May 18th, 2012 |
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceivable notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. (Thomas Huxley)
I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. (Jesus in Matthew 18:3)
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A Presidential Primary Election in West Virginia Worth Noting
Looking down at the primary ballot last week, I saw that I had a choice when it came to casting my vote for President of the United States. Above Barack Obama’s name was the name of Keith Judd.
Keith Judd! Who in the world is Keith Judd?
Now that the election results are in, West Virginians (at least Mountaineers who are paying attention) know that he is serving a 17-year sentence in a Texas prison, for extortion.
Judd, with a record of having run in numerous elections around the country, is sort of a poor man’s Harold Stassen—the man who between 1944 and 2000 threw his hat in the presidential election ring twelve times.
By the way, we’ve had prisoners on the presidential ballot here in West Virginia on more than one occasion. Lyndon LaRouche, called a fascist, racist and anti-Semite, ran from a prison cell in 1992. Eugene Debs, one of my political heroes, garnered over 15,000 votes as a socialist in the 1920 presidential election.
Thinking about Nelson Mandela last week on the eighteenth anniversary of his installation as president of South Africa, after serving 27 years in prison, I pondered a simple question. Could someone with a prison record, let’s say for a social justice conviction, like Catholic priests Dan and Phil Berrigan, be elected President in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? What do you think?
What has many of my West Virginia friends in a stew, even embarrassed, is the fact that Judd pulled down 69,799 votes—41% of the votes cast. That means that four out of every ten voters who went to the polls voted for this guy. That’s more than twice the number of votes John Edwards, flirting with prison time himself, got in the West Virginia presidential primary in 2008.
What else could we have expected when so many folks here in West Virginia are upset with Obama? Sure, there’s a good chance that voters darkening the small circle next to Judd’s name didn’t know anything about the man. Sure, racism may have raised its ugly head with some of the ballot-casters. But there is another aspect to this situation.
By my reading of the figures, this Looney Tunes election result was a vote against Obama, not a vote for a Texan named Judd. Senator Joe Manchin and Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, both Democrats, are making front-page news these days stating that they, also, may not vote for Obama in November. I certainly don’t count them as Judd fans, just politicians pandering to the coal interests that view EPA regulations on mining as a chastity belt used to prevent the rape of our mountains.
What all of us need to remember—conservatives who recognize it, and liberals who often fail to understand it—is that our nation is undergoing a seismic economic, political and cultural paradigmatic shift of enormous proportions. One I’d like to comment on in this edition of Notes.
A Paradigmatic Change—Gay Marriage
One of my dear friends, Jimmy Creech, now a defrocked United Methodist minister, has just paid a visit to Charleston. Jimmy and I did all sorts of social justice work together while I was working for the Diocese of North Carolina and he was a pastor in Raleigh. Discover Jimmy by doing a Google search. On top of that, buy his book, “Adam’s Gift.”
Jimmy got in trouble for blessing gay relationships. We share that journey, myself having been threatened by church trial twice for blessing gay couples going back as far as 1976. I still have my “frock” because I escaped trial. Jimmy’s frock has been taken from him, but not his ministry as a prophetic voice focused on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) civil and human rights.
Here to reconnect our friendship, speak and preach, do a radio talk show gig, and sell a few books, he hustled back to Raleigh to face the North Carolina referendum that would amend the state constitution banning gay marriage. Jimmy and his wife, Chris Weedy, have been tireless workers in defeating that proposal. Despite their work, they lost the battle. North Carolina went Neanderthal.
Over the years, I’ve faced friends, even heard myself say, “What’s the big deal? Gay marriage doesn’t threaten me, or my marriage. What’s wrong with these people?”
Those words no longer serve me well. In fact, using them, as many of my liberal friends continue to do, really minimizes the importance of the gay marriage effort. It is a big deal. Gay marriage is a threatening matter. There is nothing wrong with people who disagree with me, Jimmy or anyone else who will continue to work on GLBT issues.
Gay marriage is one of those paradigmatic shifts I am talking about. To put it in plain English, every so often something happens that dramatically changes the entire way we have looked at things. A new model of understanding emerges that confronts the way things have always been perceived. That’s a paradigm shift.
In the middle of the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg found a way to transfer ink to paper using a press. One man in Germany, by doing what he did, started what has been called the Gutenberg Revolution. And what a revolution it was. It totally revolutionized the way people conceived the world they lived in, because now they could read books and gather information previously denied them. Everyone could read Luther and Erasmus, not only the privileged few who had access to information. The Bible became a vulgar document—capable of being read by the common folks. Now, think Reformation and Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment.
One might easily say that when I bought a transistor radio at a Marine PX in Okinawa back in 1960, (a hot item to bring back home in those days) I was, indeed, participating in the beginning of a microchip revolution headed toward the computer I am using, my iPad, and an electronic wonderland hardly imaginable back when I was 25 years old.
Hey, think fax, Internet, Arab Spring, a wholly different way of gathering and storing information, organizing and managing one’s life. Think brain-change.
Gay rights, that include marriage, are one of those paradigmatic revolutions. In 1960, when gays were being dishonorably kicked out of the military, who could have imagined that troops now come out as gay without punishment, and may even be promoted. It has been an evolutionary change that will, despite the North Carolina defeat, finally come into bloom just as the rhododendron I saw last week in Asheville, North Carolina. Just like my granddaughter Katherine, whose graduation I was there for, has grown from the infant I once held into a magnificent woman.
Having been a part of the Episcopal Church paradigmatic change that took place around women’s ordination in the 1970s, I see a similar reaction to gay marriage when I face the opposition. “What’s the big deal? Women priests don’t threaten me, or my ordination. What’s wrong with these people?”
Get the point? Change means growing into new ways of thinking and visualizing life, breaking familiar habits that no longer satisfy the spirit’s desire to grow into new and vital expressions of wonder, joy and vibrant life. And it means acknowledging that adjusting to these changes can trigger phobic reactions. Remembering this helps me reconsider and redefine “homophobia” not as a derisive term but rather as a condition that is understandable, given the seismic forces of change that all of us must come to grips with.
Race And The River Styx
You may have heard by now that white births are no longer a majority in the United States. Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and people of mixed race have reached 50.4 percent. That population is a now a majority for the first time in our nation’s history. Talk about paradigmatic shifts with seismic implications.
Sabrina Tavernise, writing in the New York Times, says, “Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when that moment would arrive—signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration.” A milestone is just another way of describing what I have been calling a paradigmatic change.
I can still remember the early years of my ministry reading a book about racial change—“the browning of America.” That was well before my work with immigrant workers in the North Carolina tobacco and sweet potato fields, and the deluge of Mexicans and Central Americans who flooded Sussex County, Delaware—a white redoubt—looking for work in the poultry plants that dot the rural areas of the Delmarva Peninsula.
Lyndon Johnson has long been the most fascinating president in my lifetime. Now that Robert Caro has written four volumes encompassing the man’s life, with yet another to come, I can say that I am even more intrigued by LBJ. Having consumed his earlier books, I am now working my way through his latest, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power” which covers 1958 through 1964.
Little wonder I am pulled, personally, into the vortex of those particular years. Those were the years when I graduated from college; got married to Judy; did a tour of duty overseas in the Marines; became the father of four children; went to seminary; and took my first parish job in Annapolis. All of that living was done amidst the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the emergence of hippies and the assassination of President Kennedy. Keeping with the theme of this issue of Notes, I can say with all certainty that I was living through personal seismic pressures in the very midst of a changing national and international political, social and cultural paradigm shift.
For all of his eccentricities, political shenanigans, personal blustering insecurity, obscene gestures, and sheer manipulation, one must finally acknowledge that LBJ, after that dark day in Dallas, accomplished more toward racial justice than any previous occupant of the Oval Office, perhaps since Lincoln.
When Johnson gave up his powerful seat in the Senate to take what had always been seen as the powerless position of vice president of the United States, he was heard to say, some thought arrogantly, “Power is where power goes.” With the Black Power movement on the rise, this white man went to the White House with civil rights black power on his mind and his agenda.
When Johnson brought black leaders into the White House, Rosa Parks had already refused to sit in the back of a Birmingham bus (1955), and now we have Barack Obama riding up to Capitol Hill in a limo to an inauguration into an office never before held by a black man. The movie, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” was yet to be made (1967), and now the color of people around the dinner table doesn’t matter. Instead, a parent might well ask today, “Is George bringing his partner Allan” over for a family meal?”
I often think about James Baldwin and what he had to endure as a black, gay man. I remember how he had to flee this country and go to France in order to work out his own personal destiny. When I see Don Lemon, the successful black CNN news anchor, now out as a gay man, judged only by how well he covers the news, I think of Brother James trapped in a day-an-age when even artists and performers had to hide their sexual orientation.
When a patient develops what has been called a “death rattle,” it is an indication that the eerie gargling sound is a precursor to death. When I hear the loud racist diatribe, the ugly and gruesome growling of racial animosity, and feel the subterranean racial currents that run like a polluted river through our national conversation, I hear the rattling sounds of a paradigm making the journey across the river Styx.
Dr. Billy Graham’s Opposition To Gay Marriage
I was disappointed, angered, but not surprised when Billy Graham was the subject of a full-page advertisement in which he spoke out in favor of the constitutional amendment in North Carolina banning gay marriage. There’s no need to tell me that he has a right to do what he did. I’d go to jail over his right to say whatever he wants to say. Nor is there any reason for me not to say what I feel compelled to say about Dr. Graham, despite the good work this religious icon has often done.
Dr. Biily Graham has troubled me on any number of occasions. It goes well beyond his evangelically fundamentalist theology. His all too-easy, unchallenging connection with power –his unwillingness, for example, to speak hard truth about war and the death penalty to presidents he has nuzzled up to over the years.
To start with, back during the Vietnam War, he called for the bombing of the dikes in North Vietnam that would have killed as many as a million people. Throughout the war he pandered to President Johnson’s escalation of the war, and blamed the war on President Kennedy.
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the Vietnam War in his monumental sermon at Riverside Church in New York City, in an attempt to end the war and bring troops home, Dr. Graham said King’s remarks were “an affront to the thousands of loyal Negro troops who are in Vietnam.”
On the night President Bush triggered the Persian Gulf War in Iraq in 1991, Dr. Graham, sitting next to Mr. Bush in the White House, watched the opening aerial bombardment of Baghdad on television. That prompted one critic to say, “Can anyone imagine Jesus watching a war on TV without weeping aloud for its innocent victims, and demanding that it be stopped immediately?” I guess I can imagine it, because the Biblical story includes numerous false prophets who whispered only sweet nothings into the king’s ear and justified plenty that should have been challenged in the name of God.
As the story goes, Dr. Graham is given credit for having “saved” George W. Bush in 1985 by helping him walk the path from alcoholism toward sobriety. Dr. Graham should take due credit, with the help of God, for that pastoral care. What is questionable is the fact that Dr. Graham never once called the Iraq War into question. Alcohol addiction is fair game for an evangelist, but war is not?
A few years ago, I wrote Dr. Graham while I was the Director of Christian Social Ministries in the Episcopal diocese of North Carolina. I asked him if he would sign-on as a person opposed to the death penalty. The letter his associate sent back to me said that Dr. Graham’s work was to save souls and not make public political endorsements.
I thought about that, when I saw his public endorsement favoring a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Gay marriage is fair game for an evangelist, but the death penalty is not?
That made me think about old wineskins and new wine.
New Paradigms And An Old Parable About New Wine
When it comes to understanding the mystery associated with paradigmatic change, I find nothing more inspirational and empowering than two tiny verses found in a New Testament parable in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Luke.
It goes like this: “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins.”
Interestingly enough, that parable has one other part to it, which speaks about the foolishness of trying to sew new cloth onto old garments. It ought not be done, and George Bernard Shaw must have made a connection with that advice. He wrote, “I like my tailor. He takes my measurements anew each time he sees me, whereas others expect me to fit old measurements.”
As I recall Shaw’s words, I can feel God taking my measurements.
May 18th, 2012
April 23rd, 2012 |
I quote others only in order to better express myself.
Michel de Montaigne
They are like dandelions; you can find them all over the place.
I am talking about little quotes, snippets, and tiny fragments from various sources. Sometimes you find them attached with magnets to a refrigerator. Clippings carried in one’s purse, like the man I know who carries a Pablo Neruda poem in his wallet. You might spot one pasted on the rear end of a car. Friends often send them to me in e-mails or by postal delivery. With tattoos in vogue these days, you might notice a fragment from the Bible, like “God is Love,” colorfully displayed on someone. These snippets also show up on colorful tee shirts. You might pick them up in church bulletins, on highway billboards, in Chinese fortune cookies, and of course, in the multitude of books, magazines and newspapers where worthy lines get underlined with a yellow Magic Marker or clipped for keeping.
Montaigne’s words serve me well: “I quote others only to better express myself.” They help me express myself to people I care about. They serve as mulch for my garden of ideas and observations. Consider this issue of Notes as my gift of mulch for your garden.
Let’s start with Trayvon Martin’s death in Florida and see where that takes us.
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When do you have time to call experts? When do you have time to sort through data and information and do your own research? Even with a well-staffed news organization, we are hostages to the non-stop, never-ending file-it-now, get-on-the-Web, get-on-the-radio, get-on-TV media environment.
Ken Auletta—Non-Stop News
Trayvon Martin’s tragic death in Florida has dominated our nation’s attention for the past few weeks. It will have a long media shelf life. It requires extensive and accurate analysis, as well as careful perusal. I have refrained from writing anything up to this point but will, throughout this edition of Notes, make a couple of observations.
Ken Auletta is profoundly correct in his observation about the hurry-up nature of reporting. His observation about reporters is one that applies to all of us as consumers of news. The rush for “breaking news” and “exclusive” interviews, contributes to the enormously dangerous rush to judgments we all find ourselves caught in when hearing and viewing the news. Facts dissolve in the frenzy that voraciously consumes a hungry public yearning for an opinion about whatever the subject happens to be.
Case in point: An NBC News producer was responsible for a piece for the “Today” show that had an audio clip of George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin, saying, “This guy (Martin) looks like he is up to no good. He looks black.”
That comment, because of selected editing, became fuel for the fire that raged around the possible racist aspect of this killing. Zimmerman’s comment was, in fact, a response to the 911 dispatcher asking the question, “O.K., and this guy (Martin)—is he white, black or Hispanic?” Only then did Zimmerman say, “He looks black.”
The NBC producer was fired. I won’t question his motives. My guess is that the piece displayed for millions of “Today” show viewers was the direct result of what Auletta has called the rush connected with the “non-stop, never-ending-file-it-now environment” that drives the media.
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“Do you have a permit for that hoodie?”Comment from a policeman to a man wearing a red hoodie, armed with six guns and a rocket propelled missile.
An Ed Stein cartoon in The Christian Science Monitor
A veteran, with two tours in Iraq under his belt, pointed out something rather startling to me the other day. The “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida which will come under scrutiny in the trial of George Zimmerman for the shooting of Trayvon Martin, gives more leeway to shooters here than our own military gives to soldiers in war. That has me thinking about the ground we stand on, the weapons we carry, and how we use them.
Of course the primary issue in court will boil down to whether Zimmerman was defending himself. I recognize that even raising that possibility is no way to win friends and influence people. The subject of racism has a way of bullying legal issues into submission, and to call racism into question as a motive for the killing is to risk being called a racist. I shall resist that fear by making a couple of observations.
· Race is always an issue when any of our systems are involved, particularly the criminal justice system. Black people are incarcerated seven times as often as whites. One legal scholar has written, “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage.” Based on my work with Latino immigrants, I would say that they, also, are the targets of our nation’s original sin—racism. Accompany me on a trip to prison, like so many church folks have done, and I promise that when we exit the prison I won’t say, “I told you so.”
· The rush for white people to run to the street crying “racism” has me, a frequent street marcher, a bit suspicious. I’ll tell you why. White folks sometimes establish their individual virtue by flocking to the rallies and marches in order to differentiate themselves from all those bigoted white racists among us. It’s as if we somehow want to absent ourselves from the deep systemic racism that pervades our life together in this country. No march in the world will ever accomplish that, even though I would encourage marching for justice whenever the occasion arises.
· The hoodie? Sure, Someone wearing it can be intimidating to some people—a shroud of anonymity worn by a person intent on committing a crime. Just last night, a man described as wearing a hoodie burglarized a home here in Charleston. But think about this. Since the rash of Wall Street and banking corporate executive crime, maybe we should beware of men dressed in expensive Brooks Brothers suits. And with so many pedophiles in clerical garb, maybe folks should cross the street when they see me coming.
· Let’s face it, given the threat of violence, as we see it portrayed in the nightly news or in the morning paper, it’s totally understandable why people are frightened and choosing to live in gated communities, buying weapons, and arming community watch people to protect them. Hundreds of new gun-friendly laws all over the country give people the right to carry concealed weapons to fight suspicious characters. Ohio allows permits for people to carry concealed weapons into restaurants, bars, and sports arenas. It’s become Gunfight at O.K Coral time. Avoid asking for a shot of anything at your local bar because it may come to you from the barrel of a gun.
· Since fear acts as kindling for an emotional fire, is it any wonder that guns serve as the match for a huge bonfire that can rage out of control when it comes to dealing with unknown strangers, people who are different from us, and dangers that might go bang in the night?
· Maybe you’ve seen the bumper sticker that reads: “God, Guns and Guts. Three Things That Make America Great.” Adherence to the three G’s is what seems to get political candidates elected. You can see it at work as Mitt Romney hops from speaking at the National Rifle Association convention and to delivering a commencement address at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. His God and guns are readily visible, but where are his guts when it comes time for him to unmask the lie that President Obama is taking guns away from Americans.
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In what other context would a news organization allow someone to become such an integral part of the story and then represent the organization? Shouldn’t Sharpton have to choose between his dual roles?
Howard Kurtz, Newsweek, Washington Bureau Chief
Folks on my side of the political street, myself included, have an endless supply of barbs readily available to hurl at Fox Network commentators who are a part of what I refer to as the “screech media.” You know, the hollering, four-letter screaming, interrupting-everyone-in-sight, self-appointed political pundits who go vicious in their attack of everyone who makes a left turn in their thinking or in their politics. They distort facts, twist the news into an image of their own likeness, become the news they cover, and blur the line between news coverage and analysis.
The Reverend Al Sharpton’s participation in the coverage of the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman story requires me to look at the same kind of distortion on my occasionally not-so-sunny-side-of-the-street. Don’t get me wrong, Sharpton has the same right to advocate for his opinions and beliefs, many of which I agree with, as does Sean Hannity on the other side of the street. The First Amendment to the Constitution protects all of us—Screaming Banshees going after Barack Obama as well as Raving Maniacs devouring Sarah Palin. Hey, there are plenty of lemon meringue pies available to toss in all directions. It’s as American as, let’s say, lemon pie.
Prizing and protecting a person’s right to express his or her opinions, however, does not address my concern about the hazy distortion between reporting news and making news. When Al Sharpton makes news attacking George Zimmerman and raising money for Trayvon Martin’s legal expenses, it seems to me that he has crossed the line when he then tries to report the news on his MSNBC television show.
The complicity and complications around race are like a maze without an exit. Someone like me, and I’ll bet you as well, can get stymied and fearfully lost and timid when trying to talk about the subject, even with family and friends. I either get snow blind or lost in the dark just trying to sort through the debris that smothers this terrible shooting.
One need only remember that both men involved in this tragedy were what society calls “people of color”— Martin, a black man, Zimmerman, an Hispanic man who grew up in a multiracial family. And the color line gets even more blurred when we remember that Al Sharpton, not long ago, made the discovery that his genealogical family tree included white segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond?
Two things I am sure of. First, I wholeheartedly agree with what Al Sharpton said right after he discovered his connection to Thurmond. “In the story of the Thurmonds and the Sharptons is the story of the shame and glory of America.”
Secondly, as jaded and discouraged as I might get about the criminal justice system in this country, I still have hope that the whole truth, and nothing but the truth will emerge about that tragic night in Florida, and that justice will prevail because of who we are, and despite who we are. That’s a prayer as well as an expectation.
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Any recruit…was prone on occasion to incorrectly refer to his rifle as “a gun.” As punishment, a recruit would likely stand at attention outdoors (sometimes clad only in his undergarments or even naked) and repeat over and over “This is my rifle, this is my gun. This is for shooting, this is for fun.”
Richard Allen Burns—This is My Rifle, This is My Gun: Gunlore in the Military
Maine’s Senator, Susan Collins, has conjectured about the Secret Service sexcapade with prostitutes in Columbia. “To me it defies belief that this is just an aberration. There are too many people involved. If it had been one or two, then I would say it was an aberration. But it included two supervisors. That is particularly shocking and appalling.” I agree with that conjecture.
It’s an ugly truth, but it must be acknowledged if we intend to address the relationship between violence and sex, masculinity and misogyny. Face up to the fact that wherever boots and guns are on the ground, whether our military personnel wear them, or Secret Service agents recruited from the military wear them, the link between violence and sex will be present.
By pointing to these connections, I do not mean to say that people in the military or Secret Service hate women or love violence. What I am talking about are the connections built into the systems we live inside of, particularly that are male driven and militaristic. For example, it is no secret that prostitution thrives just outside the gates of military bases. While in the Marine Corps, I saw that in Olongapo, the town outside the base at Subic Bay in the Philippines, and in Henoko, just outside of Camp Schwab in Okinawa. Doing church work in Honduras, I was in Comayagua where prostitutes were transported fom Tegucigalpa to service the troops at the nearby Palmerola military base.
Cartagena, a sex tourist oasis, is where the Secret Service agents were sexually serviced while in Columbia to protect the president. Being a man, I know the system that winks and nods with a smile, and says, “boys will be boys.” So why would this dalliance with prostitutes shock me, as it has with so many folks who say, “how could this have happened?”
The shock for me was the fact that while the media was fixated on the sexual shenanigans of Secret Service agents protecting President Obama, he was signing a trade agreement with Columbia, without any human rights provisions to protect the workers in that country. Mind you, dozens of workers have been gunned down over the past two years for having tried to organize their workplaces.
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If you were writing a morality play about class privilege, you couldn’t do better than to dream up a glamorous ship of fools and load it with everyone from the A-list to immigrants coming to America for a better life. The class issue is one major reason the Titanic disaster has always been so ripe for dramatization. And yet the way we tell the story reveals more about us than it does about what happened.
Daniel Mendelsohn—The New Yorker
In case you haven’t noticed, we have just passed the one hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Books about the disaster are the quite the rage. If you go to the Titanic exhibit in Orlando, Florida, you can put your hands up against an iceberg made of real ice in order to understand the horrors of hypothermia. In the gift shop you can buy a lavish cookbook titled “Last Dinner On The Titanic.”
Mendelsohn’s comment calls attention to the class issue, one that intrigues me. I think that’s because whenever the class issue is raised, particularly in a political campaign, Americans argue about it vociferously.
Conservatives tend to pretend there is no class divide, and when left-wingers go after the rich for more taxes, or to attack upper class abuse of power, apoplexy sets in. The Fox News Obama-hater commentators say the president is “resorting to the politics of division, by using outrageous warfare rhetoric to attack his opponents.” The president’s political strategy is, they say, “to pit American’s against one another in order to win a second term and hang on to the White House and Air Force One and his beautiful helicopter.”
One of the reasons the Republicans are able to connect with working class people is the very fact that they recognize the ambivalent feeling that exist among their hard hat working class audience. They understand all too well that the average Joe’s hostility toward fat-cat rich people masks a latent desire to become one of them. One need only watch people run like lemmings to purchase lottery tickets in order to understand that the closer folks are to the bottom of the economic ladder, the more they want to become one of the rich people they can’t stand.
A common question I hear so often when it comes to elections goes like this: Why do folks who are economically hard-pressed wind up voting against their own interests? Perhaps it’s because economically strapped people want to be a member of the class that is responsible for their situation so that they will no longer have to feel powerless and penniless. If that’s the case, it’s understandable, but not possible without tax increases on the rich and adequate regulation on powerful corporate interests that live at the expense of poor and middle class people.
To return to the Titanic imagery, the apocalyptic truth lies at the bottom of the ocean. It is simply the fact that unless there is a more equitable economic balance among all people, the ship on which we are all passengers—Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean—will tilt and sink and all classes will perish.
April 23rd, 2012
April 2nd, 2012 |
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Palm Fronds And The Springtime Stink Of Manure
It is Palm Sunday and I am on the third floor of a home Judy and I moved into on that fateful day now defined with numbers—cold, stark numbers—9/11.
Worshipers are about ready to exit two churches I can see from my window. I anticipate their arrival on the street. They will carry dead palm fronds that have been stripped from trees, blessed and carried home. In but seven days they will return to these worship spaces to celebrate Easter where holy tables will be bedecked with fragrant flowers.
Today is also April Fools’ Day—a trickster’s holiday. What a serendipitous delight that Palm Sunday and April Fools’ Day converge at the start of Holy Week—the week that leads to Easter. The Apostle Paul’s words written to Christians in Corinth seem rather appropriate. He charged them to be “fools for Christ sake.”
Come to think of it, these Christians, hurrying to their cars, are a bunch of fools. Paul made a wise choice of words when he defined followers of Jesus as “fools for Christ sake.” Paul, you see, is the ironic trickster reminding them that they will appear as fools by worldly standards if they dedicate their lives to the Jesus Message.
On top of that, only a fool would think that something good could come from that ugly hill—Golgotha, the Place of the Skull—where a crucifixion took place. I once had to sit and watch a man put to death in a North Carolina death chamber. There were absolutely no flowers in the room.
Can goodness blossom from goodness betrayed and destroyed? Reason would cast a doubtful eye at such a thought, and finally have to cede its overrated authority to a sprightly Muse who knows her way to truth that surpasses human understanding.
Perhaps this muse is Gaia, the Earth Mother of all heavenly gods. And most likely she would lead us to a place known to farmers, horticulturists, or anyone who puts their hands into the earth, or uses their nose to smell the springtime stink of manure on the ground. For that’s where wisdom can be found, right there in the manure on the ground.
With those fragrant words, let’s get down to earth and see if anything good can grow in the stinking pile of excrement that accompanies war, suffering, pain and death.
Bent And Broken Yet Repaired And Rebuilt
Speaking of palm fronds, I call to mind Jim Rendon’s recent and powerful article in The New York Times Magazine entitled “The Postwar Attitude Adjustment.” The article has been a huge help in reconciling the obvious disjuncture between Good Friday and Easter, a tension that raises its ugly head every year when Holy Week appears on the calendar.
The article is about troops who have come back from Iraq and Afghanistan with severe injuries and who are trying to piece back together not only their bodies but, also, their very lives. Sgt. Jeffrey Beltran is one of those soldiers.
Beltran shows Rendon a photo taken right after an I.E.D. explosion that blew his Humvee upside down. In the photo is a plowed field, a deep crater from the explosion, the demolished vehicle, and a palm tree. Beltran, we are told, has undergone 14 operations to address a broken knee and leg, fractured lower spine, buried shrapnel in his thigh, and a brain injury.
“I was dealing with post-traumatic stress, anger, all the emotions,” says Beltran, “the ups and downs, the physical, emotional, psychological pain.” All he wanted was to be healed in order to get on with his life—get back to his unit. Full of anti-anxiety medications, he was sent back into battle in Afghanistan. After a steady exposure to suffering and death—seeing a farmer killed, along with friends in his unit, he was finally sent home for good.
Sent home for good—more irony à la the Apostle Paul.
“As much as you want to avoid it,” says Beltran, “death is always in front of you.” Reading that comment, I come to understand more fully that the “shadow of death” spoken of in Psalm 23 is one’s own shadow.
Richard Tedeschi, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, along with others working with injured veterans, are convinced that, given the right care, it is possible for people to grow as result of their suffering rather than be destroyed by it.
Rendon writes, “Paradoxically, many grow even as they suffer. The way we cope with trauma is far more complex than once thought, and the way it molds us is similarly complex. We bend, we break, we repair and rebuild, and often we grow, changing for the better in ways we never would have if we had not suffered.”
After having lived for as long as I have, and having accompanied so many people—family, friends, parishioners, even strangers—through their suffering, pain, and death, I can honestly say that, on more than one occasion, I have witnessed a resilient power within human beings capable of transcending the most horrifying situations. I have learned not even to ask where it came from, just to accept and celebrate its validity.
Appropriating the language of my own faith, while trying not to impose it on others, I describe what I have witnessed as a power, a spirit that moves people from a Good Friday experience to an Easter revelation—from physical, mental and spiritual death to a resurrection this side of the grave. In the face of idiopathic medical trauma and inexplicable horror, that satisfies me. Need I get preoccupied with a future resurrection after death when new life is blossoming all around me in the here-and-now?
Need I say more? Yes.
An Inexplicable Emergence Of Grace In The Least Likely Place
While in the Marine Corps, Judy and I had neighbors, Sam and Kathy, who became friends. When our unit, the Fifth Marines, went overseas, we left our pregnant wives behind. Judy gave birth to our son Stephen; Kathy gave birth to a son; our military unit finally came home; and Sam went on to pursue a military career. Even though separated, Judy and I, off at seminary, had made the promise that we would be responsible for raising their children, if both of them should die.
We have kept touch with them each and every Christmas as friends and godparents to their daughter. Just recently we came to learn that Kathy had been treated for a second bout of breast cancer. Speaking with her by phone just a few days ago, she told me that her cancer had put her in touch with a remarkable group of people—cancer patients and medical staff—who had blessed her life with support and understanding care. It was obvious in the conversation that Kathy had experienced an unexpected and gracious gift right where she least expected it.
I don’t mean to suggest in any way by what I have written that war and cancer are gifts. They are a curse with no blessing attached. And to folks from a religious background that see illness and violence as God-sent, either as punishment or as a lesson God sends to put us in our place, I don’t buy it. As I have never seen a flood or earthquake as an “act of God,” I refuse to see a war as a good thing, not even WW II so often referred to as “The Good War.”
What I do believe is that in the midst of a physical or emotional desert something very strange may happen—something beyond comprehension or reasonable understanding.
In the worst possible situation—dead space or dead land as T.S. Eliot calls it—something inexplicable often finds a way to crack through and emerge as relief to suffering, as well as hope for a depressed spirit or a broken body. Every time I see a flower or even a weed crack asphalt or a concrete wall and poke its head out for sun, I think about that.
Sometimes, however, pain—physically and psychological—can be so great that it becomes a barrier to any gracious emergence of relief. Fear, a companion of pain, also serves to thwart any growth beyond the ordeal.
In my own experience, I find that pain is one of the most difficult things to deal with. Pain is hard to gauge, easy to doubt in others, and easier to dismiss than, let’s say, a physical injury that might require surgery. Pain is deeply subjective, beyond testing, and virtually impossible to describe. Pain isolates us from others by its ability to destroy language.
One of the great authors, Virginia Woolf, understood that as well, if not better, than anyone.
Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf’s Inability To Describe Pain?
Virginia Woolf, was well acquainted with pain; it was a constant companion throughout her life—family death, sickness, and depression that institutionalized her and finally drove her to suicide. In her essay “On Being Ill,” Woolf bemoans the failure of literature to portray bodily pain. “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver and the headache…The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”
With Woolf’s words in mind, I think of Good Friday and Jesus suffering on the Cross. The Gospel writers combine to record seven last words uttered by a suffering Jesus before he dies. The isolation created by pain, the separation from those at the foot of the Cross, as well as from God, is captured, as best it can be, in his agonizing cry, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.” I have heard that cry time and time again from suffering, fearful people stretched out on their own cross of pain.
Tzipi Weiss, an associate professor of social work confronts patients in pain with bold counsel, hard to imagine and even harder to appropriate. She encourages them to work through pain because “pain and suffering are the mechanisms for growth.” It may sound dishonest, even ridiculous—saccharin words from a superficial greeting card—but there is a kernel of truth in that statement, perhaps it is a diamond in the rough. A friend, who has known pain in her own life, said to me recently that she had discovered new insights about her self, new strength, new growth on the other side of her pain. I believe her.
I know that athletes overcome pain by playing through it. I know as well that many addicts, who finally face up to the misery their denial has fostered, have used their pain that has caused them and those around them, to finally face up to the task of building new lives. You may ask how pain has served them rather than destroy them. In the end it may be as difficult for them to explain the redemptive power of pain, as it was for Virginia Woolf to articulate the pain that finally destroyed her.
There is another word uttered by Jesus before he dies. From his agony on the Cross, he cries out benevolently and unexpectedly for God to forgive those who have nailed him to the hard wood—“Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Those words might very well serve as a worthy example of a holy piety unexplainably available to those who suffer—a spiritual reconnection with the larger community that pain has tried to destroy.
Laotian Beer, Stale Bread and Rancid Wine
I peruse the travel section of the New York Times Sunday edition. And what to my wondering eyes do I see but a full page on Laos—the very country my Marine Corp unit was prepared to enter in order to kill people back in the latter part of the 1950’s.
But wait, by taking a trip there now a tourist can find a variety of pleasures in some of the hot spots. You can get feel good food, find a spa for a rejuvenated rubdown, and for a tropical brunch you can feast on sticky rice pancakes. An while you’re at it you can do and don’t forget a banana flower salad after you’ve done some creative drinking over one of the chef made decadent dishes like terrine of foie gras with Laphroaig-perfumed minced mushrooms. Oh, yes, and for the mellower crowd: harem-pants-wearing, jewelry-laden backpackers there is plenty of Beerlao—cheap beer.
Laos is where the United States, between 1964 and 1973, dropped over two million tons of ordnance. It is the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. Since that war, over 50,000 casualties have occurred from the bombs, a third of them dropped that did not detonate.
The tourist, between bouts of Beerlao and goat cheese rolls, can actually pay a visit to a local Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise where documentaries, art and interactive exhibits tell the troubling story of the unexploded bombs. This cooperative is attempting to address the pain and suffering that was inflicted on the people of Laos, and continues to haunt them. Tourists may donate money to this effort. Perhaps, for American travelers it is expiation for the senseless war that brought so much misery to this land.
Scenes like this causes me to visualize our planet as if it were a huge archeological dig with layer upon layer of ruins from which the suffering and pain has been squeezed. In some indefinable way, does that vision open the possibility, without justifying the wars, torture and killing, of a perpetually resurrected world? Do we require innumerable, ongoing Good Friday’s in order for Easter to come into bloom? I hope not, but given the human propensity for violence, perhaps Easter is the only way for redemption to take place.
I ponder all of this as florists work during Holy Week to deliver the seasonally cherished lilies to churches, some of which are serving stale bread and piss-poor rancid wine, yet praying to be resurrected for a new justice-seeking mission.
Syria—A Rainbow—And A Tearful Young Girl
Last week I was asked to speak at a dinner sponsored by the Middle Eastern folks in the area, mostly Muslims. The occasion was to raise charitable money for people suffering in Syria. As the people of Israel were oppressed by the Roman Empire, the Syrian people are been tortured, killed and oppressed by their President, Bashar Al Assad.
Right before the dinner a monstrous storm dumped flood-like water on the area. Closing out my remarks, I referred to a rainbow that had appeared in the sky in the middle of the downpour. Like the Biblical rainbow that appeared to Noah promising a new covenant with the people, I said that in the midst of the Syrian deluge, at the end of the rainbow, God-willing, there would be a pot full of justice, mercy and a new democratic government.
After the meal, a high school girl asked me if it was ever proper to interrupt someone while they spoke. She said that when I spoke of the rainbow it reminded her of a poem she had written about a rainbow. I told her that I would have welcomed the interruption. She went on to say that it would be difficult for her to speak in front of a group of people as I had done. She was fearful of raising her own voice. I noted a tear rolling down her cheek. It prompted me to say that deep inside her was a voice eager to be heard and that, with her very own help, and the help of others, I promised her that her words would find a way to break through her paralyzing fear. A smile and more tears gave me an indication that my promise had pleased her.
Like the water in the flooded street as I make my way home, the image of the empty tomb at the end of Holy Week floods in on me as I think about that girl and her weeping. All of us, I would propose, depend on the rolling away of the stone so that our best inner-self, shrouded and bound, can be set free. When that happens, an Easter moment has arrived.
A Final Look At An Empty Cross And Empty Tomb
Whether we give it much thought or not, I do believe that each and every one of us desires a guideline for life worthy of the very best in us—call it a rule of life, if you will. We want the best, even at our worst. And so I pass this along to you as a seasonal gift from me to you.
Try, with as much grace as possible—because it will take as much grace as you can possibly muster—to make the most of the suffering, pain and death you have inherited, and the suffering, pain and death you yourself have created. And always, I say always, deal as little suffering, pain and death as possible to your friends and enemies. For in so doing you may find a peace beyond expectation and explanation.
April 2nd, 2012
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