© Davidson Loehr
23 September 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave.
Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
CENTERING: “The Dance of Life”
It was the great Dance of Life: countless people, holding hands, moving and dancing over the fields.” They often didn’t seem to be aware of one another, yet they danced on in that great human circle, as they had been doing since before time counted.” Occasionally, parts of the circle would pass over a deep chasm, or a natural disaster like an earthquake, tornado or lightning would strike, and some dancers would be lost.” But immediately, the loose hands sought each other out, the circle was closed, and the dance went on.” After each loss, the dancers would recite their special stories:” stories to explain why they had been spared.” “It was God,” said some, “looking out for us.”” For others, it was a kind of cosmic energy that safeguarded the enterprise.” Others had their own explanations: guardian angels, Fate, and more exotic plots.” There were disagreements over just what it was that kept the dancers safe ” they seldom spoke of those who were lost from time to time.” And there was no pattern to the periodic losses and accidents.” Still, each time the circle was broken it seemed to heal itself, and the dance went on.” Yet the question hovers: with so many different stories, what should dancers believe?” In what, if anything, should they put their faith?
NOTE: This sermon was delivered without notes, then transcribed from the recording of the 11:15 service on this date, and edited by Dr. Loehr. While the sermons will necessarily vary some between the 9:30, 11:15 and 5:30 Sunday services, this is a fair approximation of the original. This is also why it reads more like an oral presentation than an essay.
SERMON: More Aftermath from September 11, 2001
Every generation, it seems, has its defining moment, the watershed event when we suddenly realize that the world isn’t as we thought, we’re not as safe as we thought, perhaps not as innocent as we thought. In that moment, a new generation is rudely and painfully taken forever out of a world of innocence and naive trust.
There aren’t many of these moments. They stand out in history as dates we’ll never forget:
December 7, 1941, “the day that lived in infamy” was such a moment and the world never felt quite as safe to those who lived through it again.
November 22, 1963 was a moment for people who grew up when I did. We all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard that President Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas. The world never seemed quiet as safe again.
Another moment took me by surprise when I was in graduate school. I was stunned to see how powerfully the events of December 8, 1980 affected people in their 20’s the day that John Lennon was murdered. And I remember how many of them cried, held each other, and talked about not feeling safe anymore.
And now September 11, 2001 has joined the list of world-shattering moments. They almost seem to come in 20-year intervals. For many people it was the first significant time that the world didn’t feel safe. And I can assure you from having been through a couple of such moments, you will never feel as safe again. There’s a loss of innocence and a loss of naive trust in the world that happens at these powerful moments, and it tears us from feeling that life is completely trustworthy and sacred and nourishing.
That’s something we all went through twelve days ago. What comes next is something that many here have not been through and something that many others here have been through and that’s the threat, the noise and probably the reality of war. As one who’s been through a war and been in a war, all of the feelings coming over the airwaves and coming from speeches of leaders are suddenly very familiar. I feel like I know what we’re getting into and what’s next.
When people are threatened, they band together within a common identity, and war offers one of the oldest and deepest and absolutely most powerful senses of reconnection that we can find. You can unite a country of 280 million people with a war against a common enemy, even an invisible enemy without a country, without a religion, without boundaries. Just the idea of a common enemy is enough to unite 280 million of us as one people, with one voice, one God, and one purpose. It is seductive as hell. War makes everything simple and it comes at a time when the complexity of things overwhelmed all of us.
War makes everything simple. It gives us very simple, black and white pictures of everything and it’s so easy to fall into them. A war for infinite justice to end all evil in a world so simple that all countries are either for us or against us. Never mind the fact that British and European newspapers for years have been writing that our country has created the economic and military conditions that foster the hatred. Never mind that in other parts of the world this story has been written only in nuances and grays. It is black and white. It’s cowboy logic. You are for us or against us. It is very simple-minded and seductive. There are, of course, no problems in the real world that are as simple as such solutions.
I thought of this when I began watching the interviews: the people who are carefully chosen to have their interviews aired on the screen. The news is managed and the news is selected for the effect it will have on the viewing audience. And the effect that’s desired on the viewing audience is that it unites us as one people, with one voice, and one God behind one goal, without necessary nuances or quarrelsome questions. “A people” becomes much like “a herd” – if they ever differed at all.
I saw the interview of the blonde wife of that brave man on the fourth plane. The man who was part of a crew who fought with the hijackers and succeeded in crashing the plane into the ground killing all aboard rather than letting them fly the plane into another building — perhaps the capital, perhaps the White House. The man and all aboard were absolutely heroes with no qualification of any kind.
But there were lots of relatives and friend of heroes who wouldn’t have said that what got them through it was their faith in God and their knowledge that their husband was in heaven where they’d see him again. It was that combination of someone with the right religious message, the right picture and the right words to support the speeches that had just been heard in the capital that were chosen to be aired. The “news” was carefully selected to present the picture needed to hunker us masses into a herd.
Every bit of news we see is going to have been chosen for us and carefully selected. There is another way of saying this. The other way of saying this is that there are nuances and there are stories and there are facts and details that will not be printed and will not be aired and which we may not find out about for a year, if ever.
I don’t know what they’ll be in the new war, but I do know what some of carefully avoided facts and stories were in our last war. So I’ll take the Gulf War as an example. That’s emotionally less loaded than the unknown territory that we are getting into now. You could also go back to the Vietnam War and mention the Pentagon Papers, which brought about a tremendous amount of disillusionment in people who discovered how intricate the scheming had been to deceive the American people. But from the Gulf War there are 2 stories I’ll tell you. And I wonder if you knew either of them. If you didn’t know either of them, you need to be very worried.
The first appeared in a one-paragraph story in the inside of the December 3rd, 1990 issue of Newsweek. The Gulf War was declared January 15, 1991. Six weeks earlier in Newsweek there was this little story under the heading “Where Are the Troops?” This followed several months of our being told that the reason that we had to send troops to Kuwait was because several hundred thousand Iraqi troops had crossed over the border into Kuwait and it was a desperate situation that demanded a strong and large military force.
This story said that some independent investigators had bought satellite photos and had hired retired CIA people to interpret them. They were satellite photos taken of the Iraq – Kuwait area in, I think, mid August and in mid November — during the time that several hundred thousand troops were said to have passed on the highway into Kuwait. The photograph in mid August showed the lone highway leading from Iraq to Kuwait. At one point a large sand dune had blown over about two-thirds of the highway, making it barely passable. The photograph in mid November showed the same highway and showed that by now the sand dune had blown all the way across the highway. It was covered completely between August and November. No troops had been driven down that highway.
The satellite photo that was so precise that it showed the make of the aircraft, showed no troop formation or locations anywhere in Kuwait. We think that about 2000 members of the Republican Guard of the elite Iraqi troops were in Kuwait, and that’s a large force. But it’s not 200 to 300 thousand. Where were the troops? Those photographs were published on the front page of the St. Petersburg Florida paper on January 6, 1991. Once war was declared nine days later, to the best of my knowledge, they were not published in any newspaper in the United States for the rest of 1991. At the end of 1991, the Columbia Journalism Review, which does this sort of thing every year as a watchdog, listed that story as one of the 10 most underreported stories of 1991. Can you say “understatement”?
The second story concerns what happened shortly before the vote was taken to declare war on Iraq and to send troops into Kuwait. Some of you will remember it was a very close vote. We voted for war by only five votes. The voting followed not long after some terribly poignant testimony by a young, 15-year-old girl named Naiyira.
Naiyira testified that she had been in the nurseries in the hospitals in Kuwait when the Iraqi soldiers came in and bayoneted babies, threw babies onto the floor and murdered them. It was a repulsive, gut-wrenching, story. After the vote, at least six of our congressmen said publicly that they had changed their vote on the war. All six were going to vote against the war until they heart Naiyira’s testimony, then all six changed to vote for the war. Just in those six votes was the difference in going to war and not going to war.
But the story that Naiyira told was a complete fiction. She was the daughter of the Kuwait ambassador to the United States. The Kuwaitis had hired Hill & Knowlton, one of the largest public relations firms in America, to help them prepare a story that would convince America to send our soldiers (almost as mercenaries) to protect their (and, of course, our) oil interests.
The story was completely concocted by Hill & Knowlton, and rehearsed with Naiyira, who had not been anywhere near Kuwait at the time. Now if you didn’t know this, at least know that this story is a measure of how completely and how effectively stories and important facts can be kept from us during the atmosphere of war, because it will certainly happen again. I don’t know what facts or stories will be invented or buried this time, but it will happen again. Because the only way to mobilize people for war is to keep it simple. Make it one people with one voice and one mind against one common enemy. We’ll be pulled in this direction.
The same thing happens in religion that happens in politics. The theology of war is a very different theology from the theology of peace in any religion. The theology of peace — whether it’s Christian, Muslim, or any other — is a theology with a very big God but no army. In a theology of peace we sing hymns and read poems about how we are all brothers and sisters, all the children of the same God. We speak of how there are no significant distinctions between races, nations, sexes or anything else – we are all children of the same God. It’s a very big God. And in the theology of peace there’s no mention of weapons.
The theology of war is the reverse. Churches are expected to, and do, provide a theology for war — or theology for imperialism, however you want to put it. And now it’s a very small God and a very big army. If you want to read the theology of war, there are two places you can read it right now. It’s the same theology in two different religions. One is to read Statements from the Taliban. You’ll read what a theology of war sounds like. Here are people who have taken a noble, broad, powerful, compassionate religion of Islam and found instead only things to hate. They hate liberated women. They hate women whose hair is uncovered. During Khomeni’s regime in 1979 they had some fundamentalist Muslim scholars writing that – this is hard to say with a straight face, because I remember reading it and I couldn’t read it with a straight face – saying that scientific discoveries had proven that there are emanations from a woman’s hair that drive men mad so their hair must be covered.
They hate anything outside of a very straight and narrow path on which you find only people who look just like them. They hate Westerners. They hate American culture. They hate our television; they hate the sexuality of our culture. They hate the range of sexuality in our culture. They hate the range of sexual orientation in that it finds a welcome in America but cannot find a welcome there. This is the theology of war. It’s a very tiny God who’s very angry and willing and eager to strike out against the evil in the world. It’s frightening stuff.
Now if you can’t read Arabic and don’t want to read the Taliban anymore, you can read the same theology of war from the interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Look at the list of things they hate: it’s the same list. The women’s liberation movement is responsible for the attack, gays and lesbians are responsible for the attack, women who had abortions because they don’t think breeding is a high calling for our species are responsible for the attack.
This is the same list of hate objects that you find in the Taliban. And it’s one of the most important things to understand about the theology of war. All religions are reduced to the same theology in the theology of war. It’s a list of a very tiny in-group and a very large out-group and it’s focused to be able to direct anger and hatred and weaponry against the source of evil. This reminds me of a story from Native America that I just heard this week:
A young boy went to see his grandfather because he was angry. He was angry because one of his friends had committed a terrible injustice against him and he wanted revenge and he wanted his grandfather’s advice on how to get revenge. His grandfather sat him down and said “I know these feelings. I’ve had them myself.” I too have had the feelings of hatred and anger and lust for blood and a lust for revenge. It’s as though there were two wolves inside of me fighting to control my soul. One is a good wolf who takes care of its pups and who is a peaceful wolf that only fights when it’s necessary and only as far as it’s necessary. And the other wolf is an angry, angry, angry wolf that strikes out in all directions whenever it’s given a chance. And these two wolves, the grandfather said, “are inside of me all the time fighting to dominate my soul.” The grandson thought about it for a second and he said, “I don’t get it grandfather, which wolf wins?” And the grandfather said, “The one that I feed.”
We have those two wolves now fighting for control of our soul as a nation and fighting for control or our individual souls. And the wolf that wins will be the wolf that we feed. I can’t resolve this problem this morning. But we need to say it out loud. We’re in a time of great pain and hurting. More than six thousand people have been killed. We have no idea of how many people on what will now be called “the other side” will be killed. We may wonder what to do about our hurt and about our deep sense of disconnection.
There’s another story for us here, about a woman who was sad to the core of her soul because she had lost her son. She went to see a wise man and she said, “I’m hurting so much I cannot go on with life because of the sorrow I feel for the loss of my son. There must be some magic potion or spell or something you can do to make all the hurt go away.” The wise man said “You’re very lucky that you came to me.” There is such a magic to make the hurt and the sorrow go away. All you have to do is bring me a mustard seed, a tiny mustard seed, from the home of someone who has never known sorrow.”
So she went around. She went first of course to the palaces, because certainly rich people don’t know any sorrow. And she found at every palace and every castle story after story of people who had lost a daughter, lost a son, people who had been visited by horrible tragedies, by diseases, by all of the woes of humankind. And each time she heard one of these stories from one of these families, she’d stop and stay with them for awhile to help them, because she knew what it was like to feel sorrow and she knew how to help them.
And after six or eight of these visits to families and people who had known sorrow and stopping to help them, the woman finally realized that the sage she consulted had been right. That magical mustard seed was the seed within her that made her reach out her own hand to take the hand of others who suffered. In our days and weeks and perhaps months ahead, I hope that we can find ways to reach out our hands to help those others that are suffering, here and abroad. And if when we reach our hands and take theirs we find that we don’t know how to stop the suffering, then let us hold hands and try to remember together the Dance of Life.
