Yesterday, when I heard about the explosions in London, I remembered the sermon “Fragile Days, Fragile Nights” and the song by Sting that we heard at the UU church we were attending at the time of the September 11 attacks. Remembering that Mark’s sermon’s are online, I did a web search, and found a page of links to sermons done by many Unitarian Universalist ministers at that time. I haven’t had a chance to read any of them yet, but am bookmarking the page so that I can come back to it.
http://www.uua.org/news/91101/clergy.html
Excerpt from Rev. Mark Belletini’s sermon below the jump.
Actually, before I post the excerpt, here’s another sermon link…”Responding to the Violence of September 11th” by Rev. Davidson Loehr
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, Texas
September 16, 2001
http://www.uua.org/news/91101/dloehr916.html
He was one of the speakers at the Religion and Democracy forum at DeanFest.
And here is some of Mark’s sermon, as promised…
Fragile Days, Fragile Nights
The Rev. Dr. Mark L. Belletini
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, OH
Sept. 16, 2001
http://www.uua.org/news/91101/mbelletini916.html
In the end, I have to have hope. The sheer horror of this event has so many asking so many questions about underlying causes, realities and yes, our interdependence, that I have some cause to think that we might move up a notch or two in the area of global community.
“What life have you if you have not life together?” asks the poet T.S. Eliot. “There is no life,” he says, “that is not in community.” Then he adds that there is “Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore. When the stranger says, ‘What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?'” What will we answer?
Our lives will be different perhaps, now, but they will resemble more the lives of those who have been our brothers and sisters around the world for decades. Maybe this new awareness of our mutual fragility, our fragility by day, our fragility by night, will help to shape a new awareness of what self-questioning we need to begin so that we can find ways to stop not terrorism, but the reasons for terrorism, alien and frightening as they may seem to us now.
If our mighty buildings can fall like stacks of cards, so can we.
Therefore I pray that, with this new consciousness wed to our grief, our despair and our hope, we might, 30 years from now, look back on these days and know that the dark red rose of peace can grow even on so cruel and muddy a ruin as we saw created this week. I am sad, but I will not remain sad forever. I cannot feed on tears alone, rage alone, forever, and frankly, the numbness slows me down to a stop. In the end I am convinced I must return to hope. I can’t tell you now exactly how I’ll get there, but I suspect you and I will have to take hands and go there together. I don’t think I can do it all by myself. I don’t have a map, and my compass seems to have got broken this week. I think I’ll be able to fix it.
But I assure you, I will get there. I’ll still be fragile when I get there, too, I suppose, but fragile with hope is a lot better than fragile with despair. Give me all the encouragement you’ve got, and I’ll give you mine. We all have a long journey ahead, and a whole hell of a lot of growing up to do. That’s right, a lot of growing up. For with our poet Kumin, I don’t know what all the answers are, and there sure is no question about that.
I don’t go to that church any more–as some of you know I was received into the Episcopal church a year and a half ago. But First UU in Columbus was an important stop on my journey, and it had an effect on the person I am today. The person I am still becoming. And because the people and places associated with major, world-changing events tend to stay, to some extent, frozen in our memory, I will always remember who I was with and the words I listened to as I tried to make sense of that day. It was a good place for me to be at that moment in time, and this was a good message for me to revisit right now.
