Summertime Musings

August 13th, 2011  |   

“When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

                                                                        Martin Luther King Jr.

Looking For The Secret Word And The Bird From Above

Some of my readers may be old enough to remember the quiz show You Bet Your Life that aired on radio and television. Groucho Marx was the host and contestants were given money they could bet on answering questions from various categories.

There was a bit of tension built into the show around whether the contestant would say the “secret word” revealed to the audience at the beginning of the show. If the word was spoken, a toy duck resembling Groucho descended from above with a $100 bill for the contestant.

In the ongoing, never-ending contest between science and religion, the secret word is miracle. It descends on a whole variety of conversations. It sticks out like that Groucho duck. For example, twice, in the past two days, that secret word has come to my attention.

There’s the young boy who was rescued from the Pacific Ocean after being underwater for 15 minutes. His father said “There been several miracles just in the circumstances of finding him, the fact that he’s not dead, the fact that he can move, the fact that he can speak.”

Then there’s the story about the woman who lost her entire face when a 200-pound pet chimpanzee went on a rampage and mauled her back in 2009. Remarkable pictures just released show her with a full new face accomplished by a medical team of 30 physicians, nurses, anesthesiologists and residents. Today Show host, Ann Curry, called it a miracle.

In religious circles, the recent beatification of Pope John Paul II is the next-to-last step toward making him a saint. Required now is the discovery of at least one miracle he performed, usually an instantaneous, permanent and scientifically inexplicable healing. From my vantage point, I’d have labeled it a miracle if he had authorized women’s ordination, birth control and a new view from Rome on the subject of gays.

Even though science is capable of explaining the physical and biological aspects of healing, the medical community, as I have experienced it over the years, recognizes that there are extraordinary events that defy expert medical analysis. Idiopathic events.

I am a child of the enlightenment, for better or for worse. And I am also a product of an orthodox theological tradition. In other words, I live a bifurcated existence between Galileo and St. Paul. One might say I live between a Darwinian ape, or duck, if you like, and the dove that descended from heaven at the baptism of Jesus.

All this talk of miracles has a very practical and ordinary side to it for me—one I’d like to explore in this issue of Notes. Call it an obsession with the nature of things as I travel the path between my birth and my inevitable departure from this life that I cherish.

A Swerve In The Road

Full disclosure requires me to flat out say humbly yet boldly that I am not into miracles. Like Star Wars and Harry Potter stories, they entertain but serve little purpose if I can’t recognize their mythical significance in practical terms. I humbly admit that I don’t really know if Moses divided the Red Sea, or whether Jesus walked on water or healed a blind man, for I am skeptical. You see, I told you I was a child of The Enlightenment.

Call my faith holy skepticism, if you will. What I can say boldly is that I go to those stories for more than knowledge about whether Moses wound up with dry feet, or Jesus had wet feet when he reached the shore, or whether the blind man, after his encounter with Jesus, could hear the people at the foot of the cross shout, “crucify him.”

Parting the sea? My faith would find satisfaction if a way could be found through the hostility that divides Israel from Palestine. Walking on water?  I’d be satisfied if people could just drink clean water in communities where mountaintop removal is destroying tap and well water. As for blindness, I might even call it a miracle if our President would open his eyes and bring all of our troops home by next Easter. Hey, a real resurrection!

I just finished reading a fine article by Stephen Greenblat about the two-thousand-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things.” Penned by Lucretius, I was struck by the fact that he didn’t believe in miracles. He believed that nothing could violate the laws of nature. Instead, he wrote about clinamen, the Latin word for swerve. A swerve was an unexpected movement of matter. Ah, I like that—an unexpected movement of matter.

Lucretius was way ahead of his time. Operating strictly on what he could observe with his naked eye, no help from a microscope, he discerned what Greenblatt calls “a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—imbued with a poet’s sense of wonder.”

I like the fact that Lucretius cared not a whit about the afterlife. He was too engrossed with matter—the stuff of his everyday world. He recognized that human beings are made up of the same material as the stars, the oceans, and the animals and plant life that filled his world full of wonder. It was all there to be discovered, hallowed and enjoyed.

This hallowing of the material world shadows the Jesus I know and follow—the material Jesus. Searching for the sanctification of a material world, I’ve drawn sustenance from monks, monasteries, and traditional desert theology. But when stripped down to my theological underwear you’ll find me suspicious of an asceticism that basks in flagellating self-denial and sucks all the juice out of my flesh and blood world. The unexpected swerve in my daily life—call it God’s Spirit—drives my quest for a meaningful piety in politics and my hunger for a sustainable daily life. And sometimes it nearly drives me crazy.

Peanuts And Cracker Jack And A Dose Of Civic Religion At The Ballpark

Have you ever been in a room where someone gets up and says something that you, and perhaps others in the room would like to have said but didn’t? Or perhaps you were on the verge of saying it but for some reason hadn’t arrived at the point of articulation. That’s what happened to me this week. On the verge of sharing my thoughts with you about what I see as military manipulation, lo-and-behold Andrew Bacevich went public with an article, “Cheap Grace at Fenway.” He may have beaten me to the punch in print, but I celebrate his insightfully courageous piece and my opportunity to add to it.

Bacevich, a retired Army Colonel, is a West Point graduate who later taught there. He is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, and the author of numerous books; his latest is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. He describes himself as a conservative Catholic. In 2007, his son was killed in action in Iraq. I consider Andrew Bacevich to be a major prophetic voice on the American scene.

Bacevich is upset by what happened at Fenway Park in Boston on July Fourth just prior to the Red Sox baseball game. Here’s the abridged version of what took place. There is a stage on the field. A flag draped over the right-field wall. A uniformed Air Force contingent stands at attention. A Marine Corps unit sings the National Anthem. Four Air Force F-15C Eagles fly over the field. The crowd roars approval.

If that weren’t enough, the Red Sox announcement is made on the public address system: “On this Independence Day, we pay a debt of gratitude to the families whose sons and daughters are serving our country.” A picture of Bridget Lyndon, a sailor on board the carrier USS Ronald Reagan, appears on the giant Jumbotrom above the centerfield bleachers. She tells her parents, who are standing on the field in Red Sox paraphernalia and Mardi Gras necklaces, that she wishes she could be with them at Fenway Park.

The next scene is right out of Hollywood. Suddenly, from behind the flag in left field, Bridget emerges in dress whites and marches toward the infield where she is hugged and kissed by her parents. The cameras roll and the crowd roars approval. Bridget (annual salary about $22,000) throws out the ceremonial first pitch and is handed the ball by pitcher Tim Wakefield (annual salary $2,000,000). Bridget and her family yell “Play Ball” into the microphone and are escorted off the field as the game begins.

 Bacevich calls this spectacle “a masterpiece of contrived spontaneity.” It leaves everyone feeling good about his or her baseball team, the military, and his or her own self-regard. This symbolic display of patriotism absolvetheir chosen distance from this war. “Put simply, the message that citizens wish to convey to their solders is this: although choosing not to be with you, we are still for you (so long as being for you entails nothing on our part). Cheering for the troops, in effect, provides a convenient mechanism for voiding obligation and easing guilty consciences.” You see the cheering fans haven’t had to sacrifice their lifestyles, or their lives. This display was “America’s civic religion made manifest” in which support the troops “has emerged as a central tenet of that religion.” One might call it solidarity without sacrifice. “Cheap grace” as Bonhoeffer called it.

(You can read Bacevich’s entire article at  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-bacevich/ballpark-liturgy-americas_b_911858.html)

Don’t Take Me Out To The Ball Game—Bring Me Home

Here’s my icing on Andrew Bacevich’s cake.

Since the Fenway Park display, the show goes on. I see a TV clip showing a soldier stationed in Iraq surprising his daughter by showing up in her classroom. The child cries, the teachers, and the kids cheer and clap. Then on the Today Show there’s a woman in a Mississippi ballpark, supposedly chosen randomly, throwing out the ceremonial first pitch. The catcher then runs to the mound, throws off his mask, and surprises her. He’s her husband who is home on leave from Afghanistan. 

Emotional and heart-rending for sure, but I say, stop the theatrics, the romantic cover-up of this atrocious war and bring each and every one of the troops home. 

We’ve been through a major budget battle, and it is far from over.  Now we are on a Stock Market roller coaster ride, with lots of fearful companions. As our nation goes bankrupt, individuals fear bankruptcy. Today’s news contains a story about a soldier who comes back home from military duty in Iraq on the same day JP Morgan Chase has foreclosed on his home. Karl Rove, “Bush’s Brain,” was on TV the other night blaming President Obama for the nation’s debt and squawking about the plan to raise taxes. Hey, Rove was the architect of the $2 trillion tax break for the wealthiest among us, as well as two $1 trillion wars we are saddled with. Karl, did you forget JP Morgan Chase?

I hate these wars. They are huge and costly mistakes. Instead of feel-good public relations events like patriotic ballgames and surprise troop visits that cost us absolutely nothing, I say President Obama should call for a huge tax increase to pay for these wars. Call it a Support the Troop Tax. Make all of us pay for our folly overseas. Who know, perhaps a call for a war tax would awaken a sleeping nation and garner protest to end these wars.

President Obama is under attack by critics who wonder if he has the starch in him for a fight. Drew Westen, a professor at Emory University, writes a stinging indictment of Obama in a New York Times August 7 article “What happened to Obama?” He writes: “The president is fond of referring to ‘the arc of history,’ paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.”

I figure that young soldier who is back home in Bend, Oregon, without a home, is wondering if the “arc of history’ bends toward justice or toward JP Morgan Chase.

Holy War—For God And Country

The August 8 New Yorker has a graphic and detailed account of the Navy SEALs mission that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden.

As to why bin Laden wasn’t captured rather than killed, the special-operations officer says, “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision.”

Nicholas Schmidle, the author of the article, says bin Laden was unarmed. “Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11^th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye.”

That done, he sent this message to President Obama: “For God and country—Geronimo, (the name assigned to bin Laden) Geronimo, Geronimo.” Then, after a pause, he added. Geronimo E.K.I.A.” (Enemy killed in action.)

And how, I ask myself, did God get dragged into this scene? Was this SEAL the hit man for his celestial commander-in-chief? If so, maybe he should have cut off bin Laden’s ear and brought it back to The National Cathedral in Washington as a hallowed artifact. Why not? Troops brought back enemy ears from Vietnam. There is even credible evidence that Yale’s Skull and Bones boys, one of whom was the grandfather of George W. Bush, stole Apache Geronimo’s skull from his grave.

Peru’s president, Alan Garcia, says the killing of bin Laden was the second miracle Pope John Paul II needed for his elevation to sainthood. Garcia says that the Pope’s beatification was on the same day Navy SEALs blew bin Laden away. And that, he says, was no coincidence.

On Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network web page, someone has posted this response to the story about bin Laden’s death. “Can anyone deny that God was at work here? I am so grateful to the Navy SEALs who got him. I am grateful to God they returned unharmed.” My dear, how about the nearly 5,000 troops who have not come home from Iraq and Afghanistan? Was God on an extended vacation?

I wonder whether there are Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world, that are thanking God for the death of the 30 Americans, including 22 SEAL’s, when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan—one of them from West Virginia.  Why not, considering, the fact that there are Christians offering similar prayers. Maybe the Our father who art in heaven is a bipartisan deity—an inclusively just Father who doesn’t want to leave anyone out when it comes to answering prayers and inflicting punishment. If so, God is an abusive father.

An Ordinary Lunch With An Ordinary Woman

I had lunch today with an ordinary woman—you know—flesh and blood like the rest of us. And because I keep looking for the extraordinary all around me, in creation and in human beings, I find it. Asceticism may be fine for some folks but I must be out and about in the traffic.

Over a simple meal—and I am always thinking about where those simple meals come from and the chain of human beings responsible for the food and drink—I find an extraordinary presence at the table. This woman, who works as a waitress in order to put a roof over her head and food on her table, is interviewing for a job with a social justice organization. She believes King’s words about the universe bending toward justice. She wants to go with the flow—swing with the swerve. She is intelligent—wise beyond her years— and carries her moral compass in a courageous way. I hope and pray she gets the job.

I think as we talk how difficult it is these days to live a moral and meaningful life in the midst of our dying empire. That is the challenge we all face, whether we realize it or not.

I have recently bumped into some writings by Alfred Kazin. One is worth mentioning. In some mystical and yet very human way it defines me. “I believe in God. I cannot live without the belief that there is a purposeful connection that I may yet understand which I can serve. I cannot be faithless to my own conviction of value.”

Walking home after lunch, I can honestly say that I had felt that connection.

 

 

 

 

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