As we focus our attention today on our experiences and memories relating to the events of September 11, 2001, our predominant emotions are, not surprisingly, mostly negative.  There is the sorrow over the loss of life.  There is the anxiety arising from a sense of diminished security.  There is anger toward those who choose violence and terror as a means of expressing their own anger and frustration.

    I find myself, especially with the passage of time, left mainly with feelings of sadness – almost despair – stirred by endlessly repeated  demonstrations of the human capacity for evil.

    I offer a quote for you to ponder:
 

       Standing where calamity has struck, we are stunned with bewilderment.  What is the use of hope and faith, of patient labor and long endurance?  And what is the use of this – this senseless blind destruction?  That is how it seems, at first, but not at last, not if we stay with it long enough and carry it with us into our lives as we live them, for then we see something else – that, where a plan was crushed or a hope was broken, something better than plans and stronger than hope began to grow.

    These words could easily have been written in the past year, but they were not.  They were written in 1953 by Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies of Washington D.C.  I’m not sure what calamity he was responding to, but they do point to the truth of the repetition of history.  There is little new under the sun.

    Pain and sorrow and havoc have been wrought upon peoples and nations over and over throughout history.  When I start thinking about it, I’m almost overwhelmed by the instances of oppression and genocide and terror that have occurred in just the last century of our world.  And sometimes the well-intentioned responses to those acts are just as deadly, and cause just as much pain and suffering.  Mohandas Gandhi asks, “What does it matter to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought in the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
 And so the sadness and despair triggered in me by September 11 comes not simply from the loss of some three thousand innocent lives on that day.  Rather it comes from the reminder of the millions lost to the Holocaust in Europe, the half-million Tutsis slaughtered in Rwanda in the summer of 1994, the continuing experience of terror and oppression by Israelis and Palestinians, and the 35,000 children who died from conditions of starvation on September 11 and every other day as well.  The list could go on and on.

     When I get caught up in those thoughts and memories, my heart cries out once again, “Where is the hope?  Where is the hope?”  Well, the hope lies primarily in the realization that all of that suffering, all of those horrors, are not the whole story.  Yes, we humans have, and frequently demonstrate, a capacity for evil.  But we also have, and frequently demonstrate, a capacity for love, for courage, for compassion.  Indeed, the marvelous, positive human responses in the face of tragedies like September 11 help to keep the spark of hope alive.

     Peaceful Tomorrows is a newly formed group founded by family members of 9/11 victims.  They held a dusk-to-dawn vigil in New York last Tuesday night which included an Afghan-American speaker who had lost 19 relatives when the United States attacked her home village near Kandahar.  Rejecting the idea of revenge, this group’s mission is “to seek effective nonviolent responses to terrorism” and “to spare additional innocent families the suffering that we have already experienced – as well as to break the endless cycle of violence and retaliation engendered by war.”

    Historian Howard Zinn writes, “What we choose to emphasize in . . . history will determine our lives.  If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.  If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”

     Novelist Barbara Kingsolver took this sort of approach in her own response to the terrorist attacks of a year ago.  As a writer, she turned to writing to work through her feelings and her grief.  The result was a volume of essays called Small Wonder.  If you haven’t encountered it yet, I recommend it.  In this collection, Kingsolver “brings to us from one of history’s darker moments an extended love song to the world we still have . . . consider[ing] a world of surprising and hopeful prospects.”

     She writes in the Foreword, “Compiling this book quickly in the strange, awful time that dawned on us last September became for me a way of surviving that time, and in the process I reopened in my own veins the intimate connection between the will to survive and the need to feel useful to something or someone beyond myself.  In fact, that is a theme that runs through the book.”  It is also a theme that will run through my remarks this morning – the importance of making ourselves useful to something beyond ourselves.  Therein, I believe, lies the most basic source of hope for our future.

     While Barbara Kingsolver seeks hope and wholeness through writing, I am more inclined to do so, at least in part, through reading.  Another excellent book I encountered this summer in my own quest for hope was a volume by essayist Scott Russell Sanders called Hunting for Hope.  This book was written four years ago, and while it was not written in response to September 11, its wisdom certainly applies.
 Sanders’ search for sources of hope in the world grew out of a disturbing conversation with his son, who confronted him with the observation, “Your view of things is totally dark.  It bums me out.  You make me feel the planet’s dying and people are to blame and nothing can be done about it.  There’s no room for hope.  Maybe you can get by without hope, but I can’t.”

     Sanders didn’t feel that he was without hope, and his son’s words stung him.  And so he set out on an intentional quest “to gather his own reasons for facing the future with hope, finding powers of healing in nature, in culture, in community, in spirit, and within each of us,” and to pass them on to his son.  But this was no exercise of sentimentalism or denial.  He acknowledges throughout that “No understanding of hope can be honest unless it reckons with the absence of hope, the dark night of the soul when nothing comforts and nothing reassures. . . If hope is a bright, indomitable bird, despair is the dark ocean over which it flies, against which it sings.”

     So where did Sanders’ quest lead him?  He found his first source of hope in the wildness of the natural world, where his experience and understanding revealed elegance, order, and splendor.  And in addition to hope, he finds here a sense of purpose in efforts to nurture and restore the wild.  His sense of nature as a source of hope is bolstered by a spiritual understanding of the oneness of his own body with the rest of creation.

     The next source of hope for Sanders is family, in the sense of a “household, a gathering of people who take shelter together.”  He once again avoids a simplistic, sentimental view, recognizing that families themselves can be sources of pain and heartache.  But he writes, “No matter how troubled our households, we’re going to keep on taking shelter together because we need one another.”  We need protection, guidance, companionship and affection.  He says, “In the struggle between a destructive, reckless, shallow culture and these ancient human needs, I place my faith in the family.”

     Sanders also finds hope in the existence of beauty, which feeds us from the same source that created us, restoring our faith in the generosity of nature.  And his ultimate response to his son is that, yes, we can change our ways of seeing and thinking and living.  “If we are determined to live in hope . . . we join with others who are making a kindred effort, and thus our work will be multiplied a thousandfold across the country, a millionfold around the earth. . . In order to live in hope we needn’t believe that everything will turn out well.  We need only believe that we are on the right path.

     A common thread through the various sources of hope that we’ve considered this morning is that they all involve looking beyond our own individual selves.  To wrap things up, I’d like to emphasize two aspects of that reaching out.  The first has to do with reaching out our hand to another, whether it be a relative, a friend, or a stranger.  The hand of another can be a source of strength, of courage, and yes, of hope.  And it occurs to me that when you reach out and take someone’s hand, they are holding you by the hand as well.

 Rabbi Harold Kushner tells the following story:

    I was sitting on a beach one summer day, watching two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand.  They were hard at work building an elaborate sandcastle by the water’s edge. . .  Just when they had nearly finished their project, a big wave came along and knocked it down, reducing it to a heap of wet sand.  I expected the children to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all their hard work.  But they surprised me.  Instead they ran up the shore away from the water, laughing and holding hands, and sat down to build another castle.  I realized that they had taught me an important lesson.  All the things in our lives, all the complicated structures we spent so much time and energy creating, are built on sand.  Only our relationships to other people endure.  Sooner or later, the wave will come along and knock down what we have worked so hard to build up.  When that happens, only the person who has somebody’s hand to hold will be able to laugh.

     That story brought to my mind those haunting images of the couple leaping from the World Trade Tower, hand in hand to the end, in a bond stronger than death itself.

     The other aspect of reaching out that I want to leave you with is the idea of devoting ourselves to a life of service, to others and to the world, in an effort to make that world a better place.  To elaborate on that point, I’d like to share with you a poem I received from a friend of mine, Marj Donn, who is a retired Director of Religious Education.  It’s called “After September 11”:

“If I am for myself only, what am I?”  Yet…
to transform a world that includes terrorism…
How?  And who am I to undertake such a task?
I’d rather sit in the corner of my sofa,
knitting mittens for my grandchildren and
for needy children through my church,
one stitch and another stitch,
always one stitch at a time.

How can I think that I can have any part
in what needs to be done?
It’s too big, too HUGE a task.
Yet, “the journey of a thousand miles
begins with the first step.”
The twenty pairs of mittens I’ve created
in the last six months began with one knitted stitch,
continued, one stitch at a time.
It’s the way knitting has to be done:
one stitch at a time.
So too, creating a new world happens slowly,
one person at a time:
one person making one phone call,
writing one letter,
attending one rally,
talking to one friend.

One little movement of one part of my body at a time.
I lift up the receiver,
I push the buttons one by one,
I talk.
I pick up a pen and begin to write,
each movement, one more stitch,
one more step.
I call a Muslim friend.
I write to a friend on the other side of the world;
she writes to me (on the very same day!)
I attend a prayer vigil.
I write to my senators.
We all keep on taking that next step,
saying the next word,
singing the next song,
making a new friend,
knitting the next stitch.
“If not now, when?”

     All of our healing actions are vitally important, no matter how small their seeming effects.  In the words of Mohandas Gandhi again, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”  Similarly, you must be the love you wish to see in the world; you must be the caring you wish to see in the world; you must be the peace you wish to see in the world; you must be the hope you wish to see in the world.