Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 23rd of September, 2001
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
once again to worship,
to hold up the reality of our lives
to the greater reality of our responsible search
for deeper truth and more redemptive loving.
Claiming for our own lives
the learned wisdom of our forebears
we bless this day and our days with our unrestricted hope and
vision.
And at celebration's end (all) may our reason and our passion keep us
true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to that shared vision of what we may together become.
Prayer Before
the Silence [Next]
[back to top]
Melody to Kol Nidrei, hummed
The autumn arrived this week
with a disinterest that would become a great saint.
The browning leaf takes no notice
of my sadness about lives lost.
The drying grass does not bend
before the ache of pounding wardrums in my head.
The mums and dahlias do not bloom in celebration
of my good friends who call and write me.
The misty rain which will fall this week
does not shroud the city because of my conflicted emotional state.
The autumn does not come, as far as I can tell, for my sake;
it just arrives. The autumn is there just like a great saint,
like Buddha under his tree, or Gandhi walking by the salt-flats,
or a nameless woman holding a hand at a bedside, and just being there.
The autumn does not grieve to remember the plunge of stocks or the roar of tanks or the destructions of storms and earthquakes. For passion is ours, but holy passionlessness belongs to the seasons. And oh! great Womb of all life, your dwelling is neither on the ruined summit of Olympus, or on the thin clouds of a pearly heaven, but can be found in that interweave of the passionless autumn and the passion of our concerns, woven into our desire that all people might live in peace, in mutual forgiveness, and shared abundance. And now let the passionlessness of Autumn, and the passion of our human concerns walk the narrow path of silence together for a time, holding hands in tenderness the whole while.
Silence.
Now we lift up all those who mourn, who celebrate new grandchildren, who cultivate deep friendships and relationships, and all those who are lonely and yes, all those who are alive. We name all those who welcome us, who challenge us, who love us, and whom we love, that we might embrace the circles of care which secure and enoble our lives together. In our silent heart or in the common air, we name and remember.
Naming
In this season called the Days of Awe by Jews the world over, we close with a line from Tehillah 96, Psalm 96: Yismehu hashamayim vetagel ha'aretz Yiram hayam umelo'o. Let the sky rejoice and the Earth be glad, and the sea exult in its fullness.
Amen.
First
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
The first reading comes from the Jewish Liturgical poet, Ruth Brin, who
wrote this simple reflection on the seasonal Jewish prayer, Kol Nidrei. This
is an excerpt from a longer poem. The word Marranos in this poem refers to
the Jews of Spain, who, in the late Middle Ages, in the time up to Ferdinand
and Isabella, were coerced to convert to Christianity. The word Marranos
means pigs, and is thus a Christian insult.
Turning and returning this melody flows,
Calling and recalling, bringing us home.
Turning and returning us to other years,
Calling us to remember and dream once more.
In the dreaming and remembering,
In the winding flow of time,
We hear the weeping of the Marranos
Who were torn from our people
And yet returned to us.
Across the cruel centuries they call these words:
"We were not lost, nor shall you be lost.
We were not destroyed, nor shall you be destroyed.
You shall be forgiven your false vows
As you were forgiven,
You shall be returned again to your people and your homes
Second
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
this morning comes from the recent book Why Forgive by Johann Arnold,
who tells a story of and quotes a man named Roberto Rodriguez.
While witnessing the beating of a young man by sheriff's deputies from the Los Angeles Police Department, Roberto Rodriguez decided to photograph them. Before he knew it, he was attacked by the same club-wielding officers. Hospitalized with a cracked skull, he was then jailed and charged with attempting to kill the officers who almost took his life.
Roberto, now a nationally syndicated columnist, fought back, and after seven long years, he won both an acquittal and a federal civil rights lawsuit. In the meantime, however, his attempts to challenge the system made him a marked man. He writes:
Once during this time, I was handcuffed to a bench in a police station, with my picture posted over me, and an article detailing my legal battle with the police department. Each officer who passed by was told not to forget who I was. Apparently they didn't, because during the next few years I was continually harassed-and arrested about sixty times.
Ask Roberto what he thinks about forgiving, and he has answers. But he has plenty of questions, too.
You ask me about forgiveness? Do I need to forgive the deputies who beat me, who made me believe-in the middle of the night-that they were driving me to my final destination? Do I need to forgive the officers who falsely arrested me and relentlessly pursued me, the district attorney who filed charges against me, the prosecutors who tried to put me away? Do I need to forgive the politicians who wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole when I pleaded with them for help, or the reporters who painted me as a criminal? And what about my own lawyer, who abandoned my case two days before trial?
I realize that we cannot be fully human if we have hatred within us-if we are consumed by anger or harbor resentment. These emotions define our lives. Especially for someone who has been brutalized and dehumanized, getting rid of these debilitating emotions is fundamental to healing. But doing that also means searching for something else to fill the void: searching for what it actually means to be human.
I began that search in 1998, on my birthday, when I sang for the first time in almost thirty years. A few months later, I started to paint, and then to write fiction. I had finally begun to regain my humanity.
Though thousands of minorities suffer similar mistreatment, most are not so fortunate as Roberto. Most never see justice served. Should they too expect to forgive their oppressors? Roberto thinks they must, and not only for their own sake.
Because these abuses continue year after year, there is a feeling of bitterness on America's streets, especially among those who have been brutalized and falsely imprisoned. Some are zombies. Some are walking time bombs, filled with hate and ready to explode. And they do explode. Look at what happened in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict. Tragically, such outrage usually hurts the very people it is supposed to avenge…family, friends and neighbors.
All this is not personal tragedy, but a societal one. It is like an out-of-control disease. But those who have been dehumanized need to forgive, to heal on their own, without waiting for apologies.
Sermon: The Importance of Forgiveness At A Time of War [Next] [back to top]
My best friend, Richard, called me last week from San Francisco, as did so many of my friends. Richard has an interesting idea about what the world community, led perhaps by the United States, might do in Afghanistan to respond to the tragedy of September 11th, 2001.
He suggests a great airlift from all over the world, dropping, by ample parachutes, huge supplies of butter and milk and tomatoes and lemons and mint and eggs and goat meat, and whatever else might fill drought-emptied stomachs. Some warm blankets, too. Maybe some radio e-mail cell-phones with plenty of batteries and our e-mail addresses. And then, he adds, without even a hint of facetiousness, a million teddy bears. (Or whatever the Afghani equivalent might be.)
When he was done, I smiled, and then thought, "Well, it's the first time I have heard of a concrete alternative being offered." I hear people saying they don't want war, they don't think that violence will do anything except cause further violence. I hear people saying that they want "justice."
But what does "justice" look like? Who will draw me a picture of it? It's a nice sounding word, but it's a completely abstract word. Richard didn't talk about justice. He simply offered me a picture of it.
Oh sure, he's coloring outside the box, outside the lines. Of course it's not what anyone would think right off the bat. After all, as I said last week, wanting to return violence for violence seems like a very common human response. I certainly have to struggle with it myself.
Truly extraordinary people like Gandhi and King and the Sicilian peace-maker Danilo Dolci had to work very, very hard to break this habit of wanting to return violence for violence, this habit of revenge. How did they go about doing that? They studied. They prayed. They fasted. A little bit at a time, and with great difficulty, they tore down the dominant tit for tat habit that most societies plant in their children unconsciously. These great teachers tried to color way outside the box, far outside the lines. They tried to teach their hearts a new and better habit than violence, and that is "non-violence."
You know, the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur has some really interesting things to say about this business of changing ordinary habits into extraordinary ones.
At the center of all the high holy day services is a famous prayer called Kol Nidrei. It is not a prayer to Adonai, to God. It is not used at any other time of the year, or used in private devotion. It is only sung, or chanted if you will, three times at the main service on Yom Kippur and then it is not heard until the following year. It is sung to a hauntingly beautiful melody. The two words mean literally "All Vows" as in "All vows we have made from last Yom Kippur until today are cancelled, nullified and made as nothing," as says one version of the prayer.
Now search as you will, you will not find this prayer in the Hebrew scriptures. You will not find it in synagogue worship for the first 1500 years of synagogue history. It was not until the sad days leading up to Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, when Kol Nidrei became a living prayer in the synagogue. Before the famous year of 1492 when all the Muslims and Jews were expelled from Spain for good, there had been a long process of forced conversions. Men and women and children were threatened with violence, were terrorized by their neighbors and made to convert to Christianity to save their own lives and lives of their families.
But you cannot force a conversion, as our own Unitarian Universalist ancestors at the same time knew and proclaimed. When you use violence against others, you only make them bitter, and make them prone to violence themselves. The human heart cannot be forced.
But to save their lives, many Jews converted. The other Spaniards called them pigs, marranos, which tells me that even the Christians did not take these conversions seriously, and that their hatred of Jews had not abated one bit.
The rabbis in those days understood the power of violence in forced conversion. The idea of their whole people being martyred one by one for refusing to change religious practice was intolerable. And returning the violence to the Christians, trying to force them to become Jews, made no sense at all. So the idea of the Kol Nidrei prayer rose in the minds of the rabbis like a dream. Someone crafted the prayer on legal precedents. And then, every year, at secret meetings, Jews who had been forced to convert, Jews who had, during their baptisms, made promises and vows to be loyal to the church, came to have those vows cancelled, their promises nullified by the great cancellation prayer. They really had not converted at all. You might think of it as verbal "crossed fingers."
Most of the marranos eventually returned to the Jewish community, as Ruth Brin says in her poem, Kol Nidrei. They returned home. The cruel conformist habit of violence and force did not win their spirit.
But Ferdinand and Isabella are dust, you say. Those days are over. The Roman Catholic church no longer prays for the conversion of the Jews, and pompous buffoons like Mr. Falwell, who claims "God does not hear the prayer of any Jew," have been utterly discredited in the eyes of most folks of good will, including all Christians that I personally know, Catholic, Orthodox, Anabaptist, Protestant or Quaker. The days when Christians openly harass the Jews with blood violence have, thankfully, become far fewer.
And thus, modern Jews have had to understand Kol Nidrei in a differing context. Contrary to some modern Gentile understandings, the prayer is not strictly about forgiveness, but rather, it invites us to change our habits, the unspoken vows we have made to live lives that are not the best for us or the world. Kol Nidrei is not strictly about forgiveness, no, but it is the footpath that that helps get us onto the grandest highway of all, forgiveness.
Kol Nidrei is about not letting the unspoken promises we made under the duress of being raised in this culture define our lives.
These unspoken promises became the unquestionable common habits of modern life.
Habits of keeping up with the Joneses.
Habits of competition and one-upsmanship in our relationships and work
lives.
Habits of hoarding and using up the majority of the world's abundance here
in this one small nation.
Habits of thinking our way of life is so superior that we don't have to even
crack a Qu'ran to understand how a million people on earth might see life
differently than most of us do.
Habits of focusing on our experience of violence without understanding how
we have contributed as a nation to violence against others in the
world…Sudan, Grenada, Afghanistan, Baghdad, etc.
Habits of righteousness and swagger.
Habits of loving quick answers better than difficult questions.
Habits of revenge, of tit for tat, of violence for violence, of having to
do something right away instead of taking the time to figure out how to do
things right.
Kol Nidrei, in Buddhist terms, simply asks us to be mindful of what we really think and feel, not what we have been taught to think and feel.
The Kol Nidrei, the cancellation of promises and vows, is for many modern Jews, and for me, no longer about the violence of the Inquisition, but about the inherent violence in a culture that imagines that everyone in the world really wants to be just like us, and that all differences are thus just temporary and therefore not worth the bother to learn about.
"You shall be forgiven your false vows," writes Ruth Brin, in her version of Kol Nidrei, "nor shall you be lost or destroyed." She offers this mighty hope to those who would consider breaking the habits they were raised with in our culture, and learning to live a life of mindfulness and compassion.
"In the winding flow of time, you shall dream once more."
Thus did Gandhi and King and Dolci, though not Jewish, dare to dream their great and moving dreams. They gave up their promises to live out their popular culture uncritically, and took up the yoke of living freely and non-violently, or as our Thoreau would have put it, "deliberately." Kol Nidrei after all, is not just an arbitrary ritual, but a grounded ritual that invites us to take up a challenging way of life, whether we are Jewish or not.
And in giving up their habits of revenge, these non-violent men I just mentioned began to live lives of remarkable forgiveness, as did hundreds of other women and men who did likewise.
(digression) Now every year I will do this, so bear with me. I shall define forgiveness, and it is only by this definition that I preach this sermon.
Forgiveness is not condoning, pardoning, or saying 'Oh, that's okay.' It is not the same as forgetting. Forgiveness is much harder work than such trivial things.
Forgiveness is not an act, a state, but a journey, a journey toward a destination we rarely get to in this lifetime when we are dealing with "big things." Now here is the positive definition:
Forgiveness is to begin to give up all hope that the past could be different than it was; it is to move forward on our journey on the foundation of that fact and no other.
But you may well ask, "How can anyone even bring up the word forgiveness at this time? The terrorism of the Trade Towers is huge beyond measure, a blot on the human spirit that invalidates any talk of forgiveness, right?"
Well, yes, but only if you define forgiveness differently than I just did.
You see, forgiveness is not some reward I give to a person who has done terrible things. People ask me if I think I have some power to forgive an Adolf Hitler…and I have to always respond that this is a foolish idea to begin with. It is not my work to forgive Adolf Hitler, and all those who might begin to do it were killed by him already. I am not some Zeus-like god who forgives sins and pardons attrocities because of my arbitrary power alone.
But forgiveness as I define it is a call to walk my life with full honesty about my interdependence with all other life. Thus, to even begin to walk the road of trying to forgive others is, to at the same time, walk the road to forgiving myself. It is both or nothing.
And thus, I begin to forgive myself by asking for forgiveness for not having been outraged enough by the bombing of Sudan in 1998. Or for not having wept enough as Baghdad was bombed, and civilian after civilian died. I ask forgiveness for not have studied even more than I have, or for not having reached across the tables of modern civilization to welcome those profoundly different from me. I ask forgiveness for not being more outraged by the poverty directly caused by modern Western secular culture being exported to Muslim countries, as if it translated or was some universal that everyone is pining for. I ask forgiveness for consuming more than I need. I ask forgiveness for allowing myself to ever think in the deepest recesses of my little head, even for a second, "Oh, those fanatical Muslims, Oh those nutty Christians, Oh those pushy Jews, Oh those arrogant Humanists, Oh those…anyone--even "those cold and uptight New England type Unitarian Universalists."
When I see my own role as interdependent, my habitual and unconscious role in so much that hurts the world, I begin to gain the strength to walk the road toward forgiveness. Kol Nidrei comes first, all my vows cancelled. And forgiveness comes second, the giving up all hope that the past can be different than it was. The marranos and the Trade Tower debacles were real, but now what? What do I do with that reality? How do I come home to my deeper self, my capacity to dream once more without flinching? In short, how do I dare to live my life in these tough, tough days?
Roberto Rodriguez suggests that it's possible to live a fully human life even after a terrorist assualt. His story is singular, but it's as awful in many ways as the stories we've been hearing about all last week. Talk about being terrorized! Here is a man abandoned by most everyone, threatened, beaten, harassed, and punished for years. Just because he took photographic evidence of an outburst of violence by the powers that be. If anyone has the authority to talk about forgiveness, I personally would say it is Mr. Rodriguez.
What I get from him is something like I got from
Richard. You have to color outside the box, outside the lines, if you are going to live in this world despite the realities of terrorism. You have to find what it is that makes you more human than you are now in your bitterness and rage. Rodriguez wrote and painted and sang. He pursued justice for himself and others. He serenaded at senior centers. He prayed and meditated (and please, don't get caught up in some narrow little trivial definition of those great words, or I fear you have not understood anything at all that I have been trying so hard to say this morning).
Rodriguez is not simplistic. He understands that violence most often has social origins. I agree. The idea that a few "evil" people caused the Sept. 11th fiasco is simply poor theology. There are social elements to what happened on that day that cannot be denied. After all, there is bitterness and rage in streets everywhere, not just in Los Angeles. And since we are all in this world together, such rage would best be our mutual concern. But alas, say the great bards of
Yom Kippur, it rarely is. For Jews or Gentiles.
For Muslims or Christians. For the religious or passionately secular.
The Jews say on Yom Kippur "We have sinned."
Together, they mean. We are all caught up in each other's lives, and when there is violence anywhere in the world, everyone is involved with it. Most often not consciously, of course. Kol Nidrei invites us to consciousness. It invites us to color outside the lines. And commit ourselves to concerns and ways of life worthy of our most wonderful humanity.
I wonder. Might not my friend Richard with his whimsical idea of dropping food and teddy bears instead of bombs and planeloads of frightened angry young men have an idea worth considering? To those who cannot give up old habits, probably not. But to those who can…ah, there now!
Kol Nidrei (MLB) then reading 637
Gone are the promises we made
because of pressure or praise.
Gone are the promises we made
because of shame.
Gone are promises and vows we made
because of habit, because of custom, or
because of confusion.
Gone they are, vanished!
I see them no longer.
They are no more.
Gone the excuses for why I can't.
Gone the vows I made to confirm my vanity.
Gone the dreams I dreamed that cut me off
from everyone else's dreams.
Gone my vow to never have dreams,
so that I could carry my future in my dark little pocket.
Gone, vanished, just like that!
As magically as sunset,
as wondrously as moonset,
it disappears,
this habit of refusing to live on the edge.
Cut is the knot of all the choices I did not make,
could not make, would not make,
by the knife of this prayer, just like that,
just like that.
The paper is blank, the field is empty, the map
has not been made. The guarantees are gone.
And thus now I can begin to set down my burdens, and define myself no more
by my failings.
Nishmat hayay tevarykh v'kherev libi yahshir:
Kol od neshamah bekirbi.
The breath of my life will bless, the cells of my
Being sing in gratitude, awakening!
Blessing: [back to top]
Found in our memorial garden,
Dated Sept 11, 2001,
It was in an envelope, handwritten on a lovely card, partially dissolved
by the rain.
I do no know who wrote it.
But I thought it would make a fine blessing.
Courage for the rescuers.
Wisdom for the leaders.
Strength for the survivors.
Hope for the victims.
Healing for the nation.
Mourning for the dead.
Peace for the living.
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