SERMON: “Monsters”
Rev. Paul Beedle
September 10, 2006
Four years ago tomorrow, I participated in an interfaith service of remembrance on the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. As people arrived for the service, we clergy took turns reading the names of people who had died. Each of us read a portion of that long list, about 20 names, and as one finished a portion the next would come to the pulpit and continue. And so we had a living symbol of all the faiths mourning together.
As it happened, my list included a name I knew. Or so I thought. Carlos Munhoz was a guy who played really great classical guitar on the subway platform at Penn Station. I bumped into him a lot commuting between my home on Long Island and the seminary or other places in Manhattan. It was lovely listening to him while waiting for the train, especially when I was on my way home and tired – it was good medicine. Sometimes the platform was crowded and I'd try to stand close to where he was so I could hear; other times there weren't many people and I could sit at some distance to listen, and it was quiet enough that I could appreciate the accoustics of a subway platform in a way that one doesn't when it's crowded or a train is coming through. I bought two cassette tapes from him that I still enjoy listening to.
So there on my list was his name, identified as an employee of Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of One World Trade Center, the north tower, the first attacked. And because here was a name I knew, and it seemed plausible that Carlos might have had a job at Windows on the World, I felt very connected to the terrible event we were remembering, and I entered deeply into that service. It was a good thing – feeling that I had lost one person who I remembered very concretely and warmly helped me to grieve for my lost sense of safety and security that so many of us had felt a year before.
It took me that whole first year to step back enough emotionally from the shock and fear to recognize and really feel that loss. Until that service, I didn't feel right thinking that I had lost anything. Other people had lost loved ones that day – who was I? As far as I knew, I had only lost the landmark in Manhattan that told me where south was, and I didn't live in Manhattan any more and didn't need to know that. Who was I to say I had lost something that day? So it was good medicine at that service to remember Carlos and to feel that I had lost more than a landmark, because it allowed me to connect to my feeling of loss and to recognize what it was I had lost, and how this event had changed me.
I later discovered that the guy who worked at Windows on the World and the guy who played guitar in the subway were two different people. They just happened to have the same name. You can find out all about the Carlos Munhoz I knew at carlosmunhoz.com – I'm glad to say he's alive and well and still playing classical guitar. So in fact a false belief helped me to claim my feelings and understand how 9/11 had affected me. And I'm here to testify that knowing the truth is good now, and healing was good then. I don't mean to suggest that having a false belief was my only path to healing, only that having the false belief worked.
I tell this story because it illustrates the role of imagination in our emotional lives. In this case, it was positive. The role of Carlos Munhoz in my recovery from the 9/11 attacks was, of course, greatly exaggerated. What happened was, my feelings made use of my memories in order to be heard by my mind. Some details of those memories may have been adjusted. What platform was I on? I think I heard him in Penn Station, but did I? What's true is that the 1 train that I rode most often, because it took me uptown to the seminary, also ran downtown to the World Trade Center. It probably said “World Trade Center” on the signs on the platform. Maybe I only heard Carlos while waiting for the 6 train, which doesn't go through Penn Station, I don't know. In that way, this story I was telling myself about Carlos was like a dream – it wasn't made up of facts, but of symbols. It's funny how that works, isn't it?
Sometimes it's said that we remember what we want to remember or believe what we want to believe. But when my imagination puts things together like this, seemingly without my help, usually it's about something I feel rather than about something I want. It wasn't that I wanted to know someone who died on 9/11. It was that I felt a sense of loss that I wasn't claiming. In other words, it wasn't that I wanted to be connected to that event, but that I was connected to it and wasn't letting myself feel it. The mystery is, although we feel separate, we are connected. And when I saw his name on my portion of that list, my unclaimed feeling of loss – a loss of my sense of feeling safe in the world, a feeling that what I trusted about the world might not be trustworthy – that feeling grabbed hold of his name and the memories it evoked to put together a story that allowed my mind to acknowledge that mystery and feel that loss.
Our feelings can do that. They want acknowledgement. They don't care about facts in the exterior world. They care about peace and balance in the interior world where they live. And if there isn't peace and balance there, then our feelings want to tell our minds all about it. This is part of how we make meaning of our experience.
Different feelings tell different kinds of stories. The kind of story it is can be a clue to what the feeling is. Loss tells a story about a treasure and a transformation. My memory of Carlos playing his guitar on the subway platform became a pearl coating my doubts about what I could trust in the world. The disturbing feeling that I wasn't adequately in touch with the world's dangers, in the initial shock of the attacks, found expression in the idea that the world had changed. But of course it hadn't. And as the shock wore off, the idea that the world had changed didn't tally with reality – as I noticed all the things that were the same – and didn't fit with what was going on inside me, as I realized and reaffirmed what I still felt I could trust in the world. The guitar player on the subway platform was a symbol of the trust I was grieving. A subway platform is a potentially dangerous public space. The sound of the guitar made it feel safer. It was a treasure that transformed the space.
In the same way, the kinds of stories we tell about the death of a loved one are about a treasure that transforms pain. Loved ones live on in us, or we still have what they taught us; we move from a relationship of presence to a relationship of memory; they live on in heaven – each of those stories can be a treasure that helps a person heal from loss. Is the story true? That's beside the point. What matters is the treasure and the transformation of pain, the healing.
Five years later, I think that collectively we Americans are still working through what 9/11 means to us. I think we're still working through what we feel we can trust because there are so many aspects of our collective life, of our society to think through. I think that we're still telling ourselves stories that feel true, and that our politics has remained so intensely polarized because neither the left nor the right has stepped back to look critically at its own story of what feels true. It's clear that collectively we are struggling not only with a sense of loss such as I've been describing, but also with fear. And that's where monsters come in.
Fear tells a story about a monster. The monster represents whatever danger has inspired the fear. There are different kinds of monsters. Some monsters – dragons and sea monsters and the like – represent external forces opposed to us and more powerful than we are. These might stand for forces of nature, or as Elaine Pagels points out in her book, The Origin of Satan, they can represent foreign enemies – the monsters in the Biblical book of Daniel represent other nations threatening Israel. If the enemy is not foreign, but rather an opposing group within Israel – an intimate enemy – the image shifts from a monster to Satan (the Hebrew word satan means opponent or adversary). Tradition tells a story that this adversary is a fallen angel, and so records the sense of disappointment or betrayal we feel when “one of us” becomes an adversary.
Pagels mentions an anthropologist named Robert Redfield who “has argued that the worldview of many peoples consists essentially of two [polarities]: human/nonhuman and we/they.” Monsters are a nonhuman they. Satan is a more-than-human adversary, not monstrous but still in human form. As a fallen angel, now a deceiver or tempter, Satan symbolizes what we can't trust in the world, including things we used to think we could trust. So when some in the Middle East call our country “the Great Satan,” what they mean is they see us as powerful and untrustworthy. Obviously the way out is to build trust and learn to see each other as human again.
We experience fear and distrust in different ways, and so there are different kinds of monsters. Werewolves and vampires represent forces that invade and take us over, turning us or “one of us” into a monster. Mr. Hyde comes into being because Dr. Jekyll drank a potion – he's the alcoholism monster, so to speak. Frankenstein represents our genius and invention getting away from us and becoming a threat. Sometimes a whole community becomes the monster, as in Shirley Jackson's famous short story, “The Lottery,” where neighbors become a mob who kill one of their own. All these different kinds of monsters are figures of different ways we encounter danger in the world, and different ways we feel fear and distrust.
How do we work with the stories that fear tells to us? How do we hear what our fear is trying to tell us and make meaning of it? How do we help our children learn to do that? I think that the friendly monsters on Sesame Street are sheer genius – especially Oscar the Grouch. Grouchiness can be scary, or at least intimidating, but Oscar allows us to laugh at it. Some of Dr. Seuss's characters have a similar effect. A few years ago Pixar made a movie called “Monsters, Inc.” about monsters who went to a factory to work every day, where they would go through magical doors that led from the factory floor into children's bedrooms, as if they were coming out of the children's closets. The factory was a power plant that made power from the children's screams. They discover by the end of the movie that laughter makes more power than screams. I think that's brilliant. One way we can help our children is through stories like these.
So how can we help ourselves? I think that an obstacle to our collective recovery from 9/11 is our use of the word “war” both in our vocabulary and as a metaphor. This is what I think has happened: after World War II, international tensions were still very high, and it was scary and we didn't quite know how to talk about it, and then somebody coined the term “Cold War” and it caught on. So we gained a concept of war-without-fighting. Perhaps the idea that there already was a kind of war going on made it easier to get involved in Korea and Vietnam and Central America. Then our own dear Lyndon started talking about a War on Poverty – and we bulldozed neighborhoods and built projects to save the poor from poverty (remember “Urban Renewal”?). The latest variation on this way of thinking is that we talk about a War on Terrorism.
I remember during the week following 9/11, my colleague Forrest Church spoke before a group of people and said “World War III has begun!” I think it was just his way of registering his feeling that the world had changed. Our political leaders also started talking about us being a nation at war. And after a while they talked about it being “a new kind of war.” Of course, it is no such thing. Terrorism is a new word for “guerilla warfare” – and when the word “guerilla” was coined two hundred years ago to describe the Spanish resistance to Napoleon, it was also not a new thing. American colonists had used such tactics against Great Britain. The Greeks had used them against Troy. It's not something new, it's something very frightening because it's a state of affairs where we don't know who or what we can trust. I don't think that the metaphor of war has served us well as a description of what's happening and what we're afraid of. I think it just turns our fear into anger. I think it makes us lose sight of the mystery that although we feel separate, we are connected. I think it makes it easy for us to become attached to false beliefs and stories that turn out not to be true.
A good monster story for us to work with today, to start to heal our fear and correct our false perceptions of the world, is the Jewish folktale about Rabbi Yehuda of Prague and the Golem. In the 16th century, Rabbi Yehuda was famous for the wide range of his knowledge and his command of many languages. And he lived to see the King of Bohemia decree that there should be no persecutions or killings of Jews based on prejudice. But there were still enemies in the kingdom who sought to harrass and harm the Jews. So Rabbi Yehuda used his great knowledge of mystical secrets and the elements to make a Golem – a powerful, superhuman creature that could defend the Jews against their enemies. He blended the elements of fire, water, air and earth with the clay he sculpted into a giant human form. He inscribed on its forehead the Hebrew word emet, which means truth. And on an auspicious day, with help of other men of learning in the community, he performed rituals that brought the Golem to life. They dressed the Golem in servant's clothing. Rabbi Yehuda told the Golem it had been made to protect the Jews from their enemies. The Golem could not speak – for only God can give the power of speech – but nevertheless it understood what Rabbi Yehuda had said. And Rabbi Yehuda used the Golem to right wrongs and to defeat the plans of the Jews' enemies. The enemies became fewer and weaker, but the Golem grew larger and more powerful and more zealous. It began to attack enemies on its own initiative. It began to attack people it only suspected of being enemies. After a time, Rabbi Yehuda saw that the Golem had become larger and more powerful than was necessary, and he began to fear that the day would come when he could not control it. Carefully, he approached the Golem. Some say it was asleep, others say the Golem attacked Rabbi Yehuda. However it was, Rabbi Yehuda touched its forehead where the word emet – “truth” – was written, and smoothed away and erased the first letter, so that it said met – “dead.” And the Golem crumbled to dust, never to threaten the peace again. And the people – Jews and non-Jews – worked together for peace and justice in their kingdom.
May all Americans heal from the shock of the attacks five years ago. May we all acknowledge our feelings of loss of a sense of safety and trust in the world. May we acknowledge and better understand our remaining fears. May we find ways collectively to step back and evaluate the stories we have been telling ourselves because they feel true, to see what is true. And may we recover the grounding in love and human connection that allows us to work effectively for peace and justice within and beyond our borders. So may it be. Amen.