"Been in the storm so long, Lord. Been in the storm so long. Been in the storm so long, Lord, just need a little time to pray." The words to the traditional African-American spiritual are evocative - I came across them as I mined my bookshelves for resources to bring into our worship services this month of February as we honor Black History month. Those spirituals emerged from a people oppressed in unspeakable ways; people who were looking for a way to endure, to survive, and to triumph. They speak of hope as well as despair; they are not just 'singing the blues' but singing towards restoration.
We've been in a storm for a while too. It began with the terrorist attacks on September 11th, when we learned that the joke from out of town relatives about living at ground zero wasn't a joke after all. It continued with the anthrax mailings, the serial sniper, SARS, gun violence, drugs, flu, child molesters on the internet. The list seems endless. Of course most of the items on that list pre-date September 11th, but all the scary stuff seems to stand in starker relief in the post 9/11 world. There is so much to be afraid of, so much to protect our children from, so much to protect ourselves from. What a world! And yet, as the cynical sage of the Hebrew Scriptures reminds us, "There is nothing new under the sun."
A quotation from ancient Egypt: "To whom can I speak today? The gentle man has perished, the violent man has access to everybody. To whom can I speak today? The iniquity that smites the land, it has no end. To whom can I speak today? There are no righteous men, the earth is surrendered to criminals." Dr. Diane Butler Bass, professor of American religion at Virginia Theological Seminary, reminds us of some relevant history from the Roman Empire. "In 410, the barbarian Alaric and his Goths sacked Rome, the symbol of immortal civilization, the cradle of the Christian church. 'Eternal city,' bewailed St. Jerome, 'if Rome can fall, what can be safe?' And as the monk Thomas Merton would write many centuries later, 'The fall of that city that some thought would stand forever demoralized what was left of the civilized world.'" She goes on to discuss the theology that emerged out of that event - the work of Augustine called The City of God and the City of Man.
Moving up several millennia, we hear these words by theologian Henri Nouwen, written in the mid 1990's as part of an Advent meditation on the spiritual discipline of waiting. "In our particular historical situation, waiting is even more difficult because we are so fearful. One of the most pervasive emotions in the atmosphere around us is fear. People are afraid - afraid of inner feelings, afraid of other people, and also afraid of the future. Fearful people have a hard time waiting, because when we are afraid we want to get away from where we are. But if we cannot flee, we may fight instead. Many of our destructive acts come from the fear that something harmful will be done to us. And if we take a broader perspective - that not only individuals but whole communities and nations might be afraid of being harmed - we can understand how hard it is to wait and how tempting it is to act. Here are the roots of the 'first strike' approach to others. People who live in a world of fear are more likely to make aggressive, hostile, destructive responses than people who are not so frightened."
So there is nothing new under the sun. "For the United States," opines Dr. Bass, "September 11 was Alaric's sack of Rome. When the outsiders smashed into the centers of power, the unthinkable had happened. Many things went through my mind and heart as I watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center, but St. Jerome's words struck me once again: 'Eternal city, if you can fall, what can be safe?' The peace of the earthly city of the United States had been destroyed; maybe it had been an illusion all along."
So here we are, living in that world. We are not the first to confront the spiritual implications of having our illusions of safety destroyed in violent and dramatic fashion. Like the Christians of ancient Rome under the leadership of St. Augustine, we have decisions to make now, questions to ask ourselves about the way we will respond as people of faith, the way we will live, intentionally, in the new and scary world. We need to build a new theology that will help us, as the spirituals helped the American slaves, to live out of our fear and despair and into hope and restoration.
Fear is a debilitating emotion. As Henri Nouwen pointed out, the basic human response to fear, biologically hard-wired, is that classic fight or flight response. Useful when confronted by a hungry woolly-mammoth, no doubt, but perhaps not the response that would serve us best as we attempt to navigate this complex modern world. "The nature of fear is that it separates us from the people around us, from ourselves," says Frank Ostaseski, founding director of the Zen Hospice Project. "When we come into contact with this fear without running in the other direction, we can make some peace with it."
We humans are endowed with minds that allow us to move beyond the basic fight or flight instinct. We can use our ability to reason to confront our fears, analyze the actual dangers we face, and decide how to react. We can use our ability to intuit the feelings of other people. This may allow us to stand still and hear out even the ones who threaten us, and begin to make some peace. Instead of allowing fear and anxiety to further alienate us from each other and from ourselves, we can coax our scared selves back into conversation, back into relationship, back into community. We have choices, we have the ability to be intentional. And this, my friends, will save us.
In the newsletter this month I alluded to the fact that the idea for this sermon came to me after watching the documentary Bowling For Columbine. If you haven't seen this film, I recommend it. In fact, if there is interest, I propose a movie night here with our big screen TV. We could watch the film, then talk about it. I'll bring the popcorn!
Anyway, without telling you too much about the film itself, I found myself stimulated by one of the basic assumptions, which is that the reason Americans own so many guns and feel so strongly about gun ownership is that we are a fearful country. And the reason we are so fearful is not that we live in a less safe place than citizens of other nations. It is that our media has made fear into a normative cultural message. Local news is all about crime. The weather channel is never satisfied to just tell you what is happening, or what might happen next. They scream about the next storm, the next threat to our safety. Our self-concept as a society has been warped by a continuous barrage of bad news. And there isn't any more bad news than there was before the television was invented. The ancient Egyptians, recall, were wringing their hands about crime. The ancient Romans had to cope with hostile barbarians at the gates. Many, many more people died of infectious diseases much earlier in life in past centuries. In fact, the average life span in this country continues to increase in spite of the steady diet of fear-based information about SARS, Mad Cow, and the latest flu strain.
How many of you, in the days after September 11th, had to make a conscious decision, to say to yourselves, "Enough!" and simply turn off the TV for a while instead of continuing to watch the replay of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center? Enough! We know what happened. Watching it over and over again was making us sick, making us crazed, making us afraid. In an interview soon after the terrorist attacks, Fred Rogers was asked for advice in talking to children about the unfolding events, particularly in light of the fact that so many kids were exposed to the horror of the attack through those repeated televised images. His answer was simple. "Tell them," he said, "to keep their eyes on the helpers." Good advice for all of us. Instead of being seduced into watching the violence over and over, look instead at the rest of the story. Keep your eyes on the helpers.
Days after September 11th, Danny came home from college and insisted that we accompany him to the Pentagon to see first hand what was happening. Weeks later, we answered Mayor Giuliani's call to 'come to New York' and visited Ground Zero while it was still smoldering. The sight and smell of the carnage was indescribable. But the most moving part of both those experiences for me came from keeping my eyes on the helpers. At the Pentagon, we were part of a large crowd standing on a hill a couple of blocks away. We noticed a police officer walking into the crowd, talking to people and shaking hands. He came over and introduced himself as the Police Chief. He thanked us for coming, and explained that when the rescue workers emerge from the building, they look up the hill, and they see us standing there in solidarity with them and are encouraged to go back in. Not standing and gawking, but standing in solidarity. And in NY we met a team of firefighters from California. We thanked them for coming so far to help, and their response was, "A couple of summers ago, during the wildfires, the New York firefighters came to helps us. We're just returning a favor."
Keep your eyes on the helpers. The reality of their heroism is no less concrete than the reality of the destruction. And this is true not just about 9/11, but about every story that makes the evening news. There is more than one side, there is more than one image, somewhere there is always a helper in addition to a criminal, or a germ. But you have to look for them, because Fox News is not interested in showing them to us.
So the first step in building a theology of hope and trust is to make an intentional decision to pay attention to the whole spectrum of life rather than just the negative and scary part. In the Building Your Own Theology class last week, we talked about what we believe about human nature. The discussion was lively and challenging. The curriculum provides a whole page of quotations representing various takes on this question of human nature. The ancient Egyptian rant about crime was one of them. But so was this one. "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." From The Diary of Anne Frank, July 15, 1944. You can't argue that she didn't have enough information to make an informed decision. She knew full well the depth of depravity to which humans beings are capable of sinking. She also knew about courage, and fortitude, and kindness. Several people in the class identified that quote as the one that most closely approximated their view of human nature. And I rejoiced!
Because Unitarian Universalists have always erred on the side of optimism about human nature. We rejected the doctrine of original sin. We rejected the idea that eternal damnation was a necessary corrective for human evil. We hold onto our positive view of people, our belief that with the proper environment the good can be found inside almost anyone. We hold onto that view in spite of our awareness of the great evils that have been perpetrated by our species. We don't filter out the realities of the world; we just insist that there is more to us than the evidence of evil. We keep our eyes on the helpers. Sophia Lyon Fahs, UU minister and religious education, said, "The psychological scientist conceives of living, spiritually, emotionally and ethically, as an evolutionary process, rather than as a continuing battle between good and evil, controlled by God and Satan. Living is growing, learning, experimenting, and discovering." That, by the way, was the quote that got the most votes from the Building Your Own Theology crowd Thursday night. But a member of the class said it best. "It's just my darn persistent Pollyanna attitude!" Amen to that!
If we hold on to our darn persistent Pollyanna attitudes, we can learn to live less fearfully. We can reclaim that sense of trust in humanity that we learned in the earliest stages of our development. Developmental psychologist Eric Erickson theorized that the very first task in human development is developing trust. Trust is what we learn first, and our first UU principle reaffirms that trust when it asserts the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It isn't easy to reclaim trust as a faith statement, not in this complicated and dangerous world. But we can make a start. We can begin to look fear in the face, to evaluate risk more rationally and less reactively. And the tools we need are found in our own minds and hearts, and in the core principles of Unitarian Universalism.
I want to close by bringing you back to the words of that spiritual that I started with. "Been in the storm so long, need a little time to pray." Rather than fighting or fleeing, maybe we all need a little time to pray. And by that I mean time to re-center ourselves in our basic beliefs, to reground ourselves in our basic values. We opened our service this morning with David Rankin's words about trust, and all the gifts that flow from the cultivation of trust. "When I trust . . . I am able to join in authentic relationships, in intimate sharing, and in personal dialog. I am able to take risks, sail on fresh adventures, and explore the dark regions of the world. I am able to touch the springs of consciousness and to see the inherent potential of life. Trust is saying "yes" to creation."
Been in the storm so long, Lord. Just give me a little time to learn to trust again. Amen.