LIVING IN CRISIS
by Richard Leonard
June 9, 2002
Many of you know that I am not a frequent speaker from the pulpit here at All Souls. It's my choice, I can add, particularly since I retired five years ago. This is actually the first time I have been in this pulpit on a Sunday morning since the tragedy of September 11.
Perhaps you can imagine the weight that that fact places on my shoulders at the moment - to make the best possible sense, factually and spiritually, out of the situation we New Yorkers in particular find ourselves in, nine months after our country was shaken to its roots.
The truth is that I was traumatized that Tuesday morning, not as much surely as those who lost loved ones, not as much as the bride of a few years earlier who took many minutes on the telephone before being able to say:
"I was there. Our apartment is unfortunately about five blocks from the World Trade Center. I was in my kitchen. When the first plane hit, I heard it. The plane flew right over my building and smacked into the building, and it was horrifying."
Not traumatized as much as several of our members were, who saw and heard from their offices the towers come down in an unimaginable, earsplitting noise.
But more so perhaps than those around the county who only watched the awful events on television, and were able to say afterward, "It was like watching a bad movie."
You see, I had my own personal encounter with Flight 11 two minutes before it hit the North Tower.
I was coming to work at the church that beautiful Tuesday morning. I had gotten off the Madison Avenue bus at 79th Street to walk the last two blocks to All Souls. At Park Avenue the light turned against me. I had to just stand and wait for an endless string of cars to pass.
I glanced up to my left, and was surprised to see an airplane coming straight down Park Avenue. It was not particularly low, nor particularly high. But what struck me was its course, not varying one degree from its path down Park Avenue.
The light changed and I walked out onto the center island, and looked straight up as the plane passed overhead. My reaction? "Is there anything more beautiful than a big commercial airliner silhouetted against a perfectly blue sky?!"
But its course was disquieting. Had it taken off from LaGuardia? Somehow the angle didn't seem right.
I stood and followed its path southward. When it seemed to be directly over Grand Central, but actually was beyond it, it began to bank to the right. Was it heading to Newark? But planes don't go to Newark over Manhattan.
In the next moments I had lost sight of it. I walked on to the church, forgetting all about it, of course. Ten minutes later we knew where it had been headed.
A day later I was able to fully visualize what was going on in the cabin as the plane passed directly over me and I had seen it as the very epitome of beauty.
Three days later I knew that the co-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 had been a classmate of our nephew's wife in Massachusetts.
Everyone was touched by the attack on the Trade Center. One way that I was affected is that it is simply impossible now for me to cross Park Avenue at any point from Grand Central north without looking up in the sky and reliving my experience of that flight, and thinking again about the people in the plane and the four men who took them to their tragic ends.
If I'm at 79th Street, I follow the exact path of the plane, gauge again its height, look straight up from the center island, and then look down toward Grand Central and try to see the exact spot between the buildings where I saw it for the last time.
This is not something I choose to do, dear people. This is what it means to be traumatized. I can't imagine that Park Avenue will ever have the same meaning for me that it had last summer and the years before that.
Bear with me. This sermon is as much TO me as it is FROM me.
I have to say that the leadership your other ministers have given, Forrest's conduct of the candlelight service on September 12, Galen's sermon that Sunday, Jan's visits to Ground Zero and her interviews with rescuers, all three of their counselling to the bereaved and to the stunned, and all of your responses to each other and in setting up a significant relief fund, these things have sustained ALL of us, Polly and me far from the least.
All Souls was called upon to minister to a city, and to a whole country, and minister it did. Polly and I were never prouder to belong anywhere than we were to All Souls these past months.
Three weeks ago when I began to write this sermon we were in Atlanta, visiting the Martin Luther King Jr. Center and Emory College, and not coincidentally, two granddaughters and their families, including two of our four great grandchildren.
But as I scribbled the beginnings of a sermon, New York was under a special alert - the fleet was coming to town, the Brooklyn Bridge was shut down, and the news was full of worrisome information: the FBI and the CIA had failed to head off 9/11 though they might have, had they imagined a worst-case scenario, Al Qaida pilots were still at large in the U.S., charter airlines were discovered to be a completely weak link in our beefed-up airline security measures, as was air cargo security.
And Donald Rumsfeld and others were saying: There is absolutely no way in which we as a country can protect ourselves against all the threats, to our water, to our food supply, our nuclear power plants, our airplanes, our rails, - the list went on and on.
We sat at breakfast discussing the world scene and our place in it. Atlanta was simply gorgeous! We didn't have to come back to New York the next day. We were among family and friends. Somebody else could take Friday's wedding. This sermon was still almost three weeks away.
In fact, we didn't have to continue living in New York at all. With such a large family scattered now from Germany to New Zealand, a rough calculation said that if we divided our time over a year among our sixteen descendants, we would be spending less than a month with each one.
And as soon as we put those thoughts into words, we knew we would be heading back the next day. New York became my city in 1949, 53 years ago. Polly adopted it in 1967. One does not run out on one's adopted kids!
But I have to tell you that, for better or for worse, I personally am not somebody who can sit around and let things just happen to me when I can do something that may influence what happens.
There are many voices today telling us that there are so many threats to our safety that we might as well just sit back and let what's coming come to us.
I was surprised, for example, to hear Curtis Sliwa on television tell us - this is the Curtis Sliwa of the red berets who organized his corps of young Guardian Angels to cope with crime on the subways and largely succeeded - tell us that we should just keep going about our business in these crisis days, as if we had nothing to fear.
It is part of one viewpoint, which says that fear is the greatest enemy, that if we give in to fear and change our patterns from what they have been, the terrorist will have achieved his goal.
I just don't buy that viewpoint. I'm not saying that we should cave in to fear and become like the proverbial man who jumped on his bicycle and rode off frantically in all directions. Or that we should let fear deactivate us, to the point where we sit around sucking our thumbs watching only the latest news reports.
SOMEWHERE, between fear and panic on the one hand and "dancin' the night away", a la Ship of Fools, lies our ability and our need to cope with reality. Indeed, it is my very strong belief that the best way for us
to keep our sanity, in this time of great danger, is to try to cope with perceived threats, in intelligent ways, without trampling on people's rights, and to hope that others will do the same.
On September 12 we were told by our President that we were at war. That's War with a capital 'W', not a small one. I see little evidence that we've caught on to the fact, in people's attitudes day in and day out.
The energy that goes into a Super Lottery, for example, is prodigious. One might well ask what difference it would make to pour that energy into a more concerted effort to defend our city. So much of our time goes into activity that we will look back on as being of no consequence, or even detrimental in our present jeopardy.
The picture keeps coming back to me of Great Britain during the London blitz of the 40's. Every night 200 German warplanes did everything they could to utterly destroy that great city, and they destroyed vast portions of it.
Every Londoner, however, fit into the war effort and knew how he or she fitted in, whether it was holding a fire hose, or shipping children off to a safer countryside, or even decoding things they knew nothing about.
The famous German Enigma Machine was solved in part by dedicated people comparing lists of numbers that meant nothing to them, except that it was vital to the war effort.
Perhaps September 11 has changed many of our lives. Perhaps there are lots of people who have been transformed into doing their jobs of inspection, and visualizing, and restructuring their organizations to cope with the forces bent on destroying us. Perhaps. The FBI and the CIA and Congress seem to be rousing themselves to analyze the structures that became far too bureaucratic over decades of time.
But I don't sense a general rallying of the public at large. Indeed, public opinion polls seem to indicate the opposite - that, by and large, we want to forget 9/11 and go back to the world we knew before last September.
My proposal is that each one of us pick a NEW area to become well-informed about, in defense of our lives, our city and our country, and devote energy to that area. We may not become experts, but we can make a difference.
I've decided that the area I want to make my own is the nuclear problem. I guess it's because I perceive it to be the greatest threat to us. A month ago I pictured our nuclear plant at Indian Point simply waiting for a dozen terrorists to leap out of nowhere and create a Chernoble-like explosion that would render most of the Northeast uninhabitable.
That's what I pictured, until I began reading actual material in the field and realized it wouldn't be quite that easy to attack the plant by land or by air. By the way, if you missed the N.Y. Times Magazine article of two weeks ago by Bill Keller, on the various nuclear threats, that's a good place to begin. I've reproduced copies of it. If you leave your name with me after the service, I'll see that you get one.
And don't forget that in Guy Quinlan, a member of the congregation, you have a treasure of information about the nuclear field. Guy is a former president of our board and has headed our Committee on Nuclear
Disarmament for some time, not to mention heading also our denomination's Service Committee. Recently I conveyed to Guy my intention to be more helpful to him and not to miss any more of his committee meetings if I can help it.
But, as I say, we can all fit into different places in our effort to save our city. There are potential decoders among us, and the holders of water hoses, and the people who might have ideas about checking incoming cargo. As Laura Johnson said last Sunday, we need to improvise, to adjust to the forces around us, have our own voice, but express it in the context of the group, so that we have a harmony of effort. Getting to know those who dislike us, and reaching out to understand them, is another worthy effort we can consciously undertake, perhaps for the first time.
If we rededicate ourselves to meaningful activity, we will find ourselves moving into new, tangential areas. I learned this past week where Gov. Pataki's New York City office is, right down there on Third Ave below 42nd Street. I didn't get to see the governor, (and it would have been a waste of his time if I had), but I know now where his office is, and how I might communicate with him or his office.
And I learned in the last week who the state Homelands Security Director is, a Mr. John Scanlon. Every state has its counterpart to Tom Ridge, the Homelands Security Director in Washington. I'm drafting a letter to Mr. Scanlon outlining a plan for a state volunteer corps of people who do not feel their talents are being used enough in the present crisis.
Last Sunday Polly and I were about to head out to lunch after church when we remembered that Jan had invited all of us to a luncheon meeting with Nigel Robinson, the vice president of the HALO Trust, the principal organization in the world for clearing the 20,000,000 or so land mines that have been planted in war zones in many countries which continue to maim people who return to the land if the mines are not cleared.
Sunday was another beautiful day, and the temptation was strong to eat somewhere else. But in keeping with our new sense of urgency to do something about the mess the world is in, we went to hear and eat with Nigel and his two assistants. Only about a dozen or so people joined us.
My guess is that you've never held a land mine in your hand. Nigel brought one, which he handed around —deactivated, of course.
It's about the size of a hockey puck, and costs $3.50 to make. It can always be detected, even buried a foot underground, because it has to have a tiny bit of metal in its triggering device. They are dug out of the ground laterally, by people in protective gear. That is, a hole is dug next to the mine and then the dirt is carefully scraped away and the mine is lifted out sideways so that no pressure is put on top of it to detonate it. They are dug out often by the very people who want to come back on the land and farm it.
They are paid to do this. The money comes principally from a number of governments that contribute to the effort. The U.S., to its credit, makes the largest contribution. You will point out that we have not signed the anti-land mine treaty, (for complicated reasons that involve the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.)
Incidentally, anybody who wants to work for HALO I believe can do so, although nobody works at a desk for the organization who hasn't been first to Angola or Afghanistan or Cambodia to become a hands-on expert in the science of digging and removing.
I'm sorry that more people didn't have the experience last week of holding the land mine in their hands, and pushing down on the rubber top and spring, and imagining where they would spend the next 13 billion years if it had not been deactivated. (In actual practice the mines are not deactivated - they are put in a pile in a field and then detonated together.)
I say I'm sorry more people didn't have our experience, because I suspect that when you have held one of those things in your hands, you become a somewhat different person, just as my watching Flight 11 pass directly over my head has undoubtedly changed me in some respects, and losing love ones, whatever the cause, makes monumental changes in a person.
We live in a time of crisis.
The primary instinct is to protect ourselves. Polly and I now carry cell phones. Their only real purpose is to connect us to each other if there were an emergency. Nobody else has our cell phone numbers. I don't think people should feel guilty about taking reasonable steps for protecting themselves.
The second response, which I've tried to advocate in this sermon, is to take seriously any challenges that you perceive and try to undertake something new that helps you feel that you are coping, very important, I think , for one's mental health.
Having done those two things, I think there IS a place for letting events roll over you, so to speak, and for simply carrying on, doing one's best, and knowing that our fate is never finally in our hands.
On September 11 I happened to have a Japanese wedding scheduled for 11 a.m. here in the sanctuary. By 9:30 the church staff was distraught, watching TV in Forrest's office. I said, "There's no way the wedding is going to happen, with the whole city in such distress." I didn't even think about preparing myself or the sanctuary for a wedding.
But at 10:40 two white limos drove up, with the wedding party, still missing one set of parents who hadn't been located. I moved as quickly as I could, and soon everybody was in the Ware Room for our pre-wedding interview, complete with their interpreter.
I don't remember most of what was said in that session, but I do remember saying what a shame it was that on the day that should be the happiest day of their lives, our city was going through its saddest day.
We did the ceremony, changing some of the words to recognize the unhappy events taking place as we stood there. We then went out to Lexington Avenue. They had brought rice with them, which they threw on the emerging bride and groom.
Meanwhile many people were walking up Lexington Avenue, stunned by what they had seen downtown, and here was this wedding coming out of the church. One young woman had a cell phone to her ear. As she went past she was saying, "Can yo believe it? With everything that's happening, they're having a WEDDING at this church?"
I tapped her on the shoulder and said, "These folks came more than 5000 miles to get married here today, and we decided to go ahead with it." She said, "Oh, I wasn't being judgmental - I just thought it was odd, to see a wedding at a time like this."
I'll admit that it was an odd juxtaposition of events. I'm not sure anything would have been gained by delaying the wedding or cancelling it. We sent the young couple off with the thought that they represented "new life" in the world, which was important on that day of all days.
This past April Polly and I were in San Francisco attending the UU President's Council, along with John Reidy of our congregation. That Sunday morning we attended the First UU Church of that city, whose co-ministers are John Marsh and Margot Gross. Many of you will remember Margot when she was an intern at All Souls.
The sermon that day included a question and answer period between the children of the church school and their ministers. If the questions were inspired, the answers from the ministers were equally inspired. I asked Margot to send me the transcript.
One little girl asked, "Do you think we will live in a peaceful world?" Margot answered, "To begin with, I do not think that peace is the natural state of the world. We all know that birds, fish and animals kill and eat each other. Most human beings eat meat, fish and fowl, which have been killed. And, human history has been a constant struggle of one group of people against another. However, this is not to say there is no caring, nurturing and peace-making in the world. There is, and we can see it amongst wild animals as well as human beings.
"But there is a different way to answer the question," she went on.
"I believe, I know, that peace is possible inside you. If you practice peace, you can develop a peaceful place within you.
"And how do you practice peace? By being aware, noticing what is happening at the moment, giving it your full attention. You learn to become aware of your body and notice the signals it gives you if you are becoming tense or agitated. You pay attention to your breathing, focussing on it to help calm anger or nervousness. So, you gain control over your actions and reactions."
She concluded, "You can choose to act and speak peacefully. You can become an island of peace, touching and changing the world with your peaceful presence.
"Rita, you asked me if I think we will ever live in a peaceful world. My answer is: No, I do not. But I do think you can live in a peaceful way in this world, and that will make all the difference." Good work, Margot!!
So that's my message for this morning. And remember that I am talking as much to myself as to you.
One: Do reasonable things to protect yourself and don't feel guilty for doing what seems reasonable.
Two: Do something that helps you feel you are contributing to the effort to save our city, our country, and even the future of humanity. And
Three: Recognize that, finally, events are out of our hands, and that it is important to develop that inner self Margot speaks of, that has a measure of peace, whatever else happens.
May we each find that peace to carry us through. Amen.
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