Out of the Ashes
The 9-11 Call to our Humanity
Words of Dedication
Spoken in Battery Park, New York City,
On behalf of the Rose Harmony Association,
For the Festival of Dedication with the same title.
December 30, 2001
By Klara Logan,
Children's Program student.
Painted 9/10/01
It is when the night is darkest that the stars shine most brightly. During the dark months since September 11th, it has been possible to experience particularly strongly the light that can irradiate our humanity. We have come here today to pledge our resolve to do all we can that this light of humanity continue to illumine our darkening human future.
In November, 1863, Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to dedicate the cemetery for the thousands of souls who had perished on the battlefield there. His two-minute address made no mention of enemies; no mention of sides, of issues, of battle-lines. Instead, Lincoln sounded a call to us, the living. He called on us to rededicate ourselves to an unfinished task: our task of freedom.
As a dedication for our festival today, I will speak part of Lincoln’s address (in which I have twice amended the word
nation).
We have come here to dedicate a portion of the battlefield, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that [a world of freedom] might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate ~ we cannot consecrate ~ we cannot hallow ~ this ground. The brave souls, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract… It is for us the living, rather, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ~ that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause to which they gave the last full measure of devotion ~ that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ~ that this [world], under God, shall have a new birth of freedom...
A few paces north of where we stand today, thousands of souls have also given their lives in sacrifice. Some were the courageous men who ran up the stairs when everyone else was running down. Some were in the planes. Others were working in the Towers. And the ground on which we stand has been consecrated by the ashes of those whose bodies were burned in that conflagration. Consecrated ashes, scattered by the winds. Ashes that in other circumstances would have been scattered with love and devotion by their human companions.
Like Lincoln, we cannot hallow this ground. The dead have hallowed it for us. But, with Lincoln, we too can ask: What is the unfinished task of freedom to which we need to rededicate ourselves, so this sacrifice shall not be in vain? This is our challenge today.
The American birth of freedom of which Lincoln speaks has taken place in several stages, each incomplete in itself. Through the War of Independence, we threw off a foreign power. But it left intact the institution of slavery, over which, in part at least, the Civil War had to be fought. But even the elimination of slavery left many of our black brethren to face the terrible scourges of poverty and hunger, of illiteracy and poor education, lacking basic health care. Hence the Civil Rights battles of the ‘60s. And many of these ills remain unredeemed to this day--both in our nation and in the rest of the world.
What does this, our journey towards freedom, say to the challenge of September 11th? Our country went to war in Afghanistan. Whatever our views of this military campaign, it is clearly, in the longer term, but a band-aid. that provides, at best, an outer protective layer against a particular terrorist group. To really overcome terrorism itself will require far more radical surgery. As the Wall Street Journal acknowledged on December 20th, to accomplish this, we will have to cleanse the soil in which terrorism festers. Again, it’s the soil of poverty and hunger, of illiteracy and poor education, of AIDS and other illnesses--the same basic human rights that were the focus of the Civil Rights movement. But now on a global scale! What a gargantuan challenge! One that will require, in the Journal’s words, a new, global Marshall Plan.
But, even if this enormous task were accomplished, a further challenge remains, the one Martin Luther King characterized as the need to
“transform the jangling discords of our nation [now, our world] into a beautiful symphony of
brotherhood:”
Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood. And yet, we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood…. We must all learn to live together as brothers--or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.
This even-greater task is the challenge of our festival. Because it is the challenge to every individual. To each of us. Only the individual can make another human being their sister or brother. And we can never be forced to do so--it can only happen through our own persevering, strenuous work.
How is this challenge relevant to Afghanistan? Right now, for example, our nation is called on to help rebuild the country we have been destroying. Yet most of us know so little about Islamic culture or the Afghan soul that we don’t have the remotest idea how to give truly helpful aid. And when you’re blind to the context where help is needed, that help always tends to be “unecological”--it has the flavor of dropping token yellow, peanut butter packages with English-language instructions for illiterate, starving Afghans. To give truly helpful aid, we have to learn to understand the Afghans as human beings, with their particular cultural background, their individual and cultural needs. To make them our sisters and brothers.
We’re probably too late to meet that goal--it can’t be done overnight. But the underlying challenge remains: what practical steps can we take as individuals to work towards such brotherhood? Does it mean we must all become saints¾ kinder, more generous, more tolerant? In a word, more moral human beings? Maybe so, but there is another, essential element, as I learned from Thomas
Weihs, author of Children in Need of Special Care, who was speaking about loving our neighbors as ourselves. It has to do with the way I see my neighbor, he said.
I go to work one day and see my “neighbor” being nasty to a colleague. That woman’s got a real problem! I think, instinctively. The next day, perhaps, I’m equally nasty to a colleague. But then, of course, it couldn’t possibly be because I have a problem. It’s because my kids are sick and I didn’t sleep last night. When I look at my neighbor, it’s always as if I’m looking at an assortment of disconnected photos. As she is right now, as she was yesterday, or a year ago. When I see myself, by contrast, it’s as if I’m an actor in a play or a movie. Every shot I have of myself is only a scene, a frame, of that drama, one that makes sense only in context of my whole story. I don’t love my neighbor, says
Weihs, because I can’t see her as part of her story, her life-drama. And I can’t love my neighbor as
myself until I learn to see my neighbor as I see myself, from within that story, her life-drama, the way she sees herself.
In the human sphere, this is the same task that faces us in learning to see nature ecologically. It means learning to “think like a mountain,” to see nature as the mountain sees her, in the words of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, which tells the story of a farm from the farm’s viewpoint. King’s challenge to brotherhood calls on us likewise, in the human sphere, to “think like a mountain.” To see nature the way she sees herself, to see other human beings the way they see themselves, within their own, particular story. To tackle the Herculean task of developing a truly ecological world-view, in fact. And it will cost us. To radically transform our thinking so we can see what is living and human in its mobility, we’ll have to be willing to undertake disciplined inner practice, doing exercises again and again and again, for years on end, just we did when we were learning algebra or the violin. In addition, the consequences of this radical transformation will be a volcanic upheaval comparable in magnitude to that of the Renaissance and Reformation, when we transformed our church-dominated thinking to a think-for-yourself, scientific world-view.
This is our unfulfilled task of freedom. And if each of us individually cannot rededicate ourselves to this task, I believe, there is no possibility of brotherhood. We will, in King’s words, “all perish together as fools.”
In sounding Lincoln’s words again, I speak them as a vow of rededication, for myself¾and, I hope, for all of us gathered today on this consecrated ground:
It is for us the living, rather, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ~ that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause to which they gave the last full measure of devotion ~ that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ~ that this [world], under God, shall have a new birth of freedom …
As the clouds gather in the months and years ahead, may this deed of dedication anchor our resolve to make fruitful the sacrifice consummated on this hallowed ground, that the light of humanity that radiates from it may continue to illumine and strengthen our human future.
John Alexandra
December 30, 2001.
- Visitors to this website may
also be interested in the following insightful article about the
September 11th tragedy: The Forum
Responds (to September 11th), by Jim Garrison, President, State of the
World Forum.
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