Learning from Disaster
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
You know this type of joke. Someone is told that there’s good news and bad news and asked which they wish to hear first.
Like the man with two broken legs. He wants the bad news first. The nurse says, "We're going to have to remove your legs." Hopeful, he asks for the good news. The nurse says, "The guy beside you wants to buy your trainers."
Or the artist who goes into the gallery that exhibits most of her work. The gallery owner notes that there is good news and bad news. The artist takes the good news first.
‘The good news’ says the owner, ‘ is that a man came in here today asking if the price of your paintings would go up after you die. When I told him they would, he bought every one of your paintings.’
‘That's great!’ the artist says, thrilled at the profit. ‘What's the bad news?’
‘The bad news is that man was your doctor!’
These jokes come in every variety there is. In the galley of a Roman ship in ancient days, there comes the slave master to announce: "Slaves, the good news is that at the next port there will be food and grog for everyone. The bad news is that this afternoon the captain wants to go water skiing."
There has been a suggestion that this originally came from announcements to passengers from the flight deck. “This is your captain speaking. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we're ahead of schedule. The bad news is that our navigational equipment has failed and we have no idea where we are.”
Sometimes it’s good news first, sometimes it’s the bad news first. But there are some scenarios that it’s hard to pull the good news out of.
In late April, the news was filled with reports of a disaster in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of the southern United States. The Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig out in the deep waters off the coast of Louisiana, had blown up, killing 11 people. Were it not enough to have this tragedy, nearly a mile underwater, beneath the rig, oil was beginning to pour into the water, and the earth bled for 86 days, toxic oil blooming across the surface, a plume of oil spreading along the deep. Five million barrels of oil, they reckon, poured into the water before the well was plugged with cement, and further work could be done to be sure – as sure as they can be – that it would not leak any more.
The cost of this event has been high. BP has created a fund of $20 billion to try to compensate the residents of the Gulf states for the cost of cleaning up the sludge, tar balls and brown crude oil that washed onto their shores killing seabirds and fish alike. It is meant to also to pay the people who made their living fishing in those waters, a huge industry that is all but gone. The cost to the environment is still to be tallied, and it won’t be in terms of pounds or dollars, but in the degradation of habitats and the loss of sea life.
The Deepwater disaster is of nearly unimaginable depth and breadth, and only days into it, engineers were looking to see what could be learned from it. Henry Petroski, a historian of engineering, might well have been quoted at that time from his book Success through Failure: “It’s [failure, that is] a great source of knowledge — and humbling, too — sometimes that’s necessary.” He quickly adds, though, that ‘Nobody wants failures. But you also don’t want to let a good crisis go to waste.”
The bad news was all too apparent. And for some, the good news was that it was too good a crisis to waste.
Now, the learning that some of us might take away from this – as environmentalists have – is to end the deepwater drilling for oil. Just stop it all. Recognise that the cost is too high in too many ways. The unfortunate truth, however, is that new technologies such as the complicated systems that allow humans to build these incredible massive structures to tap the oil deep under the ocean are unlikely to be abandoned. Once created, technologies are rarely abandoned, though they do fall out of favour. After the Hindenburg disaster, rigid airships were still built but used non-explosive helium for their lift. The horrors of Chernobyl didn’t stop nuclear power but taught some deeply costly and necessary lessons. The sinking of the Titanic didn't stop the construction of ocean liners. Each provided opportunities to learn. They were crises too good to waste.
The bad news is, you might say, terrible things have happened. The good news is that we can learn from it.
One of the most startling – and I gather most transformative – engineering disasters was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. I expect that some of you have seen the choppy black and white films of the bridge when high winds hit it and it began to sway and then to twist and shudder and eventually the roadbed shattered and the cables snapped. The only life lost in that disaster was a cocker spaniel who was trapped in his owner’s car, but the massive failure caused the way bridges were constructed to be radically changed, the wind was taken into account, how to tend to the stresses created by the world around was refigured. Bridge construction was forever changed after the designers and builders had exceeded their ability and their creation failed. The bridge spans in the years since have only increased and the elegance of the building has only been enhanced.
It seems that technological advance is strewn with failures as the inventors and designers push the limits of what has been done before. It’s probably best that most of us don’t know the kind of risks that get taken in the making of what we take for granted. Eric Brown, who developed aircraft for Britain during the second war, later described the process of structural engineering, “the art of moulding materials we do not really understand into shapes we cannot really analyse, so as to withstand forces we cannot really assess, in such a way that the public does not really suspect.” It doesn’t wholly build confidence in the work of the engineers, but you have to admit that for all that we humans are able to do, the trail of failures and disasters could have been much, much worse.
Now, by this time in the address, you may be thinking to yourself, ‘this is all very well and interesting too but what in the world does it have to do with my life and why in the world is our minister prattling on and on about engineering and oil wells and bridges?’
It is, of course, that I was struck, as you may have been by now, at how the work of the engineer is not unlike the work we do day on day. Not with girders and tarmac, nor with intricate mathematical calculations about mass and load, discerning how high a building might be built.
It’s none of that but the stakes are equally high. How we come to our lives, and especially how we come to the difficulties, the hard places, will in large measure determine how our life is. It’s like Jacob: the struggles in life are what give us our names, those defining names.
And there are some lessons to take from the engineers. It is perhaps obvious that we have to learn from our failures and disasters, we all know that to be true even if we don’t pay attention to it.
My colleague Nancy Crumbine in a talk at a conference reframed the traditional Jewish prayer in which a man is meant to pray each morning in thanksgiving for not being born a woman. Nancy suggested that the prayer need not be taken as a disparagement of women, but as an affirmation of who we are in ourselves: the unique set of experiences and attributes that make us who we are. She now starts her day with prayer of thanksgiving for not being born a man, taking it as a celebration for being the woman she is. This, she prays, is what I have been given. Let me bow in thanksgiving.
In like manner, the disasters and failures of our lives – you are thinking of that list of them even now, the hidden or not so hidden failures and disasters that are woven into your life – the disasters and failures of our lives are often what has formed us most deeply. And like the engineers, we ought not let a good crisis go to waste, not let some disaster go unplumbed for what it can teach us of compassion and meaning, of hope and truth, of love and commitment. Even if it is only learning some measure of compassion for ourselves. Even if it is only finding the meaning in survival. Even if it is only beginning to be able to say the prayer of thanksgiving for the fragments of love and hope and truth that we are able to gather in, small collections of what is good and worthy, like coals in our hearts.
Like the engineers, and even more like the alchemists of old, we are well served in our lives by making use of our failures and disasters, by taking the lead of what has been difficult and damaging and finding that there are ways to transform it into something like gold.
More than that, I take the work of the engineers to be an inducement to something else: boldness in our living. It is only by exploring those outer reaches that we learn what our possibilities are. It is only by risking failure that we discover who we are, what we can do. It is only by plunging ahead, by building the brides that are ever longer and narrower, by creating something never before attempted that we find what is possible. It is, I think, in some measure this boldness that underlies the people in Lisel Mueller’s poem (Virtuosi, from her collection Alive Together). Recognising that there isn’t really anything other than risk in anything we do, they choose to swallow fire, to dance on a thin wire above the crowd. They do not hide from the world, but embrace it, explore it to the limits.
I hasten to add a word of caution, noting that I am not advocating that every path is worth following – following the metaphorical leaps one can make around the Deepwater Horizon disaster will lift up the potential for toxic remnants, even death as a result of boldness. I am not saying that every exploration is healthy and helpful in our lives, but that caution and timidity need to be well balanced with a willingness to take chances, to experiment and push the boundaries in our lives.
It is certain that there will always be bad news in our lives. Anyone who doesn’t get some cannot be actually living. But we can in large measure choose if there’s good news to come from it, if there is something to learn, something to find, some bit of our soul that has been opened in new ways.
Eyes and hearts open, let us seek that good news in the midst of our lives.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
you who attend us in
all our moments,
in our joy, in our sorrow,
in our success
and when all we do seems to turn to mud and loss,
in these moments of quiet,
we reach out to your abiding presence.
Open our eyes, our hearts, to what is around,
in the midst of the struggle,
illumine the wisp of truth that resides there, too;
in the midst of our failures,
give us the strength and the courage
to see what can be learned,
to use what we have gathered.
Though we may pray
that unguarded prayer for life without
trouble, without worry,
without all the difficulties and disasters,
hear the prayer that we mean:
that we might
sift the events
and offer our prayers of thanksgiving
for what can be gained,
for what can be celebrated,
if it is only thanks for that which sustained us,
if it is only for the lesson in humility and compassion,
if it is only for the relief at the end
Spirit of love and life,
you who are with us
in all our moments,
may we be renewed in our search
to find the gifts of our life
moment on moment,
that we may live in gratitude,
in compassion,
and in love.