The Call of Community in Times of War and Catastrophe
An address delivered by The Reverend Don W. Vaughn-Foerster
at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Grand Traverse
September 11, 2005

This is a problematic Sunday. Here we are at Resumption Sunday, ordinarily a happy and optimistic coming together after a summer of preoccupation with our individual lives and, for many of us, a season of relaxation and joy. But this is also September 11, 2005. Today is the fourth anniversary of the terroristic attack by Al Qaida on our country.

I had to announce a sermon topic for the newsletter six weeks ago and was faced with making some kind of sense out of the 9/11 terrorist attack and “truths to live by”, our program theme for the next several weeks. Furthermore, I had to deal with these apparently contradictory issues while welcoming all of you back to an optimistic and promising year of religious community life.

And, as if that were not a grim enough conundrum, since then countless numbers of our fellow citizens have been killed, injured, and dispossessed by Hurricane Katrina, a so-called natural catastrophe. The lives of everyone in our country are being affected by the deaths and destruction of this hurricane. The chaos on the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf Coast and the way in which necessary aid was unnecessarily delayed and leadership was bungled have left most of us dismayed and feeling personally at risk.

We are struggling to find ways to help those who need our help and, at the same time, to reassure ourselves that we, as a people, will be able, somehow, to coax a better world out of all this suffering and destruction. Actually, we are struggling to find a collective “truth to live by” -- a truth that will motivate us to cope with threats from the natural world and the all too many ethically challenged people who want to lead and control us.

Actually, all this only looks contradictory. The human reality is that people are perennially faced with finding ways to come together in the face of some kind of threat. We, perennially, seek aid and support from one another. We must do this in a world that is both supportive and threatening. The natural world is friendly to us in the way it provides food, shelter, and companionship with our fellow creatures -- human beings included. It is unfriendly to us because its processes -- its earthquakes, its tornadoes, its temperature extremes, its hurricanes -- have functions that exist for the world’s own equilibrium, not ours. The natural world builds us up and tears us down, gives us life and demands our death.

Furthermore, many of us can survive for long stretches of time alone in a wilderness, but we wouldn’t be able to without the parents who bore us and skills learned from others. We wouldn’t even know what being human is without other persons being human around us. We need others. No matter what we call it -- family, or clan, or tribe, or neighborhood, or nation -- we need to be with other people. We need community. We, perennially, seek community. But the issue, always, is not whether but what kind The truth we seek about community is the answer to the question: What =basis for community serves not just our survival but our humanity?

It seems to me that the kind of community that often prevails is largely based on fear -- the fear of being killed, hurt, humiliated, embarrassed or even merely inconvenienced beyond our desires. This fear arouses our survival instincts and we seek out, by ourselves or through others, a certain and a safe comfort zone. This, it seems to me, was the basis for city walls, and moats around castles, and feudal lords and kings who could manage our lives and theirs. This, it seems to me, is the reason for governments and laws and political parties today. There is an innate fear in us that we will not survive unless we band together to create systems that provide the essentials of what we want -- like food, clothing, and possessions that give us comfort and entertainment.

Fear prompts us to give our leaders control over our lives -- even if it means, paradoxically, that they can require our livelihood and our lives. Fear that we will lose all of what we have keeps us from protesting when those to whom we give power take away from us some of what we have. Fear, ultimately, is why, in this so-called Christian nation, people avoid living up to the precepts of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, one of the major sources of our society’s morals and ethics. We are afraid of what will happen if we turn the other cheek and love our enemies, the implications of which we seldom bother to explore. We’re afraid of what will happen if we speak the truth clearly, if we forego wealth for service to others, if we try to serve humanity first and the systems humans build second, if we value peace over conflict, if we actually try to eradicate poverty, and on and on.

The price we pay for such a fear-based community is all around us. We have social systems designed to protect power and status rather than to support the sick, the weak, and the poor. We have a national -- and now a world -- environmentally-exploitive and people-exploitive economic system geared more to benefit those at the top rather than to benefit those in the middle and at the bottom who make the system work. We have nations and leaders of nations fundamentally so suspicious of one another that warfare seems an almost ineradicable human institution.

It is strange to me that people in general tend not to understand the dynamics of fear as a social organizer. They don’t understand that it is fear that keeps them from protesting self-serving, avaricious leadership and that keeps them locked into a system that diminishes rather than enhances their humanity. They don’t grasp that it is fear that says war is all right and necessary. Nor, once that is said, do they understand that the next rationalism is to say that any war that serves our leaders’ purposes is good because, by serving the leader of whom deep down we tend to be afraid, it serves us. Were it not for an American populace fearful of losing the material advantages it has gained, the Iraqi war would not have been possible. Open and critical and courageous minds would not have allowed it.

Much of the distress and destruction of Hurricane Katrina occurred because of this system based on fear -- a system that allows its leaders to protect themselves (their power, their status, their control over others) in the face of other people’s losses. Katrina demonstrated for me that our national community, based on fear as it is, is bankrupt of humane concern. In regards to Katrina, the self-serving and bungling elected leadership -- especially on the national level -- left most of us dismayed and feeling personally at risk.

But there was another factor at work with Katrina, as the same factor was at work in the aftermath of 9/11. And this factor points to an essential truth about community. It is another innate human characteristic: the compassion and concern that human beings can feel for others who are hurting. I am talking about the immediate desire to help that overcomes fear and that leads people to risk themselves for the well-being of others. Most people have this desire -- except the sociopaths, some of whom go into politics or seek out other venues of self-aggrandizing leadership.

That this humane response resides within all people who grasp in their minds and hearts what being human entails is why, I believe, the human species has survived as long as it has. It is, also, this response that will carry our species into the future and, someday, may even build the utopia of caring citizens, the desire for which underlies the truly ethical religions of the world. The notion of democracy stems from this humane impulse because it assumes that the will of the people is, finally, rooted in the peoples’ good will.

When people surmount their fears enough to allow this more caring response to one another, then a different kind of community is possible. In contrast to a community based on fear, this one is based on empathy. It acknowledges and celebrates the reality that human beings can actually feel for and with one another. In the face of the catabolic, tearing down forces of the universe, it affirms that the purpose of life -- certainly of human life -- is to build up and integrate and aim for an excellence in being that fear neither values nor understands. Whereas a community based on fear feeds on control and, ultimately, on violence, a community of empathy transcends these callous urges and, instead, proclaims: We are here not to use one another; we are here to help one another. We are here not to exploit; we are here to conserve and strengthen. We are here not to attack problems and manage people for our personal edification and security; we are here to solve problems and support others in mutually enhancing ways.

The story Mary Van Valin told the children this morning is a wonderful image I would like to apply in my own way. She told of how sticks taken singly are easy to break but taken in a bundle have enormous resiliency and strength. Let’s forget the single sticks for the moment and think of them in two bundles that represent two kinds of community. One bundle is bound by an ever-tightening steel band that eventually will squeeze out the singularity of the individual, leaving only an amorphous mass of entities mashed together. The other bundle is drawn together with a sturdy, elastic band that holds the sticks in touch with and supportive of one another but allows the individual her or his own experiences and continued growth. The first bundle exerts control; the second enables growth both individually and collectively. The first represents the community of fear; the second, the community of empathy. I would say that the quality of our community depends on the way we stick together, but I won’t.

I’ve already used the word “utopia”. When I speak of an empathetic community, does it sound like I am describing an impossible utopia? In a way I am because, although I believe such community is latent in all caring human beings, fearful people tend to act in other damaging and demeaning ways. But, in another way, I am describing what has to be the future of the human species if it is to survive the rigors of a world that makes no special provision for a continued human presence. Will such a community ever be? It will be by coming to a mutual respect for one another individually and to a caring cooperation collectively. Then threats can be overcome without sinking into self-serving and brutal behavior. It will be when we seriously try to make concrete in our collective and personal lives the highest of the moral and humane values discovered and taught by the most perceptive religious prophets and philosophers of our human condition.

But, isn’t that why we meet here on Sundays? Isn’t that why we resume our activities together after a summer apart? As religious liberals, haven’t we learned that the price we pay for “security from fear” tends to squeeze out our individuality, our personal freedom, and our human concern for both persons and our environment? Aren’t we, here, seriously trying to determine what empathy feels like and how it is expressed? -- why it is necessary before we can even start to like and love one another? Aren’t we trying to make humane values concrete in this room, in our families, in this town, in this nation?

It is my belief that we are trying to do these things. It is also my belief that, as a congregation and as a larger movement, we are making headway in this regard. We are not perfect yet We still get overly diverted by institutional matters because of our fears about our institutional survival.. But, yet, we are here. We want to make the most we can of life in human terms whether it pleases the rest of the fearful world or not.

So, on that basis and in spite of the tragedies of four years ago and the tragedy of Katrina that is still happening and shall be happening for much too long in the future -- in spite of all this I welcome you back from summer. I welcome you back to a community that is based on care -- one in which compassion and love can spring forth with more ease than at many other places we go. I welcome you back to this continuing effort to create a community of empathy. After this summer and in spite of the tragedies surrounding us, let us resume our lives and our work together. If we do it well, we will be better able to model for others a more humane behavior in times of war and catastrophe. If we do it well, we will be better able to find the truths and meaning of our own lives.