After the Massacre

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ast month I was privileged to attend a ceremony honoring Waitstill and Martha Sharp at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C. A photograph of the Sharps, along with a short account of their work, was set in a place of honor, among photographs of other non-Jews who had risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. A couple of months before, the Sharps were recognized in Israel as only the second and third Americans to receive the high honor of being “Righteous Among the Nations.”

Martha and Waitstill had been sent to Europe by Unitarian headquarters before the outbreak of the Second World War to see how they could help people fleeing the Nazi regime. After a short first visit they returned to Europe, helping one person after another escape. Many of the people they helped were children. Martha also helped bring food to children in refugee camps in France. This was the beginning of the Unitarian Service Committee and the seed of what would become the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, or UUSC. While in Europe, this tiny group of American Unitarians needed a logo to make their correspondence look official. This was the origin of the symbol of the flaming chalice. Every week when we light our chalice we should recall that this symbol was born in the struggle to help the oppressed find freedom.

In the Holocaust Museum I saw once again the horrible images of the death camps. I am sure you have seen many of the same old black and white photos of piles of bodies, of liberated prisoners starving and near death. I had the same reaction I had when I first saw these images when I was still a boy. How could people do this? What could possibly make human beings murder thousands upon thousands of fellow human beings? I don’t want to believe that my fellow humans are capable of such brutality. I suspect many of you share my reaction. We want to believe that people are basically good. At some level, I don’t want to believe that I am capable of such behavior.

The images of the Nazi mass murder are nauseating. When people of the world saw the images after the war, their immediate reaction was “Never again.” Any human being with an once of morality would say the same thing. After the massacre we say, “Never again.” We must not let this happen again. We must promise each other that we will never stand idly by and allow our fellow humans to be massacred by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, the millions. No, never again.

All the religious traditions on which we draw teach us that we are all brothers and sisters. As Unitarian Universalists our first principle is an affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Any morality worth the name begins with compassion and kindness, with the recognition that other human beings are fundamentally just like us. No group of human beings can be sub human. Everyone matters.

Never again, we say. And yet the massacres happen again and again. Since the Holocaust we have witnessed mass murder in Cambodia and in Rwanda. We have seen “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia.

And it happened again in Guatemala. As James Durgin described in his chalice lighting, about 200,000 people, almost all indigenous Mayans, died in Guatemala twenty years ago. Thousands upon thousands of them were women and children methodically slaughtered by the army. Just last week the New York Times ran a story about mass graves in Guatemala that continue to be uncovered. The president at the time, Efraín Rios Montt and several members of the military were indicted for crimes against humanity by a court in Spain during the time we were in Guatemala.

Three months ago James, I, and eight other members of this congregation stood in a cemetery where scores of massacre victims removed from mass graves had been given a dignified Mayan burial. A couple of crude, simple concrete monuments in the cemetery commemorate the massacres in which these people died. I remember standing there reading the names of victims, names written by hand with paint. Already the effects of weather are taking their toll. At one monument I counted eight Moraleses. It could have been me. It could have been members of my family. It could have been you. It could have been members of your family. And, of course, in a true sense, these victims of massacre were members of my family and your family.

After the massacre there must be healing and there must be some measure of justice. In our brief time in Guatemala we also visited several local non profit organizations that are seek justice and, more important, seek to build a new future for the survivors. We visited a forensic anthropology lab where brave people do the slow, painstaking work of examining remains of mass graves in an attempt to ascertain the identities of the victims and the cause of death. The “lab” is at a former large home. The work takes place in the open air under a cover to keep the rain out. We saw skeletal remains carefully laid out on tables. A technician showed me a skull with a bullet hole in it. The work of these people serves to bring closure to families whose loved ones “disappeared” during the violence. The Spanish word for someone who has disappeared, a “desaparecido,” has frightening connotations in Guatemala and across Latin America. “Desaparecidos” almost never return. They truly disappear; most are never found. In almost every case they were tortured and killed and their bodies discarded. The people who do the work of forensic anthropology face danger, for their work not only helps bring closure to families of victims, their work serves to document the massacres that the government and military want kept secret.

The massacres in Guatemala hit especially close to home. On our trip we flew through Houston. The flight from Denver to Houston takes the same time as from Houston to Guatemala City. This massacre wasn’t in some far off country on the other side of the world. These were our neighbors killing each other. Worse than that, as Americans our hands have blood on them. Our CIA orchestrated the overthrow of a progressive elected government in the 1950’s. We did it in large part to support the financial interests of the United Fruit Company. Worse, our military then equipped and trained the army that did the bidding of the oligarchy. Those people in the mass graves were killed with American rifles and American grenades. The military officers were trained by us here in the United States.

While seeing the graves and the skeletal remains was horrible, I and others found our trip inspiring and uplifting. We witnessed heroic people working steadily to build new lives. The UUSC works with indigenous groups that strive to improve the lot of survivors. We visited a settlement outside the city of Rabinal, just a few minutes from the cemetery that holds scores of victims. This settlement can only be described as a refugee camp. Here campesinos live without electricity and without running water. The adults have no prospects. Most are illiterate. They know subsistence farming, but have no land. Children get little education. What they get stops at fifth grade. After that one must pay tuition. We also visited a couple of tiny settlements in the hills overlooking the new reservoir. The reservoir has covered their old villages along the Rio Negro. These people, living at bare subsistence, chose not to go to the new settlement next to Rabinal.

We listened to these survivors talk about their dreams and their steady work to build something new. They don’t seek revenge. I find the fact that they don’t seek revenge incredible. I doubt I could I could be so generous of spirit. What they do seek is a new future filled with hope for their children. It humbling and inspiring to hear the determination without rancor of leaders like Juan de Dios and Juan Manuel Gerónimo.

Our UUSC works with these people, not by giving them handouts, but by helping them organize, seek justice, and create new hope. Since returning, I have been in contact with Charlie Clements, president of the UUSC. I have asked Charlie to contact these groups that are working to build new lives and ask them how we might help in some small way with their work. I had hoped that I would have a proposal to present this morning. Alas, I do not. But stay tuned. I dream of JUC doing something modest, but with a potential long term impact. For example, a year’s tuition for the equivalent of middle school or high school costs only a few hundred dollars. I would love to see our congregation take on a task like sending sending some kids, especially girls, to school so that they can escape life in a resettlement camp. The people we met will never return to the lives they once had, if for no other reason than a huge hydroelectric project has buried their homes. Their hope lies in education.

I believe that doing our small part of healing the wounds after the massacre is fundamentally a religious act. Taking part in the UUSC’s efforts is an act of affirmation of our deepest moral and religious values: our belief in the sanctity of life, our hope for peace, and our compassion for those who suffer. After so much death, it is a religious act to affirm life.

Let me also say here that next week I, along with a few others, will present more information and stories about our UUSC human rights trip to Guatemala as an Explorations session at 10:00 in the chapel. I urge you to come to Explorations either before or after one of our worship services. The UUSC is ready to lead another trip in the next few months. I hope we can send another delegation, perhaps along with other UU’s from the Front Range. We will have more information next week at Explorations.

And yet it is simply not enough to seek healing and some measure of justice. (How, after all, does one atone for killing thousands of people?)

No, we have to mean it when we say “never again.” We must help transform a compassionate emotion into effective action.
It is so natural to feel powerless. What could I have done to prevent this? What could any of us have done to prevent the slaughter in Rwanda? More to the point today, what can any of us do to prevent the developing genocide in Darfur? Alone we can do very little. We cannot go, as Martha and Waitstill did, off to a foreign land to help save innocent lives. We wouldn’t know where to begin.

Together, however, we stand a chance. Together, we can support organizations like the UUSC. Our UUSC is working with other organizations to draw the world’s attention to the dangers of another mass killing in Africa. We cannot know if it will succeed, but the world and the United Nations are taking the situation seriously. Even our own government, which was slow to react in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, has been pressing for action to save the refugees.

Every year we pass out the Guest at Your Table boxes. You were given a box on the way in today. The Guest at Your Table is the annual fund raiser for the UUSC. Frankly, I never paid much attention in the past. We would take the box home and, likely as not, I would misplace it. Then we would hunt for it when the deadline approached and put in a modest donation. It was all very distant. I just didn’t get it. Well, I get it now. I have seen one small piece of the good work our donations make possible. I have learned more about our heroic origins. It makes me proud and it touches my heart.

This, my friends, is how we can do our part to make bring the pledge of “Never again” closer to reality. Alone we are helpless. Together we are a moral force.

We have two challenges before us. One is to be merciful and to heal the wounds caused by human brutality. After the massacre, we must help the survivors.

Our second challenge is to help prevent the next massacre. Together we can make a difference.

Together, let us do our part. May there never be another “after the massacre.”  Amen.