BITTERSWEET
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
May 26, 2002
Maybe if I go to bed tonight and wake up tomorrow morning, it will be May 27, 2001. Maybe, but probably not.
What a terribly wonderful year it’s been, were words I heard recently. We know the "terribly" part all too well. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by without vivid recollection of that blue sky morning that held all the leftover ease of summer and for so many of us, a presumptive anticipation that the day would pass as gently as this city allows.
Memorial Day seems redundant this year. Haven’t we been remembering all year long those we have lost? Haven’t we been flinching with the aftershocks and the ongoing uncertainty about what might yet happen? Aren’t the episodic disbelief and the rampant anxiety quite enough, not to mention the intense ache we feel when we recall her or him who was lost--our husband or wife, our daughter, our son, our mother, our father, our fireman, our policeman, our friend, and yes, our homeless neighbor?
Last Saturday I went down to Ground Zero again. I hadn’t been there for some time, since most of the chaplaincy work I did was at Pier 94, the primary site of the Family Assistance Center, and that site shut down weeks ago. My friend, Rev. Bill Minson—Pastor Bill as he’s known--had invited me to come and participate in a Service of Healing, sponsored by the Salvation Army. Bill is a Baptist minister, a native New Yorker, a resident of Los Angeles. From September 13 on, he’s been back here in his home town to minister to the families and all who lost so very much.
What a privilege it was for me to go back, as I know it’s been a privilege for some of you to serve at Ground Zero and Pier 94 and 51 Chambers Street. All these sites have been hubs for providing assistance and support to the surviving family members and the thousands of New Yorkers whose lives and livelihoods have been turned upside down by it all and the hundreds of recovery workers who just don’t give up.
In her poem, "All Souls," May Sarton speaks to what we know:
Did someone say that there would be an end,
An end…..to love and mourning?
Such voices speak when sleep and waking blend,
The cold bleak voices of the early morning
When all the birds are dumb in dark November—
Remember and forget, forget, remember.Memorial Day. A day set apart for remembering. Across a stretch of Pennsylvania countryside in the late autumn of 1863, amid the last great war fought on this soil, the words of Abraham Lincoln rang out:
…that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain… And thus the cemetery at Gettysburg was dedicated, and fallen Union soldiers were remembered and honored.
Inspired no doubt by the memorable words of President Lincoln, it was two years later, in 1865, that a man by the name of Henry Welles promoted the idea of decorating the graves of Civil War veterans. Welles and General John B. Murray, a county clerk and a Civil War veteran, assembled a committee to decorate with wreaths and crosses and flowers the graves of Civil War veterans who rested in the cemeteries of the little town of Waterloo, in upstate New York. Martial music heralded processions to each of the town’s three cemeteries, where speeches were delivered by General Murray and local clergy.
It caught on. Women’s Auxiliaries from the North and the South redirected their energies from nursing the wounded to preserving and decorating the graves of the dead. Cassandra Oliver Moncure, who led the movement in Virginia, coordinated the efforts of several groups into a ceremony held on May 30. Of French descent, she is said to have chosen that day, because in France it is commemorated as the Day of Ashes, marking the return of the remains of Napoleon Bonaparte from his exile on the island of Helena. In 1868, General John Logan, first commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued a General Order establishing May 30 as a day to remember and honor all who had died. On what was then known as Decoration Day, 1868, five thousand celebrants gathered at Arlington National Cemetery to decorate the graves of over 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers buried there.
This is striking. Brother who had fought against brother and died were buried in the same sacred space. How common is it that we share the same acreage of earth with those we once fought? How common is it that the construct of enemy dissolves into the common ground of a shared resting place? One hundred thirty-four years ago, in Arlington National Cemetery, brother reunited with brother.
In 1882, Decoration Day became Memorial Day, and in 1971 after the loss of millions more in two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, Congress declared Memorial Day a national holiday. Its significance has expanded to a day honoring not only those who lost their lives in conflicts of war, but to all who have died, all whose lives need remembering. And there are so many lives we remember today.
As I walked into the tent on Murray Street last Saturday, on the edge of what is known as "the pit" at Ground Zero, I had a strange sense of coming home. In this service of healing, I remembered all those stories of last minute phone calls and e-mails. I spoke with a family whose son had made one of those calls. "I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. Call my folks and tell them I’m okay." That was the last they heard. I remembered the woman I had sat with on one of those boat trips that carried family members from Pier 94 to Ground Zero. She hadn’t lost anyone from her immediate family and wondered why she should feel so awful. Of course she had barely made it out herself, and 85 of her colleagues had perished. I remember asking her how she could possibly think she hadn’t lost family, with over 80 members of her extended family gone. I remember on the same trip Connie, a volunteer caregiver from Oklahoma City. In the debacle there, Connie had lost her daughter. "Yes, I think of her every day, every day," she had said. Connie was here in our city to lend credible comfort.
I remember too the family who surrounded the young mother at the Family Assistance Center on Carmine Street in the West Village. This young woman had given birth to a son only days after the collapse of the Towers, with her husband among the missing. And I remember in that same site speaking with men and women who had come here from Bangladesh. They had found employment and a work culture they described as family at Windows on the World. Now they were mourning so many from that family as they filled out countless forms to secure assistance that would help them buy groceries and pay the rent. Their windows on the world had been shattered indeed. And I will never never forget walking back from Ground Zero toward St. Paul’s Chapel in the early morning hours of September 27, when I spotted a crew of sanitation workers. I had spontaneously walked up to them and thanked them for the work they were doing. One gentleman looked at me with a tired smile. "Clean souls rest easy, Reverend. Clean souls rest easy."
May Sarton’s poetry comes home again:
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and feel new-cherished, new forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.There’s not a Memorial Day that goes by without me calling up the visage of the man I lost in wartime. Some of you know that my first husband was killed in Vietnam, that as a seminarian, he volunteered, not believing that he should hide behind the protective draft status accorded divinity students. As a Second Lieutenant, he was killed near Quang Tri on February 2, 1968.
Now this may be hard for some of you to hear, but I honored his life, not his death. I loved him dearly, but I disagreed wholeheartedly with the cause for which he died. When the medals came, and there were many, I carefully wrote a letter to the officer who had signed his name on the official stationary of the U.S. Army and explained that I couldn’t accept them. While I had loved this man and honored and celebrated his life, I found those medals to be a particularly wrenching way for the powers that be to convey the message that war is honorable, rather than a pitiful excuse for all of us failing to find a better way.
There are undoubtedly many of you who cherish medals in your possession. I respect you for doing so. I just couldn’t do it myself, and I returned them. Of course the army sent them back to me, with no letter, not even a letter of indignation. So be it. Yet, I wonder what it would mean if in all the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries, we would recall the precedent set in 1868 in Arlington National Cemetery, when those who fell on both sides of the conflict were remembered and honored. Would it smooth the edges of humanity’s penchant for war? Would it change our habits of violence?
In the sacred space of Ground Zero, the remains of ten desperate men lie among the remains of those whom we will forever remember and honor. For all the love that infuses our remembering, it’s so hard to feel anything other than hate and vengeance toward these ten men and those who trained them and sent them off on their mission of horror. For all of us who have mourned, anger is a natural part of healing. Sometimes that anger turns to rage, and that rage must be felt. Yet I wonder if one day, we can share the sentiments expressed this past week by Eunice Davis. Ms. Davis is the sister of Cynthia Wesley, one of the four little girls so brutally murdered in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. On the occasion of the conviction of Bobby Frank Cherry, the last man to be held accountable for this heinous act, Eunice Davis announced her intention not to hate him. "He just don’t know better," she said. "He just don’t know better."
Accountability, yes. Compassion, yes. Thich Nhat Hanh tells us that:
In the eyes of Great compassion, there is no separation between subject and object, no separate self. If a cruel and violent person [does great harm to you]….it is his upbringing, his situation, and his ignorance that cause him to act so mindlessly. Look at him—the one who is bent on your destruction and heaps injustice upon you—with the eyes of love and compassion. Now I’m not so sure I can abide by this notion of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and peace activist, who found it in his heart to forgive this country after the desecration of his village of 300,000 souls during the Vietnam War. I’m not so sure I can abide by the sentiments of Eunice Davis. But I do know that if I don’t try, I will have no claim whatsoever to advance a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person and the connection of us all. I do know that if I don’t try, whatever I utter will resound, in the words of St. Paul, as a "noisy gong or a clanging cymbal," because I will not have love.
We remember and hurt and rage and hurt and remember. We do this in response to the deaths of all those we have loved. And we do this in response to the deaths of those whom we have loved whose passing had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the events of September 11 or with a war or with another act of violence. We remember all who have died.
Some of us this morning are worried that this weekend may bring further deaths. Some of us this morning are awash with the anxiety that floods the pronouncements of what might happen-- even though we know life is an adventure with uncertain outcomes, even though we know we could walk across Lexington Avenue and not see that oncoming taxi. In fact, I’m worried that some of you are so preoccupied by what might happen that you won’t pay attention to what is happening. So please, pay attention. Look both ways before you cross the street. Please!
Yes, it’s been a terribly wonderful year. The "wonderful" is real too, like that perennial plant whose root and stem taste first bitter then sweet, it’s been a bittersweet year. God knows we’ve known the bitter, but we’ve known also the sweet nectar of compassion and generosity. We’ve known also the sweet promise of weddings and birthdays and new life. We’ve celebrated this very morning the miracle of new life in our midst and have dedicated ourselves to "nurture and instruct" this new life "in the way of right living both for herself and for humankind." How we all need nurturing in the way of right living, in the way of remembering and moving ahead with a large spirit.
The words of our offertory anthem ring so true:
Cause us, O Lord our God, to lie down each night in peace,
And to awaken to renewed life and strength.
….Save our world from sorrow, from hate, and from war.
Curb Thou within us the will to do evil.
Shelter us beneath the shadow of Thy wings…..Healing happens as we hurt, but healing is patient. It rises within us as love is remembered, bathed by our tears. It rises within us as we gather in the sacred space of this sanctuary on the sacred ground that is this city and this earth. It rises within us as we notice the ebb and flow of one another’s breath and the warmth and wetness of spring. It rises within us as we celebrate new life and dedicate ourselves to that life. It rises within us as we say to Jahnavi, whom we have dedicated this morning and who is one year old today, "Happy Birthday, dear child, and welcome. We promise to try harder, that you might lie down each night in peace and awaken to a brand new day." Amen.
Sources:
Rick Bragg, "38 Years Years Later, Last of Suspects Is Convicted in Church Bombing," New York Times, May 23, 2002, pp. 1, 28.
Thich Nhat Hanh, from Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962-1966, reprinted with permission from Riverhead Books by tricycle, Summer 2002
John Hollander, "By Heart," The New Yorker, October 30, 2000, Vol. 76, #32, p. 55. [the reading]
May Sarton, "All Souls," in Cries of the Spirit, edited by Marilyn Sewell, Beacon Press, 1991, p. 131.
"Cause Us, O Lord" from the Book of Prayer
http://www.twilightbridge.com/hobbies/festivals/memorial/history.htm
http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/memorial/history.html
http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/n/nighwo06.html
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