Shock and awe

We have all been here before

Photo by John Benitez on Unsplash

To the reader: Following is a sermon I gave Sunday, November 6, 2016 at First Parish of Sudbury, Massachusetts, two days before that historic presidential election. (For longtime readers who may be confused, I used the title, “Shock … and awe,” for an unrelated post back in April 2023.) Given the daily barrage of political news, which has led to a kind of siege mentality in many people I’ve spoken with, I thought it worth offering this up, as after the election I heard from folks who said re-reading it helped them get through the week following the election.

Some points here can certainly be challenged given that 2024 is not 2016, so please feel free to post your thoughts in the comments. I’m leaving this as I wrote it and delivered it as a kind of test of the eternal.

The “faith” I refer to is Unitarian Universalism.

Do you remember “shock and awe?”

I see some nodding heads. You may be thinking, yeah, Gulf War. And you’d be half right. There have been two Gulf Wars, and they were 12 years apart. So, a little military history. “Shock and awe” was the unofficial theme of the second Gulf War begun on March 19, 2003, when the United States began continuous bombing in Iraq in an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein, because, it was alleged, he was hoarding weapons of mass destruction.

And a little glance into military college: shock and awe was technically known by military academics as rapid dominance, a military doctrine based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight.^[1][2] In other words, to leave the enemy physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted. And that is how we attacked Iraq in 2003. All these years later, Iraq is still a mess, and we, after an overlong election cycle, after one long and endless and merciless news cycle, we find ourselves physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted.

But take heart, good people. Today, I bring good tidings. First, however, I think we need to put these current troubled times in perspective.

I remember the shock and awe campaign. It was officially called Operation Enduring Freedom. My two children were 12 and nine and we lived here in Sudbury. I remember thinking, as many did, I’m sure, that given the shaky ground upon which this military action was launched, we were finally headed toward Armageddon. Osama Bin Laden was still at large, Al Qaeda was all too active, the Middle East remained the tinderbox it has always been, and we were once again at war, this time based on personal and political vendettas rather than anything resembling righteousness and sound foreign policy.

I remember that I was feeling shaky, too. After all, in March 2003, it had been less than 18 months since 9/11, the day when our lives changed.

I think we all remember where we were on September 11, 2001. I was at work. I remember running down to the lobby of my office building in Cambridge, in Kendall Square, where hundreds of us gathered after the first tower fell to watch the TV in the lobby, watching aghast as the second plane exploded into the second tower, in real time.

Of the many sights and sounds and words that occurred on that day, what I remember most is an eerie silence that night. Back in our little bungalow up the road from here, past the Atkinson soccer fields and off Hudson Road, I will never forget that after reassuring our young children and tucking them into bed, I stepped out onto our porch and noted that the night sky was completely quiet. Remember? All commercial air travel had been shut down. Thousands of flights canceled, but no one complaining. There were no planes in the sky. And it was so quiet. I stood there on our side porch, looking up. It was impossible to know then whether the day’s events were isolated incidents, or was there more to come tomorrow, or even overnight? I looked up into the silence and wondered whether this was the end, whether my sons would survive into adulthood, and would they know the joys I’d known of fatherhood.

Suddenly I heard a whir. A plane flew overhead, and at first I thought it was another terrorist attack, and my stomach turned. I then realized it was a military plane flying into Hanscom Air Force Base.* Only military planes were allowed to fly that night. Only then did I feel reassured that our defense system was watching over us, and only then, as I watched the plane disappear a bit to the northeast, did I go back inside, feeling that my family was safe, and head to bed.

Because this wasn’t the first time I had been shocked into a kind of fear. I remember back in 1991, living in Watertown, when one Wednesday evening, January 16, 1991, to be exact, President George H. W. Bush appeared on TV and announced the start of what would be called Operation Desert Storm—a military operation to expel occupying Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which Iraq had invaded and annexed months earlier.

I remember the moment so clearly. I remember seeing our one-year-old son, Jay, innocently tumbling about on our living room floor as our television displayed images of tracers and missiles shredding the night sky over Kuwait as the UN-sanctioned air invasion began. And I wondered, what kind of world have we brought you into, Jay? What’s going to happen? As Jay gamboled about, oblivious to the fireworks on the screen, I feared for his future.

Because this wasn’t the first time I had been shocked by current events. I remember hearing about the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the radio as a six-year-old boy, their deaths a mere three months apart, April and June of 1968. I remember concluding that if you were famous but also good, or were good and then became famous, that someone would kill you. I didn’t understand why—as a young Catholic, I was taught that everyone should love everyone—but I decided that that was how it worked. After all, we had had the Vietnam War on TV in our dining room every night, body counts and sad news, so I already knew being good or doing good—and I assumed my country was trying to do good—being good or doing good was no invincible shield. So I embraced the Catholic teaching to do good works silently. Be good, but don’t be famous about it. Keep it quiet. Keep it underground.

I think we can all go back and back, to these events I’ve just described that many of us remember well, back to our parents, who experienced the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and realize that there has been shock after shock to our collective system. And for all the talk of “flawed candidates” today, we have always had flawed leaders. Even the mighty King David, a hero of the Jewish people, was flawed: he arranged to have a man killed in battle so he could take the man’s wife.

And this is what I want to say today: that we are all inured to shock, all sensitized to shock. I don’t think we would know shock if God herself reached down and plunked us on the head and said, “How do you like them atoms?”

The net effect of all this is that nearly everything feels like shock. It doesn’t help that television news has become a circus of countdown clocks and instant analysis, weather reports renamed storm centers, reality TV stars becoming famous simply for being famous, the Kardashian effect.

So it was especially challenging for me when, this past July, civil rights leader Dr. Rev. William J. Barber II spoke to the Democratic National Convention and invoked shock as the task before us. He said:

We must shock this nation with the power of love. We must shock this nation with the power of mercy. We must shock this nation and fight for justice for all. We can’t give up on the heart of our democracy, not now, not ever!

I’m fine with that. I believe our nation needs to be shocked back into love. I have met Rev. Barber and heard him preach about the Moral Mondays movement and do know that what he is doing in North Carolina is needed and is creating change.

But I myself am not a shocker. I’m not a social action kind of guy. I prefer to work from within. That’s why I’m up here instead of out there.

Plus, I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted. Rapidly dominated, as the military expert would say. Shocked and awed.

So how do the more timid or introverted among us gather the strength to shock? Where do we look for our wholeheartedness?

Fortunately, we all have a weapon of mass instruction. We have a faith that calls us to love against hate and intolerance and petty playground politics. We have the means to fight back. We have the means to override the sorry news of the day. And key to this weapon, this faith … is our sense of awe. Our sense of the transcendent. Our sense that there is something larger than ourselves at work in the order of the cosmos. We don’t know what it is. But that invincible shield gives us a sense that there is something greater at work in the universe, and that that something larger is in all of us, too, and because of that, we are bigger than what has been going on.

How exactly does this work, you ask? First, let me bring in the words of the religious scholar and writer Karen Armstrong. Armstrong, a former nun, has written deep explorations about the history of God, the history of Islam, the history of fundamentalism and the history of violence as a byproduct of religion. In 2009, Armstrong was interviewed by Terry Gross on the National Public Radio program, “Fresh Air,” when Gross asked Armstrong, “What do you think religion is for?”

Armstrong said: “Religion is about helping us to deal with the sorrow that we see in life, helping us to find meaning in life, and helping us to live in relation to [transcendence ]. Religious people are ambitious. They want to feel enhanced. They want to feel at peace within themselves. They want to live generous lives. They want to live beyond selfishness, beyond ego.”

[She continued] “All the world religions say that the way to find what we call God or Brahman, Nirvana, or Tao is to get beyond the prism of egotism, of selfishness which holds us in a little deadlock and limits our vision. That if we can get beyond that, especially in the practice of compassion, when we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, we live much more richly and intensely.”

Armstrong then described a competition Hindus held back in about 1000 BCE, in India:

There, some of the Brahman priests devised a ritual. They went out into the forest, and there they made a retreat and put themselves into a different frame of mind.

They fasted and practiced breathing exercises, early forms of yoga, and then they came back, and the competition would begin. Each challenger would try to define the Brahman—that is, the ultimate reality in Hinduism, something that lies way beyond the gods, that is way beyond anything we can know and yet is within us all.

After each challenger spoke, his opponents would listen to him very carefully, and then they would respond, moving on from what he had said and make their own definition of what Brahman—or we would say God—is.

The winner was the priest who reduced everybody to silence. And in that silence, the Brahman was present. The Brahman was not present in the wordy definitions of the divine. It was present in the stunning realization of the absolute powerlessness of language and speech to describe this.

That, Armstrong said, is an authentic model of religious discourse. She told Gross that “a theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do. All religious language must reach beyond itself into a sort of silent awe.”

I believe there is some power in that sense of silent awe. Of all the responses to the incredible and crazy circus that has been on display the last year and a half, I choose a sort of silent awe to sustain me. This does not mean say nothing and do nothing, no. It simply means that in your most private moments, when you go to the well to seek succor and sustenance, and you peer down into the well and see your own reflection in the water, that what you see will be enough to keep you going. For what you see is a survivor. You’ve been here before. You’re bigger than this. The mere fact that you are here is testament to the fact that you come from a line of survivors. We are all descended from people who experienced shock, who no doubt at times were convinced that the end of the world was nigh. Yet here we are. All of us here today come from lines of ancestors who survived wars, famine, poverty, pogroms, racism, hate-ism, discrimination, economic threat and outright terrorism. Not to mention a 24-hour news cycle. Through it all, the power of love, whether you believe it comes from the God without or the God within, that which inspires and is deserving of our silent awe, has been working in the background.

Regardless of what happens this Tuesday, love will not be defeated. It never has been and never will be. Hate is temporary. Hate has to run campaigns. Even if hate were to get four years, it doesn’t mean hate wins. Who, after all, with the opportunity to shape this nation for four or eight years, has truly won? Or lost?

It is all outside the eternal. Love doesn’t rise or fall with the polls. Love doesn’t depend on the Electoral College breakdown. Love never has to fundraise. Love doesn’t have to run for reelection. Love is the only constant. Love is the antidote to the constant shock of our existence.

So … hold signs, write letters to the editor, protest, cry out against injustice. And vote, please, if you haven’t already. But when the polls close and all is quiet as we await the outcome, when the nighttime is silent because no planes are flying, when Madame President comes on TV to announce yet another military action, it is then that we need to remember the greater impulse that urges us to a silent awe. Love will prevail. That which is beyond us will remain beyond us, despite all the temporary amplified distractions. Ignore the noise. Embrace the silence. We are all children of the universe, and if you have ever listened to a nighttime without planes flying overhead, a silence quieter than quiet, you would understand that the universe itself prefers a kind of silent awe.

Maybe it’s trying to tell us something.

* A United States Air Force base located predominantly within Bedford, Massachusetts, with portions extending into the adjoining towns of Lincoln, Concord and Lexington.