Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
September 15, 2002
A Modest Salvation
"Alone, alone, in a terrible place; in utter dark without a face - with only the dripping of the water on the stone, and the sound of your tears, and the taste of my own."
Everyone says that the worst moment was when the drilling stopped. For the nine men trapped and huddled in bone-chilling dampness 240 feet beneath the surface of the earth, it seemed possible that the world had forgotten them, given them up for dead. For the rescue workers, laboring with frantic skill to free their imperiled colleagues, it was an agony of frustration; a broken drill bit, a machine that could not do what human will demanded it to do. For the families, wives and little children, mothers and fathers, gathered together in unbearable suspense, it was the thin thread of hope stretched to the breaking point. This is a world of stubborn physical facts, as non-negotiable as 240 feet of solid sedimentary rock, and those physical facts only yield to our intelligence and determination, not to our prayers. Nature, said one of the early enlightenment scientists, can only be commanded by being obeyed. If you want to reach through 30 yards of stone, you have to have a huge drill, and a terrible patience. The story of the Quecreek miners is one that affirms the truth of every tenet of humanism - and then confronts us with a profoundly important question. That same question is posed in various forms, it seems to me, by the work of our Hands On Humanist family, the Hutchinsons, and by the work of the Unity Summer program. It lies at the heart of the ancient celebration of Yom Kippur, and our observances of the first anniversary of September 11th.
For one of the first things that Humanism teaches us is not to ask for magic to do the work that is ours to do. If there are children living without joy or hope, feeding on the waste of cities far away, then it is our task to bring the light of care and new possibilities to them. If there is service that needs to be done, here in our own hometown, we must give our young people the tools to learn how to do it when they ask. The stubborn facts of the world, like walls of solid rock, will not give way before our wishes and our prayers, and we have no right to ask that they should. Humanists insist that intelligent reason and compassionate care must be the values by which we approach the challenges of our world, and we are likely to add that asking God for help is at best a waste of time. We can certainly point to the story of this summer's mine disaster as a good example; what saved those trapped miners and reunited them with their anxious community and their loved ones was a sequence of quick thinking, generosity, technical skill, ingenuity, and untiring commitment on the part of human beings. To have left this matter in the hands of God alone would have been to abandon what hope there was for those nine lives, and it is worth noting that no one involved, of any faith persuasion, ever suggested that that stone tomb could be pierced by mere prayer or supplication.
And yet, I want to suggest this morning that the events of those four days at the end of July were both a test of and a testament to faith - a faith that is in no way contrary to the principles of humanism, but indeed part and parcel of our being fully human in this life. I want to suggest that when our compassion is at its fullest flower, and all the knowledge and cleverness we have is being exercised, and everything that we can do is being done, then something else comes into play. That something else is a question, and it is a new question each time we confront it, and the answer is never certain.
Imagine yourself, exhausted, half-drowned, having fought your way through a wall of raging water to a cramped island of bad air, nine of you together, chilled to the bone, with no way of knowing what, if anything, was going on above you, nauseated from the lack of oxygen, one corned beef sandwich and a couple of cans of Mountain Dew to share among you, your lanterns with their fading batteries turned off to conserve the light for when it might be truly needed. The fatal water is only a few feet away, and rising. The crew boss suggests fastening yourselves by your work belts with a cable, so that if the worst comes, at least all your bodies will be found together. One man takes a cast off piece of cardboard, writes a few last words of love to his wife, and after others have all done the same, seals the note in a plastic bucket with tape. There, in that truly terrible place, where there is in fact "only the dripping of the water on the stone, and the sound of your tears, and the taste of my own," there is but one question left, the eternal, essential question: What kind of a person are you?
What kind of a person are you; a question that will be answered for good or ill by what you do next. Will you go mad, laugh hysterically, run into the rising flood to get the inevitable over with? Will you fling yourself away from the group, cursing them, cursing your luck, cursing God for this malevolent trick? Will you pick up a rock and strike out, hoping that if there are fewer of you breathing, the air might last longer, and you alone might make it through? Will you curl up in a fetal position on the damp ground, weeping with despair, and refuse to take your turn tapping on the ceiling in the hope of guiding searchers? Will you speak of fear and regret and futility, complaining aloud how unlikely it is that anyone will find you, how impossible that they should get you out before the water takes you, or suffocation, or starvation? Or, will you reach deep, deep into the spirit within you, and find there some sort of ultimate strength and peace, to speak calmly and cheerfully, to do what can be done in the hope of rescue, to comfort your companions each in his turn of despair, to face death with some sort of final courage and pride? The odds are that no one will ever know, whether you died in selfishness or generosity, in rational hope or in rage. The chances are good that there is no payoff for courage or calmness; the wise are likely to perish along with the unhinged. What makes the difference in that moment? It's the kind of person you are, and that I believe, is a function of faith. Not faith that if you ask nicely, God will sunder the crust of the earth and lift you out on a ray of light and a chorus of angels, but the faith that sustains our everyday values in extraordinary circumstances, that summons us to helpfulness and hopefulness and decency, even when the odds are against us and no one else will know the difference.
But it is not only in the most extravagant settings that this sort of faith plays a role as we confront the ultimate question. For the rescue workers and the families as well, there were moments when they were stripped to the essential bone of personhood, when they, too, stood revealed to the demand, What kind of person are you? Will you go on, even in the face of setbacks? Will you keep faith with those whose only hope you are, even when hope seems lost? Human intelligence, knowledge and inventiveness, have never been so necessary as when word of the flooded mine reached Dave Rebuck, owner of the Black Wolf Coal Company, and Joe Sbaffoni, Pennsylvania's deep mining safety expert. Together they used existing knowledge, in the form of detailed maps of the Quecreek mine, and modern technology, in the form of global positioning satellites, to pinpoint the likeliest place for the miners, assuming they were still alive, to have migrated away from the rising water. Of course the ultimate goal was to get them out, but more urgent was to make it possible for them to survive the time that would pass before that could happen. What would conditions be like? What was the best way to help them? One obvious issue was to get the water out of the mine, and a telephone chain to everyone in the area who might have a powerful pump available was begun. The reason that the water never rose to flood the island where the men had taken refuge was because those pumps began sucking that water, gallon by gallon and drop by precious drop, away from tunnels it had filled. No one who was asked to contribute a pump refused.
What else could be done? Undoubtedly the miners would have been soaked to the skin; the water temperature was a bare 55 degrees, and the air that deep would be cool. If their bodies were actually in the water, they might succumb to hypothermia before help could reach them. Moreover, if the air they found was the stuff they called 'black damp', its low oxygen content might leave them suffocating, or unconscious and unable to try to avoid rising water. Heat and oxygen were two imperative life-sustaining commodities, and if Rebuck and Sbaffoni were right in their surmise of the miners' location, heat and oxygen could be supplied long before the actual rescue could take place. At 3:15 in the morning, a little more than six hours after the water had flooded through the breached wall, a four man team started a six inch drill into the soil and rock of a quiet farm pasture, and less than two hours later, cautiously broke through into the mine shaft where indeed the men were huddled. After an air pipe was inserted, the rescue team was elated to hear nine solid bangs on the far end; a code that nine living people awaited help. But the air pipe revealed bad news as well; they were indeed breathing 'black damp', so the need for better air was critical. John Urosek , of the U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety Health Administration, had an idea. It had never been tried in the United States before, but perhaps they could actually seal the six inch air pipe, and use it to drive warm air into the pocket where the men were trapped. This would serve three purposes; as well as giving them warmth and oxygen, it would create a sort of bubble that would prevent the water from overtaking them in case the drain pumps were not fast enough. Improvising with the equipment on hand, volunteer firefighters used inflatable bags designed to lift wrecked vehicles off of trapped accident victims to create a seal around the air pipe, and the drill rig's air compressor began filling the cavern with heated, oxygen-normal air.
While these immediate needs were being addressed, the larger question of how to get the miners out of their perilous situation was also being considered, with all the reason that intelligence could supply, and all the urgency that compassion could suggest. Could rescue divers go in after the men? Even assuming they could find their way to them through the miles of flooded tunnels, what could they do to get them out? The best option was a giant rig called a 'super drill', which could use a 1,500 pound bit to make a 30 inch hole down into the mine shaft, through which a rescue capsule could be lowered to bring out the miners. The drill was in West Virginia, and the needed bit was also several counties away from the Quecreek. They arrived under police escort after agonizing hours of transport, and more time was needed to put them in place and get the assembly working, but by early Thursday evening, the huge drill was biting through the stone, and hopes were high. Many on the team at the site had not slept since learning of the emergency the night before. Hour by hour, foot by foot, the drill chewed its way into the earth, and then in the middle of the night, at 105 feet, disaster struck again. The bit broke, and the great rig fell silent. That was the hardest moment, for the rescue workers, who had been preparing medical assistance for men they expected to be bringing to the surface by morning, for the families, who knew that no signals from the miners had been discerned since earlier in the day, although the intense noise at the surface made it hard to tell, and for the miners themselves, who had taken comfort from the sound of the drill, which they could hear clearly - as clearly as the ominous silence when it stopped. That was when the question loomed before all of them; What kind of person are you? What is in your soul; is it something of steel and unshakeable, or does it crumble when the intractable facts of the world go wrong? When you sit in the firehouse, miles away, helpless while your husband could be dead or dying, knowing you might never see your son or your father again, how is it with your spirit? Do you lash out at the messengers, at the other families? Do you make more work for everyone else by demanding special care and soothing? One who never did that was Susan Unger, wife of miner John Unger. She was a woman who knew something about the question of faith, and the struggle with hardship, for she must use a walker as a result of her ongoing battle with Multiple Sclerosis. She, more than most, might have found reason to weep and curse, to turn her face to the wall in dejection, to say bitterly that hope is a fool's paradise. Why didn't she? I don't know anything about her theology - maybe she's a devout Christian; in that community it's altogether likely that she is. But here's the thing; in that soul-testing moment, it's not about theology. It's not about what kinds of hymns you like to sing, or whether you think the Bible is wisdom or foolishness, or whether you pray to Allah or Mary or Yahweh or Zeus, or To Whom It May Concern. It's about what's inside you, what kind of person you are, and that's the only kind of faith that really amounts to a hill of beans.
Surely that's what we learned, if we have learned anything, in the past year. The memory of September 11 is not about whose religion is better than whose; and if anyone thinks that secularism itself has never been guilty of atrocities, let them study Stalin's gulags and be still. Surely we have learned that what we love and grieve and admire, and would wish to discover in ourselves, is the faith that sends the passengers of flight 93 into the cockpit, hoping not so much to save themselves as others; the faith that sends firefighters up the treacherous stairs for the sake of those in peril on the upper floors; the faith that kept the workers at ground zero month upon month, sorting the grim remains and clearing the space for life to assert itself again; the faith that brought us together in tears on Wednesday, Jew and Muslim, Christian and Humanist, to speak the names of the dead, to light a flame of shared memory and carry it a thousand fold into this city.
Surely it is that faith we would nurture in our children, helping them to learn a conviction that in the face of the suffering of the disinherited, their own intelligent reason and compassionate care can swing the balance of justice. Surely this is the faith that took George and Jenna and Amy and Brent to the slums of Ecuador, to share their love, their hope, and themselves with children the world had forgotten. And surely it is the faith celebrated in these days of awe, when our Jewish brothers and sisters are asked again, What kind of person are you? What kind of person should you be? Just in case you never are trapped in a mine, that is what such days are for, in every tradition the world around - to ask that ultimate, inexorable question; to make you stop, and ponder, and perhaps, having considered the answer as things now stand with you, to make some needed changes.
"Have you been saved?" the dogmatically inclined will sometimes ask, and of course the temptation is always to respond, "from what?" But if I were one of those miners, you can bet I would answer hereafter, "I certainly have!" For what human compassion willed, human ingenuity performed, and as Governor Mark Schweiker had promised, after three harrowing days the miners were pulled from their damp stone prison, "nine for nine." They are of course transformed by the experience, as who would not be? Most of them hope never to find themselves in the depths of a mine again, though for some it is all the work they know. It is a modest salvation, I suppose, but it is the sort that humanism recognizes; the product of reason, intelligence, knowledge and creativity on the one hand, and of passionate determination, friendship, and caring on the other. All of us believe in modest salvations; we strive to bring each other out alive if we can; if human creativity and persistence can do it, we tend the drills all day and all night. It doesn't always happen, in this happen chance world, and not every story has a happy ending, however much intelligence and love are poured into it. But the third dimension, that can tip the scale not only of survival but of what makes survival worthwhile, is that which remains when everything that can be done, has been done. When all that courage and cleverness and steadfast, sensible care can do has been set in motion, and all that is left to us is a terrible patience, then we turn to something that can only be found within the human heart, and in the community of shared feeling. Then is revealed something about us that can be known no other way; then is answered the final question of faith: what kind of people are we?
In our modest salvations, I would suggest, lies the salvation of the world. It lies in our becoming the kind of people who can confront terror and tragedy, danger and suspense with an unwavering faith in the power of reason and compassion, and when all else is done that can be done, the power of the human spirit to endure and triumph. That is the candle that we shelter together, the light that lives in our hearts when all around us is most dark. It is the promise that I have the power to choose, in each new moment, something about the kind of person I will be, and that beyond all our loss and all our fear and all our agony, the world has wonders that we may yet witness.