no sports bar where you do not hear NPR, or see CNN, or Fox, or the BBC. It's hard not to watch the networks and their analysts, walking across floor maps of Iraq, pushing markers across its surface like some morbid shuffleboard game, indicating the movement of troops. We are told the time and temperature in both New York and Baghdad with frequency and familiarity. All this attention, all this sudden intimacy — and all in the service of death.

I believe that this war is wrong, for so many reasons. Not only because war is always a failure of politics, of diplomacy, of leadership and of national will. Not only because people have died and will continue to die. Not only because the unintended consequences, the long-range impact of this war, have yet to be fully known. I believe this war is wrong because the day is long gone when a single nation and its leadership can decide to invade another nation and to kill the human beings of that nation, without an overwhelming sense of clear, present and immediate danger. I believe it is an outrage to embark on such a course preemptively, and it is a particular outrage to engage in the hypocrisy to which our government has been a willing party. To demand that the government of Iraq adhere to the precepts of the Geneva Convention in their treatment of American prisoners of war, while the United States holds thousands of suspected members of Al Queda in Cuba, and in cities across the US, without any due process whatsoever is a double standard that shames me as a citizen, and frankly embarrasses us before the world. I love this country; it is my home. But loving the United States right now feels to me like loving your embarrassing relatives. They're yours, you'd do anything for them, but you really wish you could pretend you didn't know them.

Yet we don't have that luxury. We are citizens of this country, and there is no turning away from that. So we who believe that peace and justice are the truest acts of patriotism have a heavy load to carry right now. We who are mourning the ideals of American life this morning need a place for our sadness and our grief and our rage. We who have friends and family in harm's way this morning must learn to manage our fear as well as our anger against the policies that have placed our loved ones in danger. We who continue to long for the land of the free and the home of the brave, even after all our many disappointments, need help in renewing our courage. We, the patriotic coalition of the unwilling, must prepare to live in a world where we seem foolish, or naïve, or so small in number as to be insignificant. That is not all we must do. We who think we are sure the war is wrong, must learn to live gracefully and graciously with those who do not agree with us, lest we move closer to becoming like the people we most fear.

In his extraordinary book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, the former war correspondent Chris Hedges provides an eloquent and persuasive voice about the seductions of war. A war correspondent for 15 years, Hedges has seen and been seduced by the urgency of combat and what he calls "the cause." And of course, we know that the cause changes from conflict to conflict, and from moment to moment. Every one of us knows what it means to be seduced by a cause; even we who are opposed to this conflict are likely to be seduced by our own anger against it. It is really very easy to demonize Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld; easy to rail against American arrogance and intransigence—I have done it too. But at what point do we cross the line between our principled opposition to our government's policies, and the dehumanization of those we oppose? It's so easy—it's too easy. And whenever we slip, whenever Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld ceases to be wrong and begins instead, to be an idiot, or a fascist, we ourselves have succumbed for a time to the seduction of violence.

These seductions are the earliest steps of a long, downward spiral. The insidious, very human propensity to set aside those we disagree with—to see them as the other—is key to what has brought our world to this moment. No conflict on earth can proceed without this shift in perception. Our common sense of humanity is so strong that conflict can only escalate when the enemy becomes in our minds inhuman, less than ourselves.

The preeminent teacher Parker Palmer refers to himself as "a would-be pacifist." I was so reassured to read this deeply spiritual Quaker's reflections on working toward community, for though intellectually, I understand and believe the truth of nonviolence, life has taught me just enough fear to resist total nonviolence emotionally. Sometimes, pacifism feels too vulnerable to me, too risky for the world in which we live. Yet I know that the governments of this world have learned too well the lessons of death and destruction on a global scale. The world is running out of time to learn the ways of peace, and our own government, in refusing to work harder on a diplomatic solution to the world's issues with Iraq, has crippled the United Nations, the world body most likely to create pathways to peace for the warring countries of the earth.

And so we sit together this morning, in anger or mourning or despair. I believe that we need to be prepared to be exactly where we are, for we are liable to be here for a while. We are living in the wilderness right now, a wilderness marked by a callousness toward human life and freedom; the seeming ascendancy of fundamentalist religious belief; the linking of that belief with the desire for empire that seems to have overtaken our country; and a corresponding desire to undo the last seventy five years of work for every progressive humanitarian cause most of us have ever known. We are in a desert of expectations, blasted by the sands and heat of our country's sense of national superiority. We are people of faith who thought we knew where we were headed—The Beloved Community or something like it—and now we have lost our way, and we wonder if we will ever get home.

We will get home again; in this we are no different than the generations before us who have worked and lived and died to bring a new world into being. This very sanctuary has been filled before, with other men and women who thought the world would be different than it turned out to be, and who gathered to help and strengthen one another, to weep for a while and then began to dream again. Now it is our turn to abide with one another, at a time of fear and despair, to witness to the power of life and of love, and to carry that witness to the world.

How do we do that? We are doing it already. So many of you have been faithful to your commitments to peace, with your marching, your writing, your prayers and your songs. We have succeeded at least in making sure the world knows that the bombing and killing going on at this very moment can't be done in our names. The leaders of our own country may ignore us for now, but the other nations and their people are paying attention. It's important that, for those of us who oppose the invasion of Iraq, we do all that we can do to be consistent and respectful in our critique and our opposition. Courage is contagious, and our opposition serves to give others courage to resist the seductions of war. Remember that it took three years of concerted effort by those opposed to the Vietnam war to change public opinion. We are still in the wilderness, and it takes time to reach home.

For those of us unsure about this war, or for those of us who support it, I add a word for you. As you sit in this sanctuary with others who feel differently about the war, I remind you—and all of us—of one important meaning of sanctuary—a refuge. Throughout human history, sacred places have been safe havens; Unitarian Universalist sanctuaries like this one are meant to be safe havens for discussion, for dialogue, for respectful disagreement. In a time of enormous betrayals by society's other institutions, let us not betray ourselves and our liberal religious legacy. Let us be a free and faithful religious community for all who enter here, and live into the words of the Unitarian martyr Francis David: "We need not think alike to love alike." You are safe here.

Amid our sadness and our sense of helplessness, it is easy to forget joy. But we should be prepared to seek out joy, to remind ourselves of the goodness of life. It is a good time to make friends and to make love, to be kind, to play, to laugh, to dance. We do these things, not in callous disregard of the world's sorrow, but as a reminder of why we work to end that sorrow—so that all of the human family might know joy. As we live in this wilderness time, joy becomes essential.

Lastly, I share with you the words that most people think of as originating with Dr. Martin Luther King, but are really those of the great Unitarian preacher and theologian Theodore Parker: "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." As we walk in this wilderness together, as we work, and cry, and pray, and rejoice together over every tiny victory for peace, let us remind one another that it is our turn to bend the moral arc. Those words are my mantra as I walk in the wilderness that has become our nation. I believe them with all my heart, and though I am still young, I have lived long enough to know them for the truth they represent. May our work and our witness for peace bend the universe a little closer to justice; may our time in the wilderness be short indeed.

Amen.

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