When Our Hearts Are Breaking
Rev. Kathleen McTigue and Rev. Danita Noland
September 16, 2001
Call to Worship
Rev. Kathleen McTigue
"Over my head, I hear music in the air…There must be a God somewhere…"
Welcome into this community of grief and of hope.
We come together this morning in deeper need than most of us have known
before.
We need the kindness in one another's faces.
We need the assurance and strength in each other's arms.
We need the comfort of a familiar voice,
and we need the touch of welcome from a stranger's hand,
to tell us that even as we cross the threshold for the first time,
we are at home in this place.
Over our heads, today, we may hear no music in the air.
But in our time of deep grief, we come together to bear witness.
The music is sounding still.
As the sun still rises and shines each day,
as the rain falls in its course and blesses us,
as the stars, serene, turn in the sky,
love is alive in our world.
Love is our only salvation.
Love will bring us to wholeness again.
Let us worship together.
Reflections
Rev. Danita Noland
It is good to see so many of you here today. This coming together as a
faith community is important as we need comfort and healing in the days
ahead. A horrible tragedy occurred this past week and I want to talk to
all of you, but especially to our children and youth, as they remain
sitting in the loving embrace of their families and community.
Five days
ago, in two cities, buildings were attacked and many people were injured
and lost their lives. This has caused us all to be very sad, even if we
didn’t know anyone in these cities. And when so many people are hurt at
one time, it is very hard to understand what is happening. Most things
in our daily lives have been affected by this tragedy and we are hearing
about it everywhere it seems. People around us are talking about it, at
school our classmates and teachers are sharing stories about the people
who were hurt, and our newspapers and televisions show us pictures that
can be frightening to see.
All of this talk about people being hurt in
such an awful way can make us feel many things, and it is ok to feel
them all. All of us, the littlest among us and the oldest, may be
feeling extremely sad or angry, or both even at the same time. We may
also feel very confused about what happened and have many questions. It
is important to talk to your parents and the people in your life that
you love about all of this, and ask the questions you have. It is also
ok to say, you don’t have all the answers.
I think the one feeling most
of us have all felt, and may still be feeling, is being afraid. It is
scary to think that anyone would hurt and take the lives of so many
people, and now we know that it can happen. But there is one thing I do
believe, and this makes me believe with all my heart, that this world
can still be a safe place for everyone. I know that for any one person
who is willing to hurt someone, there are many, many, more people who
will do everything they can to help other people and protect you from
getting hurt.
We are seeing this now as thousands of people in this
country are helping those who were hurt.
We saw this when many people
were willing to go in to the buildings that weren’t safe, and save the
lives of those who were still inside them. We saw this when people
helped each other on the streets in New York, sharing their water and
shoes with people they didn’t even know, but wanted to help them get
safely back home, because most people in this world are good and caring
and love those around them.
And I believe most people in this world want
everyone to be safe and live in peace. Many, many, more people want
this, than those who do not, and will do all they can to make sure this
is the kind of world we live in, a safe world at peace. And when I start
feeling afraid, I remind myself of this, that there are many more people
in this world who do good and brave courageous acts everyday, than those
who don’t, I don’t feel so afraid.
I also want you, our dear children,
to know, that you are surrounded right now by people who love you, and
not just your families, but everyone here right now loves you and we
will do all that we can to protect you and keep you safe. And we will do
all that we can to make this world be a peaceful and safe place for you
to live.
When Our Hearts Are Breaking
Rev. Kathleen McTigue
We gathered together a week ago for our Homecoming service here in
this room. Just a week ago. But when we look back on it from today it's
like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, and that comfortable,
ordinary celebration of community looks almost as though it happened on
another planet. In the days since Tuesday's attack, we've all had to
keep on going through the motions of our ordinary days, and we've done
the necessary things to keep our lives turning. But there has been no
ordinary day since Tuesday's horror, and haunting us all is the fact
that we don't know when another truly ordinary day will be ours.
As we saw the unthinkable images over and over again on television
we could feel ourselves being marked by them, changed, and we could feel
the ground shifting beneath us, beneath the whole national psyche with
the force of a continental earthquake. We have been changed by this, our
country has been changed, in ways we don't yet recognize, in ways we
would not have chosen. We have spoken differently this week, even to
strangers. 'How are you?' is something we still ask, but in a different
tone and with an utterly different meaning. 'How are you doing? How are
you holding up?' is more common, and then, unless we already know the
answer: 'Is there anyone you've lost?'
Given our proximity to New York and how often so many of us travel
there, I have heard blessedly few people answer 'yes' to that awful
question. And yet there is no sense of having escaped by the mere fact
that no one in our personal circle died on one of the planes or in one
of the buildings. This anguish has no personal boundaries. Every lost,
beloved face smiling out at us from old photos looks familiar. Any one
of them could have been our husband or wife, our sister or brother, our
child, our friend, our cousin, our workmate. Any of their faces could
have been our faces. We have been unable to tear ourselves away from
them, many of us going almost no time at all without watching the
television or hearing some story of pain from the radio. This isn't
obsessivness. It is keeping vigil. We have been keeping vigil all
week.
All week, places of worship have stood with their doors open and candles
lighted. All week they have held within their walls vigils, rituals, the
first of thousands of funerals and memorial services. All week these
places of worship have stood open simply as places where people could
gather together for solace. And gather we have, in mosques and temples
and churches and meeting houses, and at spontaneous candlelit shrines
everywhere. We have not gathered out of a sudden conversion experience,
and although some of us have come desperately seeking a sense of God's
presence, many were not looking for that presence in the form of a
transcendent being. We came looking for each other, and we did it in so
many religious places because we remembered one of the things our places
of worship offer us. They give us our rituals of mourning. They give us
the places of safety in which to cry out our pain. They give us silence,
a prayer, a phrase of music, to speak for us when we have been struck
dumb by the enormity of what has happened.
The grief is unfathomable. Each singular person lost is worth keening
over for weeks or for months. Each child whose parent didn't return is
worthy of being named, cradled, wept for, passed from arm to loving arm.
Every voice making the last phone call deserves to be heard, to echo out
into silence and be mourned. Each story of heroism, of a fireman or
policeman who ran against the tide and against his own fear to try to
save another life, cries out to be learned by all of us, learned by
heart.
It takes time for the unbearable to sink in. It takes a long time to
grieve a loss so enormous. It takes a very long time to discover how to
incorporate -- literally, how to take into ourselves -- what has
happened and what it will mean for our future, to discover how we might
finally wake up on a day in the future and not feel so fragile. It takes
time before we can look around us with something approaching clarity,
and choose with care what ought to be done next.
It is time that we have not yet had. In this condition of extraordinary
pain, while we have not yet had the time to grieve, our nation is
already rushing headlong into action. It is action born of our pain,
born of our longing for justice, but colored also by rage and the
longing for vengeance. How many more innocent lives will be lost if we
set out to conquer our pain through our enormous military power?
In the weeks and months ahead, if that is the path on which our
government embarks, we will have a very hard road to walk with one
another, and with the other aching and frightened citizens of this
country. There will be many among us who feel that our leaders need our
support and encouragement no matter what road they choose for our
nation. There will be others who are so angry and so wounded that they
thirst for the old equations that have crippled us all for so long,
taking an eye for every eye, a tooth for every tooth. There will be
those with a brother or sister or child in uniform, whose lives may well
be at risk in the coming months. And there will be those who will cry
out in every way we can for an end to the violence, for the wisdom and
strength of will to find another way.
It is much too soon for us to be so grievously divided one from another.
Our healing may well involve action in the world, but it must be action
that arises from the best of who we can be, from clarity, from a longing
to lessen the pain, not spread it to others. And our healing begins
first with our grief, with where we are right now, today, our hearts
breaking. Our healing begins with our willingness to accompany one
another through that pain in the hope, in the faith, that there is a
passage through. The balm in Gilead is here. Its name is love.
Let's hold silence together.
Meditation
Rev. Kathleen McTigue
Adapted from the words of Edward Frost
If the world is not innocent as Eden, purely good and safe, nor is
it an evil place. There is evil, which some people come to embody and
inflict upon the innocent. But there is also good, which I truly believe
is embodied by the vast majority of humankind. For every [infuriated]
bomber, there are …millions of people who will crawl into the smoking
ruins toward the voice of a crying child, who will sit and [weep] for
the suffering of people they never knew, who will--in the face of such
evil as this-- remind us over and over again of what is good.
The world is not a safe place. No one ever said it is. We teach
our children that the stove is hot, that the street is dangerous, that
the woodpile is not safe. We also teach our children to hear the music,
to sing the songs, to honor the creatures and the earth we share
together. We teach our children not to talk to strangers. We also teach
them, by our example, by the tears we shed for [people we have never
met], that life is so good, so worth risking, that our hearts ache when
a single life is lost. It may be that someone around our campfire will
do us harm. Still, the circle of humankind around the light and warmth
is what we have. It would be far worse for us if, in our fear, we doused
the fire and ran, alone, into the dark.
-----
I light these candles as a prayer for comfort for those who grieve
the dead, the dying and the missing in New York, in Washington and in
Pennsylvania.
I light them in tribute to all those whose brave hearts called them to
run toward the smoke and rubble to try to save a stranger.
I light them in gratitude for every person whose life was at risk who
miraculously survived.
I light them in the name of the hope that turns our faces toward
goodness, toward healing, and toward a vision of peace, even when our
hearts are breaking.
-----
From The Cure at Troy
by Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in goals
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-strike’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self –revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
O new life at its term.
Closing Words
Rev. Kathleen McTigue
The world will speak the language of war.
You must translate.
Take the words of vengeance, of pain, of fear,
Take the words of anger, of grief, of hatred,
and turn them into the light you carry like a secret coal,
banked against the wind.
We must find a new language or perish.
The earth is holding its breath,
the stars have stopped their dance to listen,
the wind and rain are waiting to know:
can we stop shouting long enough to hear
that among us all there is only one great heart beating.