This was a very full service, and so I wrote only a short homily.  Here it is.

With love,

Rev. Michael

Rising Up

Rev. Dr. Michael Tino
September 11, 2011 – Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Northern Westchester
© 2011 Michael Tino

Human beings are relational creatures.  We exist not as isolated individuals but as people connected to everything and everyone around us.  What happens to someone we’re connected to affects us.

I believe that goodness in our world is a result of connection, of real and right relationship that helps us act not as individuals but as a community.  When we see ourselves as connected to others, we are more likely to do things that make their lives better.

I believe that evil happens in our world when we break those connections—or refuse to form them in the first place.  When we separate ourselves from others, we are more likely to do things that affect them badly.

Small bits of badness come from broken relationships between individuals.  I say something on purpose that hurts your feelings.  Siblings strike each other in anger when they’re frustrated.  People tell lies to one another because they think they won’t be caught.  Someone steals from another who has something they want or need.  These things can be healed when the relationships are healed.

Larger systems of immorality and wickedness come from severely harmed relationships between groups, sometimes magnified through time and history.  We allow people in our very midst to go without shelter, food, medicine in a nation of riches.  Oppressions are handed down from generation to generation—racism, sexism, classism and others.  These things take serious amounts of work to overcome—whole networks of relationships need to be rebuilt.

And unthinkable acts of evil come from true brokenness.  Murder, rape, war, terrorism.  I honestly cannot imagine how someone can be so completely disconnected from the feelings and experiences of another to even contemplate something like this.  I certainly cannot fathom what goes into the hatred that makes someone do something like what happened on September 11, 2001.  Such evil can only be faced and destroyed with unthinkable amounts of love—amounts of love that we are not be capable of by ourselves as individuals, amounts of love so great that even this one community is not enough; we need to enlist others in creating it as well.

It falls to each of us to engage in the work of creating connections and love in our world as a response to the immense evil we witnessed ten years ago.

Each of us is asked to respond to the pain and suffering in the world by sharing some unique part of us with others.  Perhaps we see systems in a way that helps us dismantle injustice.  Perhaps we grow vegetables that nourish others.  Perhaps we express ourselves—or help others express themselves.  Perhaps we make ourselves vulnerable by sharing our own experiences of pain and loss.  Perhaps we have (or make) the time and patience to listen.

In the days following September 11, 2001, artists responded to the pain that they were seeing by creating beauty as a gift to a world where ugliness was running rampant.  My friend Sarah Dan Jones wrote When I Breathe In, from which comes the hymn we know as Meditation on Breathing. Bruce Springsteen wrote The Rising—but not until after he was called on to sing something he had already written for a telethon.

He chose his song My City Of Ruins, which was originally written for his adopted hometown of Asbury Park, New Jersey, a city that faced depression and devastation, and was just beginning to revitalize itself.  In the song, he describes this destruction and emptiness, and he asks, “Tell me, how do I begin again?  My city’s in ruins.”

His answer?  “With these hands.”

With these hands, we pray.  With these hands, we heal.  With these hands, we reach out to others and comfort them in times of mourning.  With these hands, we build a new society.

“Come on, rise up,” Springsteen sang that evening to a nation in mourning.  Rise up from the devastation using your own hands to rebuild our society, to rebuild our city, to make justice in our world.

Among the signs of ruin in Springsteen’s song was a church whose doors were open, “but the congregation’s gone.”  The picture we get of an empty church is a striking one to use to indicate something’s wrong.  I don’t think that Springsteen meant that he longed for a society that adhered to a specific dogma or creed.

Rather, he understood that empty church as a religious institution, and a religious institution, whether church, synagogue, mosque or fellowship, is a place of connection.  Connection with other people.  Connection with something greater than ourselves.  Connection with the holy—however you experience or name that holy.

This religious community creates goodness whenever it comes together in community.  We create goodness when we worship together.  When we sing together.  When we learn together.  When we dance together.  When we work for justice together.  When we discuss and debate together.  When we play together.  When we sit in silence together, we create goodness.

Whenever we come together as a community, we are building relationships.  Relationships that make possible compassion.  Relationships that make possible beauty.  Relationships that make possible love.  More and more and more love.  Until that love expands far beyond our walls and embraces everyone, asking them to add to it, to multiply our love again and again.

Our religious response to evil and ugliness in our world, then, is community.  It is coming together, despite our differences, to build the world we want to see.  With these hands.

And if we do that, we will see it rise up from the ruins around us.  May it be so.