These readings were selected for our service following the tragedies of September 11th in New York City, Washington D.C., and western Pennsylvania. The readings include excerpts from the Rev. F. Forrester Church's sermon delivered to an overflowing crowd at the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City on Wednesday, September 12th. You may find the full text of Rev. Church's words on the UUA website by clicking here. You may be interested in reading selections from other services (of many faiths) in the September 17th edition of the New York Times online.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs--
The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore--
And yesterday--or centuries before?
....
This is the hour of lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow--
First--chill--then stupor--then the letting go--
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
...
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
...
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
The future as we know it is dead. ... No longer can we measure human
accomplishment by technological mastery or by our standard of living.
Henceforth, for years at least, we shall be remembered by two things
above all others... As a nation we shall be known by the steadiness
of our resolve in leading the war against the perpetrators and
sponsors of terrorism around the globe. And as individuals ... we
shall be known no longer by the symbols of abundance and prosperity,
but by how well we learn to recognize our own tears in another's eyes.
...
I know that the effort to curb terrorism will shed more innocent
blood, claiming the precious and fragile lives of children and
parents, lovers and friends, falling from windows, crushed under
buildings. But the future as we knew it ended yesterday. Even as
Churchill, not Chamberlain, answered the threat of Hitler, we must
unite to respond to this new threat with force, not appeasement.
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing
evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but
you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence
you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence
merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of
stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do
that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are
people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain
without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful
roar of its waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be
both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.... Find out what
people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of
injustice which will be imposed upon them.
We can never make the world safe by fighting. Every nation must learn
that the people of all nations are children of God, and must share the
wealth of the world. You may say this is impractical, far away, can
never by accomplished, but it is the work we are appointed to do.
Sometime, somehow, somewhere, we must ever teach this great lesson.
O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam, Undimmed by human tears!
He said three or four men planned to take a vote about how to proceed,
and joked about taking on the hijackers with the butter knives from
the in-flight breakfast. He was not a man who would let things
happen. He told me not to be sad and to take care of our daughter and
he said that whatever happened he would be OK with any choices I make.
Never forget this. Never forget the email sent by a doomed employee
in the World Trade Center, who, just before his life was over, wrote
the words, "Thank you for being such a great friend." Never forget
the man and woman holding hands as they leapt together to their death.
Pay close attention to these, and every other note of almost
unbearable poignancy as it rings amidst the cacophony... Commit them
to the memory of your heart. For though the future as we knew it is
no longer, we now know that the very worst of which human beings are
capable can bring out the very best. From this day forward it becomes
our common mission to be mindful of both aspects of our nature: ...to
face the darkness and yet redeem the day.
We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
God is no White Knight who charges into the world to pluck us like
distressed damsels from the jaws of dragons, or diseases. God chooses
to become present to and through us. It is up to us to rescue one
another.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
God is present in the confusion and dislocation of the world. One
encounters God not by turning one's back on the world but by plunging
into it with the faith that the divine-human encounter occurs in the
midst of the encounter of human with human.
If there be anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe
from falling, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown me. But this
was shown: that whether in falling or in rising we are always kept in
the same precious love.
I don't know Who--or what--put the question, I don't know when it was
put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did
answer *Yes* to Someone--or Something--and from that hour I was
certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in
self-surrender, had a goal.
Faith is so rare--and religion so common--because no one wants to live
between first base and second base. Faith is the in-between space
where you're not sure you'll make it to second base. You've let go of
one thing and haven't yet latched onto another.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love
*the questions themselves*.... Don't search for the answers, which
could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live
them. And the point is, to live everything. *Live* the questions
now. Perhaps, then someday far in the future, you will gradually,
without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Love...puts you in a right relation with God and others, reciprocal
rather than hierarchical....But the great commandment is extralegal.
Love cannot be forced. It must be chosen. You love not out of dread
but out of your own fullness. It's what you were made for. When you
fail at it, you aren't sent to prison, or to the electric chair, or to
hell. You are commanded again: Love.
What brings us together can hold us together. If together we live in
such a way that our deaths, and those whose deaths have changed us,
prove worth dying for, we shall (if God exists) have answered God's
prayers.
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle.
But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin
air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle
which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves,
the black, curious eyes of a child---our own two eyes. All is a
miracle.