Opening Reading: from Ray Bradbury's short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains"
“Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down. The five spots of paint- the man, the woman, the children, the ball- remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.”
* * *
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 now it looked like 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. 15,000 tons. The birds burst into
flame in mid-air. So did combustible
things like paper—as far as a mile away.
Instantly.
The people in the park right below turned to ash. Instantly.
42-year old Mitsuno
Ochi was sitting on the steps of her bank, waiting
for it to open, when the bomb exploded.
She was reduced to nothing but a shadow.
You can see it today in the Hiroshima Peace Museum where they moved those
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 then 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 100,000 people died as a
direct result of the blast and the fires.
100,000 people.
Yet these are just numbers:
15,000 tons of TNT. Seven
thousand degrees. 100,000 people
dead. 60 million dead if you add
in all those—military and civilians—who died during World War II. The war after
“the war to end all wars.”
When I was in my twenties I got to
spend a couple of months in Tokyo working with a Japanese mime troupe. One of the few regrets I have of that time is
that I never made it to the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Like so many I have been haunted by what
happened at 8:16 on August 6th, 1945. The suddenness of it. The enormity of it. The … I don’t know … the comprehensiveness of it.
Everything changed in that moment.
Everything. And the shock waves
continue to reverberate in our world and in our psyches.
Who are we – as a people, as a
species – if we’re capable of this? And
not just once, but again two days later?
In 1903 the incomparable George Benard Shaw wrote a play called Man and Superman. It’s a four act play, but most often only
Acts I, II, and IV are performed together.
The 3rd Act is almost always performed as a stand-alone piece
and even has its own title: Don Juan in
Hell. I grew up listening to a
recording of Don Juan in Hell that
was one of my parents’ prized possessions and one of my greatest pleasures – a recording
of a 1952 readers’ theater production staring Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton, Cedric
Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorehead. Oh but those four could have been reading the
phone book, their voices are so marvelous to listen to. I recently found this recording on iTunes and
have been listening to it, enraptured, since.
The
play is a philosophical dialog about the meaning of love and marriage, men and
women, life and death – pretty heady stuff, really. It takes the literary figures of Don Juan,
Doña Anna, and her father the Commander, and sets them in Hell having a
conversation with the Devil. It’s full
of wonderful Shaw-isms. An example? “An Englishman thinks he is being moral when
he is merely uncomfortable.” There are
also some tremendous monologues, one of which I’d like to quote at some length
here, germane as I believe it to be.
This is the Devil, countering Don Juan’s assertion that man’s (this was
written in 1903) that man’s brain is the pièce
de résistance of creation. And so
the Devil says:
And is Man any the less destroying himself for all
this boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I
have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in
the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes
Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of
plague, pestilence, and famine. The peasant I tempt today eats and drinks what
was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he
lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a
lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a
marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden
molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his
fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his
cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have
invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters
and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the
Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial
machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvelous
force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength
by his destructiveness. […]
The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest
were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily
satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more
ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of
the rack, the stake, the gallows, the electric chair; of sword and gun and
poison gas: above all, of justice, duty, patriotism, and all the other isms by
which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to
become the most destructive of all the destroyers.
It is said that Robert Oppenheimer, known as “the
Father of the Atomic Bomb,” responded to seeing the first test of the device he
helped birth by quoting the Hindu holy book the Bahagavad Gita: I am
become death, the destroyer of worlds. We,
we human beings, had become death, the destroyers of worlds.
How is it
possible that we haven’t stopped fighting yet?
After Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Pearl Harbor, the Congo, Korea,
Rwanda, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Sarajevo, Somalia, Northern Ireland, New York
City, Bagdad, Fallujah, Allepo, Israel, Gaza—how can we still be slaughtering
one another? It’s been nearly forty
years since Edwin Starr shouted out, “War.
What is it good for?” and
answered himself, “Absolutely nothin’.”
How is it that we’re still doing it?
Maybe it’s
because we keep talking about numbers.
Joseph Stalin said that the death of one person is a tragedy, while the
death of millions is a statistic. But there are no statistics. There is no such thing as “collateral
damage.” There are only people—mothers,
fathers, sons, daughters, grandparents, grandchildren, neighbors, friends. Strangers, even. Enemies, even. But no numbers. Numbers don’t exist; only people do. Until they don’t anymore. Until they become shadows in a museum.
Or maybe
it’s because we keep thinking that we can fight our way to peace, that the problem
is some bad people over there and if we can just beat them into submission
peace will prevail. We believe that it’s
in talking tough, acting tough, that we protect the peace. We’re told—and many believe—that the best
defense is a good offense and that while might might not always make right,
might in the hands of the good guys is there to be used.
The revelation of that lovely Monday morning when
the birds burned and the world shuddered was just how incredible is humanity’s
power to create death. We demonstrated,
irrefutably, just how masterful we are when it comes to being “ingeniously
destructive,” as Shaw’s Devil put it. I think
that it was Einstein who said, after seeing the devastation of the atomic bomb,
that humankind had progressed so far technologically that we now
needed an evolution of consciousness if we hoped to survive.
Yet I don’t believe that that’s all that was
revealed in that blinding flash – we
also saw clearly, and still can see when we look back at it, how important is
the imperative for us to work against our inclination towards death and work for life – tirelessly, unceasingly, incessantly.
We say in our Mission Statement here at
TJMC that we, “seek to
have a lasting influence on local, national and global programs that promote
equity and end oppression.” Surely work
for peace fits that criteria. So while some of us engage with the struggle for full equal
rights for LGBT folks; and others continue the seemingly endless work of striving
for racial justice, and economic justice; and some are working tirelessly to
end the suffering, the oppression of the earth herself; we need some to be
standing up for peace, too. Peace among
nations. Peace within communities. We need people to attend protests and vigils, write letters, host community
forums, work on legislation, run for office, keep the rest of us informed . . .
there so many things we can do. And we
should do those things. Our own
Peace Action/United Nations group is a good place to start. And there is much to be done.
I’ll end with four quotations that, I think, taken together are a
fitting response to the horrors we remembered today and, I hope, are an
inspiration for the work to be done:
If we have no peace, it is because we
have forgotten that we belong to each other.
~ Mother Teresa
~ Mother Teresa
There is no way to peace. Peace is
the way. ~ A.J. Muste
Peace is not merely the absence of
war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful
people. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru
Peace is more important than all
justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the
sake of peace. ~ Martin Luther
Closing Words: "Every Day"
War is no longer declared, only continued. The monstrous has become everyday. The hero stays away from battle. The weak
have gone to the front. The uniform of the day is patience, its medal the pitiful star of hope above the heart.The medal is awarded when nothing more happens, when the artillery falls silent, when the enemy has grown invisible
and the shadow of eternal armament covers the sky.It is awarded for desertion of the flag, for bravery in the face of friends,
for the betrayal of unworthy secrets
and the disregard of every command.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
PS -- As the prelude to the service, and to provide an alternative to the grim nature of the sermon, the incomparable Scott DeVeaux performed a rendition of this classic Randy Newman song:
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