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by Bob Reed, bbsbob@earthlink.net

There is a story of a little girl whose mother sent her on an errand. She was gone a long time and when she finally returned home her mother asked what had taken her so long. She had stopped to help a friend fix his bicycle because it had broken. But you don't know anything about fixing bicycles, exclaimed her mother. I know, replied the girl, I stopped to help him cry.

Dear friends, as I have struggled with the right words to give you today, I found myself having the most difficult time in writing this sermon. I have found myself doing, over this past week, the very things that seem to be common behaviors, shared by many with whom I have spoken; feeling the things I am certain all of us have felt; thinking of the event over and over again. I have been preoccupied with the horrifying, life changing event of last Tuesday; I have had difficulty thinking about other things. I have been glued to the tv, even when I wanted to turn it off and not hear any more, or see any more pictures of the people in NY who have been begging for information about a lost loved one. I have read many comments from my colleagues all over the world - and I have both agreed and disagreed with every one of them, even as they went from one extreme to the other. I am amazed at the reaction and responses to the United States from around the world - and watched with a full heart the work of firefighters, police, volunteers from all over who have made donations, doing the awful work of removing what is said to be over a million tons of steel. I have come to realize that one of the only things to do...is to help each other cry.

But I have also come to what I know are the most important words that I can say to you - I love you. I love the struggle that I know each one of you has been going through; I love the tears that I have seen in your eyes. As individuals, truly now members of one embattled body, we shall be known no longer by the symbols of abundance and prosperity, but by how well we learn to recognize our own tears in one another's eyes. Though our minds have been imprinted forever by images of horror, our hearts join in deep admiration for the ordinary courage and simple goodness of our neighbors in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, made one in shared suffering, reminding each other of how splendid we can truly be.

That said, I come back to the deep and painful reality of the blurry gray muck at the center of it all that is the human condition. Suffering begets suffering, and at some point we must create communities and cultures that are willing to make the courageous move to start playing a different game than the one the world has been engaged in for too long. We must not surrender to the anger which engenders feelings of hatred. "We must not choose one in place of another - on the one hand, if hatred and vengeance spur our lust for retribution, rather than the greater quest for peace, we will only add to the world's terror even as we seek to end it. On the other, if we pray only for peace, we shall surely assist the spread of terrorism. "

Rev. Forrester Church, minister of All Souls UU Church in NYC, explains that statement in this way, and I quote him because of his eloquence: "History supports each of these statements. In the first instance, we must recall history's most ironic lesson: Choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them. Terrorism is powered by hatred. If we answer the hatred of others with hatred of our own, we and our enemies will soon be indistinguishable. It is hard, I know, to curb the passion for vengeance.

When we see Palestinian children dancing in the street to celebrate the slaughter of our neighbors and loved ones, how can we help but feel a surge of disgust and anger, the very emotions that precipitate hatred. But the Palestinians are not our enemy. Nor are the Muslims. This is not, as some historians would have it, a war between civilizations. It is a war between civilization and anarchy, a war of God-demented nihilists against the very fabric of world order. I hope you will go out of your way in the days ahead to practice the second great commandment and love your Arab neighbors as yourself. Few outside the circle of those who lost loved ones in Tuesday's tragedy are more surely its victims than are the millions of innocent Muslims whose God's name has been taken so savagely in vain.

"This said," Church goes on, "to pray only for peace right now is unwittingly to pray for a war more unimaginable than awakening to the World Trade Center smoldering in ashes. .. After simmering for decades, on Tuesday World War III commenced in earnest, against an enemy more illusive and more dangerous than any we have ever known before.
Good people here in America and around the world must join in a common crusade against a common enemy. From this day forward, any state that sequesters terrorists as a secret part of their arsenal must be held directly accountable.
"With the war to be fought one between civilization and anarchy, our only hope lies in the balance we strike as we enter this uncertain and forbidding future. It rests in how well we balance justice and mercy, retribution and compassion, the might of weapons and the power of love."

To do this we must not only prepare our minds; we must also prepare our hearts. Above all else, this is a spiritual challenge, one that each one of us must meet. If before we could seemingly afford the luxury of relegating our spiritual lives to the occasional Sunday, today, we must redirect our energies and spirits. In times like these, measured against the preparation of our souls, all lesser priorities lose their urgency.

So I challenge you to pay attention - even though I have been preaching this for the three years that I have been giving sermons here - to pay attention to your spiritual lives, to prepare your heart for the challenge that faces each and every one of us today. Further, I challenge you to come to church every Sunday - and to come on other days - and make the strengthening of your spiritual lives, the protection of your very souls, a full time endeavor. No less than the salvation of this world now demands of us that we NOT surrender to hatred, to the lust of revenge; we NOT surrender to the easy words of "let's get 'em - let's go over there and bomb the hell out of them..." We will be judged by how we balance justice and mercy, retribution and compassion. That is a spiritual issue.

A story (that comes from the Rocky Mountain Storytellers Guild Newsletter) called "The Wolves Within."
A young boy told of his anger at a schoolmate who had done him an injustice. His Grandfather said: "Let me tell you a story."

"I, too have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But, hate wears you down and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times. It is as if there are two wolves inside me: one is good and does not harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. But the other wolf is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights with everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."

The boy looked intently into his grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?" The grandfather solemnly replied, "The one I feed."

We will be judged by how we balance justice and mercy, retribution and compassion.

I have used the word "surrender" - and the things to which we must not surrender; but I believe that "surrender" is a spiritual idea, and one that, in the most positive way, can become a spiritual practice. I have already told you what I do not mean by surrender - those feelings to which we must never surrender. But think for a moment: when was the last time you have felt a spirit of peace, validation and joy of surrendering your impenetrable selfhood...to nature, to love, to intimacy, to community, to the sacred?

I will never ever forget the kind of experience I had when I went on a vacation to a New Hampshire lake one summer - it had been a hot day and still warm at 10:00 pm, so we (my partner and I) decided to take a dip. Easing into the cool water and taking some time to get used to the water temperature, I lay back, floating on the calm surface, with my face toward the sky. I was amazed to see the array of bright stars shimmering from one end to the other. In an instant, I had this wonderful sensation of not knowing where I ceased and where these great, infinite, welcoming heavens began. I relaxed, and surrendered to this feeling of what I can only describe as being merged with all that was...I allowed myself to be submerged into something much larger than I could ever imagine to be. In that moment of willing surrender to that YES, I was filled with a sense of peace, beauty, belonging, and love that I wish I could always feel but rarely do...a feeling that I wish with all my heart I could recapture right this instant, to share with all of you as we try to heal our ravaged hearts from the experience of this week. Do you all know this intense spiritual feeling of peaceful, complete surrender I am describing?

I am convinced that if I were to make the search for this feeling, by being more willing to surrender myself to mystery - by searching for the God that seems to be hiding from us today - I would be more able to help myself and therefore, you - begin to heal.

I have realized that I myself have been pretty nervous when it comes to this particular spiritual stance. In spite of the peace, validation and joy I take from moments of surrendering my selfhood (like the one in the lake) I have not been so sure I really want to regularly let go of myself in the spiritual sense. Surrender (in one's religious life) implies and requires that one willfully submits, lets go of, and gives over one's conscious control of one's life to some power or presence larger than oneself, and this I find very hard to do as a rational, independence-minded Unitarian Universalist. As you know, our liberal faith tradition (which has always been suspicious of ecclesiastical, scriptural and cosmic authority) is built upon the rocks of individual freedom, reason and personal authority. We are perhaps the most rational, willful and individualistic religion on the face of the earth, because we insist on assigning, to each individual Unitarian Universalist ultimate responsibility for his or her own religious beliefs, values, behaviors and practices.

You are not only FREE in this church to use your own personal authority to look for what is true and real, right and good for yourself, you are then OBLIGED to do the disciplined work of following your own authentic spiritual path, once you have uncovered it. While we do in this religious community regularly look beyond ourselves, to scripture, tradition, history and other external sources of authority, for spiritual guidance and direction, ultimately, each individual UU is free to reasonably and responsibly establish (and then, live out of) their own religious, spiritual and ethical framework. It is anathema, then, for UUs to even consider the spiritual value of surrendering authority and control to someone or something else.

Most of us fiercely want to control and shape our own spiritual beliefs, principles, landscapes, and destinies. I myself, even though I do personally believe there is a great and mysterious spirit afoot in this creation, a spirit to which I purposefully belong, have been nonetheless routinely hesitant to willfully surrender much philosophical, emotional or spiritual control to anyone or anything beyond my own skin. But I think you and I have missed something of great personal and spiritual importance if we fail to consider the spiritual value of surrender, as one stance in our religious lives. I do not believe that capable and self-contained as we might be, any of us can live a rich, full and satisfying life imagining ourselves as somehow independent agents in this otherwise amazingly woven creation. The events of this week have underlined this for me.

Another form of positive surrender in our daily living is when we feel impelled, or compelled, to surrender our personal will to the sheer power, clarity, and rightness of some principle, cause or value. Today we are asked to commit to justice, and mercy; retribution and compassion. Sometimes we as human beings simply must obey the dictates of something which we know to be absolutely right, good or true, thus subjugating our own immediate self interest on behalf of something higher and holier.

And I believe that what is higher and holier for us now, in this time, on this day, in this space, is that we commit ourselves once again to encouraging ourselves and each other in a search for the holy, the sacred - a search for a God whose love and compassion we can identify - that we continue to seek meaning, even meaning that is hard to find, and not go home because we can't find it quickly - that we reach out for the hands of the persons next to us - that we lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time, emphasizing the human dimension in the task of building a genuine civilization. And make no mistake about it, dear friends, the very salvation of the world demands it of you - of me - right now. The very salvation of the world demands- that we recognize our own tears in the eyes of another; that we be in right relation, depth relation, caring relation, with ourselves, with each other, with the culture, and with creation. We are asked to do no less.

May each one of us find the comfort and healing that we need. So may it be. Amen.

For our closing hymn today - the UU ministers of the Washington DC area have asked all UU churches around the country to sing with them - This is My Song - #159.