My preaching plan for this month was to start out with two sermons that would give you a bit of historical context for Unitarian Universalism. I spoke last week about Universalism, and this week I intended to present the most interesting Unitarian core - namely the Transcendentalist philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau. You may recognize that, in a new ministry, one often goes back to former sermons for material, but this was not going to be possible for a sermon on Transcendentalist thought. You see, the last time I had scheduled a sermon on this topic, I never actually wrote the sermon. It was scheduled for an April Sunday in 1995, and I changed the sermon topic that week when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred. I am not superstitious. I know that the universe in general and terrorists in particular do not care what I have on my preaching schedule. Therefore I will someday again plan for a sermon on the Transcendentalist vision. I'm just not sure that I will announce it in advance.
The time since the World Trade Center attack has seemed like a year. Astonishment, disbelief, anger, fear for loved ones and for the future - I have lived it all this week, and I have heard from many of you who were doing the same. And here we are on a weekend when every rabbi, every priest, every minister has gone back to the drawing board to find words to give their congregations - words of comfort, words of inspiration, words of blame or explanation. This is one of those all-overpowering, transcendental tragedies - going beyond all we could have imagined before. I don't remember Pearl Harbor, which, for this country, was one of those tragedies, pulling us into a war we thought we might avoid. The assassinations of the John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King were, each of them, transcendental tragedies, demonstrating to all of us how much loss and change could come from single bullets. This tragedy shows that bullets aren't even necessary, that the technology that we need and love can be turned to enormous destruction.
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have indicated that some ministers in this country might be blaming us today -- using this opportunity to point again at the liberal views in this country which bring education to all and which empower women and gays and lesbians. Falwell and Robertson did not name the Unitarian Universalist Association, but they certainly named the ACLU. I would call this blasphemy, and if you are asked in the days to come to defend your liberal values of openness and freedom, please do it proudly.
Other more mainstream religious leaders today might be trying to say that this tragedy is part of a divine plan, with the good not yet apparent, but I imagine that most of them will be troubled by that idea. They know that any God worth believing in would not intend the death of so many innocent people. Good may come out this event, but, if some call that God's plan, I can't believe it. The good that comes from this will be based on what human beings do now. The idea that there was a plan somewhere that makes this right is anathema to the world's religions. I cannot and will not preach to you today the idea that any of this makes sense.
And yet our airwaves and our newspapers have been filled all week with words, trying to make sense of it, and the human mind wants things to make sense. Should we have known, should we have predicted? As we move into a globalized world, with the haves and the have-nots so much in each other's faces, was it inevitable - that a force, purportedly speaking for the have-nots and the left behinds, would strike out at the symbols of the haves? I had been reading a book that gave me a take on the political side of this, namely The Lexis and the Olive Tree [1], a book on globalization by Thomas Friedman, who writes on economic matters for the New York Times. Friedman is admittedly positive on the matter of globalization, feeling, for one thing, that globalization is inevitable, given the democratization of technology, finance, and information. Friedman makes a convincing case that general access to information, technology, and even finance are expanding world-wide, and that if these changes continue in the right fashion, greater prosperity and greater equality could be ahead for a broad proportion of the world population. I won't explain this further today, but I will recommend this book to you as part of a study of globalization which the Unitarian Universalist Association is recommending this year.
Friedman is clear that there are dangers and downsides of globalization. One is, of course, the inequalities that exist now and that, in the short run, may get worse. But the one danger that has been haunting me as things have unfolded this week is the danger of the "Super-Empowered Angry Individuals," who can "use the powers embedded in globalization to attack even a superpower." (Friedman, 398). In the last phase of history, a megalomaniac had to seize control of a nation-state in order to find glory in through the death and destruction of others. To play out their power, Napoleon needed a France in pain following the Revolution, Hitler needed a Germany in pain after WWI, Stalin needed a Russia in pain as Russia has always been in pain. An Osama bin Ladin needs only the money for technology and for worldwide communication to play on the pain of particular poor and oppressed groups. When he allegedly masterminded the embassy bombings in 1998, Bin Laden "communicated regularly around the world with satellite phones through his own Jihad Online (JOL). The New York Times . . . found an e-mail . . . in which he detailed how he kept tabs on global events through CNN." (Friedman, 401-2). Nation states are mostly irrelevant to the actions of these Super-Empowered Angry Individuals, and this is a side-effect of globalization. And make no mistake, a man like Bin Ladin is not really fighting for the poor and oppressed in Palestine or Afghanistan; he is using the issues surrounding the Palestinians for his own greater glory. He is giving them the excuse not to enter fully into negotiation, and he is bringing death and destruction on thousands. He needs no nation state to do this. The wonderful gifts of technology and communication make it possible for him to harness worldwide power.
He creates his network by using the pain of the oppressed, and by using the radical side of a rift in Islam. One of the things that a responsible UU can do in the wake of the tragedy of last week is to learn more about Islam. I am going to suggest that the newly forming World Religions class should depart from the roughly chronological sequence that we decided on last week and look at first Huston Smith's chapter on Islam [2]. I will also offer all of you a teaching sermon on Islam in two weeks. I hope too that we can, as an institution, reach out to Islamic individuals and communities and express the truth that I hope all of you will see - that the Islamic faith did not bring on this disaster. In Michigan before I moved here, I was in touch with a young Immam from the local mosque. He was working very hard to communicate with other religious leaders and with community leaders as well, trying to figure out how to guide his community to a balance between a life of faith and life in America. A new face of Judaism has developed in America over the past decades - given the general freedom and opportunity that Jews have felt in many parts of this country. I imagine that a new face of Islam could develop as well in time, and that this face will be more multi-cultural, more able to find a balance with Western goals and ethics. Some Islamic leaders fear this, and Bin Laden is using that in his search for power. We should be in touch with this moderate face of Islam and understand that this attack is very distressing for them.
The religion of Islam is not the villain here. Many UUs say that religion is usually a villain, that religion is the source of violence, and I have often nodded in agreement, because it does seem that religion is at the center of so much of the violent conflict in the world: Northern Ireland, Serbia, and of course the Middle East. But aren't these also political struggles, pure struggles for space and prosperity in the world? And aren't these struggles based on interminable cycles violence and generations of revenge? I am going to go out on a limb here and agree with the French philosopher Rene Girard, who says in his book Violence and the Sacred [3] that "in the final analysis, the sole purpose of religion is to prevent the recurrence of reciprocal violence." (Girard, 55). There are many examples of this: the Hebrew Exodus, in which the Egyptian enemy was drowned in the sea, and the actual and mythic sacrificial violence that exists in so many religions, including, of course, the crucifixion of Jesus. In Greek tragedy, the gods often came down to end sequences of revenge. Religious pronouncement must be associated with the violence in order to end the violence. As Girard says, "Violence will come to an end only after it has had the last word and that word has been accepted as divine." (135).
I hate war and I don't viscerally understand violence, but I know that we must not accept the violence of last week as divinity's last word. Therefore, I must say, with some regret, that I think force must answer this violence, which would inevitably call forth more violence. The only way to break the cycle would be to offer force, paired with the divine, paired with compassion. The upwelling of compassion for those who have been lost would be part of this, -- compassion for those who gave their lives on behalf of life - the firefighters and policemen around the World Trade Center, the brave people in the plane that went down in Pennsylvania instead of Washington, and the people in those buildings, whose stories of courage we will never know. We must keep the compassion flowing for the survivors in the weeks and the months to come, demonstrating what I think is true about our culture, that we Americans are not just in things for the short term and for the rewards, demonstrating that we do, in fact, love our neighbors. The more difficult compassion will be for the poor and oppressed who are, as I say, being used by Bin Laden for his own purposes. We should be offering development aid, a new Marshall Plan, for the deep pockets of poverty in this world. The radical Muslims, and other radicals as well would say that we would be tempting these populations with evil materialism, and let them say that. The fact is that aid will be only way to make sure that developing nations become part of a world in which innocent people will not be slaughtered, a world in which each person will have a vine and fig tree, and shelter and transportation and hope as well. This economic support will, over time, dry up the fear and anger that feeds someone like Bin Laden.
I didn't know what to do on the day when the tragedy happened, but as the week ended, I have found myself driven to make a list of things to do. Feel free to take notes now, but this list will be in my Communitarian column this week.
- Give yourself a chance to continue weeping and grieving. We have all suffered loss this week, even if we knew no one directly involved. We have lost the vision of a life of freedom. The grief for that will stay with us in many forms. Know that your grief will continue and don't ignore it.
- Plan to do something to help those who suffered and are suffering still because all that happened. Money to the Salvation Army line at the phone number in the order of service or in special baskets at the back - that will be channeled through our service committee. Giving blood and other hands-on projects will be good things to do in weeks to come.
- Be clear about who is the enemy. The World Trade Center attack was the act of radical individuals, not a particular faith or ethnic group. If you hear blame directed toward groups of people, like the Muslims, the Arabs, or non-Westerners in general, do what you can to quash that idea and speak in defense of anyone who is being attacked.
- Support with your votes and your letters to political leaders a balanced national response: a focused show of force, coupled with the recognition that violence alone will change nothing, that violence must be balanced with participation in development efforts to lessen the level of fear and poverty worldwide. This will be a long-term effort.
- Recognizing that the tragedy of this week has stolen our confidence from us, I ask you to be active in taking care of those around you - your children and grandchildren - lonely neighbors - the ill and depressed. Let them know that we can find our confidence again, and acting that way will help you get your confidence back.
- Recognize that, even though I have tried to explain some things here, we cannot really know why there is so much suffering in the world, why there is such a the tragic asymmetry between the daily good we do and those occasional evil acts that bring so much pain. We will never understand. We simply must go forward
I disagree with Rene Girard on one thing. Stopping reciprocal violence is not the sole purpose of religion. Equally important is to help us question and to grieve the fact that there is so much violence and evil in the world. Scripture and literature down through the ages have struggled with this: from Job and Greek tragedy down through literary works like The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver in our day. They remind us of the terrible truth I to you read from Stephen Jay Gould [4] this morning, that violence is so powerful, and kindness is so fragile. Let us all be kind.
Footnotes
1. The Lexis and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
2. The World's Religions, Huston Smith. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, pp. 221-270.
3. Violence and the Sacred, Rene Girard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
4. From "Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness" in Eight Little Piggies, Stephen Jay Gould, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1993, p, 281.
