This is the sermon exploration preached at the
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia.
If you'd like to hear the podcast,
click here.
Erik Wikstrom's Exploration:
This is
not the sermon I’d intended to preach this morning. Not be a long shot. I’d wanted to do something really clever. Something a little bravura . . . with style
and panache. Something theatrical.
That’s
not what you’re going to get.
I’d told
Wendy that after hearing Tony preach last week I really wanted to take this
exploration all on my own – both, to be honest, to see if I still had it in me
to do it, but also because what we’d said we were going to try to do this
morning was not going to be easy. I
thought that I’d need a whole sermon length to be able to pull together what I
had in mind.
We’d
promised to try to show a link between three events the anniversaries of which
fall this coming week. August 6th
is the 67th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. August 9th is the 67th
anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.
And in between, on August 7th, is the 38th
anniversary of the day that the French wire walker Philippe Petit danced for
forty-five minutes a quarter of a mile above the streets of New York City on a
¾” cable he and his accomplices had spent the better part of the night before
stringing between the towers of the World Trade Center. (I like to call this International Philippe
Petit Danced Between the Towers Day, and it’s one of my . . . yes, the pun’s
intended . . . High Holy Days.)
So I
thought I’d create a juggling piece – I’m already all in black like Monsieur
Petit. I’d take these three dates, these
three events, and . . . juggle them.
Create a pattern with them. I’d imagined
that I’d develop a lyrical, poetic exploration (in words and movement) of the
folly of war and the wisdom of, well, folly; thought I’d try to dance on a
tight rope myself, with the most horrific of human actions on one side and one
of the most enchanting on the other.
But, as
I said, that’s not what you’re going to get this morning.
I
tried. Oh, I really did try. And it’s not just that my juggling skills
aren’t quite up to it – as I often say to my kids, “if someone offers you the
opportunity to fall down the basement stairs and break your arm in three places
. . . say ‘no.’” But what really got in
my way is that this topic just doesn’t call out for clever. Cute just isn’t going to cut it today.
Let me,
instead, begin by sharing with you something I wrote back in 2007 when I
preached about Hiroshima and Nagasaki to our congregation in Brewster,
Massachusetts. This is the way I started
that sermon (those of you who like will be able to read it in its entirety on
my blog tomorrow morning):
At 8:14 there was a clear blue
sky. Birds flew in the morning
sunshine. Children laughed as they made
their way to school. People were doing
tai chi and calisthenics in a city park.
There’d been a scare earlier in the morning but it seemed now that
everything was okay. Even when the world
around you seems to be going crazy, days like this can make you feel alive and grateful. The air is clean; the sun, warm. You can forget the insanity. On a day like this. For a moment everything makes sense.
And in
that moment—31,000 feet above the birds, and the children, and the men doing
tai chi—the bomb doors on the Enola Gay opened and let loose a metal
cylinder. Ten feet long and
two-and-a-half feet in diameter, it would change the world. Not just for the people below or the people
in the plane, but for every man, every woman, and every child who lived or ever
would.
Forty-three
seconds after it was flung loose that metal cylinder was 1,900 feet above the
ground and it exploded with the force of 15,000 tons of TNT. The birds burst into flame in mid-air. So did combustible things like paper—even as
far as a mile away. Instantly.
The
people in the park right below turned to ash.
Instantly. A woman sitting on the
steps of her bank, waiting for it to open, was reduced to a shadow. You can see it today in the Hiroshima Peace
Museum where they moved the steps so that she might not be forgotten.
Next came
the blast wave. Moving at a rate of two
miles a second, people were blown from their feet, buildings were blown to the
ground, trolleys and cars were blown from the roads. Glass shattered twelve miles away. A boy was blown through the windows of his
house and across the street; his house collapsing behind him. Within minutes, nine out of ten people half a
mile or less from ground zero were dead.
And the
numerous fires that erupted around Hiroshima soon joined together creating a
monstrous firestorm that engulfed nearly four and half square miles of the
city. In its heart it is estimated that
this beast reached temperatures of over seven thousand degrees. (For comparison, the surface of the sun is
just under ten thousand degrees.) An
interesting fact: a postwar study showed
that less than 4.5 percent of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima suffered
leg fractures. That’s not, of course,
because those injuries didn’t occur but because those who couldn’t walk died.
It’s estimated
that somewhere around 150,000 people died as a direct result of the blast and
the fires. 150,000 people.
And yet,
as I noted back then, those are just numbers.
Joseph Stalin famously said that when one person dies it’s a tragedy;
when a million people die it’s a statistic.
And
then, three days later, it all happened again in Nagasaki. Oh the more uneven, hilly terrain there contained
some of the effects of the blast, the devastation was not quite as widespread,
but it was as incomprehensible none the less.
When Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist on the Manhattan Project and
often known as “the father of the nuclear bomb,” saw the first test explosion
back at Los Alamos he turned to the Hindu scriptures for his reaction. “I am become Death,” he said, quoting the
Bahagavad Gita, “the destroyer of worlds.”
Albert Einstein reflected that our capacity to destroy had advanced so
dramatically that we now needed an equal advance in consciousness if we were
going to survive.
And
while neither we nor anyone else has ever again exploded a nuclear bomb in time
of war, from that day ‘till this our planet has never known a period in which
there was not some war going on somewhere.
I looked it up and found references to nearly 250 separate wars since
1945. Not battles – wars. 250 wars in 67 years – that’s nearly four new
wars each and every year.
Have we
learned nothing? Has that advance in
consciousness that Einstein called for still not come about? I’m afraid that we are still unconscionably
good at savaging one another . . . and our planet. And that’s why I just couldn’t find the way
to be playful this morning. When I
ponder our penchant for positioning this
against that and then bringing
ourselves to the brink of oblivion to defend the differences . . . well . . . I
just don’t really feel like juggling.
Yet
maybe that’s exactly why I intuitively wanted to take the two poles of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and put a little line between them, and on that line
place a crazy twenty-five year old French juggler. A pixie.
A denizen of a magical realm where the impossible is possible and
absolutely nothing is beyond our grasp.
The more outrageous, the more compelling.
At some
time later today – and by Tuesday night at the latest – get yourself a copy of
the movie Man on Wire. It’s an extraordinary documentary – available
on Netflix if you don’t have your own copy – and watching it has become part of
my annual celebration of International
Philippe Petit Danced Between the Towers Day. I watch it over and over again, with tears in
my eyes, because it reminds me that we human beings are capable of acts of profound
beauty, as well as demonic devastation, and that our species’ tendency toward
insanity does not just result in evil.
We can hatch plans of inspired idiocy, lyrical lunacy, and then
literally put our lives on the line for them . . . and, really, just for the
sake of having done it. (When asked why
he’d strung a wire a quarter of a mile above the earth Petit at first answered,
“There is no why.” The closest he ever
came to explaining a reason was words to this effect: “When I see three balls I must juggle; when I
see two towers, I must walk.”)
Perhaps
I am overly romantic. Or perhaps it’s an
occupational hazard left over from the old days. But in Petit’s walk that August morning – and
the way the whole world was enchanted by it – I believe I see a glimpse of that
new consciousness that might just save us.
Oh, I
don’t think it’ll necessarily involve death-defying circus acts. (Not necessarily. Although by 2016, when the 7th
will fall on a Sunday I may be up to stringing a wire in here and preaching
from up there . . .) But I do think it
has something to do with seeing the world as enchanted and enchanting, and
believing that beauty is something worth striving for. And maybe it’s not so much a new
consciousness as, perhaps, a renewed one – did you know that when the Chinese
originally developed gun powder it wasn’t for use in weapons but, rather, for
fireworks? Oh, to have a Manhattan
Project dedicated to creating fireworks.
Because
there is so much to celebrate in this life.
And, perhaps, it turns out that I’ve chosen to dance on that wire after
all. I invite you to join me.
