Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth 
Religious Community Responding to Community Crisis
by Rev. Karen Gustafson, September 24, 2006
I was married for the first time late in 1968 when this country was at the midst of police action in Viet Nam and at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. I had been acquainted with my new husband since high school. He had graduated in 1962, I in 1964. We reconnected briefly in the spring of 1967 weeks before he left for thirteen months as a Navy Hospital Corpsman with the third marine division in Viet Nam. While he was in the midst of binding the wounded, I was struggling with my identity, protesting the war, and balancing the demands of my coursework at UMD with my real education.
We collided by chance or by fate in the first days of his return and very soon recognized that we could find shelter and security with each other that would protect us from the uncertainties that were all around us. We were engaged on our second date and married seven months later. We were married for thirteen years and three months. What bound us then as it does now was great love and respect. What separated us were two world views that turned out to be very different. A major aspect of this difference had to do with how we related to the possibility of disaster and the will to survive.
Soon after we married, I graduated from UMD and became a teacher in Superior, Wisconsin. He started St. Scholastica in the nursing program. We bought a house on Park Point. As I said this was Cold War times and there was a lot of talk, still about the nuclear threat. I remember with cinematic clarity the conversation that began the realization of our basic difference. We were talking about our future after his graduation. We would, he said, move back to International Falls because, and here is where I lost my breath, we would have a better chance of surviving a nuclear disaster there. Surviving a nuclear disaster? I had seen the movie On the Beach in which the last human survivors of radiation sickness had taken poison and died in each other’s arms. This was my image followed as a close second with being at ground zero where we’d never know what hit us.He was, I suspect, as aghast at my response as I was at his.
This difference unfolded over the years in a variety of ways. When planning a camping trip I would suggest shorter trips with the maximum amount of fresh food; he preferred longer trips with lots of portages and lentils. I liked French bread with tough crusts, he preferred the dense kind he made himself from the wheat he ground in our basement.
For years we kept galvanized garbage cans filled with wheat and powdered milk and honey in our garage.
This caused an ambivalence in me that I could hardly bear at times. What I know about that now is that I saw this focus upon survival as being a denial of really living fully. I didn’t want to survive. I wanted to live, to enjoy, to not be concerned about the possibility of hardship or shortage or economic recession. I saw his attitude as being grounded in fear and I have throughout my life refused to live in fear. On the other hand I also know that his vigilance and his preparedness brought me a grudging sense of security. I am a good problem solver and am enormously resourceful in my own way. But resourcefulness is limited by resources and my place as a person of privilege has caused me to underestimate at times the limits of what I can take for granted.
We did not, as it turns out, need to survive a nuclear threat from the Soviet Union. I don’t know what happened to the wheat and the honey and the powdered milk. We divorced, not for lack of love but for lack of a sustainable common vision. I always said the beginning of the end was when we bought a freezer instead of taking a trip to New Orleans.
In time I got to live out my fantasy of traveling and living in a city by going to school in Berkeley, California, having sabbaticals in Chicago and London and by seizing every opportunity I can to explore a new place. He got to test his survival limits by doing a six week canoe trip to Hudson’s Bay and spending two years in a remote part of Alaska.
And now, in late middle age I have my attention drawn back to a focus on that which threatens my survival and now, the survival of my children and grandchild that is as remote and ambiguous and as real as the threat of nuclear disaster. Unlike the nuclear threat which is determined by the machinations of human imagination, politics, diplomacy and military deployment, these threats have a life of their own that is largely, though not entirely, outside of the control of individuals or human institutions.
These are natural phenomena about which we consciously or unconsciously seem to calculate the odds and decide on the level of risk we are will assume. We think nothing of placing ourselves inside of a ton or more of steel and plastic and propelling ourselves at speeds of 70 miles an hour or more on wet surfaces or at reduced speeds on icy surfaces when the visibility is no further than the length of the hood. We have become accustomed to living with a certain amount of risk and yet as responsible citizens we fasten our seat belts and buy car insurance and carry health insurance so that if our calculation is off and this lethal weapon which is an automobile causes harm to us or others we do not expect others to take care of the expense that is incurred.
We as people of privilege, insure our homes against wind and water and fire because we know that on any day, those natural elements which bring us so much that is good can turn their indifferent fury to take away that which we value. Insurance keeps us from becoming homeless and absorbing resources that are needed for those who for any number of reasons must rely on the communal resources of a compassionate society.
And now we are being reminded of another natural phenomenon for which there is no insurance. It is the phenomenon of pandemic, a highly contagious and often fatal disease for which there is insufficient treatment and vaccine. Its onset is as unpredictable as a tornado and like tornado it depends upon conditions being just right. Unlike tornados whose conditions occur on a seasonal basis, pandemics occur only about every hundred years. The last one was in 1918. The death toll from a pandemic is about 50% of the people who get it. It is not hard to imagine the stress on the infrastructure that could occur when such a phenomenon happens.
Why are we talking about this in the context of Unitarian Universalist religious community?
For several reasons that are embedded in our principles and in the sources of our living tradition, we might look for the questions central to how we might approach this difficult possibility.
We might look first at our second principle which is to affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations.
As I say so often, we are people of privilege. Many of us have resources that could help us to prepare responsibly for a pandemic. Before hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, many people of privilege got in their cars or on air planes and they left. They did because they could and because they had places to go. This would have been more just and equitable if they had taken as many poor people as they could with them. But staying would have been irresponsible because they would have added to the burden of an already over burdened system. Many did return in the aftermath as well as many people of privilege from other places to try to restore what was lost by those who had to stay because they had no choice. Justice and equity is about responsible use of resources. What does that look like in any crisis? What would it look like in a pandemic?
Our fourth principle speaks of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. In the face of this principle can we deny the truth and meaning of the evidence supporting the probability of a pandemic?
Our seventh principle speaks of respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. Respect does not involve only the way in which we treat the web of life but respect for the way we are treated by it. This means to me that we take seriously the power of nature to destroy. It means that we take seriously the ways in which our choices impact the whole. It means that we support one another in our beloved community and beyond to use our resources in ways that sustain life.
I am not suggesting here that there is a singular way to look at the possibility of a flu pandemic or any other natural disaster that threatens a significant population or involves the destruction of significant property and infrastructure.
I am suggesting that it may be irresponsible for us as a Unitarian Universalist faith community to do less than encourage each other to consider what such an inevitability will involve and to make some decisions about how we as individuals and/or as a congregation will respond.
Here is the least that we can do.
We can try to be informed.
On Monday evening at 6:00 Tim Burke, a member of our congregation and an SMDC infectious disease specialist will be here to talk about Avian Flu. Lori Bauman , also a member of our congregation will be here to talk about one way of preparing, namely voluntary preventive quarantine. On Wednesday evening at 7:00 P.M. Helen Mongen Rallis will be here to talk about the ways in which electronic communication can support community in the event of a disaster in which the infrastructure holds. Printed materials from these presentations will be available for those unable to attend. This may just e the beginning of a more concentrated effort to organize our congregation and others around this concern.
Do your own research. The best resource I have found so far is this book, Expedition Home: Journey to Safety from Pandemic Influenza by Skip Hofstrand MD. I will be ordering several copies for our book store and some for the library. I am sure there is other stuff on the web.
This is more than an invitation to look at preparation for a specific disaster.
This is an invitation to look at the limits of the infrustructure that we rely on and to test our dependence upon it, to consider the benefits of sustainability.
This is a time to look at the difference between our needs and our wants – what do we need to survive? What can we do without?
It is a chance to consider with our friends and family what we take for granted; what we have come to expect, to think about how our wants and needs are determined from the outside in rather than the inside out.
It is an invitation to lift up the relationship between the individual and the community and how assuming individual responsibility serves the community.
And ultimately it is an opportunity to look with humility at vulnerability to forces outside our control and the real and indifferent power of nature.
In the introduction to Expedition Home, Will Steiger writes:
“To survive the significant changes of an uncertain physical universe, we will need to become more self reliant. The situation may seem daunting at first consideration. However, after considerable thought, several points become clear. We are dependent on complex systems, governments, and public and private organizations that may not be helpful in times of crisis. What are we to do? First, we need to study the problems facing us before they occur. For instance, we need to understand what a Pandemic is and to grasp the magnitude of it. With this concept in mind we start our preparation for survival by laying out a strategy, creating checklists and refining the small details.
There are attitudes that have to be overcome. Some will say, ‘This is doomsday thinking”. I would say this is common sense. When I am faced with a potential danger on one of my expeditions, I will have prepared for it. Then, if occurs, our team will be prepared to safely weather the storm- be it physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.’
In the months since Lori Bauman first presented her concern about the pandemic possibility to our Board of Trustees, I have moved from waking up in the night with fear for the future of my family and this congregation, to a period of gathering information, to a time of open engagement of this topic with colleagues and friends and my children, to a place of the very beginnings of the grudging security I am beginning to feel as I begin my own journey of preparation. And I am grateful for the renewed respect and admiration I feel for the husband who, in his way no longer so very different from my own, expressed his respect for life by preparing to survive.
It is my passionate hope that in the same way that the honey and the powdered milk must have found its way into the diet of my children, that whatever preparation we do in the days and weeks and months ahead will be for naught. Some miracle of science may intervene. Something in the national or international agenda may change to shift the necessary resources to producing enough of the anti-influenza drug to save us all. The tires on my car may hold on the icy road. But I think that because I can, I must fasten my seat belt all the same.