A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence

January 9, 2005


As a child I was taught, in my church, in my home — that my life was safe in the hands of God. There was one huge exception, of course, and that would be the circumstance in which I rejected Jesus, turned away from Christian faith. Then I wouldn't be safe at all.

But barring that scenario, I was safe. Unpleasant things could happen, sure, but all for some good purpose so that I could later rejoice in what Providence brought me.

I remember an evangelical seminary professor who dared ask dangerous questions. A young man had been murdered, and he had been at the funeral. The grief-stricken mother had turned to the minister, I don't know what she'd said to him, but his response had stuck in my professor's mind and remained as one of those moments that puts everything in doubt. He had said, "The Lord had a purpose for this."

Now that was a private grief. As Christmas passed into the morning after, 100,000, 120,000, 150,000 people were swept away in horror and death in an act of nature. A half million were injured. No one knows what awaits the millions who live in the region around the Indian Ocean, but the aid workers are predicting epidemics and hunger as the consequences set in. It beggars belief.

I was ripped apart, smashed and pulverized, by the thought of tens of thousands of people swept away in unimaginably horrific moments of terror, and the heartbreak of hundreds of thousands and the destruction of civilized life across eight nations.

And quite apart from the sorrows around the Indian Ocean, I thought of what some of you are going through.

I thought I couldn't bear it. And after a morning of bitter, bitter tears, I thought . . . maybe this is ripping you apart, too.

My intended topic, Beauty, will have to wait for next week. When I first heard the news it was Sunday morning two weeks ago on the BBC. I ran downstairs to turn on CNN, and found CNN running a story about diets, and then another one about new trends in computers. Some commercials and other stories later, on the hour, they did the tsunami story, and then returned to the drivel. There seemed a terrible lack of decency in drivel-as-usual while our fellow humans were undergoing horrors on such a massive scale. Some unwritten social contract calls for our attention even when we can't do anything about it. I turned back to the continuous commercial-free coverage on the BBC. And then I knew it would be wrong for us to fail to turn aside today, and ponder what has happened.

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We know what to say about the ravages of war, about the cataclysmic climate changes our own human activity is rapidly sealing for the world's fate. We must turn. We must find a better way, we must reject greed in ourselves and in our public life, and pursue purer ends.

A writer for the Guardian said about the same thing about human folly, and then he said,

Another Guardian columnist, Martin Kettle, wrote that no religion that seeks to make sense of the world can avoid the implications of the tectonic rupture that sent unimaginable forces coursing across thousands of miles of water, resulting in death and destruction in a vast arc from Somalia to Indonesia.

For most of human history people have tried to explain earthquakes as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. One All Saints Day morning in 1755 a 9.0 earthquake, the same as the Indian Ocean quake, struck Lisbon and killed 100,000 people. It was followed by a tsunami that engulfed the downtown, and a fire, resulting in the near total destruction of Lisbon. Even as the churches collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests insisted on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which to ward off the evil.

Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire asked what kind of God could either intend or permit such a thing to occur. Did Lisbon really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he asked, that it should be punished in such a appalling and indiscriminate manner? His biting satire in Candide mocked the proclamations of divine judgment.1 Yet I'm told that in Sri Lanka, masses of people are convinced they're being punished.

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There are two things to be said about this.

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The first is about safety. We need to feel some degree of safety. We want to convey to our children the sense that they are safe.

In my childhood I was taught a kind of ultimate safety in the hands of God. I know better now, but that's intellectual. My gut has a harder time grasping the truth that safety is a myth. The implications of this are important. While in Oak Park last week I sat for awhile with one of the champions of our faith, in my opinion, Tom Dunnington. You've never heard of him. But a long procession of young people have passed through his youth group at Unity Temple. He's still doing it at 76 and I don't know anyone who does it more effectively.

And Tom spoke of the myth of safety. We don't know what's going to happen. We just don't. The old fundamentalist preachers who were trying to get you to come forward and get saved were right about at least one thing. They were right when they said you could go out from this sanctuary tonight — since revival meetings are usually held at night — and get hit by a truck. On a sitcom a hapless insurance agent was giving away company pencils on which were inscribed the motto "If it can happen, it can happen to you."

Alright, then. How, then, do we live? How do we live with the truth about life? What can we trust?

Life is an adventure, an experiment. What matters is what you do with the material given. Do it. Do it with your whole heart. Life is for living. Follow the voice within and do it with your heart. No guarantees.

There is meaning to our mishaps. But it won't be there because some God-Out-There put it there. It will be because the God-in-here — in you — made meaning out of the chaos.

And what about the safety we need? It will come from two sources. These are the bedrocks on which we can stand safely.

The first is our own inner life, your spiritual core that gives you peace and equanimity.

And the second is the safety we afford each other — as groups of friends, as families, as a congregation, as a world held together by a social contract. We knkow that the religious mentality that is running our country right now doesn't believe in the social contract. We will have to make it as real as we can, keep each other as safely as our love and care can.

I don't believe in a God or goddess or anything like that that has a purpose for tsunamis or ravaging disease. This was part of my central religious crisis when a student in an evangelical seminary. This tsunami was meant to be? No, I hope not. I came to a place where I had to say, if God had a purpose in that, well, I have some ethics and some values and I cannot have anything to do with such a monster. Voltaire was right.

Yes, I do affirm and love the Divine Life that is the Life of all Being. But whatever it is — that great Mystery beyond our naming — it has a shadow, just as I do, as you do. To love requires the capacity to forgive, or you cannot love. You cannot. We bear the sorrow and anguish of nature.

And all this applies to Nature, and to this living Universe. I grew up near the Atlantic on the Jersey shore. I always knew the power of the sea. I saw it in the hurricanes that swept houses away. That was part of what drew me to it. But I lived with a fundamental trust that it would never, never sweep up that beach and drown us all. Next time I go there, I'll go still trusting that it will not. But I'll remember that it once did. And I'll love it still. But the breakers will have a new and sinister meaning that they never had before for me. Nature betrayed our trust.

The powers of Nature are great and there is a shadow side to them. We might tremble before them.

But the powers of nature and fate are also in you. It is for us to rise to their challenge. We have always done that.

I don't know anything more poignant than the conclusion of Camus' great work, The Plague:

Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plaguestricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in people than to despise. . . . It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

One hundred years ago the average life expectancy in this country was 47 years. Pneumonia and flu were the chief causes of death, followed by tuberculosis and diarrhea. These forces of nature and fate yielded to another force of nature: the Mind. We have made great strides and we will make more unless, using the same powers wrongly, we destroy nature first. But there are no guarantees.

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If there is safety in this world it will come from our spiritual orientation to life — a capacity to live fully, to forgive, and go on loving. And it will come from the human social contract we make and keep. It will come from our ability to trust enough significant people in our lives and world. Everyone knows the utterly devastating consequences of the continual betrayal of trust. You know the difference between the forgiveness that makes the loves and relationships of our lives possible, and an abusive relationship where trust is not possible. Whenever and wherever one person has the power to do good or to do harm to another, there must be trust that that power will be used for good. We must be able to trust others and, even more, trust ourselves.

We are all living in a state of distress at our inability to trust our government. In such times we must be reassured of our grounds for trust in each other and in ourselves. By the way — you know that word "faith" that we love to argue about? Do you know what it means in Greek — the Greek word is pistis? It means, simply, trust. Trust is sacred. And trust is fragile. And trust is essential to any sense of safety.

The hope and the safety must rise from the human breast, from the noblest that is in us. The ethical values, the compassion, the love — these are the creation and gifts of Nature, and we are the bearers of those gifts of Nature.

And there will be meaning in this horror if we make meaning out of it, if we learn. Today our government has pledged $350 million in relief. It has spent $148 billion on the war in Iraq, which has been running 669 days. That means the money pledged for the tsunami relief is the equivalent of one days' spending on war. The Marines who have now been dispatched to Sri Lanka were, just a few days ago, bombing and shooting the civilians of Iraq, smashing the homes and evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of Falluja. Dramatic promises of increased foreign aid have come to nothing and the aid we give is pretty much aimed at promoting the interests of American corporations abroad.

Progressives never really made a compelling case for the moral value of aid to make a fairer world. Even the Clinton administration boasted that 80 percent of foreign aid goes to purchase American goods and services, to help U.S. businesses operating abroad. More appalling: half the aid is military aid to friendly foreign countries like Israel and Egypt. Forty percent of all aid goes to Israel and Egypt. International cooperation efforts or United Nations programs are systematically undermined. And all of this assistance — including all that military assistance — amounts to 1 percent of our federal budget. Meanwhile, any country that joins the new International Criminal Court is ineligible for our foreign aid.

Some months before the tsunami struck, Oxfam interviewed a woman called Nong, who was stitching underwear for Victoria's Secret in Thailand. She explained she was afraid of having children because she couldn't feed them. This is what she told them: "We have to do overtime until midnight to earn a decent income."2

Then to these communities of the poor came December 26th. Can the sight of such incomprehensible suffering jolt us into a recognition of our corrupted priorities? of the terrible vulnerability of the poorest people and nations? of more terrors to come, this time caused not by an earthquake but by our own assault on the natural world and the climate? As the images of crushed villages and griefstricken faces fade — will we be different?

There will be meaning to the extent that we are willing to learn and change. Can it turn us into better human beings? Can it unleash the will for a better world, which the wealthier nations have the power to achieve?

I believe human beings want a fairer world. However corrupt the government, people here and all over the world have responded. There are the great relief efforts of the United Nations, and of smaller organizations from Oxfam all the way down to our own UU Service Committee. As Camus put it at the end of The Plague, there is more in people to admire than to despise. We will have to be able to trust that.

II

And here is the second thing to be said about such a catastrophe: and I think it's the most important. I've hinted at it already.

Sometimes our trust is betrayed, and then, there must be forgiveness.

You and I are what we are. We have light in us. And we also have a shadow. We have to live with the shadow, befriend it, and forgive it. In each other, we must forgive it, and in ourselves.

I wonder if you have thought how like us Nature is. Last month I quoted the great Unitarian pioneer Channing when he said

the likeness to God . . . belongs to [our] higher or spiritual nature. . . . The divine attributes are first developed in ourselves . . . The idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature . . . In ourselves are the elements of the Divinity.

Last month I was speaking of Light; today I am speaking of the shadow. Among those elements of Divinity there are the shadow elements that require our forgiveness. We are part of this glorious, roiling, and sometimes violent whole. Sometimes, like yesterday driving in the snow, I am ravished by the serene splendor of it. But at times winter weather is described, instead, with words like "fury."

And we and this Universe of Life are all one life. In the end we are not separate from this Universe of Life but part and parcel of it.

There is a deep human desire to believe in a God who is all good, in whom there is no shadow, who is in control of everything. The shadow is assigned to the Devil, to Satan and the demons — surely not to the Heart of all Being.

But Being — the life of this Universe — is all one. What is true of us is true of it all. There is light and there is a shadow.

There are clergy who would counsel me not to say that because it is too hard for people to hear. But I have more faith in you than that.

Being is one and Being has a shadow. Can I explain it? Do I understand it? Is that necessary? If it is necessary, I apologize. I can't explain it. No one can. Our minds don't have the capacity to penetrate that.

In one of his greatest essays, written after his young wife Ellen died, and then after his beloved five-year old son Waldo died, and in the fact of the national disgrace of slavery — I'm referring to his essay "Fate" — Emerson said this:

'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.

For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part of it, and can confront fate with fate. If the Universe have these savage accidents, our atoms are as savage in resistance. We should be crushed by the atmosphere, but for the reaction of the air within the body. A tube made of a film of glass can resist the shock of the ocean, if filled with the same water.

There are great powers in us, in all being — just as there is a shadow.


Copyright © 2005 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.

1 Martin Kettle. "How can religious people explain something like this?" The Guardian, 28 December 2004.
2 Mary Riddell, "Towards a Moral Universe." The Observer [London], Sunday, January 9, 2005.


Meditation


Life of all, seen in the silent serene whiteness of snow as well as in the fury of wind and waves:

We own the same life and spirit in ourselves; we own our kinship with all Nature, with the sources of Life Itself. We wonder at our power for good or for ill, and we tremble.

Let this house be an assembly for sober reckoning with the powers and energies within ourselves. Let the noblest, the gentlest, the kindest impulses move us to acts of light and creation. Let the violence and malice and shadow within us be disarmed in the gentle embrace of healing love.

Let the eyes of our eyes and the ears of our ears be open, aware, conscious, to what is in us; — reaching toward the great and sometimes elusive goal of what we might be.

Let this people be a community of reflection, and of vision, and of great and noble aspiration, taking up in loving hands what is rent and incomplete in us, forgiving, and healing, and making all bright with all the promise of our divine humanity

Readings

Elie Wiesel, from a conversation with Richard Hefner:

It is a question that Cain asked of God, having killed Abel: "Am I my brother's keeper?" And the answer, of course, is, we are all our brothers' keepers. Why? Either we see in each other brothers, or we live in a world of strangers. I believe that there are no strangers in God's creation. There are no strangers in a world that becomes smaller and smaller. Today I know right away when something happens, whatever happens, anywhere in the world . . .

So what I would teach my students is communication. I believe in dialogue. I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence. I would like my students to be present whenever people need a human presence. I urge very little upon my students, but that is one thing I do. To people I love, I wish I could say, "I will suffer in your place." But I cannot. Nobody can. Nobody should. I can be present, though. And when you suffer, you need a presence."

—From Elie Wiesel And Richard D. Heffner. Conversations With Elie Wiesel. New York: Schocken, March 2001, pp.3,6.


from Albert Camus, The Plague


1. Father Paneloux's judgment-sermon

The first month of the plague ended gloomily, with a violent recrudescence of the epidemic and a dramatic sermon preached by Father Paneloux. . . .

And on the Sunday of the sermon a huge congregation filled the nave, overflowing onto the steps and precincts. The sky had clouded up on the previous day, and now it was raining heavily. Those in the open unfurled umbrellas. The air inside the Cathedral was heavy with fumes of incense and the smell of wet clothes when Father Paneloux stepped into the pulpit. He had a powerful, rather emotional delivery, which carried to a great distance, and when he launched at the congregation his opening phrase in clear, emphatic tones: "Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it," there was a flutter that extended to the crowd massed in the rain outside the porch.

After launching [his discourse] he went on at once to quote a text from Exodus relating to the plague of Egypt, and said: "The first time this scourge appears in history, it was wielded to strike down the enemies of God. Pharaoh set himself up against the divine will, and the plague beat him to his knees. Thus from the dawn of recorded history the scourge of God has humbled the proud of heart and laid low those who hardened themselves against Him. Ponder this well, my friends, and fall on your knees."

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Tarrou's gray eyes met the doctor's gaze serenely. "What did you think of Paneloux's sermon, Doctor?"

The question was asked in a quite ordinary tone, and Rieux answered in the same tone. "I've seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment. Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth — with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He' try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence."

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2. From the concluding two pages:

Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plaguestricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in people than to despise. Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.