Weeping Over Children In The Season To Be Jolly

December 17th, 2012  |   

A voice was heard in Ramah,

sobbing and loud lamenting:

it was Rachel weeping for her children,

refusing to be comforted

because they were no more.

Jeremiah 31:15

I have written a few letters with my old-fashioned fountain pen, an Esterbrook, whose innards suckle from a small bottle of ink. The stamps I apply to the envelopes depict the Madonna and Child, painted by Raphael, the fifteenth century Italian painter.

There is a bit of subversive humor lurking in the choice of Raphael as my letter’s companion. A darling of the Vatican, richly inventive, a master of naked design, it is said that his death was caused by a night of feverish sex with one of his many mistresses.

Going into the kitchen, I fix myself some lunch and flick on the television to check on the news. CNN is reporting on another slaughter of children, this time at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

This horrible tragedy, beyond human understanding, dominates, and will continue to dominate the news, that is, until it gets relegated to a very long list of school killings, and we move on to the next “breaking new” school attack.

In order to avoid the historically egocentric trap of thinking that American school killings are unique to our day-and-age, we would do well to remember that an enormous number of school killings can be traced all the way back to the Enoch Brown massacre in 1764 in Pennsylvania when students were shot and scalped.   

Outside intruders, as well as students, have carried weapons into schools all over our nation intent on killing targeted individuals, and, as in Newtown, random targets. When I worked in Raleigh, North Carolina, I had occasion to visit a student in prison who had shot and killed another student. Almost 20 years later, he is still incarcerated there.

After mailing my letters, I take a walk through our downtown mall. It doesn’t seem like a dangerous place, crowded and hurried, but not dangerous. But a thought comes to mind about the camouflaged gunman who, only three days before the shootings in Newtown, entered a mall in Portland, Oregon, and fired off rounds that randomly killed people.

Canned holiday music permeates the entire mall. “Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la la la la la! ‘Tis the season to be jolly, Fa la la la la la la la la!”

Given the contrast between the weeping over what has taken place in Connecticut and the jolly fa la la la la la la la la of the season, I am compelled to engage the Christmas narrative that connects my faith to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, well before I arrived here from my own mother’s womb. For, you see, I want to make some sense of this bloodshed.

A Search For The Face Of Jesus

Like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground, he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.        Isaiah 53:2

In an ancient yet inauthentic writing (the Publius Lentulus letter), Jesus is described as having wavy, curled, hazel nut colored hair. His brow is smooth and cheerful, his face without spot or wrinkle. He is described as “the most beautiful among the children of men.” Compare that to Isaiah’s prophetic depiction of what the face of God would look like among us. Quite a difference, don’t you think?

I grew up visualizing that bearded, spotless, unwrinkled, blue-eyed white Jesus. Painted by Warner Sallman, he hung on my Sunday school wall in Baltimore. By the 1990s, that pastel iconic image of Jesus had been printed worldwide more than 500 million times. In troubled times during the two world wars and The Cold War, it gave a white world an image to hold onto, comfort and security in a world full of dark forces. 

In the Lewis household, our children grew up with very different images of Jesus. From my library, they encountered a book full of portraits of Jesus from countries all over the world—faces from every racial, ethnic and cultural background. Red and yellow, black and white, these faces were precious in God’s sight, and I believe were helpful in their expanding understanding that all human beings are precious in God’s sight. 

In a fascinating new book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey explore the history of the various depictions of Jesus. They revisit the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four young girls were killed. The dynamite destroyed only the face of Jesus in the stained-glass window of that church—a white face. “In the blink of an eye, the prince of peace was made a casualty of race war.”  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the martyred Christian pastor sentenced to death in a German concentration camp for opposing Hitler, made contact with black people and the African American churches while studying in New York in the 1930s. Through those black connections, he discovered a new face for Jesus.

Jesus, he wrote, “goes incognito, as a beggar among beggars, as an outcast among outcasts, as despairing among the despairing, as dying among the dying.” He went on to write; “An expulsion of the Jews from the west must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ, for Jesus Christ was a Jew.” Alive today, he might address Palestinians as outcasts due to their expulsion from homes they once inhabited.

I would add to that my understanding that Jesus may be found in refugee camps and war torn parts of the world where people are fleeing from war and oppression. In my own life, I have sought him in men and women in prison, homeless and hungry people, in folks who suffer discrimination, isolated and disturbed human beings, immigrants in migrant fields and poultry plants, and even, when I have my eyes washed with God’s grace, my enemies and the declared enemies of my country.

A crèche scene, with a marbled baby Jesus as the focal point of my gaze, serves its purpose well if it inspires me to lift my head from whatever despondency or inertia that may have entrapped me, and allows me to recognize the Jesus in the flesh and blood encounters I seek and sometimes avoid.  

Time To Break Silence On Behalf Of Nonviolence

Why lies he in such mean estate/Where ox and ass are feeding?/ Good Christians, fear for sinners here/ The Silent Word is pleading.

             From The Christmas Carol: “What Child is This?”

As news unfolds about the tragedy in Newtown, my eye catches a line from the New York Times about the shooter’s mother and the weapons he used: “Investigators have linked Ms. Lanza to five weapons: two powerful handguns, two traditional hunting rifles and a semiautomatic rifle that is similar to weapons used by troops in Afghanistan.”

A semiautomatic rifle that is similar to weapons used by troops in Afghanistan.

As the nation passes through this violent dark night of its soul, I think of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and words from his sermon in 1967 at Riverside Church in New York just one year before an assassin ended his life with a bullet. Perhaps those words have relevance today, when it comes to our nation’s addiction to guns, its propensity toward violence, and the endless wars we cannot seem to escape.

The sermon, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” was delivered while directing his energy toward opposing the Vietnam War. Criticized, even by his own supporters, for extending his focus from civil rights to the war in Southeast Asia, he, nevertheless, made the linkage between the ghetto violence at home and the violence overseas.

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

Dr. King made the connection between weaponry, violence and war, here at home and around the world. We must do the same, if we are truly committed to peace and security. Reducing our military footprint as the supplier of troops and military weapons to countries all over the world, and, at the same time, addressing the outrageous availability of powerful weapons here at home is a challenge we must, by all means, embrace.

Addressing America’s Weapons Abroad And At Home

One of our nation’s mythic heroes is Johnny Appleseed. He spread apple seeds randomly all over Pennsylvania, Ohio Indiana, Illinois, and parts of what is now West Virginia. Sad to say but our nation now spreads weapons all over the world with reckless abandon. We are Johnny Weaponseed, spreading weapons worldwide.  

Year after year, budget after budget, we send exorbitant amounts of military aid around the world in order to protect our “national security,” when in effect it is only buying us more enemies and creating more war. Israel, for example, receives $8.5 million a day, $115 billion since WW II. On top of that, additional monies have undergirded land acquisition there that has subsidized the building of settlements, thus increasing the violence with Palestinians. To hedge our bets, we wind up becoming Saudi Arabia’s leading arm supplier. And still there is no peace in the Holy Land.

Like gigantic boomerangs, exported weapons get turned back on us, like what happened in Vietnam. We spread weapons years ago in Afghanistan, and most recently in Iraq and Libya, that were then aimed at our troops and other Americans. My God, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin once upon a time were armed allies. On the home front, it is common knowledge that weapons carried by people trying to protect themselves are very often used against them during a struggle.  

Our nation has more than 1,000 military bases scattered across the world, many of them in place since WW II. The Pentagon says we spend $22.1 billion a year in support of those bases. In fact, when the hidden costs surface, the annual total is about $170 billion. The answer begging for political support seems obvious. Reduce the expenditure by closing bases and bringing troops home. And that includes Iraq and Afghanistan where we have spent $1.38 trillion, with more projected as the cry, “stay to finish the job” is heard, even though most Americans question whether having gone to war there was worth the price in human lives and money spent.

Congress talks about cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and social programs vital to the most vulnerable Americans, but, as Forbes magazine points out, “You won’t hear a word about the huge eavesdropping satellites the military has been launching, the biggest satellites ever built. You won’t hear about the intelligence missions that U.S. submarines are silently conducting in the Eastern Mediterranean and Yellow Sea.  You won’t hear about the sprawling complex near Baltimore that monitors billions of emails every day.”

Whatever budget Congress and the President finally agrees upon, after the so-called “fiscal cliff” is avoided or arrives, the bloated Pentagon budget, full of hidden costs, will still have to be scrutinized. Clinging to the Cold War myth that more money pumped into the Pentagon budget will buy us peace, either at home or around the world, is a fantasy, a costly one at that.

In so far as guns at home are concerned, I want to be clear about this connection between Adam Lanza, the young man who wielded the weapons in Newtown and our war in Afghanistan. There is no doubt in my mind that this young man was seriously disturbed in some way that we will more clearly understand as time passes. But what is clearly observable is that he had no business being able to access those weapons at home, particularly given whatever demons his isolated personality housed. And even though legally obtained by his mother, what craziness are we tolerating, generated by the gun industry and lobbyist, that allows such weapons to be available in the marketplace?

In the spirit of Dr. King, as we approach his national holiday, I am hopeful that this tragedy offers a redemptive moment for people to break their silence and emerge as a political force more powerful than the gun lobby, in order to enact gun control legislation. And to put in place a national school curriculum that teaches nonviolence to our children.

The death of the twenty children in Newtown is a horrible tragedy. If those children had not been gunned down in school, spared in order to die at a later date in a senseless and unnecessarily war fought overseas, that would have been tragic as well.

In this Christmas season, when the words “peace on earth, good will to men” are put to music, a question hovers over us like the star that hovered over Bethlehem. Put quite simply it is this: Will we work for everlasting peace or continue on the path toward endless war?

Holy Innocents And Myrrh

After they (the Wise Men) had left, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “get up, take the child and his mother with you, and escape into Egypt, and stay there until I tell you, because Herod intends to search for the child and do away with Him.   Matthew 2:13

Christmas operates on a full tank of pleasurably romantic imagery—chestnuts roasting on an open fire; riding on a one horse open sleigh; maids a milking; figgy pudding; a star in the east; cattle lowing as the baby Jesus sleeps away in the manger. But Holy Innocents Day, which comes four days after Christmas is full of sober images.

Holy Innocents Day, because it arrives after the Christmas Day celebration, conjures up images of a discarded Christmas tree in the alley, a trash can full of holiday wrappings, and folks going back to the grind of day-to-day work. By Christian tradition it is a day when the church calls to mind the Roman Empire’s bureaucratic agent, King Herod, who is willing, on behalf of Caesar, to slaughter all the children in Bethlehem in order to kill this newborn baby Jesus. But why, what threat is he to Caesar?

Perhaps the answer lies in the gift of myrrh that the Wise Men have left for Jesus. Myrrh, an aromatic resin bled from a small desert tree and used as medicine, is a healing substance for all kinds of maladies. Most interestingly, it is balm capable of healing wounds. But myrrh is also used to embalm and anoint the dead. And because of this fact, we are given the hint that the meaning and purpose of His mysterious birth in Bethlehem will be linked to his even more mysterious death in Jerusalem. And if that weren’t enough, we are led to believe that our own death will be linked to His death, if we choose to follow in his footsteps.

That death, this side of the grave, requires a renouncement of violence as a way of life; a commitment to an ethic of resistance against any form of power that oppresses and denies human freedom; and a compassionate heart dedicated to loving others even beyond one’s own capabilities, through the grace of God

The Herod narrative, like the entire Christmas story, is a profound testimony to truth that defies a reasonable, philosophical explanation. It is meant for folks who seek to live their lives centered around, and in dialogue with, a life changing God who won’t be content to dwell in the distant heaven above, or locked inside a doctrine or institution, but chooses instead to take up residence in the flesh and blood of human beings near and far.

That said, I send holiday greetings to my readers, hoping and praying that Newtown will find the strength to become a new town, despite the slaughter of their children. 

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