On the Turning Away: Thinking about the Second Principle
Sermon by Barbara Lambert Hale
Given on March 31, 2019
at The Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
Last September I had the very great good fortune to take a trip to Europe with my son Evan and my brother Rob. We went to Zurich, Switzerland, Munich and Berlin, Germany and a few places in between.
Zurich is a beautiful city situated on the Limmat River. It is worth the effort to get there simply for the chocolate and the cheese. Munich is a wonderful Bavarian city nestled in some of the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen. But of all three cities, to my great surprise, I liked Berlin the best.
Berlin with its tragic and unhappy recent history has risen like a Phoenix out of the ashes to reinvent itself as a modern, industrious and welcoming place. It doesn’t have the romance of Zurich or Munich, but it has something that to me is much more interesting. While Berliners continue to preserve the past, it is obvious when you go around the city that they look forward to the future. After the horrors of the Second World War and the Soviet occupation of East Berlin, they have “learned their lesson.”
On one of our days in Berlin, we took a five-hour walking tour of East Berlin. Yes, you heard me, this old body walked around Berlin for five full hours with only one coffee break at Einstein Kaffee and a stand-up lunch at the best Curry-wurst stand in Berlin. We clocked more than 18,000 steps that day and though I was weary beyond words when we got back to the hotel, I am so grateful that I was able to stay with our small group that consisted of Evan, Rob, Michael, a fellow traveler from New Zealand, and Bernd, our guide. I am also very grateful that Berlin is a city that is as flat as a pancake, believe me.
Most of Berlin’s history is on the east side of the city – the bunker where Hitler took his own life is located under a dirt parking lot with unassuming signs that point this out. There is no effort to open this to the public or to make a big deal out of it because they want that particular sleeping dog to stay in place and they don’t want people who might tend to glorify Hitler to be able to use it as a shrine. There are remnants of the wall built by the Soviets in many places – one large area was left plain, but is now covered with graffiti, and is backed by a disturbing and graphic display about the year 1933 when Hitler began to rise to power. Of course, one has to see “Checkpoint Charlie” or as our guide called it “Snack-point Charlie” – an area often overrun with curious tourists. You can have your photo taken there with a quote American Soldier unquote at a fake guardhouse or buy authentic Soviet uniforms or postcards with real pieces of the Wall attached. It’s all for fun.
Our guide for this walk was Bernd, as I said before. He is ten years older than me and was alive and aware of the end of the War and the beginning and end of the occupation. He is very knowledgeable about the history there and does this tour often. He told us that on one tour, he had a client who had lost people in the Holocaust. The client looked at Bernd and said, “I hate Germans, but I like you.” Bernd said he was a bit taken aback by this, but had the presence of mind to say, “I am a German, but I am not THAT German.” Indeed, he was too young, as are most Berliners today, to have taken part in the horrors of the Second World War and was disturbed and unhappy about the Soviet occupation and, as a young man living in West Berlin, he did not turn away from what was happening and actually did what he could to resist it. So he really wasn’t THAT German who the man hated.
As luck would have it, our fellow traveler, Michael from New Zealand, is an historian. His job is working for the Justice Department there on a project that helps make restitution for the broken treaties with the Maori people who were persecuted by the English when the English took power there. When Michael told us about this, I was amazed: A government actually turning toward a past problem and trying to rectify it. What an idea! Well, in light of recent events, New Zealand does seem to be good at that. Michael said that they have settled about 75% of the cases to date, but he didn’t have time to elaborate as to how, because the minute he began talking, Bernd had us up and going once again.
As soon as I returned home from Germany, I needed a book to read and reached on the top of my pile for “The Ghost Orchard” by Helen Humphreys.[1] When I picked this book up, I thought I would only be reading about russets and MacIntoshes and maybe a little about Johnny Appleseed, but the excerpt from this lovely little book about the history of the apple in North America was our second reading today. I found it interesting that after reading the chapter that outlines a bit of our ancestors’ push to colonize the countryside it brought my thoughts back to my experience in Berlin. After all, this country, the United States of America, which was founded on the magnificent principles outlined in our Constitution, was also responsible for a horrific genocide of native peoples. This is something that I was only vaguely aware of until I was a young adult and took an American Indian Literature course in college. The history of the Native American was glossed over in the books that were used in my elementary and high school. We learned a lot about the first Thanksgiving, but we turned away from the Trail of Tears. I struggle to make sense of it all when I think about the horrors of that time and I am sure that you do too. But you and I aren’t responsible for the actions of our forefathers any more than the young Bernd was responsible for the Nazis or Michael was for the actions of the British. I am an American, but I am not THAT American.
Soon after I finished “The Ghost Orchard,” I picked up an old New Yorker magazine that I hadn’t gotten around to reading and saw an advertisement for this book, “Belonging” by Nora Krug[2]. It looked fascinating to me so, of course, I bought it. It is the true story of a young German woman who immigrates to the United States. Having been raised by loving parents well after World War II, she had not given much thought to her family’s past. When she first arrives here in the States, however, she meets an old woman who recognizes her German accent. Nora Krug learns that the woman is a Holocaust survivor, who survived 16 trips to the gas chamber simply because the officer who was to send her to her death had a crush on her. Speaking to this woman makes Nora think about what role her family played in the Holocaust. She could no longer bear to turn away. The book traces her search for answers. She starts the search and finds it emotionally difficult and painstaking, but finds out her mother’s father Edwin, was a Nazi party member, but only out of necessity. “When greeted in the street (with Heil, Hitler),” she writes,”Edwin responded with a phrase that sounded like the Hitler salute, but only meant THREE LITERS.” DREI LITER! She also finds that her father’s brother Franz-Karl was a Nazi soldier who was killed in action in Italy at the young age of 18. Her father who was born much later is also named Franz-Karl and he is held up throughout his youth as a pale comparison to his namesake. This bothers Krug and she digs until she is able to meet up with her aunt, her father’s sister Annemarie, who is estranged from Krug’s father and his family. They find that they do have something in common besides blood. They are both left-handed. Krug writes, “I know that each step that leads me closer to my uncle, each new word that’s added to my family narrative entangles me, that I am irrevocably intertwined with people and with places with stories and with histories.” In her thoughts, she raises a toast to her aunt, “To left-handedness, to brothers dead and alive,…to the unescapablilty of who we are.” Her ultimate question is: “Who would we be as a family if the war had never happened?” There is no answer, of course.
All these thoughts have been floating around in my head in no particular order. They have made me begin to think about our seeming inability to come to terms with the past and what that means to the future. But we have to realize that what’s done is done, of course. We cannot change what has happened even if we really want to. We all know the old saying about learning from the past, though. Or as one joke puts it, “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
The people who lived during the Nazi era, our colonial era, and the British colonization of New Zealand may not have been aware of the injustices that were taking place right under their noses because they just needed to survive, or they may have felt that the actions taken by the governments at that time were actually justified. Or maybe, like Nora Krug’s grandfather Edwin, they went along with the status quo because they feared for their lives and the lives of their families. Maybe they were simply ignorant because they had never seen anything outside the realm of their own existence and could not figure out how to process what was happening right under their noses. Of course, we do each see the world through the prism of our own life’s experiences. But that is little excuse for those of us living today in the privilege of middle-class America with our TVs, our free public libraries, the free press and our internet.
We are living in an era, when it is incredibly easy to access all the pleasures and all the ills of the world, but that makes it an incredibly difficult time too, doesn’t it? Like never before, we can see the big picture. We can see so much that it almost causes a kind of paralysis. There’s so much…so much. I feel like turning away. What can I do? What can you do? What can we do?
When I watch the news at night, often I hear Judy Woodruff give a warning before a particularly difficult story. Beware, she says: This story contains graphic and disturbing images. I am tempted to turn away, but I try hard not to. I believe that it is important that we bear witness to the graphic and disturbing images of this world. It really is the only way I seem to be able to put my easy, American life into perspective. It fuels my desire for justice and equity in this world. I try to pay attention to what is disquieting even if it is a world away in Yemen, Sudan, in Honduras, Mali, in the Congo. In reality, many of the conflicts and skirmishes around the world started and continue because of the way the first world powers (that includes us) have interfered in things, even if maybe with the best of intentions.
Closer to home, I cannot turn away from the hastening of climate change, the bashing of the news media, the encouragement of violence in our society, the xenophobia, the discrimination toward those who have different sexual orientations, different religions, different skin colors. So often, I find myself thinking: what can I do? What can I do? Everything I do seems so small. I have such little power, so little energy, such little impact.
But I must do something.
We often hear this message spoken from this pulpit. Each person who says it puts it in a slightly different way, but we are basically saying the same thing as Edward Everett Hale said: I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.
These words give me courage. I believe that one of the things we can all do is bear witness. Indeed, it is the only way to put our comfortable lives into perspective. Do not forget what is happening in this world that is full of the pale and downtrodden, the weak and the weary. Do not turn away. Keep your eyes open. Let’s ramp up our feelings of gratefulness because it is only pure chance that has placed each of us in this place at this time and away from the major chaos of the world and its dissonance.
“We breathe the common wind of the earth no matter where we live, who we love, what language we speak,” writes Kathleen McTigue, Director of the UU College of Social Justice. “We drink the common water of the earth, no matter the color of our skin, how long we live, the coverings we drape on our forms. We follow the common paths of the earth no matter our beliefs, how far we move from our home, the gold that we carry, or its lack. May we live from these truths, our hearts open to the holiness all around us, our hands turned always toward the common good.”
So let’s not turn away, but turn toward the common good.
Vote!
Make a monetary contribution, even if it’s small, to a cause that speaks to you.
Make art to counteract the ugliness. Make beautiful noise to counteract the dissonance.
Learn to pay attention.
If we embrace our compassion for others beleaguered by war, famine and oppressive politics and begin to think about how our easy lives are located on that same map as their suffering and may in reality be linked to their suffering, then we must begin to think about acting together to point the world toward justice and equity, toward the common good, even if our efforts seem small.
Our Second UU Principle affirms and promotes “justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.” Rev. Emily Gage of the Unity Temple in Chicago says that this “points us toward something beyond inherent worth and dignity. It points us to the larger community. It gets at collective responsibility. It reminds us that treating people as human beings is not simply something we do one-on-one, but something that has systemic implications and can inform our entire cultural way of being.” Rev. Gage further states that “Compassion is something that we can easily act on individually. We can demonstrate openness, give people respect, and treat people with kindness on our own. But we need one another to achieve equity and justice. Justice, equity, and compassion are all parts of the same package. Just as the second Principle overlaps with the first, so it is related to the seventh Principle – the interdependent web of all existence.”
So bear witness. Get together with others who want to work for justice and equity. And if you can’t, write to your representatives in congress about things that mean a lot to you. Give people respect and treat them with dignity. Volunteer to work at our community dinners. Take the high road. You may be only one, but you are one. You may not be able to do everything, but you can do something. Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. Do not turn away. It is the only way to put our lives into perspective. It is the only way we can begin to promote justice, equity, and compassion.
No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness they feel
Just one world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there will be
No more turning away?
So may it be.[3]
[1] Helen Humphreys, The Ghost Orchard, HarperCollins Publishers (November 28, 2017)
[2] Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, Scribner (October 2, 2018)
[3] David Gilmour and Anthony Moore (Pink Floyd)
Sermon by Barbara Lambert Hale
Given on March 31, 2019
at The Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
Last September I had the very great good fortune to take a trip to Europe with my son Evan and my brother Rob. We went to Zurich, Switzerland, Munich and Berlin, Germany and a few places in between.
Zurich is a beautiful city situated on the Limmat River. It is worth the effort to get there simply for the chocolate and the cheese. Munich is a wonderful Bavarian city nestled in some of the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen. But of all three cities, to my great surprise, I liked Berlin the best.
Berlin with its tragic and unhappy recent history has risen like a Phoenix out of the ashes to reinvent itself as a modern, industrious and welcoming place. It doesn’t have the romance of Zurich or Munich, but it has something that to me is much more interesting. While Berliners continue to preserve the past, it is obvious when you go around the city that they look forward to the future. After the horrors of the Second World War and the Soviet occupation of East Berlin, they have “learned their lesson.”
On one of our days in Berlin, we took a five-hour walking tour of East Berlin. Yes, you heard me, this old body walked around Berlin for five full hours with only one coffee break at Einstein Kaffee and a stand-up lunch at the best Curry-wurst stand in Berlin. We clocked more than 18,000 steps that day and though I was weary beyond words when we got back to the hotel, I am so grateful that I was able to stay with our small group that consisted of Evan, Rob, Michael, a fellow traveler from New Zealand, and Bernd, our guide. I am also very grateful that Berlin is a city that is as flat as a pancake, believe me.
Most of Berlin’s history is on the east side of the city – the bunker where Hitler took his own life is located under a dirt parking lot with unassuming signs that point this out. There is no effort to open this to the public or to make a big deal out of it because they want that particular sleeping dog to stay in place and they don’t want people who might tend to glorify Hitler to be able to use it as a shrine. There are remnants of the wall built by the Soviets in many places – one large area was left plain, but is now covered with graffiti, and is backed by a disturbing and graphic display about the year 1933 when Hitler began to rise to power. Of course, one has to see “Checkpoint Charlie” or as our guide called it “Snack-point Charlie” – an area often overrun with curious tourists. You can have your photo taken there with a quote American Soldier unquote at a fake guardhouse or buy authentic Soviet uniforms or postcards with real pieces of the Wall attached. It’s all for fun.
Our guide for this walk was Bernd, as I said before. He is ten years older than me and was alive and aware of the end of the War and the beginning and end of the occupation. He is very knowledgeable about the history there and does this tour often. He told us that on one tour, he had a client who had lost people in the Holocaust. The client looked at Bernd and said, “I hate Germans, but I like you.” Bernd said he was a bit taken aback by this, but had the presence of mind to say, “I am a German, but I am not THAT German.” Indeed, he was too young, as are most Berliners today, to have taken part in the horrors of the Second World War and was disturbed and unhappy about the Soviet occupation and, as a young man living in West Berlin, he did not turn away from what was happening and actually did what he could to resist it. So he really wasn’t THAT German who the man hated.
As luck would have it, our fellow traveler, Michael from New Zealand, is an historian. His job is working for the Justice Department there on a project that helps make restitution for the broken treaties with the Maori people who were persecuted by the English when the English took power there. When Michael told us about this, I was amazed: A government actually turning toward a past problem and trying to rectify it. What an idea! Well, in light of recent events, New Zealand does seem to be good at that. Michael said that they have settled about 75% of the cases to date, but he didn’t have time to elaborate as to how, because the minute he began talking, Bernd had us up and going once again.
As soon as I returned home from Germany, I needed a book to read and reached on the top of my pile for “The Ghost Orchard” by Helen Humphreys.[1] When I picked this book up, I thought I would only be reading about russets and MacIntoshes and maybe a little about Johnny Appleseed, but the excerpt from this lovely little book about the history of the apple in North America was our second reading today. I found it interesting that after reading the chapter that outlines a bit of our ancestors’ push to colonize the countryside it brought my thoughts back to my experience in Berlin. After all, this country, the United States of America, which was founded on the magnificent principles outlined in our Constitution, was also responsible for a horrific genocide of native peoples. This is something that I was only vaguely aware of until I was a young adult and took an American Indian Literature course in college. The history of the Native American was glossed over in the books that were used in my elementary and high school. We learned a lot about the first Thanksgiving, but we turned away from the Trail of Tears. I struggle to make sense of it all when I think about the horrors of that time and I am sure that you do too. But you and I aren’t responsible for the actions of our forefathers any more than the young Bernd was responsible for the Nazis or Michael was for the actions of the British. I am an American, but I am not THAT American.
Soon after I finished “The Ghost Orchard,” I picked up an old New Yorker magazine that I hadn’t gotten around to reading and saw an advertisement for this book, “Belonging” by Nora Krug[2]. It looked fascinating to me so, of course, I bought it. It is the true story of a young German woman who immigrates to the United States. Having been raised by loving parents well after World War II, she had not given much thought to her family’s past. When she first arrives here in the States, however, she meets an old woman who recognizes her German accent. Nora Krug learns that the woman is a Holocaust survivor, who survived 16 trips to the gas chamber simply because the officer who was to send her to her death had a crush on her. Speaking to this woman makes Nora think about what role her family played in the Holocaust. She could no longer bear to turn away. The book traces her search for answers. She starts the search and finds it emotionally difficult and painstaking, but finds out her mother’s father Edwin, was a Nazi party member, but only out of necessity. “When greeted in the street (with Heil, Hitler),” she writes,”Edwin responded with a phrase that sounded like the Hitler salute, but only meant THREE LITERS.” DREI LITER! She also finds that her father’s brother Franz-Karl was a Nazi soldier who was killed in action in Italy at the young age of 18. Her father who was born much later is also named Franz-Karl and he is held up throughout his youth as a pale comparison to his namesake. This bothers Krug and she digs until she is able to meet up with her aunt, her father’s sister Annemarie, who is estranged from Krug’s father and his family. They find that they do have something in common besides blood. They are both left-handed. Krug writes, “I know that each step that leads me closer to my uncle, each new word that’s added to my family narrative entangles me, that I am irrevocably intertwined with people and with places with stories and with histories.” In her thoughts, she raises a toast to her aunt, “To left-handedness, to brothers dead and alive,…to the unescapablilty of who we are.” Her ultimate question is: “Who would we be as a family if the war had never happened?” There is no answer, of course.
All these thoughts have been floating around in my head in no particular order. They have made me begin to think about our seeming inability to come to terms with the past and what that means to the future. But we have to realize that what’s done is done, of course. We cannot change what has happened even if we really want to. We all know the old saying about learning from the past, though. Or as one joke puts it, “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
The people who lived during the Nazi era, our colonial era, and the British colonization of New Zealand may not have been aware of the injustices that were taking place right under their noses because they just needed to survive, or they may have felt that the actions taken by the governments at that time were actually justified. Or maybe, like Nora Krug’s grandfather Edwin, they went along with the status quo because they feared for their lives and the lives of their families. Maybe they were simply ignorant because they had never seen anything outside the realm of their own existence and could not figure out how to process what was happening right under their noses. Of course, we do each see the world through the prism of our own life’s experiences. But that is little excuse for those of us living today in the privilege of middle-class America with our TVs, our free public libraries, the free press and our internet.
We are living in an era, when it is incredibly easy to access all the pleasures and all the ills of the world, but that makes it an incredibly difficult time too, doesn’t it? Like never before, we can see the big picture. We can see so much that it almost causes a kind of paralysis. There’s so much…so much. I feel like turning away. What can I do? What can you do? What can we do?
When I watch the news at night, often I hear Judy Woodruff give a warning before a particularly difficult story. Beware, she says: This story contains graphic and disturbing images. I am tempted to turn away, but I try hard not to. I believe that it is important that we bear witness to the graphic and disturbing images of this world. It really is the only way I seem to be able to put my easy, American life into perspective. It fuels my desire for justice and equity in this world. I try to pay attention to what is disquieting even if it is a world away in Yemen, Sudan, in Honduras, Mali, in the Congo. In reality, many of the conflicts and skirmishes around the world started and continue because of the way the first world powers (that includes us) have interfered in things, even if maybe with the best of intentions.
Closer to home, I cannot turn away from the hastening of climate change, the bashing of the news media, the encouragement of violence in our society, the xenophobia, the discrimination toward those who have different sexual orientations, different religions, different skin colors. So often, I find myself thinking: what can I do? What can I do? Everything I do seems so small. I have such little power, so little energy, such little impact.
But I must do something.
We often hear this message spoken from this pulpit. Each person who says it puts it in a slightly different way, but we are basically saying the same thing as Edward Everett Hale said: I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.
These words give me courage. I believe that one of the things we can all do is bear witness. Indeed, it is the only way to put our comfortable lives into perspective. Do not forget what is happening in this world that is full of the pale and downtrodden, the weak and the weary. Do not turn away. Keep your eyes open. Let’s ramp up our feelings of gratefulness because it is only pure chance that has placed each of us in this place at this time and away from the major chaos of the world and its dissonance.
“We breathe the common wind of the earth no matter where we live, who we love, what language we speak,” writes Kathleen McTigue, Director of the UU College of Social Justice. “We drink the common water of the earth, no matter the color of our skin, how long we live, the coverings we drape on our forms. We follow the common paths of the earth no matter our beliefs, how far we move from our home, the gold that we carry, or its lack. May we live from these truths, our hearts open to the holiness all around us, our hands turned always toward the common good.”
So let’s not turn away, but turn toward the common good.
Vote!
Make a monetary contribution, even if it’s small, to a cause that speaks to you.
Make art to counteract the ugliness. Make beautiful noise to counteract the dissonance.
Learn to pay attention.
If we embrace our compassion for others beleaguered by war, famine and oppressive politics and begin to think about how our easy lives are located on that same map as their suffering and may in reality be linked to their suffering, then we must begin to think about acting together to point the world toward justice and equity, toward the common good, even if our efforts seem small.
Our Second UU Principle affirms and promotes “justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.” Rev. Emily Gage of the Unity Temple in Chicago says that this “points us toward something beyond inherent worth and dignity. It points us to the larger community. It gets at collective responsibility. It reminds us that treating people as human beings is not simply something we do one-on-one, but something that has systemic implications and can inform our entire cultural way of being.” Rev. Gage further states that “Compassion is something that we can easily act on individually. We can demonstrate openness, give people respect, and treat people with kindness on our own. But we need one another to achieve equity and justice. Justice, equity, and compassion are all parts of the same package. Just as the second Principle overlaps with the first, so it is related to the seventh Principle – the interdependent web of all existence.”
So bear witness. Get together with others who want to work for justice and equity. And if you can’t, write to your representatives in congress about things that mean a lot to you. Give people respect and treat them with dignity. Volunteer to work at our community dinners. Take the high road. You may be only one, but you are one. You may not be able to do everything, but you can do something. Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. Do not turn away. It is the only way to put our lives into perspective. It is the only way we can begin to promote justice, equity, and compassion.
No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness they feel
Just one world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there will be
No more turning away?
So may it be.[3]
[1] Helen Humphreys, The Ghost Orchard, HarperCollins Publishers (November 28, 2017)
[2] Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, Scribner (October 2, 2018)
[3] David Gilmour and Anthony Moore (Pink Floyd)