Ritual and Remembrance

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
September 11, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Fifteen years after the attack of September 11, what are the ways we remember those whom we lost? How does ritual help us make sense of the events of our lives?

Call to Worship

We enter, now, into this place of renewal.
We join together, now, in this community that sustains and upholds.
We imagine, now, a world with more compassion, more justice, more love.
We worship, now, that which is greater than us,
and that holds our aspirations, our fortitude, our faith, our hope.
Now, we enter into this shared spirit of gratitude and community.
Now, we worship, together.

Sermon: Ritual and Remembrance: the 15th Anniversary of 9/11

On this day 15 years ago, it was a week day morning, and I was on my way to work when I turned on the radio in my car. I listened as a shell-shocked reporter described how apparent attackers had flown a jetliner first into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and then about 15 minutes later had flown a second jet in to the South tower.

My initial response was disbelief. My mind went immediately to the 1938 radio drama called “War of the Worlds” that had presented a fictional alien invasion as a live news report, leading to some people panicking in areas throughout the country because they believed it was really happening.

I thought what I was hearing must be like that – a fiction being presented as reality. My brain just could not accept that it could really be happening.

And then I changed the radio station. And then I changed it again. It was on every station. It was real.

Instead of continuing on to work, I went back home and told Wayne that we needed to turn on the television news. The country was under attack.

We watched in horror and disbelief as the gaping holes in the towers burned, and they played endless repeats of the video of that plane turning and crashing into the South tower. We watched as the reports began to come in that hijackers had crashed another plane into the Pentagon. We witnessed first the South tower collapsing and then the North tower, learning in between that another plane, United Flight 93, had crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

My memories of that morning are hazy and jumbled. I had to look up the sequence of events to make sure my memories of them were not distorted.

One clear and painful memory that stands out for me though, is that at some point before the towers fell, I had left the room. I don’t remember why. I just remember walking back into the living room and hearing Wayne say, “Oh my God, they’re jumping out of the windows to avoid being burned to death.” I looked at the television and saw images that fill me with horror and grief even today.

These are extraordinarily painful memories. It is so easy for me to want to avoid them. To lock them away in some distant room in the far reaches of my mind. And indeed, I suspect they are too powerful to carry with us in our consciousness all of the time. But I do think it is important that we remember sometimes – that we glance back into that room and retrieve some of what that day was like.

I think we must remember those whose who died, as well as those who grieve them each year, especially on this day – that we remember the horror and the grief and the anger and the confusion and the fear and the subsequent ways in which those feelings were sometimes used to manipulate us in the days that followed 9/11.

We remember because embedded in that day and in the ways we as a society, as a culture, reacted to it are lessons to be learned; illuminations of our values and ideals both healthy and good and some that are destructive; stories about who we are as a people that we continue to tell ourselves even today.

And to do so, that we commemorate. We engage in ritualized remembrances.

This morning, across our country in sanctuaries not so different than this one, n1any of our fellow citizens are also remembering 9/11 through whatever are the rites and rituals of their own faith traditions.

Today, in cites across our country and indeed the world, people are commemorating 9/11 by engaging in secular rituals. In Manhattan, two four mile high rectangular towers of light powered by 88 7,OOO-watt xenon light bulbs will recall the Twin Towers, as the names of those who died in the attacks are read aloud.

In Austin, City Firefighters are remembering the first responders who died on 911 by climbing the Pleasant Valley Drill Tower in full fire fighting gear enough times to equal to what had been the height of the world trade center towers. It is a ritual they do each year in complete silence.

Through these rites and rituals, we reach back into that room where we’ve stored the memories from that day 15 years ago and retrieve them, and it matters – it matters that we do so through such ritual.

When I dove into reading about what we know about ritual, I found quite a bit of scientific research and a number of theories about our propensity to engage in ritual. It has been studied across a wide range of disciplines from neurology to anthropology What I share today will be broad by necessity, getting at what seems to common among these theories about human rituals.

Here’s a definition of ritual developed by two neuroscientists that I really liked. “Ritual is a sequence of behavior that
1. is structured or patterned
2. is rhythmic and repetitive
3. acts to synchronize emotion, perception, cognitions and physical movement to potentially generate powerful unifying experiences and
4. synchronizes these processes among individual participants when in a group setting, creating a strong sense of group unity.”

Ritual has been observed across all known cultures and across both religious and secular institutions. We can see rituals play out in families, schools, workplaces, governments, sports and the military for example.

We find this patterned, repetitive, synchronization in storytelling, drama, music, dance and many of the other arts.

We engage in ritualistic behavior both on our own as individuals, as well as in group settings.

It seems to be embedded in our very genetic structure. Anthropologists have found evidence of ritualized behavior from even before language developed. It even may have been the source of more complex culture and communication.

Even very young children will automatically copy ritual. I’ve seen this several times at the “We Gather” Saturday services we do here at the church once a month. For those services, we put out a carpet and coloring materials so that children can stay with us for the whole service.

They will be coloring away, seemingly oblivious to the goings of the adults, until we start to chant or sing or do some other form of ritual. Then, they will look up and join in right away. We have had some pretty wonderful dance performances spontaneously added to our hymn singing a couple of times.

So ritual seems to be intrinsic to our nature as human beings, and we are developing greater understanding of how it may influence us both on the individual level and in groups.

On the individual level, studies mostly focusing on ritualistic meditation and prayer have found that these practices have a beneficial influence on human psychology, helping us create better coping strategies. They can reduce depression and anxiety and improve mood. They can also reduce blood pressure and heart rate, while improving the functioning of our immune systems.

Some rituals seem to turn off the part of the brain that gives us our sense of time and place, which can lead what our neuroscientists called the experience of “absolute unitary being” – that our deepest most true inner self is identical to the ultimate reality of the universe. Sounds a lot like “there is a spark of the divine within each of us,” doesn’t it?

This experience, in turn, seems to lead to greater valuing of peaceful cooperation and has even resulted in a reduction of implicit bias regarding race and age.

Ritual has also been shown to help with cognitive and memory improvements, and these all of findings are being put to use helping people.

Theresa Klein is an occupational therapist who works with people with dementia at an assisted living facility. Her own grandfather developed progressive dementia, He became disconnected and mute most of the time. He was a devout Catholic though, and she noticed that when she took him to church on Sunday, he happily joined in the familiar prayers and hymns AND that he was more able to connect with her during these rituals.

So, she brought the option to participate in rituals into the assisted living setting to powerful effect. One resident, an 82 year-old woman named Martha, had seemed so catatonic that her daughter who visited her every day had reluctantly agreed to allowing Martha to go on hospice care.

Then, they tried offering Martha the chance to participate in some rituals from her religious tradition. She suddenly sat up and joined in. As they did this more and more over the days and weeks that followed, she even looked at her daughter and said, “I love you” several times. Through ritual, a mother and her daughter were given more time to experience real connection with one another.

And that brings us to the role that rituals seem to play when we do them together in a group. First, they seem to create that sense of connection within the group. They bind people together. In smaller groups, rituals that involve fear or even pain can cause participants to very strongly fuse their personal identity with that of the group. This might have had a survival advantage in early tribal societies by creating strong cooperation and making them better able to wage war against competing tribes.

Conversely, regularly repeated rituals that have less negative emotional content can bond much larger groups together but less intensely and around a common doctrine or belief system. More recently, research has found that these differences between ritual settings are probably a matter of degree rather than absolutes.

At the group level, rituals are also a way we pass on social memory. Through ritual, we are embedding memories in a way that, for instance just reading about the events of 9/11 does not. We are getting at the essence of the story, creating and retrieving the common social values and norms, emotions and embodied experience, and we are creating a mechanism, a technology, that allows us to transmit these social memories to the next generations.

So, our 9/11 commemorations, our vigils and memorial services these are how people in a culture remember in a whole bodied, visceral way – a way of collectively saying “we remember you” to those we have lost. And even after all of us who experienced 9/11 are no longer living, these rites and rituals are ways that future generations may also say, “We remember you. We carry you with us.”

Almost all of our practices here on Sunday can be thought of as ritualistic. Our order of our service repeats itself in much the same way each week. We recite many of the same words together. We sing together. We listen to music together. We have a story for all ages together. We have a time of centering or prayer together. We light candles in our window together.

Particularly when I am leading worship, that is one of our most powerful rituals for me. I watch as people from this religious community that I serve and that I love light their candles in our window, and I imagine the powerful experiences and emotions they are holding up, and I can feel in a very visceral way that which binds this religious community together and moves out into our larger world to do justice. It is always powerful and moving.

Powerful too are our rites of passage that mark life’s transitions – our baby parades and coming of age ceremonies, weddings, memorial services and the like – our ceremonies that mark the changing of the seasons – the water communion, Christmas Eve, the burning bowl service, the flower communion.

And much of all of this has been passed down to us through social memory – from the Unitarians and Universalists who came before us.

It is important to note here that as vital as our ritual traditions are, the words that go with them, the stories that we tell ourselves, the theologies we express during our rituals matter greatly too. If these are directed inward, then the rituals by which they are expressed will create bonding within the group that is in opposition to any who are not a part of the group. We can see this with some of the more fundamentalist religions and certain highly white-nationalistic political rallies as of late.

Likewise, if the theologies we express within our rituals are directed toward all of humanity or even all of creation, the web of all existence, then the sense of interconnectedness they will generate also tends to occur both within the group and on a more universal scale.

So on this, the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I want to close by inviting you to join me in a ritual of commemoration. Please rise in body or spirit and extend your palms opened upward in a gesture of openness. I will say a few words of remembrance of several groups of folks, ending each time with the word, “today”. At which point, we will place our hands over our hearts and say together, “We remember” and return our hands to the palms held upward position.

To the Universalists and the Unitarians and then the Unitarian Universalists who have handed down to us this religious tradition that sustains and upholds us, particularly on days filled with difficult memories such as this one, today, we remember.

To our ancestors in this church, who created built, maintained and expanded it so that we are now able to continue this religious community that we love, today, we remember.

In this, our beloved church, we pause this day to look back into that sacred room at the edge of our consciousness, and today, We remember.

To the people who responded on 9/11 by going to the aide of those at the world trade center and the pentagon, some of whom lost their own lives and others who still suffer disabling health effects even now, today, we remember.

To those who attempted to retake flight 93 so that it could not reach whatever might have been the hijackers intended target, today, We remember.

To the families and loved ones of all who died in the attacks, today, we remember.

To all those who died when flight 93 crashed into that field in Pennsylvania, to those died at the Pentagon, to those who died at the world trade center, today, we remember.

For humankind, for future generations, for our world, always and today, we remember.

Amen.

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