So much has happened in the last three weeks, I don’t imagine that many of you arrived with any confidence that my sermon would be called, “Being Wonderful on Schedule,” as the last monthly church newsletter announced. Needless to say, I had no idea where we would actually find ourselves this day, as I concocted a title in the middle of August.

Still, it did have a nice flow, which was partly why I chose it. “Being Wonderful on Schedule.” The point I thought I would make is one I have occasionally made before: that as important as it is to try to do well in our lives, most of the time we can only do so well, and not more – we’ll be cranky or distracted and not wonderful sometimes, whatever the schedule may call for.

This is a message I have offered before at this time of the year, as a new church year begins, maybe to get myself off the hook, in case some of you or I have unrealistically high expectations. I remember another September sermon I titled, “Let Us Then Be Up and Doing – There’s Still Time to Mess Things Up.” This one was intended to be another in that anti-perfectionist tradition.

But of late, of course, for most of us the goal of being wonderful hasn’t been the concern – though God knows there were some people in New York and Washington and over Pennsylvania doing wonderful, indeed wonderous deeds. But for most of us, the schedule has called for courage and wisdom and patience enough just to get by, to do our jobs, to be parents, to live with ourselves and our emotions.

About now, a differing scheduling question arises: When is it possible, when is it desirable, when is it okay to start moving on?

Some of us aren’t nearly there yet, others of us have been ready for a while.

Obviously I don’t mean how we move on beyond the issues of possible retaliation and war and the like. Those will go on testing our wisdom and courage for a while, one assumes. I think our fears have a ways to go before we know how realistic they are, and which ones. The economic reverberations seem to mean to go on taking their toll. A lot of things about the events of September 11 will continue to command a goodly part of the nation’s attention and our own individually.

When I raise the question of when we might start moving on, if we haven’t already (and many have), I mean from the emotional clobbering of seeing so many people die, of seeing buildings that stood as symbols of strength and energy and beauty turned to rubble, of seeing that members of our own species are capable of that extremity of evil and hatred, and hatred of us.

Military, diplomatic, and economic consequences are very serious and far from resolution. But the toll of the pictures, the people lost, the tragic realities, the toll on our spirits, nationally, communally, and individually, does it ever start to be paid? The experience of such sobering awfulness – does there come a time when we begin to let go?

In the abstract, these could seem to be questions in dubious taste, featuring words like “letting go” and “moving on” when there are still victims unidentified as such, services still to be held for the presumably lost. The relatives and friends of those people are no doubt still much in the midst of their primary grieving. And our hearts are with them.

But we do not live in the abstract. We live in the midst of teachers’ conferences, deadlines at work, a grandson’s first dance recital, a decision about a nursing home for a parent, worry over a sister’s health, delight at getting a funding grant, and all the other matters that go on happening, even in the aftermath of such catastrophe. Other concerns bid for our attention, even as the news goes on reminding us of what we’ve been through, of what we’re still going through.

It is not a matter of moving beyond, of somehow forgetting altogether, of moving back into a world where anything so awful is beyond imagining except on a screen, but not in real life, not in our country, not to people we know. The experience will be part of who we are and what we know from now on. But it will only be a part, and that part may not be the biggest part of us by now, or sometime soon.

Our current situation relates to a universal human experience, one that few of us have escaped up till now, and all of us shall know in time: There are times in our personal lives when we are struck with grief, loss, tragedy, we enter a time of sorrow, sometimes a time of shock as well, and often a time of despair of one sort or another. It can seem like life will never be alluring or delightful again. And then it is, maybe only a little at first, but our grief evolves from preoccupation to memory -- still our grief, but leaving space enough for something besides sorrow, even happiness.

I feel like the country is in the midst of that familiar process, and most of us personally, too, though as I say, people are at many different points along that path. But in general I think the questions that come up about now are, is it okay yet to have our lives go back toward normal, insofar as the military, diplomatic, and economic realities will allow? Is it okay not to have the tragedies in mind for hours at a time, even days? Is it okay to smile, is it okay to laugh, to get married, to go play golf, to savor the ocean spray, to take in a stupid movie, to dine out, to date, to plan to visit Disney World, to experience anguish over something utterly unrelated, or to experience utter joy?

It can be hard, we know that, we’ve been there before. It was probably hard to think of anything or anyone but the loved one who died, and when other interests arrived, it may have seemed inappropriate, premature, disturbing. But in time it became clear that it is not a betrayal of the dead to go back to living and even enjoying life.

This applies to us as a church community, too, of course. If you began attending here on September 16, right after that terrible Tuesday, this could be your third Sunday. By now you’d have no reason to know that one of the things that distinguishes worship at First Parish is the freedom and frequency with which the congregation here laughs. There’s a board downstairs with cut-out petals on it. On every petal someone has written a favorite thing about life here in the last church year. A number of them speak of humor and the fun we have at worship sometimes. We will again.

We will even turn our attention to topics that are trifling in the context of our national loss. Not quite yet, and who knows what’s about to happen, but back in August I told Polly Oliver, our music director, that I’d be preaching on Lydia Maria Child two weeks from today, on a day when I will also be lecturing about her for the Wayland Historical Society. Maria Child was a Wayland resident for twenty-five years before her death in 1880. She was an amazingly creative, progressive, and fascinating character.

I suspect even if no new developments have occurred, the service will still be involved in our healing, perhaps in the prayer or the readings or more. But I am hoping that by then the service can also be about Child and her interests: the condition of women, the abolition of slavery, frugality in the home, literature for children, and more. We cannot know how soon the time will come, or after what cost. But the time will come. Lydia Maria Child, you say? Do tell.

In two weeks or if not yet then, then sometime later, we will get on with it. We will get on with life. People do. Life has awful tragedies, even bigger ones than we’d have thought to fear. And it has other parts, even happy parts, and interesting people, and everyday chores. We go on.

I find that persistence, that resilience, terribly touching. There was a radio show on WBUR on the 21st in which people called in to read poems about the dreadful events. Someone named Mary read a poem she had written, just ten lines long. As a minister, I suppose I should like the second half, about praying, and I do, but I was even more stirred by the opening lines. This is the poem:

I couldn’t figure out how to avoid a war
So I did the dishes.
I couldn’t fathom how to convert a terrorist to peace
So I took out the trash.
I couldn’t imagine the depths of a victim’s suffering
So I prayed –
 for the victims,
 for the terrorists,
 for peace,
 for us all.

But in the meantime, praise be too for the tenacity of the human spirit, that finds in chores or community or faith or resolve a way of hanging in there. Praise be for the buoyancy of the human spirit, that knocked down six times rises a seventh; that will not be crushed by what Albert Camus called “the cruder implications of history” but can re-imagine the triumph of justice and peace and work for its accomplishment; that even after pain and disappointment and worse says yes to life and truth and love [Hymn 6]; that rises like a rose from underground [the children’s story]; that even in its grief can start to be coaxed back to life and fun and hope and the future and action and love and normalcy. So may it be. Amen.
 

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