Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, September 23, 2001
This Sunday falls right in the middle of the ten days of the Jewish High Holy Days, beginning with Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish new year, and ending this Wednesday with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I don't know that I've ever been so grateful for the meanings and the power of these holy days as I am this year. We are all in need of them. Internally, within our own hearts and minds, and externally as we view the world around us, we continue to trace the cracks and fissures, the damage and the reactions brought on by the attacks of September 11. The Jewish High Holy Days seem uniquely suited to help us in that process, whatever our religious backgrounds might be and whatever language of faith sustains us today.
The language of the High Holy Days is an ancient one. It's the language of honesty in looking at ourselves and at one another. It's the language of sin and failure, the language of repentance and renewal, the language of forgiveness. The holy days are meant as a time of careful attention to the ways in which we're walking on the path of our lives, with the idea that if we don't check ourselves against a map every now and then and ask whether or not we're following that map honestly, it's quite possible that we're not where we think we are on the path.
Within the Jewish tradition, this notion of checking ourselves against the moral map of our lives is a process that is both individual and collective. We are meant to notice, carefully and honestly, the ways in which we ourselves have failed - this singular bundle of qualities we call the self. What have I done, or failed to do in the past twelve months that has somehow contributed to the suffering of the world? What must I do, or stop doing, in order to heal that suffering? But we are also made to look at the wider failings, the damage or harm done on a level far outside the scope of any one person. How have we failed to stem the tides of suffering, as a people or a nation? How have we contributed to the world's pain?
We study these questions this year in a condition of woundedness. September 11 brought us a monumental demonstration of sin, in all of the complex religious connotations of that word. Sin as a violation of self and of the holy; sin as a willful, wholesale infliction of harm; sin as a radical breach in relationship; sin in the Hebrew meaning, 'to miss the mark'. The size of this tear in the fabric, and the size of the pain it has caused, make far more complex all the notions associated with the holy days. How do we think about personal repentance, when all of our petty little failings shrink almost into invisibility when held up against the murder of six thousand people? How do we think about forgiveness, God help us, when we are still in a struggle to understand the scope of the crime?
Yet it is precisely these questions that need to capture our attention right now. We are in need of the reminders that form the heart of meaning in these solemn holy days. The reminders are not all welcome ones, and they are not easy to bear. But one of the reasons human beings create rituals for ourselves, around the large events of birth and death and the smaller cycle that's the turning of a year, is that rituals help us take stock. They pull our attention back to the internal maps we carry that mark out who we want to be, where we want to go, what we hope to accomplish in these short lives of ours. They pull our attention to the blunt truth that the road will end, for each one of us - tomorrow, or forty years from now. We would like to have walked the road well, however long or short it turns out to be. So we could use the reminders available to us in the season of introspection and resolve.
Reminder number one is this: acts that we consider "inhuman" are done only by human beings, and no matter how atrocious, they are therefore all too human acts. They have been done by human beings in one way or another as long as this planet has been host to our species. Our so-called inhuman acts differ in scale, and they differ in who is wounded and who is the cause of pain. But one of the most ancient stories in the Hebrew scriptures, a story told and retold by human tongues for millennia, is the story of Cain and Abel, the story of a man murdering his brother. We have been at this terrible business for a long, long time.
Membership in the human race makes us kin to both Cain and Abel, both victim ad murderer. And so we have to remember, as much as we might like to forget, that the people who do us harm, even very grave harm, are not an alien race. We are far more alike than we are unalike. We love our children. We feel loyalty to our brethren. We wish the world were a place of more justice than we have seen in it thus far. We bleed when we are wounded. We remember those things that have hurt us. We find it difficult to forgive. We are subject to despair. We are capable of deep and abiding hatred.
Most of us - most of the vast and troubled human race - seem to find the way to prevent our suffering from turning to hatred, or we prevent our hatred from turning to action. This is lucky for us; if it were not true, there would likely be no one left among us to tell the tale. We do not all allow our despair or rage to drive us to hurt or to kill, and these ways in which we exercise our will give us the confidence we need that a future - a good and worthy future - is possible for us and for our children.
But it's important that we remember we are not a different species from those whose choices cause new and deeper suffering in the world. The hard truth is that we really are one: it isn't just a nice religious theory about the invisible filaments that bind us into the spirits of our ancestors or the light of the stars. We are one with the ancestors and with the stars; we are also one with the mud and the spilled blood, one with the despairing minds that choose to kill. We have to ask the questions born of our connections: What brings a human being to choose a path of such violence? How are we perceived by our brothers and sisters out there in the world, that could evoke in them such hatred? What have we done, or failed to do, to contribute to that hatred? How are we called to change?
A second reminder associated with the Jewish High Holy Days is that there is more than one kind of justice. For much of our history, at least within western culture, we have been seduced by the simplest formulation of justice, which is retributive. Retributive justice is contained in the ancient biblical formula, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'. But there is also restorative justice. Yom Kippur is the 'Day of Atonement', and the idea of restorative justice is inherent in the very notion of atonement. If the fabric of our lives has been torn, what might be done that would result in its mending? If the wholeness of our living community has been violated, what should be done to restore that wholeness so that we can travel on in our lives?
This is not a Pollyanna optimism that says everything wrong can be made right; it does not deny the scars that travel with us. But it does teach that our movement forward as a human community depends on this binding action. Restorative justice is a willful turning away from the endless, tormenting cycles in which we're trapped when we set out for vengeance. We carry our pain and our wounds along with us, but we resolutely turn our faces to the future, and allow the wrongs of the past to stay there, anchored in the past.
Restoring our wholeness leads to a third reminder held in the wisdom of the High Holy Days, which is the mystery and the power and the urgent necessity of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not an easy notion, and it is not an easy or a straightforward process. In the context of grievous wrong, forgiveness has nothing in common with the casual notion of forgive and forget, because in the case of grievous wrong we are incapable of forgetting. None of us will ever forget the enormous wrong that was done on September 11, and forgiveness as we often think of it seems appallingly inappropriate. Who are we to forgive, after all? Even if my son or daughter, my husband or wife, were among the dead or wounded, what right would I have to forgive those who took so many other lives?
But I think forgiveness is a richer and more complex notion than we often consider it to be. Author Ron Roth writes of it this way: "…I describe forgiveness by reversing the words: [Instead of forgiving,] Giving Forth. [When we give] forth …in the name of blessing instead of [choosing to curse, that is] forgiveness." What do we choose to give forth from ourselves? What do we give forth in the face of an enormous grief like the one we've suffered this month? From all over the country, and in fact from all over the world, people have given forth of themselves as their tender, human response - given forth their compassion and material aid, their strong arms and their sympathy, their labor and their promises of solidarity, their grief and their love. It has in most cases been so spontaneous as to be almost instinctual, not even really a matter of conscious choice. This is who we are; this is what we want to give.
It is far too early to think of forgiveness, in its traditional frame. But it is never too early to decide what it is we choose to give forth. A surprising number of people, including the immediately bereaved, have been crystal clear, prophetic in the power of their clarity, that what they wish to give forth is not vengeance or retribution.
They are not talking about forgiveness. They are talking about something even deeper, something that goes to the heart of healing. They do not want to do more damage or bring more pain to the world, and they want to turn their grief toward compassion and healing rather than toward a self-righteous war. It may not be forgiveness; but like forgiveness it shapes us in its translating power. It turns our attention and creative hearts toward stitching back together the frayed edges of our collective fabric.
The world in which we live is not a world free of pain. It's a world of suffering and sorrows beyond naming, and many of them, maybe most of them, are hand-delivered from one human being to another. Our most profound act of faith, the sweetest prayer in any language of any religion, is our willingness, our determination, to name and feel that suffering and then lift our eyes beyond it. We get to choose what to give forth. We get to choose what will lead us to healing.
A rabbi, Seth Castleman, working as a chaplain in the ruins of the world trade center, sent out an e-mail last week, a kind of stream of consciousness reflection born of his exhaustion and the intensity of his labor of support in the rubble of the World Trade Center. At the end he writes these words: "I don't know if I am making this clear, but it feels so important. Will the heart open or close? Will we take our sadness and let it harden or let it melt? Do we allow it to turn to hatred or to love?
The Atrium, filled with palm trees in the Amex Building at the World Trade Center, where chamber orchestras once played now is eerily silent. The banners are … ripped and dangling like sails of a pirate ship. Tangled steel cuts the view of sky through shattered portals. And through the dust and smoke and sounds of slogging feet through water, comes the yellow slice of moon. …Just before dawn it has ascended above the cloud. So much devastation, the earth and the psyche marred with death - and still a beautiful new moon, rising white and untouched above our sorrow."
He certainly didn't mean it entirely as a metaphor, but it is there, achingly evident in that image of the moon sailing serene above the smoke. There is always something rising untouched above our sorrow, and we have within us, always, the choice to make as to where we will turn our faces, how we will use our hands in the next moment, whether we will bind the wounds or create new wounds for the binding. It is not easy to give forth from suffering hearts. But it is possible. And it is the only real motion toward healing.
This week's New Yorker ended with a poem on the back page by Adam Zagajewski, called, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World":
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees headed nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
May we contribute to its returning. AMEN.