Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 22nd of August 1999
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
as summer tilts us toward the open arms of autumn
to worship, to yield our illusions for deeper realities
to link our hands across the generations
and claim our place
among all those who also wondered at their kinship
to farthest star and nearest butterfly.
Blest are you, Reality, in which we find our unity.
Prelude to Hymn #86 "Spirit of Life" [Next] [back to top]
Written by Ohio born composer and poet, Shelley Jackson Denham, "Blessed Spirit of My Life" is a fitting prayer to sing today. It is fitting to those of us here in Columbus who bend in deep sympathy for the shaken citizens of Turkey whose lives are shambles of tumbled homes and lost families after the largest earthquake of our century struck without warning.
It is also a fitting hymn to sing for those of us here in Columbus who are being visited this week by a sad and broken man, Fred Phelps, a man who cloaks the misery of his inner heart with "sound and fury." He brings his sadness to the very places where our brothers and sisters in Worthington worship at this hour. My heart goes out to them as well, and to the men and women he attacks with his cruel words.
May no one here mirror this man in their own lives. May no one here repay him hurt for hurt, or blow for blow. May no one here turn from our ancient Universalist cry to maintain dignity even when it is spit upon. May we ever refrain from the self-serving acts of ridicule and feeling superior.
Let us find our way through the stress and strife of our world by remembering that the depth of compassion is bottomless, that clarity can speak to confusion, and that a sense of serenity in this overpowering world is not a luxury.
The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
This lesson is my precis of Ronald Tanaki's excellent 1996 book "Why We Dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima". NOTE: When said aloud, it best for English speakers to stress Japanese words on the first syllable, so its HI- roshima, not Hiro SHE ma.
On August 9th, after he had been urged to destroy Japan completely, President Truman responded soberly in a private letter "Even though I regard Japan as a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare, but I can't believe that we should therefore act the same way. My object is to save as many American lives as possible, but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children of Japan."
That very day, however, an atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki. At Potsdam, Truman had told Stimson he hoped only one bomb would be dropped. He told Henry Wallace "that the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He did not like the idea of killing, as he put it, "all those kids." For days afterward, Truman complained of terrible headaches. Wallace asked "Physical or figurative?" Truman responded "Both."
The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
This is from a letter written by the great Eleanor Roosevelt on June 12, 1953 to a man named John Golden.
It is always hard to tell people that it is the causes of war which bring about such things as Hiroshima, and that we must try and eliminate those causes because if there is another Pearl Harbor there will undoubtedly be another Hiroshima.
Sermon: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Still Hate the Bomb [Next] [back to top]
Most film critics I've read seem to think that Dr. Strangelove was the best among the fine movies directed by the late Stanley Kubrick. The film's long subtitle, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," gives you a taste of its precise and biting satire.
How do I know that line is satire? Because I assure you, back in the mid-Sixties when the movie was made, no one I knew loved the bomb. No one I knew lived without worry. Especially me.
I remember very well how the bomb affected me back in the year 1962. I was young teenager who lived with my father, mother, sister, brother. We lived in Detroit on Springarden Ave. in something called a bungalow. The Dutch Elm Disease left our bungalow on a treeless street, except for the white-paper birch arching over the next-door neighbor's front lawn. I could see that tree from the window of the upstairs knotty-pine bedroom I shared with my brother Robert. I could hear its leaves rustle at night.
There was a hot air grate about a foot square set in the wooden floor separating us from the kitchen below us. My brother and I often used it to spy on our parents' heads as they drank their morning brew. Sometimes, however, when it was very quiet, we could actually hear their voices floating up through the grate.
One evening we heard their voices very clearly. They were whispering, and their voices were tense.
"What are we going to do, Louie? What are we going to do?"
"I don't know, Lisa. I'm scared to death by all this." My father scared? My mother's voice cracked.
Woven behind their voices, I could make out the earnest and taut voice of a familiar newscaster. I heard the words "Khruschoff" and "Castro" and "Havana." I heard the words "atomic war." I heard the President's name, Kennedy.
And I could hear the fear in my father's voice. It was, of course, the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis. And talk of war was in the air. Atomic war. I knew something of what "atomic war" meant intellectually. We still had "air-raid" drills in those days, at least in Detroit, a city which was one of major nodes of Eisenhower's famous "military industrial complex." And we had just learned about Hiroshima in history class. I knew how one hundred thousand died from a single bomb, ten thousand of them instantly erased in a flash of light brighter than the sun. The only thing left of them was their shadows, burned into the wall by that terrible light.
As my parents talked and their worry and fear trembled up through the grate, my brother and I did not speak, even though I knew he was awake and heard it too.
We did not sleep much that night. I remember listening to the wind rattling the crisp leaves of the birch-tree next door and being strangely moved by the sound of it. Was it the last sound I would ever hear? Little by little I got a terrible headache as the night wore on. I know now what that headache was.... concentrated dread. I dreaded that sometime soon, tomorrow or the day after, there would be nothing left of me but a shadow on the white siding of our bungalow.
Like many a young teenager, I crawled though this turmoil on the knees of my "overwrought" imagination. I wondered if it would hurt to be erased in a flash of light. I wondered if anyone in my family would survive. I wondered if I might have to live in the root cellar for months trying to avoid radiation poisoning. The atomic bombs, as you may remember, never dropped on Detroit or anywhere else in the US of A. Kruschoff backed down, the missiles were removed. And many of us who lived through those days are still alive and kicking. But I still find myself living daily with a riddle asked by those days. Why is it when atomic bombs do not fall on your head, they still do? You see, remembering the dread I felt that day can hurt my head even now.
As the first reading says, President Truman had a headache both figurative and physical after he gave orders to drop the second bomb on Nagasaki. I wonder if his headache was as bad as mine was during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Bet it was. Maybe even worse.
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OK now, I need to go off in a different direction now. I do this in order to come back, as the poet says, and "know the place for the first time." Here goes.
From the autumn of 1995 to midsummer 1997 I was lucky enough to chair the Celebration Planning committee for the IARF General Congress in Palo Alto California. IARF stands for the International Association for Religious Freedom. It is an interfaith association of relatively liberal and free-thinking religious groups, and its major concerns are world peace and religious cooperation. The Unitarian Universalist Association has been a part of this interfaith community for decades. It also involves Unitarian and Free Christian groups in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Unitarian congregations in Central Europe, both Hungarian and Czech-speaking and now Russian-speaking. It involves the few Huguenot groups that remain in Europe, the German Free Religious Association, the indigenous Unitarian Church of Lagos Nigeria, the several Unitarian groups in India and Sri Lanka including the Khasi Hills churches and the Brahmo Samaj. It involves Vasayan-speaking Universalist groups in the Philippines, a number of Asian Buddhist groups, the largest of which is the Rissho Kosei Kai. It involves liberal Muslims and Christian groups. And last but not least, it involves the Tsubaki Grand Shrine, an ancient Shinto temple in Japan.
Now Shinto is not much known in this country. I certainly never heard much about it growing up, or I confused it with Buddhism. But I was lucky. Early in my career I had a chance to meet the High Priest of the Shinto Shrine, Yukitaka Yamamoto, when he came to the States for a visit. He invited several Unitarian Universalist ministers to have dinner with him. I accepted the invitation.
Before Yamamoto arrived, however, I read extensively about Shinto practices and Japanese customs so I personally would not cause an international incident during supper. He took us out to a restaurant for a banquet that lasted four hours, consisting of thousand little plates of raw fish...sushi and sashimi... as well as deep green and black seaweed salad, and liters of sake both hot and cold. His party really didn't speak English, we Unitarian Universalist ministers didn't speak Japanese, so we just toasted each other and ate wonderful things beyond my power to describe to you.
So as I was working on this IARF Celebration Commission I had at least some working knowledge of the Shinto religion. I knew that the Tsubaki shrine had never cooperated with the wartime government, and I learned that Shinto was only one of a hundred religions in Japan, including many kinds of Buddhism, Christianity, Oomoto, and Ittoen.
Let me tell you just a little about Shinto for a moment, for those of you who might like to know. Shinto is an ancient indigenous Japanese religion. It has no scripture, no savior, no prophets, and no universal theological texts. It has no written creed, but it does use an elaborate ritual. This altar you see here this morning is modeled after the simplest of Shinto altars. The mirror some of you can see (its by the chalice since I could find no way to fit it on the altar per se) is typical, as are the sake and the sack of rice. Chanting the prayers or norito, bowing to the kami or spirit in the shrine, and offering the tamagushi, or evergreen branch, are typical practices of Shinto worshippers. The rite of "Purification" where the priest waves a kind of paper-fringed wand over you as you bow is another frequent ritual.
The Shintoists celebrate the kami, which is a word at once singular and plural. Kami is sometimes translated as god or goddess, or even God capital G, but all the Shinto priests I know...and I know quite a few by now...translate the word kami as Great Nature Itself. I frankly think that trying to fit Shinto theology to Western ideas is mostly impossible; many Westerners, especially religious liberals, have such odd and conflicted ideas about both ritual and deity that I think its best not to force any apparent similarities. They are usually just that, apparent, not real.
But I'm so glad I knew something about Shinto when I started my work for the IARF because I had to work with Shinto leaders while planning the Celebrations. And Buddhists, too, and "unitarian" Hindus and Hungarian-speaking Unitarians. The planning involved translators, and outrageous theological subtlety...you see, the Hungarian Unitarians pray to the one God, the Shintoists to kami, which can be plural, the German Frei Religiose Gemeinde routinely refuse all God-talk and the Buddhists don't even have a concept of God.
By comparison, planning worship for this congregation is pretty tame. The diversity at an IARF Congress outstrips the diversity here a thousandfold. For example, my planning committee (there were five of us) wanted to honor the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, in the common Worship Celebrations. But my Shinto friends told me that the Japanese have five elements, (earth, air, fire, water and metal) and don't like the number 4, so that didn't work. I think we went back to the drawing board at least a hundred times.
Eventually we got it all together. It proved to be one of the greatest experiences of my life. For example, I was privileged to work a bit with Maya Angelou, the poet and polymath we engaged as our main preacher at Stanford Chapel.
As the day of the actual conference approached I was so excited that my energy never seemed to ever flag. Religious dignitaries began arriving in droves, wearing colorful garments. Dozens of translators scurried about smoothing communications. On the day before it began, I personally got trapped into doing last-minute paste ups on the orders of celebration in Japanese and Hungarian, two languages I assure you I do not understand in the least. I kept worrying I would paste them upside-down and inadvertently insult both Yamamoto the Shinto high-priest and the Hungarian Unitarian bishops in one fell swoop.
But eventually, the week-long conference came off with only small hitches. My committee finally worked out the theological problems in the services we prepared by walking theological tightropes strung tighter than the strings on a violin. But in the end all our care, our attention to authentic detail, paid off. Dieter Gehrman, and Anne Heller who organized the conference were happy. Brooke Medicine Eagle, the Native American Shaman we employed to call the spirits to bless us was happy. Maya Angelou was happy, her sermon completely breathtaking. High priest Yamamoto was happy, his Buddhist counterpart Dr. Niwano was happy, and so were most of the attendees of the conference, who enjoyed perfect California weather on the Stanford campus.
During the week conferees also met in small groups. Since my big work was finally almost wrapped up, I attended the group assigned to me. My group, like the others, was supposed to meet every morning for a week from 10 to eleven thirty in the morning to participate in structured interfaith dialogue. My group consisted of folks from what was then Czechoslovakia, some women from Japan, both Buddhist and Shinto; a Brahmo Samaj from Calcutta, a Canadian Unitarian woman, a Transylvanian Hungarian speaker, a Filipino minister, an Nigerian Unitarian and a Huguenot from Switzerland. A number of us spoke English, but over half of us did not, or did so with very limiting accents. Translators were supposed to come to every group to help facilitate our interfaith, international conversation. Unfortunately, there was an organizational glitch, and our group was the only one that did not get any translators.
We wondered what to do. But we couldn't talk to each other about what to do. We couldn't even discuss whether to break up and join other groups with translators.
Then I said what I considered then a completely deranged thing. I suggested with gestures that we meet anyway, but that we come up with our own language, one common to us all. It took a while for me to make my point, but they suddenly all got it. It seemed zany, but together we set out to create a new language. We used pictograms and symbols...you know, squares, circles, zigzag lines, triangles.... that were easy to draw. I wrote them down on the board, taking people's suggestions. We conveyed their meanings by mime until everyone understood.
We came up with symbols for birth, and death, and marriage, and divorce and children, and work, and catastrophe, and love, and grief, and school and graduate and religion, and anger and peace and prayer and meditation and God and Great Nature and doubt and faith and farm and city and home and sickness and war and community and family and parents and relatives and friendship and move and stay and old and young and ecstasy and despair. All together we created almost 80 symbols together in a single day.
For the next six days, each of us had 20 minutes to tell the stories of our lives using the common language symbols writing them on a horizontal timeline on the blackboard.
Now listen. Maya Angelou is great, but these stories were even greater. My work for two years putting together three worship celebrations in twenty languages was difficult and wonderful, but these morning autobiographies were even more difficult and wonderful. I heard one man describe the sound of the tanks on the cobblestones as the Soviets rolled into Praha/Prague. I heard love stories to rival Romeo and Juliet or David and Jonathan, and family horror stories to make the biblical stories of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar look tame by comparison.
I choked at the loss of children and the breaking of lives by war and poverty. I heard of religious experiences in temples or churches that transformed lives, and I heard of betrayals and misery too big for my small heart to bear. I don't know if this made-up language freed people to go deeper than they would have gone in their own language, but all the folks who shared their lives were very forthright and honest and self-revealing. It was beautiful.
One morning the Canadian Unitarian rose and told the story of how she had went to school in the States and met her American sweetheart. They got married in 1939. The war was clearly approaching. He entered the service, and ended up stationed in Hawaii. Dec. 7th 1941 came, and Pearl Harbor went up in a cloud of smoke. So did her husband's life. She wrote the symbols for death and catastrophe on her time line and wept a bit. We all wept a bit too.
Later that morning, the Shinto woman got up. She told of being born in Hiroshima, but meeting her husband in Tokyo where she summered with her grandparents. The war came, bringing difficult times for her and her family. Her husband was in the armed forces. He was stationed first in Osaka and then toward the end of the war in Nagasaki. Then she wrote the symbols for death and catastrophe on the board, drew a line through the symbol for husband with little atomic mushroom cloud next to it. She too wept a little as she did this. And so did we.
But then she paused, and glanced over at the Canadian woman. She walked toward the place she was sitting. And the Canadian Unitarian woman who lost her husband at Pearl Harbor understood at once, and got up and came over to meet the Japanese Shinto woman who lost her husband at Nagasaki. Then they looked in each others' eyes and embraced and fell over each others shoulders and wept a good deal and for a very long time. And so did the rest of us.
This event was the center of the IARF conference in 1987 for me. Not Maya Angelou. Not my hard work with my committee for two years. Not the thrill of helping to lead worship in 20 languages. But this. An embrace and some tears between two strangers who all at once recognized that they were not strangers. No theology could express that basic truth any better. And I for one understood immediately why I am involved in the church. The church for me is the institution that supports me as I struggle to proclaim that strangers are not really strangers.
These women clearly understood what Eleanor Roosevelt said in her letter....unless the causes of war are faced...nothing can guarantee that Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima won't one day appear again in the world. No controlling God stays our hand. No Fate guarantees that we won't make a complete shambles of it. We are perpetually free to embrace or destroy.
And what are the causes of war? Economic injustice. Certainly. Religious fanaticism? Now and then. Territorial disputes and nationalism. Sometimes. But deep down beneath all these fancy ideas is something a bit more basic... war and conflict happen whenever strangers forget that they are not strangers, but sisters and brothers who share a common earth they must nurture together. These two women at the IARF Congress recognized this truth all at once. Their embrace, spontaneous and simple, crossed a thousand boundaries, and called into question every single rationalization for the bomb and even for warfare that exist.
Truman and his brass had a thousand reasons to offer for why they dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. The Japanese high council undoubtedly had a thousand reasons why they needed to attack Pearl Harbor and Malaysia and China. You have to be practical, people tell me all the time. You can't have such high ideals and talk about tears and embraces and think you have said something important. You have not. Truman did a good thing and saved American lives. "But," I most often hear in the next sentence, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor because they were perverse. We did nothing to them. Nothing at all."
Ah, there now, do you see? To the non-Japanese preachers of the practical, the Japanese are strangers yet.
No, I don't have to love the bomb, or be practical about it. I can hate the bomb and what it does with all my heart.
But after seeing those two women, one a Japanese Shintoist, and one a Canadian Unitarian, refuse to be strangers despite their very different cultures, I know that my hope is just as strong as my hatred for bombs, and I can worry just a bit less. Oh, true, my childhood headache is still there, but since that summer at the IARF Congress, it hurts a lot less. And I bet Great Nature Itself, if it could, might smile at that.
Norito (Prayer in the Shinto Style with profound bows) [back to top]
With reverence and a sense of awe I speak,
knowing that you, oh Great Nature, are all around me
like a mirror in which I can see myself ...
in scented breath of wind, in arc of rising sun,
in branch of evergreen, in bowl of brown rice,
in a wooden box of cold rice wine
in the bright eyes of all who gaze upon the looking glass of the world with
me.
I have no final name to give to you,
and I try not to lay my own face on your facelessness.
I do not enter into futile debates
as to whether you are a you or not.
I simply bow before the nourishment of the world,
and the mystery that everything is,
with sorrow for all who suffer,
and joy with all who rejoice.
May there be peace on earth wherever
we human beings can and dare to have a say.
May our efforts be fruitful,
may our minds be bright,
may our hearts beat with a tender music
soft as the cherry petals of spring
or the chirping air of summer evening.
I speak these words with awe,
in this place and no other,
in this moment and no other.
Hear me o kami.
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