Opening Words:  By Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornell West, from The Future of American Progressivism

To understand your country you must love it. To love it, you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as it is, however, is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it which shows what it might become. America – this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes – needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.

READING: by Polish Poet Wislawa Szymborska. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. This is called “The End and the Beginning”

After every war
someone’s got to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone’s got to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone’s got to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone’s got to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone’s got to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirt sleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone listens, nodding
his unshattered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who know
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less
than nothing.

Someone’s got to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at the clouds.

SERMON:    “Always Faithful”  -  Rev. Alison Hyder

Growing up in Maryland, I’ve made a lot of trips to Washington, DC.  I’ve been to the Smithsonian Museums, toured the Capital and used the Library of Congress. I’ve marched the streets in support of civil rights and peace and children’s programs, and listened to speakers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his most famous address.  On sunny days, the Reflecting Pool at its foot holds the image of the Washington Monument, and the pennies and dimes of a thousand dreamers glint in the light.

Not too far from there, another surface shines. It reflects love and sorrow. Terror. Hope. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a black granite mirror, carved with the names of all of the 58,000 military men who died in the Vietnam War. The names are in chronological order by death, so that you can see, year by year, how the casualties grew. As you stare at each name, you can see your own image, your world, reflected darkly behind them. At the foot of the shrine lie an assortment of flowers and stuffed animals and letters, mementoes to the dead from grown children, from siblings, soldiers, school groups, and strangers.  They are all collected and saved by Museum and Archeological Storage. Some are put on exhibit.

I was in grade school during the Vietnam War. By high school, peace protests were the background of my life and culture. The futility of the war was apparent.  American policy was suspect.  Like most of the people around me, I was opposed to the military. The US finally pulled out of Vietnam the year I graduated.  My older brother and friends were safe from that particular horror.

            But I visited the Wall, the Vietnam Memorial designed by Maya Lin.  Everyone knows the story: how an obscure young Asian-American woman, an architectural student at Yale, won the design contest out of fourteen hundred submissions. And at first, a lot of veterans were outraged. They wanted a traditional statue depicting soldiers and marines and fighter pilots. Eventually, they got one, installed near the wall.  But Lin’s memorial proved to be a powerful and healing monument - grand, and yet remarkably intimate. In fact, a traveling exhibit, called “The Wall That Heals” will be on display in Hyannis, June 5-8. [Contact the Vietnam Vets of America  Chapter in Hyannis for more information].  I urge you to go.

            After all of the furor over the design, I wanted to see the memorial for myself. It’s kind of hard to find. It’s just a gash in the ground, a long black triangle down a gentle slope. You read one name, then five, then there are hundreds listed, in columns over your head, all sorts of people from every background imaginable. None of the names were familiar - I didn’t know anyone who died in that war. But I was moved to silence at the magnitude of the sacrifice. They gave up their lives in obedience to their country.

            Every name was a story I would never read.  Some died heroically. Some after agonies of pain, some immediately, some from infections and accidents.  Were they good men, honorable and wise? Were they cruel and petty? Scared? Desperate? There was no way to tell. The wall reflected my own questions in its black liquid depths.

            We now know more about the follies and motives of that war, how decisions were made, the political maneuverings and the long, long history of devastation. Lives were ruined, souls warped and degraded. Families were divided. Veterans of Vietnam have spoken about the trauma and physical symptoms and addictions that resulted from their experience in the war.  And yet they served faithfully.

            Siegfried Sassoon was an officer in the British Army during World War I. He wrote of a recurring memory that haunted him in after-years:

Some may recall how wartime intensifies experience and brings a heightened sense of purpose. But veterans know the horrors and degradation of battle firsthand. Many have been a strong presence in Peace and Justice circles. The recent “War on Iraq” has doubled the membership of Vietnam Veterans against the War. [vvaw.org] And CBS News reported that a large percentage of the opponents of the Iraq invasion came from those who lived through World War II. These people know the costs of war – and the price of peace. It is just as demanding, just as tough to maintain cooperation and tolerance as it is to wage combat.  Democracy must be earned in each generation through constant vigilance and action, a ceaseless, wearying, frustrating engagement with complacency and inertia. We must be vigorous humanists, always faithful to the common good of the world community, and not just our shortsighted personal interests.

            The great judge Learned Hand remarked:

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, nearly two thousand years ago, taught humanity that lesson it has never learned, but never quite forgotten: that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

            If we have any advantages as Americans, then we must use them to promote justice. We must use our freedom of speech to expose corruption and cruelty and stupidity, and be a voice for the silenced. We must create an open and creative and generous culture, respectful of differences in belief and expression. We must maintain a free and accessible press.  We must educate ourselves to the facts of poverty and oppression, so that we can unmask efforts at propaganda and manipulation and spectacle. We must use our freedoms to extend greater rights to others here and throughout the world. “America…,” say Unger and West,  “needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.”

            We must be always faithful to our values as Unitarian Universalists. Ours is not a passive faith, it is a movement: toward truth, toward greater understanding of the unfolding mysteries of life, and a higher expression of humanity. We honor our past, but we do not worship it. Instead, our heroines and heroes – teachers and writers, activists and philanthropists and soldiers and healers - inspire us to greater courage and responsibility to the welfare of the world. Their struggles compel us to the deeper calling of compassion. It is now our turn to manifest love and a willful optimism for a future of harmony and justice and wholeness. We can do no less.

            It isn’t glamorous work, or even fun. But “After every war,” Szymborka reminds us, “someone’s got to tidy up… shove the rubble to the roadsides… lug the posts… glaze the window.”  Someone has to build the schools, and make soup, and plant trees. Someone has to remember, so that others can forget and move on. 

            Poet Laureate Rita Dove published a volume called Riding the Bus With Rosa Parks.  She said, “One of the things that the book tries to express is the notion that one moment you can be ‘nobody’ – you can be an ordinary person, you can be somebody who is not going to be in the history books, and the next moment you can do something heroic. Whether it is recognized or not by history is a moot point. But it’s the idea that all of us do heroic acts everyday. Sometimes simply by surviving, or by doing something with grace or with courage.” [Interview on Charlie Rose, June 1999]

            The acts of healing and justice are wearisome and never-ending, a matter of increments, small achievements, frustrations and heartbreaks, the triumph of hope over sorrow. It is just when we are discouraged and faltering under the weight of mundane tedium that we need to remember those who went before and who blessed us with their sacrifice. Their lives are reflected through us, the names traced in our courage and dedication. We are building on their achievements, just as those who follow us will carry our own efforts further. We didn’t begin this work, and we will not see its end. But we can be proud to keep it alive in the face of evil and indifference.

            Cornel West writes, “My wife, Elleni, and I both have identical signs in our offices that say, ‘Never give up.’ And if there’s one sentence that I would want to pass on, especially to the younger generation, it’s ‘Never give up because there’s joy in the struggle for compassion, the struggle for freedom.’ And because Grandmama did not live in vain. And as long as we can sustain that spirit of resistance, whether we can win tomorrow, or win further down the line, or maybe in the end not win the major Victory, capital V, but win smaller ones along the way, we should never give up. Because there’s joy in being compassionate to others. And because the folk who come before who gave so much, they didn’t do it for nothing. They didn’t do it for nothing.” [quoted in the Community Church of New York newsletter].

            Today we give thanks and homage to all of those who struggled for compassion and freedom, who faced discrimination, imprisonment and harm to make the world kinder. Who rode the buses and tended babies and discovered vaccines. Who pointed the way to the stars. We remember the lives that were sacrificed in war, and those who lived for peace. They did it for us. May we be always faithful to their trust.

CLOSING WORDS: by A Powell Davies  “Pilgrims of a World Forever New”

The world we know is passing: all things grow strange;
all but the stout heart’s courage;
all but the undiminished lustre of an ancient dream –
which we shall dream again as
[so many] have dreamed before us,
pilgrims forever of a world forever new.

And what we loved and lost
we lose to find how great a thing
is loving
and the power of it to make a dream come true.
….After us there is the Promised Land,
strong from our sorrows and
shining from our joys,
along the road we build