Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

A Drumbeat for Darfur

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

March 18, 2007

The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee sponsors Justice Sunday each year, a day when congregation around the country are invited to consider one urgent human rights issue, in the hope that we will be moved to take action. This year’s Justice Sunday is called Drumbeat for Darfur, and the genocide and humanitarian crisis in that region of Sudan is our focus today.

I have to confess that I approach the idea of Justice Sunday with some reluctance. I think that every Sunday should be Justice Sunday to some degree, and I don’t want us to fall into an Issue-of-the-Year approach that narrows our attention to one thing at a time and assumes that we can do what we need to in a year and move on to something else. There is too much else going on in the world, and we can’t ignore other concerns in favor of just one.

But Justice Sunday gives me pause for another, deeper reason: I know that looking closely at these issues can push me too quickly past compassion and toward anger and indignation. I know how easy it is for me to make anger at injustice the source of my energy. And I know that my anger and indignation will not help to guide us toward a sustainable engagement in this issue. So I look for another way.

It’s hard for us to really look for very long at what is happening in Darfur.

We know the facts. There is plenty of information, and we can get it easily. Just this week, the Daily Progress carried a story about a United Nations panel’s report which said that in Darfur after four years of violence, “killing of civilians remains widespread, including in large-scale attacks. Rape and sexual violence are widespread and systematic. Torture continues.” The Janjaweed militia’s pattern is well documented: When the Janjaweed arrive at a village, with Sudanese military protection, they burn houses and fields, slaughter livestock, kill men and boys, rape women, kill children, and capture youth as slaves.

We have seen all this before—in Rwanda in 1994, in Bosnia throughout the 1990s, and seventy years ago, when the UUSC had its own beginnings, in Nazi Germany. We know what’s going on, and we know where it’s headed, and we know that the world has said “never again” over and over but it is happening again. The United States government declared two years ago that what is happening in Sudan is genocide—the purposeful attempt by one group of people to destroy another.

Two years ago. Why is this still going on?

It isn’t that no one is doing anything. The humanitarian aid being sent to Darfur and Eastern Chad represent one of the largest organized humanitarian efforts in history, certainly the largest in the world today. As New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof says, college students, religious communities, celebrities and armies of schoolchildren have stepped up to mobilize heroic efforts in the absence of systematic U.S. government aid. International aid agencies are hard at work there. Yet attacks are now targeting aid workers along with civilians, not just in Darfur but in Chad as well, and Doctors Without Borders recently announced along with other agencies that it will have to evacuate workers unless the situation is stabilized.

Things are getting worse in Darfur in spite of everything everyone is doing, because national governments and the United Nations have not become involved beyond humanitarian efforts. Some UN Security Council members have business interests with the Sudanese government, and they keep the UN from acting more forcefully. The African Union is willing but unable to send enough troops to stand between the killers and their victims. And the United States is too busy in Iraq to help anyone with anything unless it is connected directly with a very narrow definition of our “national security interests.” In other words, there is no one today with both the will and the power to call Sudan to account.

How easy it is to work ourselves into a fury over this horror. How simple to bubble up and erupt in a molten flow of wrath, to demand that Something Must Be Done. That would be the simplest course for a sermon on this Justice Sunday. It’s certainly my first impulse: Make a fiery speech, stir up a hornet’s nest, try to fill you with the conviction that We Have To Do Something, Right Now. Start up a Drumbeat for Darfur that is thunderous, loud and powerful, and hopefully send you out in the streets with it.

What’s wrong with that?

What’s wrong with it is that it would be about me, about us, not about the suffering of the people of Darfur.

The poet Robert Bly writes that “the health of any nations’ soul depends on the capacity of adults to face the harsh facts of the time.” Letting myself focus on my rage and indignation over Darfur is really a way of escaping one of those harsh facts, focusing on myself instead. I move quickly toward anger because it lets me skip over the pain and dismay I feel in an honest look at the human suffering that is going on right now in Darfur. I am afraid that if I let myself stay with the sorrow, my heart will break. What use is a broken heart to them?

I have a seven-year old son. Maybe you know him. Maybe you’ve got a child, a grandchild, a nephew or cousin, a friend, or a friend’s child in your life who’s about that age. It’s a fascinating age: curious, tempestuous, goofy, judgmental, affectionate. Somewhere in Darfur or in a refugee camp in Chad right now is a child that same age. The horror and havoc we’re talking about today, that hurts us even to think about, is just ordinary everyday life for that young one.

We know what that child wants. That child wants to read books and play games and laugh and tell silly jokes with her friends and compare notes on their crops of loose teeth. That child wants to be hugged and loved by her parents. That child doesn’t want his house to burn down and strangers to shout and shoot at him and his mother and sisters to be hurt and his family and his friends to die. That child doesn’t want to be sent to live in a camp where there’s no food and the people who are taking care of you don’t know you, and no one is really safe because people are still coming to hurt everyone. That child wants to live.

What are you feeling right now? Just breathe with that for a moment. . . if you feel anger, try to bring your attention back to that child. . . let that child’s thoughts and wishes and fears and hurts be real in your heart and mind. . . and as you breathe into that sorrow. . . let yourself acknowledge that you may not be able to do anything at all to help that particular child. That’s my child, that’s your child out there. They may be there and we may be here, but they are our children. Stay with them. . .

What use is a broken heart? It’s the price of living honestly as part of a human race that does this much violence to itself. We can afford it. If the people of Darfur are strong enough to live in their situation, we can surely be strong enough at least to live with knowing about it. That strength will become the source of our sustainable commitment.

It is hard for us to hold still with that knowledge and that hurt. We want to make it stop right now, we want to make the hurt go away, for them and for ourselves.

Often, in our urgency and anger and horror, we want to insist that the way to do something about this is to drop everything and make solving this problem the center of our lives. But we know we won’t do that, at least most of us, not in any sustained way. We have our own lives to live, and they have centers already. We know that tomorrow, or next week, or next month, we’ll lapse into living the life that lies in front of us this day, every day. We’ll play with our children, enjoy the daffodils, drive to Ben & Jerry’s for a nice Chunky Monkey. We’ll go to a reading, pick up a couple good books at the book sale down the hall, and let this go for now. We can’t sustain that level of urgency for very long.

So I’m not here today to say why we must do something to end the disaster in Darfur right now. You understand, I’m not here to say we don’t need to do anything, either; there are certainly things we can and should do, some of them today and some of them every single day. What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t indulge ourselves in the deadly illusion that this situation must somehow be fixed quickly, because it can’t and if we allow ourselves to think it can, we will give up and walk away. And we must not.

What I’m thinking about today is how we can prepare and sustain ourselves spiritually to be in this for the long haul, to move toward a deep identification with these suffering human beings that will become part of our lives, part of our real lives here where we live. I’m looking for a Drumbeat for Darfur that can be a heartbeat, steady and calm and sure, beating right within our own hearts along with all those other heartbeats we carry with us as we move through our daily lives.

So how can we do that?

Perhaps we can let some small part of the day, every day, be given to what Sam Keen calls “the discipline of compassion.” We can make ourselves aware of the suffering in the world and acknowledge its reality in our lives, even in this minute, even as we sit here in this beautiful and comfortable room, among these good people.

Then from that place of compassion, each day, perhaps we can take at least one small practical step. Learn everything you can about what is going on in Darfur and in Chad, and about what might be done. Some ideas are on the Justice Sunday insert in your Order of Service; when Mohamed Adam Yahya, whom I spoke of earlier, is our Faith in Action speaker April 1st, he will surely have more ideas to offer.

Above all, as we learn, we can help others learn to face the realities of life in our world. Denial is what makes our neglectful behavior possible. Tear holes in the concealing fabric of denial. Without denial, our nation will be unable to ignore the call of mercy, peace, and love; without denial, more and more voices will take part in a quiet but growing and unstoppable call for change. Without denial we can call our governments to make better choices—or we can call for better governments.

As we learn to act from compassion rather than anger, we should recognize the pain we will carry and treat ourselves with compassion as we learn to live in this new way, truly as children of one family, accepting our share of the hurt that will fill the world until we all learn together how to make it end.

And let us also not forget the preciousness of the beauty and ease of our lives here in this nation of relative safety, prosperity, and security. Nicholas Kristof writes about an aid-worker friend who came home to America from Darfur and broke down in tears at the sight of a bird feeder. People were helping birds here, while where she had come from people were throwing babies into bonfires. We should know every day that our life here is incredibly sweet and rich—and savor it deeply. We can experience this delight with integrity, so long as we don’t pretend not to know that many people in the world can’t even imagine anything like what we take for granted. We can savor our good fortune with integrity, so long as we are also working to make things better.

All of this is what we have to learn to hold. We should not try to hold it alone. Sitting in a room with a radio or television or computer, sitting at the table with a newspaper by ourselves, it is too much. We can hold it together, here in this holy place. This old world is full of sorrow, and our power to hold it without being overwhelmed is the foundation of our ability to genuinely make a difference. Here we may allow ourselves to enter the anguish, because we do it in the context of a deep belief that the Universe is a place where humankind has a true home, a belief that there is hope in the power of humankind to make a better world. Here we can remind ourselves that joy is also real, that even in the valley of the shadow of death there is aid and comfort and that we can be part of that aid and comfort. We can hold each others’ hands and acknowledge this awfulness together and encourage each other to take a small step, and then another, and then one more and one more step until there is peace for us and everyone, until there is safety and healing for all who suffer in Darfur and elsewhere, until we have found our way at last to become what we were born to be: one undivided human family.

So may it be.