SEPTEMBER 11
The Isolation blues;
reflections during covid-19
This week-end national news organizations, media outlets and remembrance events commemorate the 20th anniversary of 911. The attack on the World Trade Center was one of those events where you remember where you were and what you were doing when it happened. Even twenty years later the memories and trauma of such an event lingers and will accompany us for the years to come. It’s important to pause and reflect on such events at times like this for our own mental/spiritual health and our own deeper understanding. So this week I dug out some old files and located the Sunday Service at UUHoulton that followed the events of 911. I’ve included a few excerpts in today’s backwoodsblog. So much has changed in twenty years, so much hasn’t…
ashes to ashes Our hearts are so human. So predictable you may say, but I do not know. So many variants of feeling and thinking at times such as these. I do not know; the confusion or dismay the calamity of spirit severs us from our reference points of normalcy. And our hearts are so human. A gray dust clings to our spirit like the images we viewed of survivors on the New York streets; alive and walking, but unable to escape the ashen mark of human tragedy. The all-pervading gray dust shadows our country and blows upon the lonely winds across this great world. There’s no escape this week and our hearts are so human. Bless, O God, our struggle to understand. Bless those who are gone, and bless those of us who remain who continue on in this world, in spite of the horror, in spite of the madness, we continue on - the walking gray in the bright day’s sunlight. A National Tragedy This is not how I intended my first week on the job to go. This has not been an easy week for any of us. I have been as transfixed as you following the news this week - it’s hard to walk by a TV set without stopping for just a minute and then you can’t pull yourself away. This is a BIG STORY; the biggest national story of my lifetime, a national tragedy. I am trying to keep my comments short this morning (we’ll see how that goes). What I can’t get away from, what keeps coming back to me every time I replay the dramatic images now imprinted upon my memory is the suffering - human suffering and loss. I am not as concerned about the political intricacies of our foreign policy that may have played a role in this, or the likely economic fall-out from Wall Street or the US airline industry, or even the retaliatory military action our government will most certainly take. What disturbs me most deeply and has brought me to tears this week is the suffering. Yet, this suffering is our common humanity. It is what makes us most human. When Tuesday’s tragedy struck - all I wanted to did was to find Linda and hold her. The precariousness of life is all too real and we suddenly see what really matters. Life is precious. I am alive. You are alive. And even in the midst of a national tragedy we try to sort that out and try to ease the suffering. This may sound too simplistic, considering the complexity of our world today and the strong emotion and rhetoric of this incident, and yet, in spite of the deplorable violence and inhumanity I am still convinced that compassion is the response, in spite of the torrent of anger and hatred from all sides I am convinced that compassion IS the response. And during a week such as the one we have just experienced I have to remind myself of this repeatedly. It’s the only thing that makes any sense right now. And we continue on… In closing, a quote from Mahatma Ghandi just after the conclusion of WW II. “The moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the atom-bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter-bombs even as violence cannot be by counter-violence. Humankind has to get out of violence only through non-violence. Hatred can only be overcome by love. Counter-hatred only increases the surface as well as the depth of hatred. I am aware that I am repeating what I have said many times stated before and practiced to the best of my ability and capacity. What I first stated was itself nothing new. It was as old as the hills. I only recited no copybook maxim but definitely announced what I believed in every fibre of my being…It is the central truth by which one can stand alone without flinching. I believe in what Max Muller said years ago, that truth needed to be repeated as long as there were people who disbelieved it."
In the woods,
Dave
September 11, 2021