The Courage To See

My mentor said a day will come when I would find myself standing before my congregation with a sermon that I neither planned nor wanted to give, but one that nevertheless wants and needs itself to be heard. "It will scare you to give it," he said. "You will feel as though you are betraying your commitment to offering people hope. And it is then, Scott, "that you will have to remind yourself that sometimes hope is not something you can give in the moment, but rather something you and your congregation must make together out of the sermon after it is over."

This, friends, is that sermon.

Louise Richardson is a professor of government at Harvard University. She teaches a course on terrorism. It's one of the most popular. The class is limited to 15 students, but each time it is offered hundreds of students sign up.

The reasons why, she says, are very different than in the days she was a student. When she was in college, such courses on fringe movements were a way to sort out one's own identity as a radical. Posters of Che Guevara regularly covered dorm room walls. Shouting "Down with the man!" was an expected rite of passage. In a complicated way, understanding the alienation and anger of such movements was a way to understand your own alienation and anger.

But all that has changed, she explains. Now when she goes around the room on the first day of class and asks students to share why they are there, the students respond by saying they want to become Secretary of State or Director of the CIA or the FBI. Across the board, the students say they are there not so much to understand the terrorists, but to understand how to eliminate and lock them up.

Yet by the end of each semester, something unexpected occurs-at least unexpected by the students. You see the first thing Richardson does is require each student to select one terrorist movement. Their assignment is to then track it, consult its website, read its literature and speeches, research the personal history of their leaders and prominent members and then report back to the rest of the class at the end of the term. And almost without exception, every one of those presentations starts out with something like: "This didn't turn out the way I thought it would. While all the other groups on our lists are terrorists, mine is different. The term terrorist isn't entirely fair in my group's case."

They go on: "Let me explain what happened to them as a people. Their history is tragic and full of oppression. And let me tell you all that this organization does for the poor. You won't believe it." Almost never, Richardson says, does the word evil show up. Almost always, she says, the reports end with, "It's all much more complicated than you can imagine."

And often, says Richardson, the report ends with a large list that is prefaced by the words: "And our government's policies and aggression have more to do with their anger than we'd like to think."

I share this story because, in a sense, this was my plan for today's sermon. Starting over a month ago, my intention was to collect enough information on Al-Qaeda and those who sympathize with it so that I could then, in my 15 minutes this morning, walk us through an abbreviated version of Richardson's class. My starting assumption was that what we Americans lack most is good information. And my hope was that by giving all of us those more accurate and nuanced facts we could then go out and educate our fellow Americans, becoming part of the wider effort that is going on across the country to counter the silly and self-defeating tale about the terrorists hating us for our freedoms.

But along the way, like the students, I ran into a surprise of my own. In the midst of compiling the list of all the U.S. policies, presidential statements and American secret military actions that have contributed to and continue to contribute to the animosity and hatred towards our country, I suddenly hit a wall. I just couldn't any longer handle feeling so bad about us!

I didn't even want to look at the list anymore, let alone tell you all about it. And it's not because patriotism got the best of me. Heck, I'm a bleeding heart, appeasing, turn-tail-and-run, traitorous liberal, for heaven's sake! I'm one of those who's supposed to enjoy beating up myself and my country. But even I - after just three weeks of living with critical self-assessment - couldn't handle it.

Living with the grayness of who we are was just too hard.

Now I don't want to overdo it here. It wasn't a crisis. Nothing as dramatic as an anxiety attack or a bout of depression. It was more like my heart and mind just joined together, and in unison said, "Nope, we're done. Can't do it. Don't want to do it. Won't do it. We're going for a hike. We're running away."

So for much of the rest of the day I spent my time in the midst of simple, straightforward beauty. And it felt great! Disturbingly great. I became very aware that what was driving me wasn't simply the need to re-charge, but the desire to escape. It felt so good to walk by the giant homes and giant cars and not think about their connection to our dependence on oil and our war in Iraq. It felt so good to walk by neighbors' yards and not worry about the implications of there not being enough of my preferred candidate's signs in their lawn. It felt so good to think how much I was looking forward to my kids soon being home from school without even the slightest thought about that new estimate of civilian Iraqi children killed since the beginning of the war. It felt so darn good for things not to be mixed or complicated - no bitter-sweet, no gray, no "and's, if's, or but's."

And that's when it hit me: This is exactly what we've been doing as a nation for the past five years. We've not been pursuing an ill-informed and misdirected war against terror; we've been running away from the difficult task of living with the gray.

All of a sudden, my plan to supply us this morning with accurate information seemed wildly off the mark. Truth is on some deep and terrifying level we are not really trying to understand the terrorists at all, are we? No, what we're about as a nation, more than anything else, is a mission to hold on tight to our self-image as the cowboys in white hats. It's not really about creating a new situation out there in the world; it's about maintaining the comfortable storyline in our heads. *[see note at end of sermon]

And before I sound self-righteous, let me say clearly that I don't really blame us for wanting to run away from the gray of who we are. After all, it was my own natural inability to handle the gray that drove me on that walk in the first place. It's a human thing, right? On some level we just don't seem to be built for the gray. Our hearts seem able to juggle the contradictory emotional tasks of self-criticism and self-affirmation, guilt and compassion, despair and hope for only so long. Very few of our minds are able to hold on to all the complexities of gray; there are just too many facts and subtleties to remember. Heck I've probably read a total of 400 pages of history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East over the past three weeks, and if you quizzed me right now I could maybe remember four paragraphs worth.

No the truth is living with the gray is one giant uphill task. And given the choice, most of us normal humans will gladly opt out.

But there's the rub: I'm a pretty normal human, and in the end I didn't opt out. After my brief attempt at running away, I eventually went back to my couch, picked up my book and continued to make and struggle with my list. And I did so, not because I'm special, but because of all of you. It is, in a sense, what you require of me - what we require of each other: we are, simply put, a community committed to not letting each other run away from the gray.

Of all that we offer each other here, this is most certainly one of the greatest gifts and graces. Whether it's through our book clubs, peace vigils, cost of war sign in the lobby, monthly meditations to remember the dead, peace advocates table, or Reality of War movies, it's just something that happens, happens so regularly that many of us don't even notice it as special anymore. That is, until times like these, when we look outside our church walls and see honest self-assessment so much needed but not occurring. And make no mistake we live in times when we desperately need it to occur.

For so long now, we in the U.S. have talked as if only one giant tragedy occurred on 9/11. But in the rest of the world, it is widely recognized that 9/11 was the occasion of two devastating tragedies. One was the horrific deaths of more than 3,000 human beings killed by the terrorists and the other was our active - even aggressive - refusal to even consider that our U.S. policies might have had anything to do with the creation and motivation of those terrorists.

Many of us will remember the wide and very public denunciation of renowned novelist Susan Sontag. Writing in the September 24, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, she asked, "Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a cowardly attack on civilization or liberty or the free world but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" The next morning, in papers across the country, she was roundly labeled belligerent, self-righteous and anti-American. One prominent national newspaper even created a "Susan Sontag award" for "inanity by intellectuals and artists in the wake of the terrorist attacks."

One of the other early American responses that was circulated around the world and seen by Muslims who support us as a tragic turn of events was President Bush's September 19th pentagon press interview. When one reporter asked whether bin Laden had political goals, the president shot back "He's got evil goals! It's hard to even think in conventional terms about a man so dominated by evil."

Such defensive reactions and blind-eyed mindsets continue to this day. And while it may have been hard to recognize in the frightening fog right after 9/11, in hindsight there is no excuse for not recognizing it for what it is. There is simply no way to honestly describe these reactions as authentic attempts to understand the terrorists and those who have sympathy for them. No, this was, and continues to be, about us and our desire not to see ourselves anew. Some say the difference between the war supporters and the peace activists is that one side wants the troops to stay and the other wants them home. I see it differently. I think it comes down to one side being willing to look honestly at ourselves and the other side bending over backwards to avoid looking at all.

By saying the terrorists hate us for what we are, we free ourselves from ever even talking about what we've done.

By describing terrorists and those who sympathize with parts of their message as inconceivably evil and having perpetuated unfathomable acts, we protect ourselves from having to even talk about causes of any kind - the unfathomable after all is just. . .unfathomable.

This is not the logic of a country that is committed to understanding; this is the logic of a people who want to keep their eyes closed. And friends, even more importantly, what I think we need to see - and what we need to help the rest of our country see - is that this is also the logic of a country that has a death wish.

I know that sounds dramatic. And I've wrestled all week with whether or not to phrase it that way, but I think anything less will fail to wake us up to the cliff we are currently fast approaching.

I don't even really want to say it to be honest. But I just don't know how not to, because I have yet to read or hear one single terrorist or military expert who doesn't say the following three things:

that terrorism is something that is here to stay;
that in the next 15-20 years it is virtually a given that terrorists will have access to nuclear weapons; and
that what will give the terrorists their ability to act is the fact that they share with the millions of non-terrorist Muslims the belief that we Americans as a people lack the ability to see ourselves clearly.

Which is, in its essence, another way of saying that our most dangerous and immediate threat is not so much the terrorists as it is us.

I said at the start of this sermon that it was one I neither planned nor wanted to give. I said that my mentor told me that that hope would be found not so much in the words that were shared but in what we do together with those words.

And it is in that spirit, without hesitation, that I give this sermon over to you.

Amen.

Scott Tayler, Parish Co-Minister
October 22, 2006

[* A note about America's understanding of itself. When we, as citizens, come up against our natural tendencies to run from the "gray of who we are," we encounter a national community and culture-one might even say a national religion- that, in a sense, eggs us on. This is not meant as a cheap shot against President Bush. This dynamic-referred to as "American exceptionalism" by historians-- transcends the current administration. It's something deeply engrained in our historical national identity. We have from our founding clung tight to the famous poetic vision of ourselves as "The shining city upon a hill." ("a divinely instituted beacon of light and right.") Thomas Jefferson enshrined lack of gray in our Declaration of Independence: " firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence." Lincoln carried on the tradition during the civil war by framing warring parties in black and white terms: "God cannot be for and against two enemies at the same time." Eisenhower reaffirmed it when he described our historic battle with communism as a "faithful response to the divine" in which "freedom is pitted against slavery and lightness against darkness." And Ronald Reagan embedded American exceptionalism solidly in our national psyche with his most famous speech entitled "City on a Hill": "We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago on that little hill of Philadelphia. ...Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of all afflicted mankind. We are indeed the last best hope of man on earth." None of this encourages or leaves much room for doubt, nuance or critical reflection about who we are.]

The Courage To See

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