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From Our Co-MinistersAugust 2006 Soon, we will mark the day five years ago when most of us awoke to see one and then the other of the Twin Towers collapse. For weeks, the devastation at Ground Zero smoldered, as we learned the stories of the people who died, the people who were missing, the firefighters and all those professionals and volunteers, ordinary people doing ordinary things, who helped in extraordinary ways. What followed was more and more devastation in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, in Israel and Palestine, and around the globe. How do we live in a world where we experience so much suffering and violence? How do we grieve and keep from despair overtaking us? How do we not become numb and deadened, but stay feeling and aware? How do we continue to be engaged citizens when the culture wants to make us consumers, occupied with busyness, buying and selling? How do we keep before us our ideals? In community, we keep our hearts open, our minds engaged, our imaginations stirred, and our hands involved. Around the world, fundamentalist religious messages of hatred and intolerance have been drowning out the religious messages of love and justice. Our Unitarian Universalist religious messages of empowerment, of inclusion offer a needed moral center. On our church grounds, twenty-one guns are buried. A Guns Into Plowshares sculpture rises on this burial spot dedicated to non-violence and peace. As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 arrives, let’s keep before us and our children our values of non-violence and peace. On Monday, September 11, as a day of remembrance and peace, we will open our doors wide to our neighbors, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, theists, humanists…to a display of photographs of Workers at Ground Zero, inspiring photographs previously only displayed in Europe, showing ordinary people doing ordinary things making an extraordinary difference. Come by anytime between 6:00– 8:00 Monday evening when we will hold a candlelight vigil for peace. In a world spinning around with so much bloodshed and tears, greed and self-interest, busyness and denial, we need a religion that lifts up religious values of interdependence and the power of ordinary people to influence justice and peace.
Barbara and Bill
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