Turning

A Sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, IN
September 16, 2001

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Beloved Community, last Sunday we gathered and I talked about change. I said that change was not in itself good or bad – but that we turn change in the direction of bad or good. And Tuesday evening many of us were here again, here so soon, here because of the tragedy of September 11 – because of changes – both sudden and cumulative. Today we gather again one Sunday later in a world that is both the same and also very changed.

We gather again: the animal that makes and yearns for meaning -- facing events that slash at meaning.

Today we gather again: needful of connection in the face of events that could divide us or worse – falsely unite us.

And we gather just before Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year -- the Days of Awe, which stretch from the Eve of Rosh Hashanah tomorrow through Yom Kippur. It is the New Year Season -- not so much a New Year on the Calendar – but a New Year of the Soul. There is a power – an invitation – in the in-turning air of fall – a power to reflect – and to change in ways that can heal the world and the self. On Rosh Hashanah it is said that we work for Atonement – at one ment with the very ground of being. Today let us strive for one ness, for wholeness – for becoming again – at one. Let us strive to weave ourselves back – more strongly – into the web of life.

There is an intuition about this – as people wave flags – which stand for the web of a people. However, the truth is this event is not about our nation alone – it is about the violation of the world web – and about our awakening to that violation – and feeling with the anguish of the world. Although, if you read the papers and hear the news you find that there is no guarantee that people really awaken. A recent newspaper headline called this "the first war of the century" and this morning the newspapers announced the president’s intention to go to war -- the world is torn by war as we speak. A year ago I stood here and spoke with you about Ariel Sharon’s violation of the spirit of the Days of Awe by standing on the Temple Mount and staking it out like a piece of dirt you can own, and violence – that is the heir of generations of strife -- was unleashed and has spun out of control. We have watched war in Chechnya, we have watched bloodshed in Nepal. There has been war and horrific suffering for a very long time. I know that I preach, as they say, to the converted, but it must be said again and again that it is vital not to loose the lessons of this terrible moment in outrage – but to learn our way into a better world citizenship. Awe is wonder and terror -- and so it feels today – immense – out of human proportion. On Rosh Hashanah, it is said that the Hebrew God opens the Book of Life and begins to read the events of the last year – in the soul of every person.

On Rosh Hashanah, the Shofar blasts and those blasts are meant to awaken us down to the deepest levels of the soul. But today as the Shofar blasts we are awakened into pain -- into terrible pain and into fear that confounds. I have watched the haunted faces of people all week long and I know that every person – each in her or his own emotional language has been visited by anguish. And I know that it is hard to move through anguish as great as this. But we can do it because it has been done in the past. Because the path that we may walk toward healing is one that has been made before us there is a universality on this path. There is nothing that I can share with you that will be new to you – that you could not teach or offer yourself – many of you have shared with me insights and I know that we are the wise gathering with the wise – and yet even the wisest among us can lose the path in such terrible darkness – so today let us awaken and remind one another -- guide one another toward the turns in the path that we can discern. There has never been a loss like this loss – there has never been an evil like this evil – this is true simply because every act of evil – every loss is a new and terrible and still universal occurrence. We move through it raw with the newness and yet I wonder if, you as you have struggled through this week have noticed the universal signs of the stages of grief?

I remember learning about them first in high school when my father gave me copy of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross book On Death and Dying. The stages are not linear – they move in a person like wild dancers around a fire – a fire that begins searing and then settles back to warmth. The stages also depend upon each person – the ability to move through feelings, to allow oneself to experience feelings – to acknowledge them – to weep tears – to shake fists without hitting – to speak anger and loss – to be heard – to be held – to be freed – to seek peace. The stages are these:

• emotional upheaval
• shock and denial
• anger and bitterness
• guilt and blame
• sadness and depression
• eventual acceptance

We each know them from other losses – so you know that they really don’t keep a handy timetable – they won’t move according to your Franklin Planner – they move according to the organizer which is the heart. Anger and bitterness can resurface in the midst of sadness; sadness may remain long after acceptance. Because they can spiral around and bleed into one another, perhaps a better word would be states of grief. Well, these are the states of grief. They certainly resemble in flickering snapshots – the frames of this past week – and the way that I anticipate we may be struggling for a while. It is terrible – and yet we can struggle with it -- we can struggle through it – and we can move through these states – we can survive them – and move forward through them. Some of you may be feeling this – in small bits already – but many of us may still be bearing great pain – in either case the healing has begun – if you came to the service on Tuesday or if you wept and let yourself weep if you went somewhere to pray and remember at noon Friday or if you are sitting here now or went for a walk and let yourself see the world around you – the healing has begun – tender and raw as each one here may feel. Healing into life as it is.

What we experienced was no mere loss it was a soul-shaking encounter with evil. It is unlike other personal shocks and losses and more like the trauma that is sustained in critical incidents. And when a nation – a world in fact – shares a trauma it can be hard to find a place of consolation – in every face is anguish reflecting our own. Emails have flown to this nation from around the world – and in so many countries there is grief breaking out in response to this earth-altering history. So you may find that what you are experiencing is trickier to struggle with. Unwieldy. This is especially true in traumatic stress. In this stress, people may alternate between searing pain and numbness. A numbness I often heard about this week. There’s a reason for this. In many stress situations people may respond cognitively –mentally – thinking on their feet. In traumatic stress instead our most primitive emotional – and even pre-emotional responses kick in. We lose our minds a little. Mental seating is lost and instead of regaining real balance numbness appears – it is safe – or seems safe – the numbness protects us for the moment from that searing pain and that is good – but the pain is still there – hidden, shorting our circuits, obstructing a clear view of life as it really is. These feelings are emotional but they really are equally physical – for stress moves deep into the body – changing the internal landscape, creating new reflexes. The numbness is natural, buffering. But, eventually, for real healing and true balance to occur the only way is to awaken again, through the pain, more deeply. The numbness, over time, can paralyze – keep us from participating in the world constructively, even from taking care of our own lives. I invite each one of us to see this as an invitation to deepened awareness – to global healing – to compassion and an ability to step outside of private pain and into a community of healing. If there is hope for the future, we will build it by our healing in the present. I passed out a flyer with a list of ways to manage this stress and this form of grief. It is not exhaustive – by any means. It is simply a beginning. The beginning is simple – small steps toward a new place of balance

There is no quick remedy – there is no fix by one person or a deity. It will take each one of us in many small and then growing steps to bring about the healing that is needed. Beginning in small steps that can bring the person back to the world – the world of daily life and feeling. Perhaps in the flyer that I put out this morning you may find some simple guidance for moving through this critical time – support for doing what you already know to do. To be honest I would love to send you home with soup, with cookies, with warm blankets, with, hugs, and a magic wand – but this is more practical – this simple list can point someone who is suffering back in the direction of life – gradually, gently. I hope for each of us such a careful awakening. You can see on the list that so much of what is recommended is simply about being present to the pain of the moment and simply being present to the reality of the moment. In this moment there is pain and grief, in this moment there is peace and comfort – pain and grief, peace and comfort. Keep a journal, get plenty of rest, stay busy, but not too busy, make simply daily decisions, do things that feel good, maintain as normal a schedule as possible, eat well-balanced and regular meals – even if you don’t want to. The reason that these things work is that they help to balance the body again. Small, helpful and practical tasks can help us to ground again in the present – to make the present more bearable. They awaken us again to the present. What I realized as I studied them is that they are ways of respecting what is felt and even more of practicing a truly healing mindfulness.

In walking meditation with each step you can become more aware of where you are, that you are here in the present moment, you can practice arriving in the present moment until, perhaps, one day you may even find yourself in the present. "I can take each step asking myself – have I arrived and then in the next step answering – yes, I have arrived: in the present moment -- beyond the pain of the past and worry over the future. Becoming mindful of the present breaks the cycle of reliving anguish and anticipating anguish and this can create a breathing space -- where daily life can be lived and then, in living daily life, acknowledging the pain, and beginning to see real glimpses of the present. And the glimpses of the present can make it possible to go a little beyond daily life and to do things to address the trauma itself – in this case, things like giving blood, sending money, writing a supportive letter to those affected, breathe, planning something helpful to do, sending your thoughts and feelings to your representative leadership, offering help to another person. Not only will doing this help to guide the future and make a real difference to people in the present but it also helps to defeat the sense of powerlessness that such a trauma creates.

If you look closely at the list you’ll see that the real key is connection with other people. The list is rich with suggestions for reaching out beyond the self – and making contact with the deep human quality of resilience – to reconnect with humanity. Talk to people. Reach out. Spend time with others. Help your co-workers. Share your feelings with others. Realize that those around you are also under stress. It can be a habit to isolate in times of pain. The connection with other humans heals – it heals with witness -- it creates the ground for understanding – it breaks down that sense of icy aloneness that fear and grief can engender – it reopens the wounded heart and, though that can be painful, lets life back in. It reawakens the wounded heart to life as it has become and begins to reweave each one of us into the web of life. Today we may feel as though the web that held us – the web that is us – has been ripped away – but the truth is that it has been torn for a long time – this week we are awakened to that long standing rending. It is time – long over due -- to weave humans together again and back into the web. The danger of nationalism is that it erases for us the kindred nature of our blood – the real shared ancestry we have – the shared history of common life on earth. Even science is revealing our common ancestry. I read that we can trace ourselves back to common mothers – across oceans, across lines of race, across borders of nations – a tangled strand of DNA knotting us together. In truth, every child is our child and we are all one another’s -- brothers and sisters, cousins and ancestors, origin and destiny. Tied in a network of mutuality said Dr. King – in a single garment of destiny – and, in fact, rising out of a web of deep relation. We have broken apart our earthly family over millennia but there is no escape from the relation – and this is good. For just as we destroy one another as only family can – we can heal one another as only family may. Reweaving ourselves back into the web is our greatest hope – perhaps our only hope. There are signs of this all around because our faithfulness to the web can be strong even in times of dire stress. The story of the man who carried the woman in the wheel chair down from the 67^th floor of the World Trade Center. The stories of all the children raising money – grieving for our losses – drawing their wondering pictures. Perhaps you’ve heard the story of the Jewish group called Not in My Name – it is another glimpse into a radical sanity and hope – the group has held a weekly vigil since March 23 on Michigan avenue in Chicago in protest of the Israeli Occupation. At times the group is joined by Muslim and Christian allies. The events of September 11 had made the group question their usual meeting – their usual vigil time overlapped with the National Time of Remembrance and Prayer. It turned out that their usual location had been chosen as a site for the larger citywide gathering. The members of the group were uneasy – they typically carried signs in English, Hebrew and Arabic reading: "Arabs and Jews: We Refuse to Be Enemies" and "We Stand Together to Mourn the Loss of Innocent People: We are Jews, Muslims, and Christians Together" They decided to take their signs and to join the noon vigil in Chicago. The group, normally small, was surrounded by thousands of people. As the program ended people started leaving the area and the crowd thinned – suddenly people were able to read the group’s placards and started to take them up and carry them, as well. Another person, seeing the signs, came over and hugged every person standing in that line. And then another person and another. The response was of love and support. Suddenly it was one o’clock -- two Palestinian Muslim members of the group, realizing that there was no time to get to the mosque for that time of prayer, had knelt on the ground and begun to pray. Cindy Levitt wrote: I was still concerned that someone seeing Palestinians kneeling and praying might react negatively so we stood around them protectively as they prayed. It seemed a fitting end of the day to have group of Jews insuring that our Muslim friends could pray in peace and safety in the United States of America."

Therefore, we find hope and awaken in pain – but then life begins in pain – at times terrifying. Therefore, for this week let us take these small steps – small steps into the great web. Our hearts will grieve. We will calm and we will marry our wounded hearts to our slowly clearing minds. We will take our steps and bring reason into the larger conversation on our global future. Emerson said that in every wall there is a door – humanity is the wall and also the door in that wall – we find the door when we connect with one another. We awaken in pain but we can bear it – if we bear it together. This temple, our present church building was built in 1864 and has seen much pain – it has held much pain – the pain of human lives lived and lost – two world wars – this Jewish Temple has held the pain of the Holocaust and carried its people through to a new place. This place and even more this community can hold us and hold our pain and bring us back to a new wholeness. Take the hand of the person next to you, as we did the other night. And remember the web – not as an abstraction but in the pulsing life in your body – in the hand of the person beside you. Feel that touch – it is the touch both fragile and powerful – as is your own. This is the touch of life – Maria Mitchell, Unitarian Astronomer, wrote: "Not only is the sparrow’s fall felt to the utmost bound but the vibrations set in motion by the words we utter reach through all space and the tremor is felt through all time." To you, holding hands I say: Our hands are fragile but the power is our hands is immense. The power of our words and our deeds.

So, we will take our steps of healing and action and we will keep taking steps and we will return here – this week and next week and move together toward the future. We are present in our hands but we are more than our hands – we are held by this temple – but we are more than this temple – we learned this week that we must be stronger than walls. Therefore I invite you to come after this service for the briefest of circles on our new property. Let us gather at the our next temple – our next church – let us stand in this new Day of Awe with our hands joined and we can pour out our mingled water like tears and hope and we can spill out the many colored sand from the sand painting we made together last spring like dreams and visions and we can give those things into the strong and sustaining earth. We can pour out our human aspirations in the future ground of our temple and point ourselves toward a future we can, indeed, build one step at a time together.

These are the Days of Awe – chime – I send my heart along with the sound of this bell, along with the cry of the Shofar -- I ask you to bring your hearts along with the sound of this bell and the cry of the Shofar so that all who hear will awaken and find healing, so that the web will be rebuilt – so that in these Days of Awe we can take our lives and write ourselves and our world more powerfully into the Book of life.