Sakura

A Sermon by

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 5 April 2009

Our reading this morning is by the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova.   It’s called, “Everything is Plundered.”

                                                Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold

                                                Death’s great, black wing scrapes the air,

                                                Misery gnaws to the bone.

                                                Why, then, do we not despair?

                                                By day, from the surrounding woods,

                                                cherries blow summer into town;

                                                at night, the deep, transparent skies

glitter with new galaxies.

                                                And the miraculous comes so close

                                                to the ruined, dirty houses --

                                                something not known to anyone at all,

                                                but wild in our breast for centuries.

On August 6, 1945, the United States Air Force, Enola Gay, dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  The bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” killed 80,000 human beings instantly.  Three days later, on August 9, the United States dropped another bomb on the port city of Nagasaki, killing between 50,000 and 75,000 people.  By the end of 1945, nearly a quarter of a million Japanese had died from the bombings.

To this day, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only nuclear attacks in the history of warfare.  But they also marked the beginning of a new and awful epic in the history of the human race.  For in this nuclear ago, we confront not only our capacity to kill one another more efficiently than we’ve ever been able to do before, but to destroy civilization itself and, along with it, our planet, Earth.  And ever since 1945, the image that has come to epitomize this threat, more than any other, is the image of the atomic mushroom cloud, that brooding, hooded pillar of smoke and fire.

So it comes as no surprise, then, that our story this morning begins with this mushroom cloud.  Just fifteen months after the bombing of Japan, U.S. military brass gathered here in Washington to celebrate the end of another round of nuclear testing.  The celebration took place at the Army War College’s opulent Officer’s Club.  The Post covered the event and ran on its front page a photo from it that would become notorious.  The photo showed two generals in full dress attire and their ostentatiously gowned wives, grinning for the cameras as they cut into – I kid you not – a three-foot-high cake, shaped in the form of a mushroom cloud.  I don’t think Washington would again witness such a smug, callous and inappropriate exultation of military might until George W. Bush landed his fighter plane and announced “mission accomplished” in Iraq.

The photograph ran on a Saturday and by the next morning, All Souls minister, A. Powell Davies, had rewritten his sermon to address the outrage.  Davies said, in part, “If I had the authority of a priest of the middle Ages, I would call down the wrath of God upon such an obscenity.  I would damn to hell,” he said, “those traitors to humanity who could participate in such a monstrous betrayal of everything for which the broken-hearted of the world are yearning.”  One bemused journalist who picked up Davies’ quote said, “These were probably the harshest words ever spoken of a dessert.”  [Laughter]

Hyperbolic or not, Davies’ sermon garnered attention far and wide, including from members of General MacArthur’s provisionary government in Japan who wrote to Davies of the ongoing plight of the children of Hiroshima and asked if the church might help.  Now you may ask yourself, “How does a church adequately respond to a devastation of such enormous proportions?  How can the church possibly do anything to help the victims of a nuclear holocaust?”

Well, the children of All Souls Church – listen up, kids, this is you – along with their ministers were prepared with an answer to that question.  They didn’t worry about whether theirs was a proportionate or adequate response to the suffering.  They simply responded the best way they knew how.  The children of the church launched a school supply drive that eventually collected more than half a ton of pencils, paper, crayons and paint.  And they shipped them off to Japan.  The supplies arrived shortly before Christmas of 1947 and were distributed to the children of two schools and an orphanage.  I’m sure that most thought the story would end right there – a generous act of solidarity in difficult times.

But the story didn’t end there.  Several months later, a package arrived at the church, addressed to the children of All Souls.  The package included several Japanese comic books, two home-made rag dolls, 75 thank-you letters from Japanese children and, most especially, a book of 48 watercolor and crayon drawings made by the children of Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima.  The children of All Souls responded to each of the thank-you letters with a letter of their own and, two years later, sent another shipment to Japan, this time consisting of what, to my mind, is an even more perfect expression of love – a cache of baseball bats and mitts.

From the moment the pictures arrived in the States, the 48 drawings and watercolors have drawn enormous interest and attention.  At first, they were exhibited right here at All Souls.  Later they were sent on a government-sponsored tour of the entire country.  When they returned from that tour, they were stored away in the Church safe, right next to the old communion silver, where, sadly, they’ve remained since, largely hidden from view, with only a few exceptions.  Just about every summer at All Souls, a curious thing happens:  A bus pulls up outside of the church and a group of Japanese tourists knocks at the door.  They ask, “Is this the church with the Hiroshima children’s drawings?”  Yes, it is.  “May we please see them?”  Of course you may.

For many Japanese, the art of the hibakusha, the Japanese name for survivors of the bombing, is virtually sacred – relics of revered ancestors, moral reminders of the perils of war.  The All Souls drawings are notable for another reason.  Most hibakusha art consists of graphic depictions of the devastations of the bombings:  charred, disfigured bodies, fire raining down from the sky, mass graves, lonely survivors, wandering blind through apocalyptic landscapes.  To spend any length of time with these images is spiritually and emotionally excruciating.  And important.  What is so striking about the drawings from Honkawa Elementary School is that they are vibrant and colorful depictions of life abundant:  children playing baseball, bright kites flying high on the wind, neat classrooms filled with smiling children and cherry blossoms in full bloom.

In her poem, “Everything is Plundered,” the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova writes, “Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold; death’s great, black wing scrapes the air, misery gnaws to the bone.  Why then,” she asks, “do we not despair?”  This is the question that the Hiroshima children’s drawings beg.  How, in the wake of such devastation, can these drawings betray such hope?  Akhmatova continues, answering her own question.  “By day from the surrounding woods, cherries blow summer into town.  At night the deep transparent skies glitter with new galaxies and the miraculous comes so close to the ruined, dirty houses – something not known to anyone at all, but wild in our breast for centuries.”  I love the line from the poem that begins, “And the miraculous comes so close to the ruined.”  For miracles can follow closely upon the heels of ruin.  Life sometimes does follow death.  Spring reliably follows winter just as joy and fullness of life bubble, irrepressibly, from the imaginations and the fingers of young children.  For me, the Hiroshima children’s drawings are special because they represent one such miracle in the midst of ruin, a miracle whose expression was made possible by a gesture of solidarity from children half a world away.

Friends, the mushroom cloud remains an iconic image of our age, threatening us with our own annihilation.  But there is another image that is also unique to this age, an image that didn’t exist before man’s exploration of space.  And it is the image of planet Earth taken from space, the image of Earth, a blue-green orb, harmonious, flourishing, fragile.  These two images – the mushroom cloud and Earth cradled in space – sum up the choice of our generation.  We must choose between the bomb and the blue-green Earth.  And today, once again, the Hiroshima children’s drawings stand ready to remind us of that choice.  They have been professionally restored and they are displayed again on the walls of Pierce Hall and will soon be making their own tour, once again.  A documentary is being made of this story, the story of the children of All Souls and the children of Honkawa Elementary School, so that the drawings and their story may remind another generation of what the Reverend Dr., A. Powell Davies once reminded his own generation. Dr. Davies said this:  “The world is now too dangerous for anything but truth, and too small for anything but brotherhood.  May it be so.   

Amen.