Making sense of the senseless

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 10, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

When senseless violence happens like what we’ve seen so much in the news recently, when the unexpected and unwelcome occur in our personal lives, how do we continue our search for meaning and beauty? What do we do with our grief and anger?

Meditation

After the blinding rains came and washed away the foundations;

After the howling winds blew through windows, shattering glass and tearing apart wooden blinds and curtain fabric;

Once the bombs had knocked down even the walls made of such precise and rugged stone, and fires had ravaged wooden rafters.

I stumbled amidst the rubble of what was left, crying out at all that had been lost, unable to make repairs and build anew, searching for some new materials that might withstand such devastations.

And then I saw you, and also you, and the all of the ones following each of you, each carrying with you your own fragments of what had been.

Some of you bringing new elements to strengthen our possibilities – replace what had been lost.

And together, we built new structures of meaning.

We created soaring towers of beauty; deep wells of understanding; walls held aloft by an infrastructure of love.

And there we dwelt for a while, fortified once more, having chosen our new place and our new way of being.

Prayer

Spirit of love and life, breathe into us this day an understanding that, even amidst the violence and bloodshed we have been witnessing, love has not lost, beauty is still to be found in our world, meaning is still ours to create.

Soothe our breaking hearts.

Remind us that hope is not a feeling. It is to be found in the actions we take – the ways of being, which we offer, to one another and our world.

Raise up our compassion and carry it to those who are suffering because of the senseless violence and bloodshed that we have witnessed in the past months, weeks and days.

Soften our hearts that we might direct our outrage toward transforming ourselves and our communities for the better.

May we bring more peace, more understanding more love into our world.

We manifest this prayer in the name of all that is holy.

Sermon

Six years ago, my spouse Wayne and I attended the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly (or GA) together for the first time. While at that GA, I purchased a small chalice. I wanted to have a chalice to light during my own spiritual practices, a symbol to connect my individual practices with my Unitarian Universalist religious community.

I could not have known that my little chalice would soon take on a different and much greater meaning in my life.

For weeks before we had left for GA, Wayne had shared with me that he had been experiencing a sense of foreboding, a seemingly irrational fear that something deeply disturbing was about to unfold.

On the Wednesday after we got back from GA, I came home to find Wayne nearly in tears.

That morning, Wayne had turned on his cell phone to find the phone number of his good friend, Teresa, showing on the screen. It was a seeming accident, as neither Wayne nor Teresa had called the other recently.

Wayne and Teresa had been in medical school together and had remained great friends every since. I had grown to know and love Teresa also, along with her two beautiful daughters, Tara and Jenna, whom we had first met when they were small children. In the warmth of Teresa’s love, Jenna and Tara had grown into beautiful young women. They were both physically beautiful, but more importantly, they were loving, dynamic, smart, funny and talented. They exuded a wonderful capacity to fill those around them with joy and laughter.

Thinking it was too early to call Teresa, Wayne nonetheless punched the number that had shown up on his cell phone. The voice that answered was one of agony – of the deepest sorrow and sense of lost purpose human beings can endure.

Jenna had fallen and hit her head. She had died less than 24 hours later. She was 22 years old.

In less than a moment, in a random flash devoid of any apparent meaning, a beautiful part of our world, our interconnected web of existence was taken from our lives, from the lives of her family, from the lives of so many who loved her.

As Wayne told me this, I stood frozen in disbelief and horror. It was as if the random, meaningless cruelty of it was ripping at everything I had come to believe, tearing into shreds my ability to feel any sacred beauty at all in the world. I was filled with sorrow for Teresa and Tara. I was devastated by the pain I could see in Wayne’s face and how the way he carries his body had changed – the grief that filled his voice.

I did not know what to do with this. I could not process it, could not understand it, could not fight back against the urge to rage against the arbitrary injustice of it.

I had to sit down. I had to stare blankly at walls. I had to be with Wayne, so we would take care of each other.

Later, after Wayne had gone to sleep, perhaps the only real refuge in such situations, I got out the little chalice I had bought at G.A. and lit it for Jenna.

I sat alone in our living room, staring at the flame and thinking of her. The flame cast beautiful reflections of its light and enchanting dancing shadows on the stone wall behind it.

And as I sat and watched the dancing light from the little chalice, I began to sense in its beauty, the loveliness that Jenna had injected into the world – a beauty that might still be there in some way, if only through our memories of her.

It helped to think about things this way, but the thoughts were incomplete and not enough. At some point, I still had to extinguish the flame and go to bed, still filled with sorrow.

Another day came and went with both Wayne and I sleepwalking through it. That evening we spoke more of Jenna and what had happened, struggling to make sense of it and find some way to grasp at meaning when all meaning seemed to have been shattered and destroyed, if it had ever existed at all.

And then, on Friday morning, I got an email message from my good friend, Nell Newton. For me, one of the great mysteries in life is how sometimes we come to the aide of those we love without even knowing we are doing it. Certainly, Nell had no way of knowing how much her message would help or even what was happening in our lives. She was out of town and sent the message for a different reason.

Still, there it was, sitting in my inbox, a ray of light and a renewal of hope from a friend in a far away place, just when it was needed most.

The email contained a link to a video of Senator Al Franken from when he had spoken on the last day of GA, which we had missed because we had to leave early to catch our flight home.

In part of his speech, Senator Franken spoke lovingly of his father. He spoke of his father’s belief that we must not only be just, but DO justice – of how his father thought that nature and the earth and everything are so beautiful that there must be something behind it all, and we might as well call that something, God.

The Senator spoke proudly of his two children. He told the story of his young son who had received an award for being such a good, nice kid. When asked why he was so good, the son answered, “I think it has something to do with Grandpa”.

With deep emotion in his voice, Senator Franken continued, “To me, that’s where God is… I think God is my dad’s in me and he’s in my son… “

As I watched him and listened to him say those words on the video that Nell had sent, my own thoughts about Jenna from that night staring at the light from my chalice began to crystallize and become complete.

I had been reading A House for Hope, a wonderful book by John A. Buehrens and Rebecca Ann Parker. I looked back at something Reverend Dr. Parker writes in the book:

She writes, “The divine is not a despotic monarch, ruling through coercion and threat, sanctifying violence. This is not an unchanging, eternal reality from which the imperfect can be condemned. This is not merely a metaphor, but an actual presence, alive and afoot in the cosmos, an upholding and sheltering presence that receives and feels everything that happens with compassion and justice, offering the world back to itself, in every moment, with a fresh impulse to manifest the values of beauty, peace, vitality and liberation… everlastingly emergent, alive, responsive, creative, at one with the chaotic, messy universe we live in.”

My heart expanded and my thoughts grew much calmer. Whether metaphor or actual presence, I thought, if there is God in the sacred beauty of our shared existence, ever changing with our experience of that unfathomably interconnected web, then God weeps with us, I thought.

And that image was somehow comforting.

God weeps.
For Jenna.
For Teresa and Tara.
For all who knew and loved this amazing young woman.
For the injury to the divine that her unexpected, untimely and all too heartbreaking death had caused.

And yet, I thought, if there is God in the sacred beauty of our shared existence, then there is the joy and light and love and laughter that was Jenna, also in our web of interconnectedness.

There is the beauty of Jenna, always, in the beauty of shared existence.

I don’t know if this is merely metaphor or actual presence as Dr. Parker says it is, and it does not take the sorrow away completely even now, but it does help me remember to be grateful for life and our powerful interconnectedness, even those lives cut way too short, even at times when life seems senseless.

Now, every time I light my little chalice, I remember Jenna; I am reminded to try in my less than perfect way to carry forth her capacity to fill those around us with laughter and joy.

And, in that way, still, there is Jenna in the experiences of her that those of us who loved her cannot help but carry forward into our continued shared existence.

There is great, divine joy, in the beauty of being always interconnected with Jenna.

I wrote most of what I just shared with you 6 years ago, just after Jenna’s death but until now had only shared it with a few people, and my own theology has changed some since then. I got Teresa’s permission to update it to present tense and share it with you, because I can’t think of a stronger example in my own life of when I struggled with our topic today – trying to make sense of what seems senseless.

When something like that happens, when horrific events like these we have witnessed in our country and our world lately occur, it can cause us to question our worldview; reconsider the way in which we find meaning and beauty; lose faith even in how we perceive that which is ultimate and provides structure and a sense of cohesiveness in our lives. Whether or not it involves a concept for the divine, we can end up being forced to revise and reconstruct what could accurately be called our own, personal theology.

And life can throw so much at us that can seem so senseless:

The sudden earthquake, storm or tsunami that rips through a populated area and takes so many lives.

Terror attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Istanbul, Dhaka, Bagdad just to name a few.

A sudden, life-threatening diagnosis when we are not even known to have been at risk.

Police continuing to shoot and kill African Americans under highly questionable circumstances – twice in just the last week. Five police officers in Dallas killed in apparent retaliation.

A very disturbed young man who enters a nightclub in Orlando with an automatic weapon and takes out his own self-hatred on 49 innocent people.

These are just a few examples. There are so many more.

And some of these really are senseless, in that they are at least partially random. They are just weather patterns or life’s chance events. The creative unfolding of our universe can include events that both give us a perception of beauty and meaning and events that threaten to destroy that perception.

Others of these involve senseless loss, but, in reality, they are the products of our own human systems that perpetuate violence, loss and destruction. Laws, institutions and foreign policies that combined with an economic system of intense inequality an unfettered capitalism run amuck that are threatening life on our planet and continuing to create the conditions that lead to extreme poverty, civil unrest and strife, oppression, war, hatred, religious extremism and acts of terrorism.

These may seem senseless, but they are, in fact, not the products of random chance. They are human creations.

So, in either case though, how do we make sense of the senseless? Is it even possible sometimes, or do we at times have to look the other way for a while?

I don’t pretend have all of the answers. I do think though, that one of the things we have to do, especially in the face of great losses such as those we have been witnessing, is to allow ourselves to feel the emotions – to dwell in a worldview torn and shattered for a while. We have to process the grief and the heart sickness and the confusion.

And we have to accept the anger that often comes with it so that we can channel that anger in healthy directions that avoid more destruction, as we saw with the killing of police in Dallas this past week. Directions that can, instead, be our motivation to create change, whether in our private lives or in the public sphere.

Perhaps, for instance we will channel that anger toward demanding sensible gun laws that will keep automatic weapons out of the hands of average citizens so that our country might one day no longer be the gun massacre capital of the world.

When events like the latest gun massacre or that unexpected diagnosis strike, life can feel like the rug has been pulled out from under us at such times. We realize that we are fragile creatures, and the events of our lives are unknown and uncertain and often outside of our control. Our agency then is to be found in how we respond to them.

And I think that, like I had to do, after the senseless accident that took Jenna’s brilliant life, sometimes, sometimes we have to reconstruct our worldview out of the rubble that is left of what we had believed before.

And we do that both as an individual quest, examining and reexamining our own inner spirituality and we also need a community – a community to lament with us, to celebrate the memory of that which we have lost together and to hold us when we are in danger of falling into unyielding despair. Communally, we provide each other with the building blocks for creating a new, more nuanced and mature understanding of our world that none of us can find alone amidst that rubble that was left from how we had made meaning and found beauty in the past.

That’s exactly the process those of us who loved Jenna found that we needed.

That’s exactly how so many people are responding to the senselessness in Orlando, Baton Rouge, Dallas and elsewhere. Muslim and LGBTQ communities that have reached out to one another and found themselves coming together in shared purposes even greater than each had known before environmental groups declaring solidarity with Black Lives Matter. I find reason for hope in this.

For thousands of years, humankind has imagined gods and goddesses that brought all that exists, including us, into being. I am beginning to think that it works in the exact opposite way.

Maybe, when we reach out with love toward one another, across our differences, and, even in the face of the tragic and inexplicable, together, we find new, more creative and life giving ways of constructing meaning and finding beauty in our world, maybe we co-create the divine – bring blessings into our world that so badly needs them right now.

Amen.

Benediction

Now, as we go out into that wide, beautiful world we are working to save, know that together, we can make a difference, Together, we create the courage to act, the power to make life-giving change, the nourishment that sustains our spirits.

Together, we discover the sacred that already exists within the web of all existence, of which we are part.

May the congregation say Amen and Blessed Be. Go in peace.

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