Tonight on NPR I heard an Evangelical Christian Pastor, a Rabbi, and an Imam each asked what it meant to them to "pray for Paris." And that's something we need more of in times like this -- a religious response. The airwaves are saturated with knee-jerk, fear-and-retribution based reactions. But what does faith say? And, in particular, I ask myself what my Unitarian Universalist faith has to say when faced with actions so heinous that they can really only be called "evil."
On September 16, 2001, I was serving the First Universalist Church of Yarmouth, Maine. Five days earlier hijacked planes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It was the most devastating terrorist attack on American soil in our history. As I entered the pulpit that following Sunday I knew that I needed to speak to the religious response, the Unitarian Universalist faith's response. The words I spoke that day still strike me as true. I offer them again in response to these current tragedies.
"Love, Peace, Faith, Hope" by David Pacey, copyrighted (2014) under Creative Commons License. |
When Faced With Evil
a sermon delivered on September 16, 2001 at the First Universalist Church in Yarmouth, Maine
“For there to be
peace in the world . . . there must be peace in the heart.”
—Lao-Tse
Opening Words:
Our opening words are taken from the Holy
Qu’ran, al-Hujurat 49:13:
“O humankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other not that ye may despise each other.”
Reading:
“My heart is moved
by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have cast my lot with those
who, age after age,
perversely, with no
extraordinary
power
reconstitute the world.”
—Adrienne Rich
* *
*
This past July, during the
Question & Answer service, someone asked, “How do you reconcile Universal
Salvation with Timothy McVeigh?” This
question came to the fore again this week—how do we reconcile our Unitarian
Universalist optimism, our belief in the “inherent worth and dignity of every
person,” our theological presumption that “ no doubt the universe is unfolding
as it should,” how do we reconcile these things with the events that took place
in New York City and Washington DC and rural Pennsylvania last Tuesday? How do we make sense of the tragedy that’s
unfolded and is unfolding still? Upwards
of 5,000 people are missing and presumed dead, countless others are wounded in
body and spirit; innocent men, women, and children—whose only crime was being
on the wrong plane at the wrong time—were used as weapons. It has long been a tactic of terrorists to
pack their bombs with bits of glass, broken screws, rusty nails in order to
increase the devastation; these terrorists packed their bombs with people. What are we to do when faced with such evil?
To prepare for this morning I
looked in the back of our hymnal, where the readings and hymns are organized by
theme, but there is no listing for “Tragedy;” there is no listing for
“Evil.” It seems that our hymnal is void
of resources to which we can turn for support in a time like this. Or is it?
The reading we just heard—those beautifully evocative words from
Adrienne Rich—is #463. And that haunting
song with which we began our service and the one we’ll sing in a moment are
both there too. I will to come back to
these responses, but first I want to dwell a bit longer with the questions.
We Unitarian Universalists don’t
talk about evil very much. Maybe that’s
because our Universalist ancestors believed so strongly in the doctrine of
Universal Salvation—that all souls would be reunited with an ultimately loving
God and that none are destined for an eternity in hell. If you take away hell, perhaps, the idea of
“evil” doesn’t make quite so much sense because there’s nowhere to “put”
it. Or maybe it’s because our Unitarian
ancestors were so convinced of humanity’s ability to climb onward and upward,
to rise above our basest instincts. (An
old joke has it that Universalists believed God is too loving to damn humanity
and that Unitarians believed humanity is too good to be damned.) Perhaps it’s that our Unitarian Universalist
rationalism has been so infused with the psychological mythologies of our day
that turn “demons” into “conditions,” that “evil” has become “maladjustment”
and “bad choices.”
By whatever route, it seems that
our religious tradition has largely lost the language to deal with something
like what happened this week: because someone decided that the United States
was the Enemy and that there are no innocents here, because someone decided
that their own lives—and the lives of all those people on the planes and in and
around those buildings—were expendable, the Pentagon lies in rubble, the Twin
Towers are no more, and a planeload of heroes lie dead in a Pennsylvania field.
How are we to make sense of that?
One response is to name the act
and the persons who committed it “evil” and, so, separate ourselves from
them. Hopefully we won’t take the step
of expanding this demonization, you and I are not likely to start saying that
all Muslims—or all Afghanis—are at fault and should pay for this. We’re not likely to generalize in that
way—although I’ve already heard some of us speak words which come disturbingly
close—but even if we’re specific in our demonization, targeting only the
particular people who are, in fact, responsible, we are still, I believe,
making a mistake.
For if they are evil and we
are not, if that’s how we see things, then we are committing the same kind of
error which led to this tragedy. That’s
the problem of evil. Not so much that it
exists—in that it’s really just a fact of life, or a force of nature. The problem of evil, as I see it, is that we
are so readily tempted to imagine that it’s out there, separated from us over
here; that it belongs to them and not us. And that, I believe, is ultimately the root
and the design of evil—to make us categorize the world into us and them
rather than recognizing our common kinship.
Stay with me here for a
moment. The core of our Unitarian
Universalist faith—and the core of all the religious faiths that I know
of—points to the truth that we are part of a family that includes all of
creation. You, and I, and caterpillars,
and stars, and even anti-American terrorists are, in truth, part of one family,
children of one divine reality. We call
it “the interdependent web of existence.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. called it “an inescapable network of
mutuality.” Theists call it “the family
of God.” Whatever we call it, and we do
have lots of names, the truth remains that our faith teaches that what is real
is our connectedness.
So I believe that a working
definition of “evil” could be “whatever distracts us from our essential
relatedness.” In other words, whatever
convinces you that I am not your brother; whatever gets me to think of you as
anything less than my kin—that thing is evil.
So even this distinction of “good” and “evil” can be seen as one of
evil’s most pernicious tools, for it tempts us to think of the evil and the
good as separate from one another.
The eminent Swiss psychologist
Carl Jung once wrote,
“Those who wish to have an answer to the problem of evil have need, first and foremost, of self-knowledge, that is, in the utmost possible knowledge of their own wholeness. They must know relentlessly how much good they can do, and what crimes they are capable of, and must beware of regarding the one as real and the other as illusion. Both are elements within their nature, and both are bound to come to light in them, should they wish—as they ought—to live without self-deception or self-delusion." [adapted to remove gender-specific language]
In his book Peace Is Every Step,
the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk and poet, writes about receiving a
letter about a twelve-year-old girl, a refugee, whose boat was attacked by sea
pirates. The pirates raped the girl, and
she threw herself into the ocean and drowned.
He writes, “When you first learn of something like that, you get angry
at the pirate. You naturally take the
side of the girl. . . . [And if] you
take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the
pirate. But we cannot do that.” From out of his deep meditation, Nhat Hanh
wrote a poem, “Call Me By My True Names”
“. . . I am the mayfly
metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird which, when
spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in
the clear pond, and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin
and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks, and I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by
a sea pirate, and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.
. . .
My joy is like spring, so warm it
makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names, so
I can hear all my cries and laughs at once, so I can see that my joy and pain
are one.
Please call me by my true names, so
I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of
compassion.”
This is the religious response to
evil, not setting it apart and intensifying the illusion of separation but
recognizing, as Jung said, both how much good we, ourselves, can do and what
crimes we, ourselves, are capable of; recognizing that both are part of each of
us, that both are found in me. As Jesus
said, “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.”
Oh, it is easy to get angry at them,
whether them is those who are responsible for the attacks on the
Pentagon and the World Trade Center, or those who are responsible for the
bloodshed and the anguish in Israel and Palestine, in Northern Ireland, in
Serbia. They do such horrible,
such horrendous things and we want retribution, we want revenge, we want
someone to pay. Which is just what they
said before the stones were hurled, and the bombs set off, and the planes
hijacked. This cannot be our response to
evil, because this is just what evil wants.
Today I say to you, with all the
conviction in my soul, that we must take the harder route—opening our hearts
rather than closing them, looking with compassion not only on those who are
suffering because of the carnage of Tuesday but also on those who caused the
suffering. This is how “Universal
Salvation” and “Timothy McVeigh” are reconciled because, in truth, such
reconciliation is our only hope. It is
not easy, but unless we respond to violence with peace, to hatred with love, to
fear with faith, the cycle will only continue. Gandhi is remembered as having said, “‘an eye for an eye’ will leave the
whole world blind.” “An eye for an eye”
will leave the whole world blind.
Far from having nothing to say
about evil, our Unitarian Universalist faith tells us that the face of evil is
the face of alienation, of separation, of us and them. And our Unitarian Universalist faith tells us
that the only response to a tragedy such as this is to look through the eyes of
what is best within ourselves, opening the door of compassion and remembering
our place in our common family.
In the days, weeks, months and
years ahead, our resolve will be tested.
As much as I wish I were wrong, Tuesday’s tragedies will not be the last
blows struck against us. We will be
tempted to enter into a battle we cannot win, for the battle itself is the
enemy. But there is another choice. We can say “no” to death, and “yes” to life
over and over and over again, no matter how hard it becomes. We can refuse to let go of our faith in the
essential goodness of humanity, even in the light of how horrendously evil our
acts can be; we can refuse to settle for the simplistic solution of “an eye for
an eye,” even when it’s our own eye that has been shattered; we can refuse to
replace the love in our hearts with hate, even when we ourselves suffer
indescribable anguish. As I wrote in my
column in yesterday’s paper, when faced with evil the only response we can make
is that we will continue to Live and will continue to Love. Let this be what our children hear. Let this be what our neighbors hear. Let this be what our world hears.
Amen.
Closing
Words: “If only there were evil
people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only
to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts
through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” —Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Pax tecum,
RevWik
1 comment:
Yes, Yes, and YES Wik.
Please invite all our congregation and all who they can gather to come to listen to this talk and to then to share - to open their hearts and to look at the stones that they are carrying and all the stones in the hands, pockets and hearts of those preaching what "we" should be doing next.
Please.
Arthur Rashap
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