WHEN THINGS FALL APART
A Sermon in Bad Times

James Ishmael Ford
9 January 2005
First Unitarian Society
West Newton, Massachusetts

In October 1989 Jan and I were living in Berkeley, California. She was finishing her long delayed undergraduate program at Cal while I was on the last leg of my Master of Divinity course at the Pacific School of Religion. We lived in married student housing in the heights above the UC campus known as Holy Hill for all the seminaries that were clustered there.

I was at my internship site at the First Unitarian Church in San Jose, at the bottom of the Bay some forty-five miles from Berkeley. I have a vivid memory of that five o’clock in the afternoon on the 17^th. I was standing in the front office as was our senior minister. The administrator was sitting at her desk. That’s when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. We were all native Californians so we ignored the first pitch. But with the second roll, as products of California’s public education programs, the senior minister and I each stepped into doorways while the administrator went under her desk.

That’s when I realized there was something they didn’t mention in those instructions. I was in a relatively secure place should the building collapse, but I was sharing that space with a door that wanted to fly back and forth. Known later at the "pretty big one," at 6.9 on the Richter scale it remains one of the largest recorded earthquakes in the lower forty-eight.

While I was in San Jose, Jan was in our apartment ironing and listening to records. The room she was in, as were all our rooms in that apartment, was filled with jerry-rigged bookshelves that reached nearly to the ceiling on every wall. She felt one sharp jolt. A book fell off one shelf. As we were the building managers Jan went outside to see if the earthquake valve had been thrown. It hadn’t so she returned to her ironing. It would be an hour or so later when she’d learn that Holy Hill is a solid up shoot of granite and that the rest of the Bay Area had experienced a hellish fifteen seconds. There were sixty-two deaths, nearly four thousand people were hurt, parts of several freeways and a section of the Bay Bridge collapsed, eighteen thousand homes were damaged and a total estimated six billion dollars were lost in those fifteen seconds.

We were left shaken. I can’t quite describe the feeling after such an experience. The fragility of it all seemed to seep into our pores, and grew slowly from the first exhilaration to a bone-knowing that the earth could move from under us, and no place really was safe. So, even as California natives when the opportunity came to leave for Wisconsin the next year, we were pretty happy to leave earthquake country.

Now something vastly worse has happened. Even with my experience I can’t imagine a 9.0 earthquake. And then with the tsunami that followed, we’ve reached 156,000 dead – and the count continues. The statistics of damage and cost – in dollars and in human suffering are still being tabulated; what we do know is the numbers are staggering. It will be years, probably decades for some areas to recover. And others simply will not recover.

So here we are gathered in our Society, in this place of refuge and reflection. I hope we can devote a few moments here to consider some of the nature of the magnitude of this event, of how it marks the human psyche and what we might do out of this reflection. Last week we collected over $4,500 for the UUSC’s work. We will continue to do things. We should. And we need to. But here, for these few minutes, I would like to reflect.

In the era before we understood plate tectonics we humans looked for divine reasons in such natural disasters. Mostly we saw the hand of God, one way or another. Truthfully we haven’t outgrown this. Listening to accounts we know of various clerics claiming divine vengeance as the reason for this event. Some Muslims blaming Hindus, some Hindus blaming Christians and some Christians blaming Swedes – as you may have heard in one story or another. It’s all crazy. But it is also so very human. We are confronted with the most unsettling thing imaginable and we seek meaning.

I suggest this is something worth looking at. Jeff Jacoby, someone I don’t usually quote, wrote a compelling column published in the January 6^th issue of the Globe. In it he cited an internet poll at Beliefnet dot com. While we need always to recall internet polls are not scientific, Jacoby felt he saw something worth commenting on. And I agree.

The question was whether people believe God has a role in natural disasters. The first possible response was "yes, God is punishing us," with which three percent of the respondents agreed. Another eight percent said "God is testing us." Thirty percent said "yes, the earthquake and tsunamis were sent by God, but we don’t know what the purpose was." The largest agreement, at fifty percent, was with the statement "Although I believe in God, the supernatural had nothing to do with this tragedy." Finally nine percent agreed with the statement "God doesn’t exist, and disasters like this are just forces of nature."

Even as I pushed the button for that last option I saw how the pole is flawed - not only in how anyone can go online and push the button as many times as they wish, but that the phrasing of these responses may not satisfy anyone’s actual opinion. So, for instance, while that last option that denies some form of divine participation either as a controlling force or as a prime mover, setting up the world to be as it is; while it’s the closest to my sense of all this; still that last option wasn’t exactly what I think.

These days when asked what I think about God, I usually respond "when I’m off my game I say I’m an atheist." The god I don’t believe in is the god most of us here don’t believe in: the big human in the sky. Now personally I believe I go a bit farther than most here. I’m not particularly attracted to the argument by design that many of us find a compelling argument for God’s existence. That’s the belief how as we see the glory and complexity of the universe and in that discern the hand of God. I don’t. But why I draw short of saying atheist – except when I’m in a bad mood or, as I said, off my game – is that there is something much of our traditional language of reverence suggests about ultimacy that I find draws me up short.

With Spinoza and a whole host of people I find it easy enough to say the whole things is divine. I don’t see human like planning, but I do see something compelling, even as I feel it is something terrible and mysterious. That old Yiddish saying points to what I’m trying to suggest. "God is not nice. God is not your uncle. God is an earthquake."

I recall my own experience of the ground shaking, and the certain knowledge of complete uncertainty, I think of lives thrown a-kilter, and so many simply dying. I’ve experienced too many deaths in my family, some so horribly out of right time and place, I’ve seen too much unexpected hurt, and confusion, and… And this is critical. Just as people see the beauty of the earth and feel God’s hand, I see that beauty as well, and experience the mystery of it all, and feel something. There is such joy and grace in our human condition. That experience of grace in small and great things shuts my mouth, and while I don’t see design and intention in some human-like way, still I have no word for those moments of appreciation, except, maybe divine, except perhaps God.

And it is at those moments in which I discover the beginnings of meaning. Not meaning in an Aristotelian thread of argument. But nonetheless, something powerful and compelling. That said, this is obviously not a sweet sense of the divine. I would add anyone who says God never piles more suffering onto someone than they can handle is obviously not paying attention. This sense of God is the sense of the earthquake. I suggest this isn’t so much about letting go. This is about discovering there is nothing to hold on to. This is being thrown into the chaos of it all, of being swept away.

In this context I’d like to hold up the Book of Job for your consideration. I’ve wrestled with that book for ages and have come back to its points on a number of occasions. I’ve found in that ancient book how, in the midst of suffering and longing and frustrated desire, in the midst of that deafening silence to our pleas and calls: we are in fact given a gift. It is a terrible gift, no doubt. The wounds we receive in our lives, the death of children, the ravages of disease, the hunger and want which haunt this world – in addition to the horror of their reality – in that moment of confusion and uncertainty, can also open our hearts.

I’m not calling for a joyful embrace, here. At least not exactly. Jacoby is right in raging against the horror of such things as this tragedy. Indeed there is an almost endless litany of things in life that should offend us. But, in addition to weeping for the children, and doing our best to work to help the survivors – we can also look full on, and if we do, if we really do not turn away from those hurts, we find something. We may not want it. It is a truth that burns away all delusions. But the truth always comes back to us, always awaits us. When we don’t turn away, when we instead embrace what is – as it is – then the gift might appear. At such moments the possibility of God’s manifestation happens.

I’ve said this before, any number of times. When we are genuinely open, when our certainties about what and who we are, are torn from our hands - then we can know. We find who we are. And a tumble of truths follows. We discover who we are counts, however important or not we might be in the ordering of things. We discover what we are as individuals, is in fact holy. But, it is a terrible holiness. It is a holiness that sees how in the last analysis we, you and I, indeed all of the created universe exist only for a moment and only within the mind of God. Our individual reality is contingent, we depend upon this divine universe. Our eternal life is only as part of this greater whole.

After all that happens to Job, after his great demand for justice, then, there, from the heart of the tempest, or in my preferred translation out of the whirlwind – or, you can just as easily say from within the earthquake – he and we get God’s gift of a terrible presence and a roaring confrontation with all that is.

It is that which pulls out of Job his hymn, "I know you can do all things and nothing you wish is impossible. Who is this whose ignorant words cover my design with darkness? I have spoken of the unspeakable and tried to grasp the infinite. Listen and I will speak; I will question you: please, instruct me. I had heard of you with my ears; but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust."

Comforted that I am dust. This passage has long haunted people. Some rage against it, saying all that Job is doing is wallowing in that dust, squeaking his submission to the great cosmic bully. But, I suggest there is more here, much more. That wise commentator on this whole great mess, Stephen Mitchell in his now modern spiritual classic, The Book of Job, tells us:

"Job’s comfort at the end is in his mortality. The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, that whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.

"He feels he has woken up from a dream. That sense, of actually seeing the beloved reality he has only heard of before, is what makes his emotion at the end so convincing. He has let go of everything, and surrendered into the light."

So, we need to be appalled at what has happened. We need to reach out a hand to those in need. I’m so glad this community does that. And, I suggest, we need to stop, to notice, and to discover in this terrible moment, something about ourselves. It is, I suggest, the gateway to wisdom. And that, my friends, is where we find meaning, purpose, and direction which, I suggest, is also our work, perhaps the great work itself. In the awe, in the silence that follows the earthquake, notice.

Amen.