On the night of Sept. 12, the Rev. F. Forrester
Church, Senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church, NY, NY, ministered
to eight hundred people just hours after explosions had rocked the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon and killed thousands. Four hundred candles
were lit that night for those missing or dead as people crowded the
church to hear the homily.
On Sunday, Sept. 16, a battered and bruised New York City struggled,
along with the rest of the US, to regain equilibrium, and the Rev.
Rosemary Bray McNatt, the new minister of the Fourth Universalist Church
in New York, delivered her sermon on "Turning Around"
. McNatt issued her plea for peace, saying, ""We need to turn
away from vengeance, from the cries for carpet bombing and the demonization
of entire groups of people. We need to turn toward the support and protection
of human beings whose only crime this morning is having been born in
the Middle East, and who are being threatened, chased, harassed and
tormented."
Back across town at All Souls, the Rev. Galen Guengerich, Co-minister,
preached
the Sunday sermon to 1500 people at two services. Guengerich's title,
"The Shaking of the Foundations;" came from a sermon preached
by Paul Tillich in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. In Guengerich's
examination, he said, "We need faith that we too can be heroes
by acting in ways that make a difference. We need to keep the foundations
strong. We also need hope, which is grounded in a sense of that to which
we as a nation have been called. … We also need love--for our country,
for each other, and even for our enemies. We have done something extraordinary
over the past five days. We have paid attention to each other in ways
we usually never do. We have listened and cried and phoned and given
and hugged as though it really mattered. And it did matter. I want that
same spirit to continue."
Two days later, on Sept. 18 and writing from Brooklyn, the Rev. Dr.
F. Frederick Wooden, Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregational
Society in Brooklyn, NY, wrote in his latest 'Postcard
from the Edge',"…[a young rabbi and I] greet one another,
"L'shanah tovah!" ['to a good year!'] They are all on their
way down to the riverside to do taschlik, the ritual casting of crumbs
on water as a symbol of emptying debris from the old year and starting
new. … But we both know that the new year will be less innocent
than the old one…." Read the thoughts of Church, Wooden and
McNatt by any of the links below:
