Sermons
UUA Chapel
Led by Nancy Palmer Jones, Intern Minister
UU Society of Wellsley Hills, Massachusetts
March 25, 2003
First Reading
by Albert Camus
We must mend
What has been torn apart
Make justice imaginable again
In a world so obviously unjust,
Give happiness once more
To people poisoned
By the misery of the century.
Naturally, it is a superhuman task.
But superhuman is the term
For tasks … [we] take a long time
To accomplish.
That's all.
Second reading
From a recent essay by Jonathan Schell, who wrote The Fate of the Earth. Schell has been the peace and disarmament correspondent for the journal The Nation. This article appeared in the March 2003 issue of Harper's magazine.)
"No More Unto the Breach"
There are moments in history when a crack in time seems to open and swallow the known world: solid-seeming institutions, rotted from within, collapse or are discarded; settled beliefs are unsettled; old truths are discovered to be provisional; acts that were forbidden are permitted or even required; boundaries thought impassable are passed without comment; and outrageous and unreal events, seeming to belong more to comic books than to reality, flood in profusion from some portal of the future that no one was guarding or even watching. Sometimes everything happens at once, but at other times there is a pause between a moment of dissolution and a moment of new foundation. Such intervals may … last just a few months, or they may … last for years. At some point, however, decisions are made … [and] these are times that call for exceptional vigilance, because what is at stake is not just who will win and who will lose but the rules by which everyone will have to play from then on….
Our moment is one of exceptional unpredictability and fluidity. A decade before the towers of the World Trade Center were struck down, … the Berlin Wall was peacefully dismantled by joyful East Germans…. [Now] a new cycle of violence has been initiated, yet it can be broken or reversed…. There will be points of decision at every step along the way…. There is still scope for choice and will…. There is still time to step back … and, in a view that encompasses both the wall and the towers, pose afresh the larger issues of war and peace.
SERMON
"Believing When Belief Seems Foolish"
Psychologist Robert Kegan tells of a time when he was watching his daughter learn to read. "I watch her listening intently to her own announcement of each letter's sound," he writes. "'SIH-AEH-NIH-DUH,' she says, peering over these symbols, sitting still among these sounds which do not yet cohere for her. 'SAAN-DUH.' It is still an alien sound the way she says it, something strange and apart from her. She waits, strenuously. 'SAND!' she says, arriving home."
When we are first beginning to learn how to read, how difficult it is to make sense out of symbols on a page. What a life-changing event it is, really, whenever we come to recognize and understand a new word. Because once Kegan's daughter knows that this particular combination of S, A, N, and D means "sand," then every time she reads that word, she will be able to connect it or contrast it with all her own experiences of sand--sand in her bathing suit, sand between her toes, sand on snowy roads, desert sands. The word on the page will have meaning for her—and she can make meaning with it. Her world—and she herself—will have grown bigger and more complex because of it.
How difficult it is to make sense out of what is happening in our world right now. I wonder if we don't need to "sit still [for a moment] among [all] these sounds," like Kegan's daughter, "waiting strenuously" for the new "words" to cohere—waiting not passively but with all our most generous and courageous attention, with all the capacities that we have. With Jonathan Schell, I think this is a time when we are called to understand our world in radically new ways, called to take in all the conflicting and conflictual images and events and feelings of these days, called to hold in our minds and hearts both the news of each hour and the history of human actions and attitudes, creative and destructive, that have brought us to this time and place, and called to listen to voices we have never heard before as well as to the deepest whispers of our own hearts. It is a complex task.
This is not a luxury, nor is it just the privilege of those of us who are far from the actual fields of battle or who have had certain kinds of education. All over the world people are struggling with this task of meaning making—we see it happening in the streets and in the palaces and Parliaments, in the villages and on the battlefields. Because this is what we humans do—we make meaning with everything we learn, every choice we make, every word or action … And as Schell points out, how we make meaning now, the choices we make and that we empower our leaders to make, will make a difference for all of us for a long time.
It seems daunting, doesn't it, overwhelming—especially when our hearts are breaking, especially when we may be feeling so angry or powerless, fearful, confused, or just so tired. This process of gathering up and understanding and making meaning and laying down a new foundation, a whole new approach to war and peace—well, it requires an enormous faith in our human capacities, in our intellectual and emotional and spiritual capacities, and in our ability, individually and collectively, to change the course of history. Some folks find just such a hope in the millions of people who have united around the world to say no to war, while others feel that nothing will change, this is all human nature, things are going the way they've always gone and always will. In the congregation I serve, there are people at either end of this spectrum, but most of us land right in the middle, not sure where our hope and a really grounded faith reside, and just feeling really sad.
So let me tell you the only story I have right now, which is my own. It is a story of a fall from faith and from hope, and of the long, gradual journey, still ongoing, back toward a more complicated but a deeper belief. I hope in its telling we can find the places where your journey and mine intersect, or even where we are on the same road.
Jonathan Schell suggests that September 11, 2001, marked one of those "crack[s] in time that seem[ed] to open and swallow the known world." Certainly this is what it did to my world. Because what it revealed to me was that the way I knew the world was incomplete and inadequate. What it revealed to me was that the very foundations of my beliefs about our human experience could no longer support me.
Now, to capture this, I'm going to have to simplify. But that's exactly my point; my view was just that: too simple. I believed that we humans are fundamentally good—flawed and broken, yes, but oh with so much beauty and wisdom in each of us and so much potential for the good that these things outweighed the flaws and could heal the brokenness—as long as we dedicated ourselves to a life of love and justice. On my more euphoric days I could soar with Emerson toward that "illimitable" sense of the divine within; on an ordinary day I at least felt secure with Channing, trusting in our human capacity for self-culture—well, if we could only level the playing field for everyone and all pull together. Now, I know I was influenced in these beliefs by my social location and all the unearned privileges and protections it has brought, and I was shaped, too, by the optimism that was like a religion in my family. But the important thing is not so much what I believed or why, as how incomplete my truth was.
In the face of September 11 and its aftermath, I could no longer escape this incompleteness, this partiality. Because on that day, my gut reaction was to see my own humanity, to see who I am, as all tied up with the humanity of everyone involved: with that of the people who died, of their loved ones, of the firefighters, of the volunteers, and with the humanity of the very perpetrators themselves, with the suffering and the history of oppressions that I felt lay deep behind their actions, with the complicity of my country and of myself in that suffering—with the whole tangled web … But I didn't have a structure into which that much suffering and that much destruction, that much willful harm, could fit. My whole way of knowing human nature would have to change. In the meanwhile, I was pretty stuck—despairing, uncertain what to do or what I could do. We humans seemed awfully, fatally limited.
Now, the thing about a personal philosophy is that it does not reside in our heads. It lives in our bodies and comes out in our relationships and our behaviors; it is taken for granted, sometimes not even consciously known—it is simply who we are and how we live. And it stays there, just below the surface, until it doesn't support us anymore, until it can't bear the weight of the world as we enter into that world more fully and as the world itself grows and changes. When that moment comes, it can feel like chaos, like a catastrophe—and indeed, that's just what it may be. The inner world and the outer world may seem equally frightening and unmanageable.
But if we hope to survive, we have to step back and take a larger view. We need to see our old way of knowing, our old understanding, as just one among many. And then, "waiting strenuously" with all our most generous and courageous attention, with all the capacities that we have, we must come to a whole new way of knowing, a new understanding that encompasses all the others, encompasses our old self, our old world, and the new. Like Bob Kegan's daughter learning to read, we have to put all the sounds together to make a new meaning. We have to grow bigger and more complex.
And here is the amazing thing in my story, for it is right here in the face of this huge task, right at this frightening "crack in time," that my hope in humankind has begun to bloom again. Because, as hard as it may be, we human beings can come to a new way of knowing—it is, in fact, what we do throughout our lives. We bump right into the limits of our understanding, and we must make a quantum leap to a new level of complexity, a new spaciousness and inclusion in our whole way of being in order to handle the new world into which we have entered. Think about the size of the leap a child makes as she moves from concrete thinking into the abstract thought of the teenager and young adult. Psychologists like Bob Kegan have shown that from birth to death, again and again, we make leaps as big as that one.
Right now, many of us are making just such a leap to encompass a bigger way of knowing who we are as human beings and a much more complex understanding of truth. Limitations, ambiguity, and failure, and reason, tolerance, and freedom; oppression, violence, and hatred, and justice, love, and compassion—they must all be included this time, and much more. As Jonathan Schell puts it, we have to be able to encompass both the wall, the Berlin Wall, and the towers, the Twin Towers—the hope and the despair—if we want to "pose afresh the issues of war and peace." This "new cycle of violence has begun," but it "can be broken or reversed." There is still time and "scope for choice and will." It will take millions marching in the streets and much much more; it is a complex task. But it is a leap we can make; we can sound out the words.
After the strenuous waiting comes the arrival home.
So may it be for all. Amen.
Closing Words
from "The Cure at Troy", by Seamus Heaney
cited in a worship service led by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, Minister
Unitarian Society of New Haven, Connecticut
Sept. 16, 2001
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard….
History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
Amen.
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