THE NEEDS OF THE DAY A sermon preached by Galen Guengerich All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City February 24, 2013 The proverbial phone call in the middle of the night came to our home in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. My wife Holly and I had returned from Northern Ireland, land of the Troubles, only a few hours before troubles of a different kind arrived. We learned that Holly s older brother Marlin had died suddenly on Monday night of a massive heart attack. He was 61. Marlin lived in Hawaii. His two children, 24-year-old Maile and 18-year-old Dylan, live in Alaska, as does his ex-wife Shannon. One of Marlin s other sisters also lives in Alaska, and the third sister lives in Portland, Oregon, where his mother lives as well. His dad lives in Wisconsin. Given the geography, the family won t gather until the summer, when we ll hold a memorial service at Marlin s favorite place in the world: his summer cabin on Douglas Lake in Michigan. Marlin Atkinson was a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii. He was one of the world s leading experts on coral reefs. Ruggedly handsome and winsomely gregarious, he headed up a team of scientists his lab was known as the Atkinson lab dedicated to understanding the behavior of coral reef ecosystems in an era of sea change and climate change. He was struck down in the prime of his life at the height of his powers. His death was swift and brutal, a consequence of nature s indifference toward one of its foremost champions. The irony for Holly and me is that we had spent the previous weekend in Northern Ireland with people accustomed to death coming swiftly and brutally, often close at hand. Like the people of Jerusalem, the people of Belfast have been divided by religious convictions and sequestered by barrier walls the so-called Peace Wall, in the case of Belfast. The initial section of the Peace Wall was erected by British troops as a temporary measure at the outset of the Troubles in 1969 to separate the Protestants on Shankill Road, who were loyal to Great Britain, from the Catholics on Falls Road, who favored reunification with the Republic of Ireland. The seed of this division had been planted several centuries before, when William of Orange conquered Scotland, England, and Ireland in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The people of Ireland, mostly Catholic and poor, did not take well to being colonized by this high-handed Protestant conqueror and his privileged minions. The quest for Irish independence eventually led to an insurrection in 1916 known as the Easter Rising, which the British tried to crush by swiftly executing the leading conspirators, four of them poets. You may recall Plato s counsel in The Republic about ~ 1 ~
how to maintain stability in the ideal state. First, Plato said in effect, kill all the poets. For the British, the killing of the poets came too late. One of the poets who was involved but escaped unscathed was William Butler Yeats. He later penned a volume of poems about the uprising, including the well-known poem titled The Second Coming, which begins: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Yeats poem Easter, 1916 closes with a question about those who died: Was it needless death after all?... We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead. And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse -- MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. After five years of warfare, the British cut a deal in 1921 with the Irish Republican Army to divide Ireland. The mainly Catholic regions in the south would become the Republic of Ireland, and the Protestant-majority counties in the far north renowned for ship building and textiles would become Northern Ireland and remain part of Great Britain. This resolution left Northern Ireland deeply divided between the minority Catholics, who continued to wave the flag of a united Ireland, and the majority Protestants, who persistently waved the British flag. These religious and political tensions erupted in renewed violence in 1969 and persisted for three decades. More than 3,200 people were killed during the Troubles. The killing was usually at close-range and ~ 2 ~
often personal. Busses and shops were bombed, families were gunned down at home, and people were picked off by snipers while walking down the street. In addition to trying to quash the violence with heavy troop presence, the British began building the so-called Peace Wall. The temporary measure became a more permanent feature: today the various walls extend a total of 20 miles in length and up to 25 feet in height. Since the Good Friday Agreement brought an increasingly durable peace in 1998, people have been free to go around the walls and pass through the gates from one community to another, though some of the gates are routinely closed at night, while others can be closed remotely by police. Overall, three-quarters of the people in Northern Ireland want the walls to come down, but two-thirds of the people who live near the walls want them to remain. One of the negotiators who worked to achieve the 1998 Good Friday Agreement is a former trade union organizer named Christopher Hudson. Raised Catholic in Dublin, Chris was viewed by the Dublin government as one of their own. In his role as a union organizer, however, Chris had organized Ireland for United Parcel Service, which required negotiating with Protestant leaders in Northern Ireland. During the period leading up to the Good Friday Agreement, Chris served as a secret negotiator between the Dublin government and the Ulster Volunteer Force, one of the most violent of the Protestant paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. For his work on behalf of the Good Friday Agreement and his ongoing efforts to extend the peace, Queen Elizabeth II awarded him an MBE (Member of the British Empire) an exceedingly high honor. Today, after a career transition, Chris is minister of All Souls Church in Belfast, where I preached last Sunday. Holly and I had a deeply gratifying experience there with Chris and his wife Isabella, who teaches art history at Trinity College in Dublin. We found All Souls in Belfast a kindred spirit to All Souls in New York. It s an open and welcoming congregation of diverse political views, religious backgrounds, and sexual orientations a remarkable achievement in Ireland, either in Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. Chris remains deeply engaged in the peace process. One of the provisions in the Good Friday Agreement called for the release from prison of men who had been convicted of violent crimes related to the Troubles. Some of these men have since assumed key leadership roles in Northern Ireland. In some cases, they are now responsible for the civic wellbeing of people whose family members they personally executed. Given the animosities that linger and the walls that remain and the divisions that persist, peace remains an ongoing challenge. The leadership of Chris Hudson and the witness of All Souls Church provide a compelling example to the people of Northern Ireland that we can be united by what we share in common rather than being divided by the ways we differ. I have invited Chris to fill the pulpit at All Souls here in New York sometime soon. I d love for you to meet Chris and Isabella. The work of making peace in places where conflict persists and extending justice in places where disparities exist takes many forms, and our work here in New York can be inspired by their work in Belfast, and vice-versa. ~ 3 ~
Was it needless death after all? Yeats wondered in the wake of the Easter Rising in 1916. My own conviction is that dying to extend the domain of a Catholic God or a Protestant God or any such God is indeed needless. Dying to establish or protect an ethnic identity or nation state is a more complicated matter, of course; sometimes dying for such a cause is needful and sometimes not. My own approach is to view these conflicts through a human rights lens, which ensures that the values we sacrifice to preserve and promote are universal values rather than sectarian sympathies. The truth is that death is often needlessly present in our lives and our world. Innocent people needlessly die when political leaders are too self-serving to wage peace. Children needlessly die from lack of food or proper immunizations. Young girls needlessly die in childbirth because they were raped at age ten or married off at age twelve. Theologians and moral philosophers distinguish between two types of evil: moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil is caused by willful human actions, such as murder, rape, genocide, and terrorist attacks. Moral evil encompasses the kind of human actions that need never happen at all. One can imagine a world where girls were never raped by gangs of men; and genocidal tyrants never massacred their citizens; and bystanders were never killed by car bombs. Natural evil, on the other hand, is not a consequence of human action at least not directly but rather is intrinsic to the cycle of life on this planet, in this universe. Sometimes the earth quakes and tsunamis wreak havoc, or chromosomes get damaged and cancers grow. Sometimes arteries get clogged and the heart stops beating. As a result, human beings suffer and die. That s just the way life is. The natural world does not endorse our decided preference for human life over other forms of life or forces of nature. The question for us isn t whether or not we ll eventually suffer as a consequence of moral or natural evil, but how we respond when we do. After a series of early morning phone calls and emails on Tuesday about Marlin s death, Holly and I found ourselves at loose ends. We had no travel plan to make and no memorial service to plan. We sat in silence or wandered about aimlessly, often weeping, often holding each other close. Drained by the emotional demands of the weekend in Belfast and the physical demands of our travel, we felt devastated by the news of Marlin s death, a death that felt needless and cruel. On the list of losses Holly and I ever imagined we might encounter soon, this one well, we hadn t even considered it. Then one of us noticed that the Common Meditation for All Souls had arrived. The selection for Tuesday was penned by the novelist Frederick Buechner, who also happens to be a minister. The meditation read: It is the first day because it has never been before and the last day because it will never be again. Be alive, if you can, all through this day today of your life. What's to be done? What's to be done? Follow your feet. Put on ~ 4 ~
the coffee. Start the orange juice, the bacon, the toast. Then go wake up your children and your spouse. Think about the work of your hands Live in the needs of the day. The needs of the day emerge in the age-old struggle between good and evil between the profligate generosity of life that extends being and breath to each of us, and the wickedness and indifference that can snatch them away. Today is the last day of all that is past and the first day of all that is possible. We must accept this day as it has come to us. The Troubles can t be removed; Marlin can t be resurrected. But we are alive together on this day, and the question for us is about the work of our hands. What s to be done? What s to be done? Beyond taking care of yourself, ask what s to be done for the people around you. Who needs a kind word or a helping hand? Who needs a hug or a pat on the back? Where can you right a wrong or stand up to an injustice? Where can you make peace or sooth a pain? Be alive today. It s the only today you will ever have. As for Marlin Atkinson, may he rest in peace. And may the God of all that is past and all that is possible hold him, and the people of Belfast, and all of us in a divine embrace. ~ 5 ~