8-15-8-6-45

Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan 73 years ago.  At the time of the bombing the city's population was approximately 340,00 - 350,000 people.  It is estimated that the bomb directly killed 70,000 people, including 20,000 Japanese combatants and 2,000 Korean slave laborers. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought the total number of deaths to 90,000–166,000.  About 70% of the city's buildings were destroyed, and another 7% severely damaged.  This was the first time an atomic bomb was dropped on a city.  

Two days later another bomb was, this time on the city of Nagasaki.  At the time, the population of Nagasaki was estimated to be about 263,000 people -- 240,000 Japanese residents, 10,000 Korean residents, 2,500 conscripted Korean workers, 9,000 Japanese soldiers, 600 conscripted Chinese workers, and 400 Allied POWs  Less than a second after the detonation, the north of the city was destroyed and 35,000 people were killed.

On August 12, 2007 I preached this sermon at the congregation I was serving in Brewster, Massachusetts.  While many of the specifics are clearly of the time, I think the message still has relevance.

Opening Words:  The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

Again we'll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth,
gazing at the clouds.

by Wislawa Szymborska 

(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)

Szymborska is a Polish poet and essayist.

She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. 

Reading:  “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 titantic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of 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.”

From “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury.

* * *

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 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. 

And wasn’t it World War I that was called “the war to end all wars”?

But it didn’t, did it?  And neither did World War II.  Or the Korean War.  Or Vietnam.

And now we’re embroiled in a war which we started without provocation, a “pre-emptive war” which it is clear that our leaders lied us into launching.  Over 135,000 people have died, and our country alone has spent roughly $451,345,000,000 on the war—that’s as of 9:00 this morning when I checked a running total on the web.  The money we’ve spent on the war in Iraq could have paid for 59,780,739 kids to attend Head Start, nationwide, for a year.  Or it could have built 114,832 additional units of affordable housing in Massachusetts.  Or it could have hired 7,170 new public school teachers in Barnstable County alone.  So, what is the cost of this war?

Yet even more important than that is the question, “what is the cost of war?”  Any war?  What do we loose—not just how many lives are lost but how much Life is lost—when nations take up arms against each other? 

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—how can we still be slaughtering one another?  It’s been over thirty years since Edwin Starr shouted out, “War.  What is it good for?”  and answered himself, “Absolutely nothin’.”  How is it that we haven’t learned?

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 make right, might in the hands of the good guys is there to be used.

Or maybe we’re still warring even with the mushroom cloud in our memories because we haven’t really explored an alternative.  One thing that gives me hope is the legislation currently before the U.S. House of Representatives to create a United States Department of Peace.  This legislation would:

l     Create a cabinet level position—the Secretary of Peace—who would be equal to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State and would advise the president on peacebuilding needs, strategies, and tactics for use both domestically and internationally.

l     It would create a Peace Academy, on a par with our military service academies, which will build a world-class faculty of peacebuilding experts who would be able to analyze peacebuilding strategies at the highest level, advise other branches of government, and facilitate the training of peacebuilders for domestic and international service. 

l     This legislation calls for funds to create and expand proven domestic peace building programs in our communities.

In short, the Department of Peace would be dedicated to discovering, developing, and deploying methods to meaningfully prevent conditions of conflict before violence erupts—both abroad and at home.

Now, of course, lots of individuals and groups think that that’s just a nutty idea.  But peace will never be found at the end of the barrel of a gun.  Remember the quotations from the first of our peace services last year:

l     If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
~ Mother Teresa

l     There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.  ~ A.J. Muste

l     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

l     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

I think that it was Einstein who, after seeing the devastation of the atomic bomb, said that humankind had progressed so far technologically that we now needed an evolution of consciousness if we hoped to survive.  And Al Gore, in his film An Inconvenient Truth, made the point that when old habits—and he used the example of humanity’s penchant for warfare—are joined to new technology—and here he showed a picture of an atomic mushroom cloud—the results can be devastating and so we have to somehow learn to break our old habits.

This week saw the sixty-second anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  During the service I’ve had this metronome beating out as fast as it can, and if each beat represents one person—one mother, father, husband, wife, sister, brother, daughter, son who died from the immediate effects of the bombing on August 6^th—then when our hour is up . . . at this rate . . .  we will be halfway through remembering them all.

But it’s not about numbers, and it’s not even about what has been done.  It’s about people, and about what we can do.  I’d like to see First Parish take its place as a leader in this work for peace.  We have strongly staked our place as an open, anti-oppression congregation.  I would like to see us take and equally solid stand as a place of peace. 

We are known for stands against the demonization of people because of their race, or their gender expression, or their sexual orientation; I would like us to become known for standing against the demonization of people because of their nationality or their ideology.  We are engaged with the work of ending violence in the home, let’s expand that to our world home.  Let’s build on the work we’re already doing—which so many of us as individuals are already involved in—and make peace one of our priorities.

Protests, vigils, letter writing, hosting community forums, working on legislation, running for office . . . we can do so many things.

I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes.  Edward Everett Hale.  “I am only one, but still I am one.  I cannot do everything, but still I can do something.  And because I cannot do everything, I must not fail to do the something that I can.”

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.

by Ingeborg Bachmann, Austiran poet

Revelation 8:16 8-6-45

Today is the 69th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.  As my first sermon back after a month away from the pulpit of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist, this is what I had to say on the subject.  (As always, if you want to listen to the sermon, just click here.)

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 6^th, 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 3^rd 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

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" by Ingeborg Bachmann (an Austrian poet)

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:

Dancing Between the Towers

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 6^th is the 67^th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan.  August 9^th is the 67^th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.  And in between, on August 7^th, is the 38^th 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 7^th 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.