AN ANSWER TO FEAR

Rev. Mark Ward

Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

September 11 , 2011

I can’t say I had a particularly fearful childhood. The oldest of five children of a doctor growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey I had a fairly privileged upbringing. But I do remember from an early age a recurring dream that would occasionally haunt my sleep. The circumstances varied, but the theme was the same: some group of people I was with, usually my family, but sometimes others, was planning a trip somewhere. I was looking forward to the trip, but as all the preparations were going on I would suddenly realize that they had left without me, and I was alone. I don’t remember much more about the dreams because that was usually the point where I would wake up, sweating and scared.

I’ve thought about that dream over the years and come to realize that it expressed some doubt I felt about whether I was really acceptable, some fear that I might be abandoned by those I cared about. In some ways it has echoed in my life, made me inclined to avoid conflict when I could. And indeed I have noticed that on those occasions when I have made a mess of things this avoidance impulse is often at the source of it.

Fear is not an unfamiliar experience for any of us. We each have our worries, our demons that drift along in our minds below the surface of consciousness. Some are centered in old childhood misapprehensions; others result from events in our past. Most of us are usually able to navigate our lives so that these fears stay at bay, but at moments of crisis or stress they can raise their heads, and suddenly it’s likely we have landed on a horse at full gallop.

The old fight-or-flight response kicks in, and we are moving faster than we can even think: our vision tunneled, our heart pounding. In times of actual danger this response can be life-saving: we flee from or are pumped up to meet a threat. In the lives that most of us live today, though, the intensity of that response is often way over the top in proportion to the stimulus that provoked it. Juiced for action, our bodies and minds seek out some release, some target for our energy.

And, not infrequently, we find it. To the extreme, we see this process in the post-traumatic stress of veterans of war, when the smallest stress can put the person – mentally, emotionally – back on the battlefield, and they strike out at others in some way.

We can sometimes see a similar, but less dramatic, response in our daily lives. Challenged or stressed at work, at home, on the highway, our minds diagnose the other – it may be a partner, a child, a co-worker, the driver in the next lane – as a threat. Love, forbearance, compassion, respect fly out the window, and we are in full reactive mode. We may get through the incident merely by leaning on the horn, or with a sharp word barked at another. But it can be worse, with consequences that cascade throughout our lives.

It may because of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, or the stumbling economy that seems unable to revive, or global warning, or who knows what, but the level of fear across our community, our nation seems at extraordinarily high levels.

It seems hard for anybody to catch a break, you know? Whether it’s politics, religion, the state of the world, we have so little patience, and find it so easy to dismiss one another. It’s no surprise that our films are full of zombies and gladiators: Perceived offense piles on top of perceived offense, ratcheting up the all pervasive tension. And what gets left largely unsaid is how poisonous all of this is: Poisonous, as in deadly to body and soul, to hearth and home, to state and nation.

So, it seems to me that as we, a covenanted community of memory and hope seeking to nurture the search for meaning, while advancing freedom, justice and love, as we gather once again for a new season of worship and learning and fellowship and service, it is appropriate that we articulate for ourselves, and perhaps for the world, a way forward that can lead us away from fear toward the hope of peace and joy.

Indeed, we hardly have a choice when this day we are confronted with the anniversary of 9/11, no less the 10th anniversary, the clicking of that second digit in the calculus of this event. No event in recent history has so effectively gathered our fears, from the nightmarish scenario of hijacked airplanes flown into office towers and government centers to the image of shadowy figures conspiring in our demise. A complex world, challenging enough for us to make our way through, suddenly seemed up-ended, leaving many feeling we had few certainties left to cling to. In mourning the thousands who died that day, people like ourselves struck down simply going about their ordinary lives, we also were left to come to terms with a new sense of sadness and dread.

The brightest spot in those early days may have been the flood of consolation and support that poured in from around the world, across cultures and ethnicities. For by whatever lens one chose to view the event, there was no sense in it. This was not an armed assault against military resources but a nihilistic act of despair, on a par with a gunman who shoots up a Norwegian camp for youths, or an ex-soldier who blows up a federal office building in Oklahoma.

And so the first response was the most natural one: grief, grief at the astonishing loss of life, at the terrible, twisted ways we humans are capable of being with each other.

At that moment, an opening emerged, as William Sloane Coffin suggested at the time. It was a chance for us to model what it would be to offer a sober and considered response to atrocity by using the force of law, our ample resources and the compassion that we were shown by the world to bring the perpetrators and their protectors to justice.

Instead, our president announced what he called “a war against terror,” a curious phrase since it identifies no subject and envisions no end. It clearly had dramatic effect at the time. But, here we sit, 10 years later, with the number of U.S. troops overseas declining, with our government yet to declare what would bring this war to an end.

Meanwhile, the cost in human life and disability among our own service people, not to mention those of our allies and Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as many more civilians in the region, continues to mount. Military ventures tend to have a logic of their own, but the danger in unending war is that in time we begin to feed a nihilism of our own that saps hope in the future and feeds escapism and despair.

Models for a way ahead are few, but across history there have moments when figures have emerged to suggest a different path. Today I offer one for your consideration, an ancient one, distant from this time and place, but evocative all the same. He was Ashoka, a name not well known in the west but long revered in Buddhist scriptures. Fantastical stories there tell of Ashoka’s mythical feats, but little was known about his life until the middle of the 19th century, when a British archaeologist managed to translate a forgotten script on carved stone pillar in India. There he found a chronicle of Ashoka’s life and work.

Since then, dozens of stone pillars describing Ashoka have been discovered across southern and central Asia, including, in 1957, a pillar discovered by an Italian team in Kandahar, Afghanistan, a region known today as a Taliban stronghold.

The story is told that early in his career Ashoka was known as a successful but brutal king. He united much of the region of what is today India and the Himalayan plateau through basically ongoing war. But in 261 BCE after a particularly bloody campaign in which thousands of his opponents were slaughtered, Ashoka had a change of heart. Looking over the battlefield, he suddenly was filled with feelings of both sadness and pointlessness. These campaigns of shifting fortunes simply brought about death, he decided, while his victories accomplished little, beyond merely adding to suffering of the world.

So, Ashoka made a radical decision. He declared, henceforth, an ethic of nonviolence in his kingdom. Taking off from Buddhist teachings, Ashoka composed his own version of what he called a Dhamma, after the Buddhist Dharma, that was centered in the notion of an order of being in the world, touching not only humans but all life, to which all beings had a duty. The goal of this Dhamma was, in his words, that “all beings should be unharmed, self-controlled, calm in mind and gentle.”

Victory, he said, was to be defined not in terms of military might but in terms of living an ethically responsible life. This way of being may not always bring us success in this life, Ashoka declared, but it would contribute to ultimate flourishing of the world.

What’s especially fascinating is that Ashoka spoke not simply as some philosopher-king who issued proclamations for the masses. Instead, inscriptions on the stone pillars that describe his rule lay out a detailed program of government in keeping with those principles. Included were edicts promoting public works, transparency and efficiency in government and a whole system of administration for social welfare. He declared that all religions would be tolerated and that charity and compassion would govern the rule of law. He even provided for the protection of animal and plant life, setting a limit on which and how many animals and plants could be cultivated or killed. Ashoka sent envoys abroad, as far away as Syria in the Middle East, to establish hospitals and spread beneficial plants with other nations.

In the end, Ashoka’s rule lasted on 35 years, but the legend of his Dhamma echoed across history, influencing many nations, including the present-day states of India and Sri Lanka. What was distinctive about Ashoka is his conviction that his ethic, his Dhamma, was grounded not in the authority of government but in the ethical center of each person. It is the truth of this center, not the benevolence of leadership, that demanded the new ethic that he proclaimed.

This notion of Ashoka’s resonates in my mind as I reflect on how we have been working to shape this congregation in recent years. Being part of a religious tradition that has been struggling in a fast-changing world to distinguish and define itself, we have sought to bring some focus to what we hope to achieve in the liberal church.

A new model of governance has helped us get clear on how we can best organize ourselves, assuring accountability for the work we want done and clarity as to who we want doing it. But most importantly it has also helped focus our attention on what that work is. In the last year your Board of Trustees, examining our Mission Statement and pulling together threads of strategic planning and the dreams and hopes that you have expressed, has composed a series of what are called Ends Statements that describe in broad terms what we believe we are doing here.

I recognize that organizational detail like this doesn’t thrill everyone, so as a way of bringing us all into the conversation I am focusing our worship this fall on the broad themes that have emerged from all of this.

We have decided that the work that we hope to achieve as a congregation falls into three broad areas. We hope that what happens here will make an impact Within, Among and Beyond the members of this community. That is to say, taking an active part in the life of this congregation will help shape your individual faith journey. It will help you clarify for yourself that which is of greatest worth, that which settles your soul and to which you give your heart.

We also hope that taking an active part in this congregation will influence how we relate with each other, helping us find a way to compassion, tolerance, respect and understanding here and in our wider lives. And we hope that taking an active part here will help each of us understand and appreciate a wider duty in the world.

It is not enough to simply see to our own needs. We are each called to be witnesses to our faith and to the larger hope that this religion envisions, a hope embodied in justice, equity, compassion and peace.

So, this month we’ll be exploring the theme of Within, of some of the ways that being active here might help us to grow and be changed individually to better live our hopes and values.

Ashoka centered his Dhamma in an understanding that runs throughout our own tradition: that the place we begin in the search for meaning is in the ethical center of each person, that spark of life and hope that makes us who we are, that is the source of our deepest caring.

We come to religion not to receive that spark but to awaken it. We arrive as persons of inherent worth and dignity with gifts and insights, but also questioning, curious, and in need. The religious search is one we cannot do on our own. No matter how much we read, or meditate, or pray we will remain unsatisfied. It takes community to awaken our spark.

It takes gathering regularly like this where we can breathe together: laugh and listen, sing and speak. It takes committing the time to building deep connections with others, those with whom we have natural affinities and sometimes even better those with whom we don’t – older, younger, straight, gay, black, white, meditater, yoga enthusiast, hiker, knitter, conservative, liberal, theist, atheist, not-really-sure-ist.

It takes learning the discipline of religious practice, of choral singing, or of looking wise and listening with compassion when a four-year-old asks you an imponderable question. It takes community in all the multifarious forms it already takes here and the many ways we have yet to discover.

And in many respects, I want to argue, all of this is our answer to fear. Fear is unavoidable, but it need not swallow us up. “Be not afraid,” angels in the Bible are said to counseled the weary and the worried, and we can join them. Know your fear, but don’t live it. Accept this uncertain world where the most amazing, and sadly sometimes the most terrible things can happen. But don’t BE afraid. Don’t let your fear define you.

As Rebecca Parker, president of the Starr King School for the Ministry, said in a poem, “In the midst of a world marked by tragedy and beauty, there must be those who bear witness against unnecessary destruction, and who, with faith, stand and lead in freedom, with grace and power.”

We are called by our tradition and the hope that lives within us to be such people.

Today we join in sympathy those who mourn the many who died in the attacks of September 11 as well as the many more who are still suffering and dying in the wars that followed. May they be comforted in their losses by our solidarity and our gratitude, and may a way soon be found to end the fearful march of war and bring us peace.

Judyth Hill’s poem that you heard earlier and that was published shortly after the attacks invites us to reflect on how we might transform the losses of that day from the dealing of death to the affirming of life. And it’s worth keeping in mind that that is, in fact, a choice before us. What we take from this event will govern how it lives within us.

“Wage peace with your breath,” she advises. Breathe in images of death and destruction. We cannot deny the fearful damage that was done. Then, breathe out a larger truth, that life endures and is part of a greater wholeness in which we all participate.

“Never,” Hill writes, “has the world seemed so fresh and precious.”

On these early fall days when the scorching heat of summer is gone and the first leaves are turning there is a clarity in the air that comes with the changing of the season. Another kind of clarity offers itself to us as once again we gather in community, a clarity about our links to one another and this good earth, the wonder of the world and the mystery of our being.

We return again to a community that takes us as we are and invites us to come to know what grounds us and this human venture that turns us from fear toward the hope of peace and joy.