The rise and gradual fall of the daily victory

For the moment, I have another's words. I am nearly in a place where I can add my own to what's been going on without adding unneccessary bitterness, anger and bleakness.

The following was posted by Edward Frost, a resident of Oklahoma City,
on the Unitarian-Universalist mailing list a few days after the
bombing there in 1995. He wrote it as a meditation for the chalice
lighting at the Sunday service at his church. (The flaming chalice is
the symbol of UUism; most UU congregations light one at the beginning
of the service.) It expresses, far better than I ever could, how I
feel about yesterday's events.

It is being said that America will never be the same, that the nation
has been struck at its heart. The President of the United States
himself used the word: "Evil."

The Main Street U.S.A. ideal, the myth of invulnerability, the sense
that we are too good to be mortally wounded, must now submit to the
reality of evil. It is the end of the age of a nation's innocence.

I was a little boy, five or six years old, living in England when my
city was still being bombed. I never knew innocence. I assumed being
bombed, losing my friends and relatives, gutted buildings and smoking
ruins--I assumed this was the nature of existence.They say Americans
will never feel safe again. I have never felt safe, not in fifty years
have I assumed that there is a place of safety.

The children of Oklahoma City--the children of America and our
children here today have come into a world being called, now,
insane. I can offer this--as can millions of survivors of battles,
bombings, concentration camps and all manner of human and natural
terrors--that if the world is not innocent as Eden, purely good and
safe, nor is it an evil place.There is evil, which--who really knows
why--some people come to embody and inflict upon the innocent. But
there is also good, which I truly believe is embodied by the vast
majority of humankind. For every insane bomber, there are tens of
millions of people who will crawl into the smoking ruins toward the
voice of a crying child, who will sit and cry for the suffering of
people they never knew, who will--in the face of such evil as
this--remind us over and over again of what is good.

The world is not a safe place. No one ever said it is. We teach our
children that the stove is hot, that the street is dangerous, that the
woodpile is not safe. We also teach our children to hear the music, to
sing the songs, to honor the creatures and the earth we share
together. We teach our children not to talk to strangers. We also
teach them, by our example, by the tears we shed for the children of
Bosnia, and Sarejevo--and now of Oklahoma City--that life is so good,
so worth risking, that our hearts ache when a single life is lost. It
may be that someone around our campfire will do us harm. Still, the
circle of humankind around the light and warmth is what we have. It
would be far worse for us if, in our fear, we doused the fire and ran,
alone, into the dark. I light this chalice as a prayer for comfort for
those who grieve the dead and dying of Oklahoma City. I light it as a
tribute to all those whose humanity called them into the fallen place
to save who they could or simply to be within their hearing.

And I light this chalice as a symbol of that fire--truth, goodness,
hope, love-- around which we gather for comfort and for courage.