THE THREADS OF MEMORY

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

16 September 2001

I don’t know what is the most terrible memory arising out of Tuesday’s horror. Certainly several visual images are seared into my brain. But, what seems to bring tears every time I think of it is one of those cell phone calls, the one from Stuart Meltzer, calling his wife from the 105th floor of the first building hit. "Honey, something terrible is happening. I don’t think I am going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children."

It is now five days from those hours of horror. Like such momentous events in our past, the assassination of president John F Kennedy and the attack on Pearl Harbor, for most of us, the moment we learned what was going on is fixed in our memories. I was returning from an early morning meeting with friends from the congregation and had turned on NPR, only to hear a confused report that the congress was being evacuated.

Through the contradictory and fast moving announcements I learned something terrible had happened, not only in Washington, but also in New York. By the time I was at the office here at the Society the RE television had been rolled into the hallway. Anne and Fran and Wendy, along with several workmen from the building projects here at the church were watching fixedly the crashing of that second plane and the tumbling of each of the towers, over and over, relieved only by pictures of the Pentagon burning.

That evening we held a joint service with Dorshei Tzedek, the Reconstructionist congregation that shares space with us, and Second Church, the United Church of Christ congregation up the hill from us. We met here in our sanctuary, maybe a hundred of us. It was a brief and, I found, a healing service, where we sang and prayed together, different in our faiths but gathered as neighbors and as a people.

Since then, here at FUSN we’ve held our doors open to light candles and meditate and pray Wednesday and Thursday evenings. On Friday at noon, we opened the doors of our sanctuary, to join with many others across the nation in ringing bells, playing our chimes, singing and again praying together. Of the approximately hundred people here on Friday, I would guess the majority were not members of our Society, just neighbors and people passing by a church with its doors swung wide open, and its chimes ringing.

I’ve been at every one of these events. Sometimes participating, sometimes listening, sometimes just being together with others in our suffering and reflection. These moments of gathering have been important; these times of presence each of us to the other are necessary. I do find this presence is that "gift of a song" Anne shared earlier with our children.

Here in this place we find our sharing, our coming together, our discovery of a promise to be waiting for each other. And there is more. Within this our presence to each other, we need to remember not only our own private fears and hopes, but also that there are communal fears and hopes.

This is the season of Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur. It is a time in the Jewish tradition to reflect and to renew and, also to confess and prepare for a new life. Here we are five days after that terrible event, gathered together in a time already set aside, set aside if you will from millennia past, just to reflect, to seek renewal, to prepare to go forward. Rarely have I felt so much the power of this season, and the secrets it holds about our human hearts.

Truthfully, I’ve feared this hour. Already I’ve been called upon to speak several times. People in agony and pain and longing, are seeking meaning at this time. I stand in the occupation we give for those who deal in meaning. But how can one find meaning in such an act? What meaning can there be in such terror, such horror, such unspeakable evil?

Words have failed me. Every time I’ve opened my mouth, I’ve felt ashes on my tongue. Words, that most precious of human things, have seemed to fall so short of the event, of our emotions, of our longing, of our hurt. But, within our humanity a time comes when we must speak. However short of the deepest we may come, we must speak. Even as we must act, we must find the words to shape and frame those actions.

As such, as I’ve found my voice forming out of these horrific events, I’ve mainly found myself joining with the relatively few voices calling for restraint. We are filled with powerful emotions, and if we hope to make wise choices in our lives, we need to notice what they are and how they are shaping us.

Of course we aren’t always aware of these emotions living deep within us. As a small example: back in 1987, while Jan and I were in graduate school in the San Francisco Bay Area, we were caught in an earthquake. That earthquake has since become known in California circles, at least, as the "pretty big one."

Not the terrible event that Californians live with as a ubiquitous promise, but bad enough to collapse a section of the Bay Bridge, to burn part of San Francisco, to pancake several sections of freeway in Oakland, to devastate several communities, and kill a number of people.

As most here know Jan and I are Californians by birth and upbringing. That means we’ve lived with earthquakes smaller and larger all of our lives. Mostly we don’t even notice them, small rumbles, jerks, and rolls every now and again. But this one was different. It was big, people died, and the shape of our lives shifted because it had happened.

And this is the important point. I noticed how after that event I began to feel anxious. A vague feeling, it hung on like a pall over not just my life, but of our lives as people in community. Truthfully I wasn’t fully aware of how much it bothered me, this hesitant, vague feeling of dis-ease, until we moved away from California in 1991.

Leaving was like having a weight lifted from my shoulders that I wasn’t even aware I was carrying. Now this is nothing compared to what we’ve experienced as a people this past week. And, of course we can’t move away from the conditions of this situation. But, there are some things we should notice. Already I’m seeing inclinations of unconscious reaction, of deeper fears, and anxieties, and where they’re tending to go. At this time we desperately need perspective.

Already our feelings are shifting. Our national response is moving from grief and horror and seeking ways to help, to wondering how we can get back at the perpetrators. The president has announced we are at war, I’ve watched how flags have begun appearing, and our communal experience as Americans has been slowly coalescing, into a rather purer nationalism, sometimes with very ugly elements. I think of that Sikh being rousted off a train in Providence. Worse still, I think of that mob marching on a mosque in Chicago.

I suggest we need to be wary of this impulse. Of course it is rooted in something authentic. There is no doubt we are a people, in our grand and hodgepodge way, we are Americans, we are a people. And there is no doubt that we as a people were attacked on Tuesday morning. But that truth and the many truths of our national experience are always in danger of distilling into nativism, jingoism and that ultimate "we" against "them" dualism that haunts the human condition and human communities like a cancer.

My email has been down for the entire week. Still down. In ways I’ve found this a blessing. But, I’ve also missed what has been said in our own congregational listserv, something that frequently contains wise reflections. Fortunately Jan copied out at work something our own Bart Wright wrote that I think needs to be heard by all of us.

"My fear," Bart tells us after describing some settings up of such categories of "we" and ‘they," "are meant as a show of support, before the fact, for whatever our President decides to do next." Bart observes how this "is a natural human response when we feel that ‘our people’ have been attacked to rally around our team and our leader and strike back, to see enemy blood flow in rivers."

After this observation, Bart concludes, "This urge should be accepted as natural, then resisted in the name of wisdom. US military power is unequalled in the history of humanity, and one thing the US can do easily is make enemy blood flow in rivers—and most of what will look like enemy blood to anger-crazed eyes will turn out to be innocent blood."

I believe if we are aware and just a little wary, we can come through this awful affair no doubt sadder, but maybe also a little wiser. In this holy season leading to a moment of confession in Yom Kippur, let’s consider together what we might divine in this awful time, about ourselves, and our world. Let us consider how we can best respond to the events of our lives, and particularly those most terrible things like this Tuesday’s horror.

As I said at the beginning I don’t know what is the most terrible memory arising out of Tuesday. Certainly several visual images are seared into my brain. But, what seems to bring tears every time I think of it is one of those cell phone calls, the one from Stuart Meltzer, calling his wife from the 105th floor of the first building hit that morning. "Honey, something terrible is happening. I don’t think I am going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children."

If there is meaning to be found, I don’t believe it will come from a call for some terrible vengeance, particularly a vengeance placed upon the heads of not only the truly guilty, but of countless innocent bystanders—the inevitable victims of wars. Rather I think, if we really hope for something out of this, something more than continuing the cycles of hate and horror, it will come from those last words on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center.

I’ve long found genuine truths; the truths that make our lives are rarely cosmic in scope. Rather the truths that count, the truths that can touch us in our lives are small things, things that arise when we live fully as human beings.

The wisest words are almost always small words. But they can summarize it all. Stuart Meltzer sets the stage for all of us, sets the conditions for our finding of perspective, for our coming to wisdom. "I don’t think I’m going to make it." He confesses the truth. We all will die. There is no doubt, even though we can cloud our awareness of this fact for a time, we each and every blessed one of us will die.

But, when we allow ourselves to truly understand our passingness, that we only occupy this life for a brief time, then we find things can click into place, we can find harmony and balance and most important of all, we can find that precious perspective. Within this experience of perspective, of how we are beautiful and temporary, we can distill out of our ordinary passing experience, enough to become wise.

And what is that "enough?" What is that wisdom? Stuart said it in the face of his dying: "I love you." So powerful, so simple, so truthful of everything that makes us human. Love is the most mysterious force on this planet. No wonder we use it as the fundamental synonym for God. Love is the longing of the human heart; it is the knowing that even in our temporariness, we are also connected. Love is the glue that pulls us together. As the hymn tells us, as we open our hearts, Love will guide us.

But, even those words, "I love you," if left alone, don’t fully take us where we must go. I remember the experience of a dear friend of mine so many years ago, going before the ministerial fellowship committee, the group of lay leaders and clergy who decide whether an individual is ready for the ministry. My friend preached his sample homily for them on the nature of love.

At the end of the homily, during the time when the committee is asking the hard questions, delving, probing, to see if this individual really is ready to step out into service, helping people in the rawest of times, they asked the hardest question. "What do you say when you run out of sermons on love?"

Well, we’ve seen that time and we’ve been given an answer. Stuart tells us. "Take care of the children." Not kill our enemies. Not seek a terrible vengeance. Not create rivers of blood. Take care of the children. Of course we need to seek justice. And not everyone responsible for the horror on Tuesday was killed at the time.

But, remember our primary responsibility, and let us seek those ways that will best allow us to care for our children, by our deeds, by how we respond. As Anne told us Tuesday evening: We can’t control what happens. But, we can control our responses. Here is the heart of the song, sung to us from the 105th floor of the World Trade Center, the lesson, the only lesson we can pull out of this horror that will ease hurt and heal wounds.

Passing as we are, we are woven together into a great mystery. That mystery is love. When we know love, we go can forward to give our hands and our lives to care for the children and each other. Here is the blessing that pours forth for all of us from that terrible moment at the World Trade Center. I hope we can accept it. It is in hearing the truth spoken within that moment, I believe, that we discover nothing less than God.

Amen.