Vespers

Liturgical Materials for the 11^th of September, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
on a day much like this day a year ago,
but when the same slant of sun we saw today
fell on faces drawn tight with shock and horror.

Though many days and weeks have past,
and life has gone on,
something still calls to us from that day.

And so we come to our house of worship,
"where deep calls unto deep," and we can pray:

(together) may our reason and our passion
keep us true to ourselves, true to each other
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

A Personal Reflection on These Days by Ray Nandyal [Next] [back to top]

The Flag and the Step Stool

September 11th is approaching. I get the flag out of the garage and put it up against the front of the house while standing on a shaky step stool. As I look up at the fluttering piece of cloth, my mind starts a conversation with Marinelle, a friend from college days that I have not seen for fifteen years.

"Very nice," she says. "You move to the suburbs and fly a flag. Wouldn't it be more appropriate if you just slapped a banner across the house that says, 'I'm a sell-out'?"

"Good to see you again, Marinelle. What are you angry about now?"

"About you. Remember singing along with John Lennon on the radio, 'Imagine there's no countries, It isn't hard to do'? Apparently it is, for you. Remember talking about taking on the military-industrial complex? I'm sure now you're in favor of invading Iraq knowing that we have a thousand times as many weapons of mass destruction than they ever will. While you're crying about 9/11, do you have any tears for Native Americans who were hunted down like dogs for the sole crime of being the rightful owners of this land and the civilians of Rosewood, Hiroshima, and Mei Lei?"

I fold up the step stool and set it down against the wall. "I'm fully aware that the US foreign policy is spineless, greedy, and two-faced, Marinelle. But my flag is not about the past but about the hope and dream that the US will one day stand up for secular democracy, environment, and human rights, including women's rights, and not compromise them for oil and friendship with this country or that dictator."

"What democracy?" Marinelle rises like an angry cobra that my mother told me stories about when I was growing up. "You're such a hypocrite. You want other countries to have democracies like ours with a court-appointed president and a capitol building filled with white males who are corporate concubines?"

She stops and stares at a sticker on the rear windshield of my car parked in the garage. "United we stand? Who's the we in there? Does it include the unarmed African Americans shot to death by white police officers, gays and lesbians who can't get the most basic protection from harassment, or millions of people like you who will always be second-class citizens because of your skin color?"

I open up the step stool again and sit on it. "Let me know when you're done, Marinelle."

"I'm done," she says. "I'm just disappointed that you of all people sold out."

"Marinelle, did I ever tell you what the most basic quality of a human being is according to my mother and the Hindu tradition that she comes from?"

"Nope."

"Gratitude. I may sound like an Uncle Tom to you, but I'm grateful for what this country has given me. I think of my flag as a thank you note for a job, a diverse group of friends, a multi-racial family, and a nation that may fall short of its ideals but still has ideals that I can appeal to. Nations are like individuals, Marinelle. We all have our hypocrisies, but what helps us get out bed every morning is the hope that someday our conscience will be clear."

"And until that day you will keep quiet about what's going on?"

"No I will not, but I won't stop expressing my gratitude, either. We as a nation owe it to ourselves and to those that died on 9/11, to not only love this land but to help it keep its promises to people here and abroad."

For the first time, Marinelle smiles. "You're still there. I was worried that you lost your soul along with your hair." She runs her fingers through the hair I have left. "Take care of yourself, kiddo."

As she fizzles away in my mind, I look at my step stool and wonder how I can make it more stable.

Prayer before the Silence [Next] [back to top]

The sun falls upon us tonight at the precise
angle it fell upon us last year.

This year too the air is warm and lovely.
This year too, the sky is the color of babies' eyes.

Our bodily cells recognize the day.

They remember the shaking and shock
even when we are just eating dinner
or calling a friend or driving to the store.

There is a tissue of silence over this day, a lessening of traffic, some absences from work.

There is perhaps less fire in our eyes,
less spring in our step.

For I tell you this is a day of bodily memory,
of surreal silence and shallower breaths.

Yet let us set aside this silence as a silence
of deep breath, of consciousness and awareness.
Let us be here in this place, deliberately, opening
ourselves to this silence, this air, these people,
this evening light. Let us be at peace with each other in the silence….

silence

And now let those who knew someone who perished in the horrible acts last year speak their names aloud if they wish, or say who they were. Let those who knew folks who knew folks who died speak their names, if they wish, the circles are concentric, and reach out across the nation. This is a time of national remembrance, and all of us are part of that.

naming

Let the silence give way to the music, and the
music to the spirit of wholeness, which transcends
all we call this or that, night or day, up or down, sorrow or joy. Let hearts take hold of the thread
of the flute music and follow it back to themselves.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] this evening is a poem from Wislawa Szymborska, who, as a Pole who lived through the Second World War, is well acquainted with destroyed buildings. Here is her meditation on that part of her life. It's called, End and Beginning, and it was written 8 years before the events of last year. This poem was translated by the great Russian-American poet, Joseph Brodsky.

After each war
somebody has to clean up,
put things in order;
by itself it won't happen.

Somebody's got to push
rubble to the highway shoulder
making way
for the carts filled up with corpses.

Someone might trudge
through muck and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass
and blood-soaked rugs.

Somebody has to haul
beams for propping a wall,
another put glass in a window
and hang the door on hinges.

This is not photogenic
and takes years.
All the cameras have left already
for another war.

Bridges are needed
also new railroad stations.
Tatters turn into sleeves
for rolling up.

Somebody, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone whose head was not
torn away listens nodding.
But nearby already
begin to bustle those
who'll need persuasion.

Somebody still at times
digs up from under the bushes
some rusty quibble
to add to burning refuse.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must yield to those
who know little
or less than little
essentially nothing.

In the grass that has covered
effects in causes
somebody must recline,
a stalk of rye in the teeth,
ogling the clouds.

Sermon: Part 1[Next][back to top]

On That Day and What Happened Next
Mark Belletini

I had been up very late on Monday night Sept. 10th, talking with a friend out west on the phone, so I slept in on Tuesday. The very first thing I was aware of on Tuesday morning was not my alarm, but my friend Jimmy. He had come into my place (I had left the door unlocked) and he was shaking me awake.

"Wake up! Wake up! They're blowing up New York. Come and see!"

"Blowing up New York? What? Who?" I said, not quite understanding. Jimmy half dragged me out of bed into the room with the television. So the very first thing my half-open eyes saw that morning was the first of the towers collapsing in a burst of dust. It was one of those sights which proved to me once again one of the main dictums of my life: "It's much easier to believe in things I cannot see or hear than it is to actually believe in things I can see and hear." And that day I had to struggle hard to believe what I was seeing, over and over again, in instant replay.

All Jimmie and I could do was to say "O my God," over and over, except I don't think either of us was being particularly pious. But no other phrase seemed to work. I kept thinking of Carl Jung's haunting deathbed definition of the word God: "whatever it is that crosses your path, around which you cannot walk."

After a while, Jimmie left and went home, stunned and wobbly. He wanted to get back to his familiar walls and hang on to them.

I had a cold that day, and was feverish. And I was mad that I had a cold and a fever so early in September. I was mad I was sick and didn't think I could find the energy to respond. I just wanted to crawl into bed and conk out.

But then I remembered that my heart suddenly opened, despite my fatigue. It went everywhere. It went out to you, wondering if anyone in this congregation had people they loved there in New York or Washington or on a plane. It went out to my parents, and what a shock this must be to them, after having already lived through so much war and tumult in their long lives. I called them but couldn't get through. Then my heart went out to my friends who have family in New York. I found out later that some of them lost relatives in those falling buildings.

I knew I had to offer some opportunity at the church for people to come together, but I felt too sick to get anything done that day. Then my friend Kelly called. She asked if I could pick her up at the Josephinum, since her flight home to Lexington, Kentucky had been cancelled along with all other flights, and she was hitching a ride to Columbus from Pittsburgh via a priest who teaches at that seminary. I told her I would pick her up and spend the afternoon with her, although I warned her about the cold. She said Neil, her husband, would drive up from Kentucky to take her back home that night.

I then drove over here to the church. I set up this Worship Center with candles and copies of readings from Muslim sources on a stand for anyone who wanted to come into the welcoming arms of this place. I called Myra to see if she could play for a service the next night, Wednesday, which I thought I could manage even with a fever.

I then went to pick Kelly up at the Josephinum and waited with her and cried with her as we waited for Neil. I remember it was a beautiful, perfect, sunny day, the sun's warmth on my skin like a blessing. It was surreal that the sky could be so beautiful on a day when so many perished.

But then, isn't that how it always is?

Many did come to the church that night, putting together their own spontaneous service with the materials I had left.

I went home and fell into a delirium from the fever. I thought about our future here in this nation. I knew that we would not know right away who did this and why it happened. I knew it would take time. I knew there would be horrible blame and innuendo and finger-pointing…that went without saying. I knew that this event would be perceived as some sort of turning point, and that it would elicit a national grief like I have rarely seen in my life…although President Kennedy's death did to mind. I knew there would be flags and patriotic songs, and I knew the people in New York would be amazing in their care and courage. And I knew that it was going to be hard to feel through to the center of the event, let alone understand it intellectually right away. And unfortunately, I knew that not too long from that day, someone somewhere would find some way to make tidy profits from all the shock. I wish I had been wrong but I wasn't.

It was, in the title of Szymborska's poem, an end and a beginning both...the end of an era and the beginning of a new one...except I didn't know how to characterize either era with adjectives yet. I knew Szymborska had been uncannily right way back in 1993 "Those who knew what this was all about must yield to those who know little or less than little...essentially nothing." She was probably talking about me, without knowing it.

I also know she was right about everything else too...she who, in Poland during the war there, had seen not three but three thousand buildings come down around her, millions dead.

But then someone has to clean up, she wrote. It won't happen by itself. We have to roll our sleeves up. It is not photogenic. It takes years, she reminds us.

It's only been a year, not the many years Szymborksa was talking about, remembering the far greater devastation to her beloved homeland. Yeah, the cleaning up, the hauling away of rubble has certainly happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. But there is still some rubble in my heart that has not yet been hauled away. It was piled on top of rubble that was already there from Vietnam and the AIDS crisis, which both killed countless thousands more than those who died a year ago today, only in slow motion and without dust clouds.

Ah, Ah! The idea that we human beings kill each other so easily…with planes, with bombs, with gas, with policies, with laws, with conviction, with silence, with neglect, with unbound hatred and with the knife of true belief, conscious or unconscious, sickens me to my core.

And my own capacity for anger and blame and even, sometimes, hatred, worries me even more. It's terribly human to slip into such thoughts. So I am not as far away from these terrible events than I would like to think.

I don't know about you, but most of my life has really not changed very much since last year. There are still friends and family and godchildren. There are still my Fellowship Committee meetings and plane flights...I flew within three weeks of the towers collapsing to many people's surprise. There are still my pastoral concerns at the church, the visiting of the sick, the writing and performing of memorials and weddings and baby-namings. There are still joys and disappointments, losses and conflicts. I still have transcendent moments before a sunset rosy as a watermelon. And I still suffer the ordinary stresses of bills and debt, electronic disruptions in the office, and the ordinary ups and downs of my heart.

And underneath it all, is all this rubble at the bottom of my heart, all the confusing questions, all the imagined horror, all the surprise and the lack of surprise.

But after a year, at least, my faith is greater in what I have seen and what I have heard. And I know that something amazing, hard, cruel, foolish and strange happened and that I was a witness to it. And I know that something like it could happen again…no, not planes into New York or Washington, but equal horrors. You and I both know that talk of war is in the air again. As the admirable Szymborska put it so clearly: "All the cameras have left already for another war."

And I have to hear that too, and believe that I am hearing it. But I sure as hell don't have to like it, approve of it, or agree that such a war is necessary or good in any way. And I assure you, I don't.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is by the Oregon poet William Stafford, who used the title of this particular poem as the title of his life-time collection of poems. He calls it "The Way It Is"

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
But you don't ever let go of the thread.

Sermon: Part 2[Next][back to top]

On What It Is That Sustains Me
Mark Belletini

God came out of hiding, a year ago today. Yes, God. Oh, now don't get me wrong. I've read the figures…attendance at churches and synagogues went up for about three weeks, then tapered off back to normal. That certainly happened here. But I am not talking about the God of theology and denominations, although they sometimes clearly overlap the God I'm talking about.

No, the God that came out of hiding after 9-11 was the political God, the "capital G" God, the one on our money, in our pledge to the flag, and on the lips of presidents. The God of "Civil Religion," to use Robert Bellah's term.

Ah, but alas, personally, I do not believe in such a God. A God who loves America more than any other nation, who blesses it and keeps it safe and chastises it. Furthermore, I do not believe in a God who loves the Muslim people more than Christians, or Jews more than Muslims, or a God who hurls agnostics and unbelievers into hell. I do not serve such a God, nor will I. I don't think I ever have served such a god, even in my youth, when I was taught clearly by the nuns that God was a god for all nations, not just one; all people, not just the self-anointed. I just cannot believe in any nationally partisan God. Not even, though I am a good voting citizen of the United States, an American God.

And because I don't believe in such a God, I guess I'm a true American heretic, by some lights.

And I for one have no way of knowing about the whereabouts of other kinds of Gods or Goddesses either… about such I must remain relatively agnostic. Such willingness to remain unsure, to have little confident belief in metaphysical truisms, makes me a rather odd minister, I suppose, by some lights. Folks sometimes tell me that they see their clergy as models of great faith.

I am afraid I am not a very good model for you, if you want an example of unquestioned faith in an unquestionable, all-powerful and partisan God.

But I do tell people that I hold on to a thread. All of my life I've held on to a thread. Stafford's word is perfect…a thread. Not something with trumpets and lightning, crowns and gold. But something small and apparently fragile. Something, however, which is stronger than it looks. Something that doesn't seem to change as much as everything around it. Something central and daily in my life…

All of my life I have been a believer in something powerful but not All-Powerful. Something not partisan, but universal. Something that "dwells in the light of setting suns," in Wordsworth's fine phrase, yes, but even more in the light of bristling questions. I call what I believe in Love and Truth. I can also fairly call this thread G-d, or the Divine. Sure, I could just use the words Love and Truth by themselves, I suppose. But with the philosopher Gandhi, I rather dislike throwing out words just because some people use them in a way I don't happen to like. Love and Truth are the imageless words I use for my small but growing and non-partisan G-d, the thread I hold on to day by day, year by year.

I don't think I can ever know G-d, that is, the full truth…ever. I don't think I can fully love, either. But all my life I have felt the need to pull myself along that fragile thread of belief in Love and Truth as the closest I'll ever get to the Ultimate. My own life is not ultimate. My nation is not ultimate, great though it can be. My religion is not ultimate, my culture is not ultimate. Love and Truth are Ultimate for me. And I am convinced I can only move closer to such divinity by engaging with you, and you engaging with me. You have part of the truth too, as I do. Even people I do not like at all are part of that struggle for truth, even people in whom I would rather not find the slightest thing to love. Everyone is in this together.

"Tragedies happen," writes Stafford succinctly. "People get hurt or die. Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding." True as can be. And as I said, even my own life is not ultimate. But what gets me through absolutely horrible times is my little, heretical faith in the small and not terribly dazzling Ultimacy I call my "thread," or my divinity, or my G-d, or Love and Truth. I hold on to that thread. I pull myself along its length.

I pray it will be there until the very moment I close my eyes around death. It doesn't offer me explanations or quick fixes. It doesn't promise me salvation or to make me the exception from tragedy. It puts no star on my forehead, nor pin purple medals on my breast, nor does it stamp me with the "mark of Cain" or "the number of the Beast." It simply sustains me.

It is this divinity I worship, this divinity I value above all. Whenever I turn from this divinity, by saying that my work, or my comfort, or my pride, or my own personal visions, or my nation, or my views are Ultimate instead of ever-unfolding Truth and Love, then I find my life to be miserable and I am simply exhausted.

This thread is what has sustained me little by little during this last year of strangeness, violence and tumult. What is it that has sustained you?

Third Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the Gospel of Luke, written toward the end of the first century of our era. Chapter 13, vs. 1-5

 It was around this time when some folks came up to give him a message. They brought the news that some of his fellow Galileans had been recently slaughtered by Governor Pilate, slaughtered as they were making their way to the Temple to make sacrifice!

He said to the messengers "I wonder, do you imagine that these unfortunates suffered this fate because they were worse offenders than anyone else in the Galilee? I tell you No, but I assure you, unless all hearts find a way to change, people will continue to perish."

He continued his questions: "And those 18 people who were crushed when the tower of Siloam fell on them...do you think they were worse offenders than any of the other residents of Jerusalem? I tell you NO, but unless all hearts find a way to change, people will continue to perish.

Sermon: Part 3 [Next][back to top]

On All This Talk of Good and Evil
Mark Belletini

Not only did the Civil God come out of hiding, but within the first three weeks of last year's event, I heard the theological and ethical word "evil" spoken by secular authorities more often than I ever heard the word in Seminary, or, for that matter, I think, in my whole life.

Now no one, except the hideously broken and cruel, rejoice in misery and death. The attacks by plane last year were, as far as I am concerned, undeniably horrible, terrible, and acts of murder.

But there is danger in making such events "cosmic," and caught up with the words the three major Western Religions sometimes use to indicate something Absolute and Ultimate.

We here in the United States of America are the Devil and Great Satan incarnate, by the lights of some of our detractors. And Rev. Pat Robertson in this country daily decries the "diabolical evils" of Islam on his television show. The Jews were mere "vermin" according to the Nazi officials, cockroaches at best. The Armenians were sub-human to the Turks and the Turks sub-human to the Greeks. The Japanese were monkeys at best, according to the propaganda posters pasted on United States walls during the war, and the Vietnamese were dehumanized as "gooks."

The Tutsi and Hutus found a hundred ways to reduce each other to demonic ciphers, making murder itself no more terrible than accidentally stepping on ants.

Blame and caricature is an old game. They used to say that victims of outrage or tragedy had brought it on themselves, as the story in Luke reminds us. The 18 people lying under the tower of Siloam were sinners, culprits, offenders, according to the philosophy of the times. Some still believe such things in our own day. "They must have deserved it." Or, in our day, other philosophies are heard too. It is the perpetrators who are sinners, culprits, offenders, pure devils, the true Satans. And, of course, we who didn't fly airplanes are pure and good, angels and seraphim.

I just can't think this way, this them and us language. It grates against everything I have ever lived for, or believed.

Instead, I think about one of the pilots who flew the plane that crashed into the fields of Pennsylvania. He grew up middle class in Lebanon, played basketball, and helped kids after school. He laughed and loved and lived a life many a teen lives in Worthington. And then he flew a plane and killed many people, including himself. What changed in him so that he could do such a thing? Did his politics get that fierce by magic? How did his religio-cultural choices become that closed-minded? What did he hope to accomplish by what he did?

The act itself is simply horrible. Killing makes me sick to my stomach. Yet how does one go from playing basketball to killing? It boggles the mind.

There can be no simplistic answers.

But I think this is why the ancient teacher Jesus is so critical of folks who try to dehumanize, to reduce people to categories like sinners or devils.

This is why Jesus rejected the idea of pure blame. "We all have to work to change our hearts," he suggests, "in a world where such terrible things happen." We are bound in this together. We are all human beings, neither divine nor diabolical. It's not a question of blame or scape-goating the evil, and then anointing oneself pure and innocent. Granted, some of us are terribly broken, so broken we might need to be contained for our own sake as well as others. But no matter, we are all human beings, and we are going to have to figure out solutions together, or end up wiping each other out entirely.

It's not a question, as Pat Robertson thinks, of converting all Muslims to Evangelical Christianity. It's not a question of bombing the bejesus out of other nations and bringing them into submission. It's not a question of wiping out this or that people, or bulldozing the houses next door, or, God help us, blowing up children.

Our religious tradition has said that "we're all in this together" for hundreds and hundreds of years. It has held us to account by warning us about putting anyone into a category beyond redemption, or of sending some people off to hell forever. It asks us to be faithful and true to each other no matter how difficult it is…how long it takes…even if it takes more than a single lifetime. Our beautifully articulated tradition asks us to risk failure and to try again. It asks us to learn and study and refuse to hide behind ignorance or prejudice. It tells us that we all have our share in the joys and miseries of the world, and that thus, we are all called to lift up the joys and put an end to misery together.

When I think of this anniversary day of 9-11, I think these things most of all…

1. I will probably have to learn to live with rubble in my heart the rest of my life, but I will nonetheless live my life as lovingly and as truthfully as I can.
2. I can continue to walk through life holding on to the same thread that has always sustained me, the ever unfolding Love and Truth which open new worlds I cannot not now dream, and 3. It's never a question of blame or clear categories, it's always a question of working together, struggling together through the generations until the luminous words we utter are transformed into the luminous lives we live.

Closing Meditation [back to top] from a poem by Maya Angelou "A Brave and Startling Truth" 1995

We, this people, on this small and lonely planet,
Travelling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth.

And when we come to it,
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms;

When we come to it,
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate,
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefield and coliseum
No longer take our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil.

When the rapacious storming of the churches,
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased.
When the pennant are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze.

When we come to it,
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection,
Nor the gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe,
Nor the sacred peak of Mt. Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun,
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi
who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores,
These are not the only wonders of the world.

When we come to it,
We, this people, on this miniscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people, on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words,
Which challenge our very existence,
Yet out of these same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines.
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can life freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear.

When we come to it,
We must confess that we are the possible,
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world, that is when, and only when,
We come to it.

[back to top]
 

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