A Squirrel’s Eye View

February 17th, 2014  |   

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.  Middlemarch — George Eliot

The lawn outside my window is covered with snow. The snow is so quiet. It makes no sound as it hits my roof or the ground outside. It’s not like the rain that beats against my walls, demanding attention by riding the wind so that it can pound my face and soak my clothes. Rain loves to be accompanied by thunder and bolts of lightning, while snow eschews noisy companions.

A few days before snow arrived, I watched two squirrels digging away at the ground. They knew what they were doing, having played their own version of hide and seek with a couple of nuts. Their lives depend on nature’s gift to them—a memory for survival.

Since Judy died five months ago, silence takes up more space in the house, more hours in my life. Rest assured, I am not afraid of silence. I’ve always cherished it, sometimes had too little of it in my life. But silence was at its best when it was sprinkled with contact and conversation, particularly during those times of the day when I most needed it.

Judy isn’t downstairs, as she used to be, with me on the third floor punching keys and connecting words on the computer. The snow outside is conducive to writing about a few of Eliot’s ordinary things that roar at me. Some of them I have buried have, like those nuts retrieved by my neighbors, the industrious squirrels. It is time to dig them up and share them with my readers, a few of whom may be a bit squirrelly themselves.

The Reassurance And Reality About Safe Places

The squirrels put nuts in a safe place so I think I’ll begin with the subject of safe places in an unsafe world.

Imagine, if you will, a child waking up in the night screaming. A parent knows immediately that a nightmare has found its way into the house. An interesting word, don’t you think, nightmare? As if a wild and dangerous horse were loose in a bedroom, about to trample a vulnerable victim in bed.

The parent rushes into the room knowing that the only remedy is to hold the child and offer a few comforting and reassuring words—that it was just a bad dream, mother is here, everything is all right, nothing is going to hurt you, you are safe.

Think about those reassurances—everything is all right, nothing is going to hurt you, you are safe. Of course a parent doesn’t take time to stop and examine what he or she has promised the child before returning to bed. If the mother or father did, they would have to acknowledge the deception that lies beneath those reassurances. The transaction between parent and child, as compassionate as it is, has not been altogether honest.

Everything is not all right, nor will it ever be all right. And there will certainly be things that hurt the child. As far as being somewhere that’s safe, there are no such places, at least not guaranteed safe from violence, pain and death. In our heart of hearts we know there are limits to our power. If we don’t know it, time will take care of that.

In the December issue of Notes, I mentioned Zach Warren, who juggled at the Rev. Esber Tweel’s memorial service. He has now returned to Afghanistan to continue his work with children in that very dangerous country. His dad, my cardiologist and friend, visited Zach a few months ago. Upon returning, he told me about a marvelous restaurant in Kabul. It was located in one of the city’s most secure districts where people, particularly Westerners, could come for a meal and feel safe,

Two weeks ago a Taliban suicide bomber and gunmen blew the restaurant apart. Twenty-one people were killed, and I thank God Zach was not there. I thank God, also, that he is there working to make the world a safer place. What greater challenge is there than to make life safer for someone else? It’s called salvation, saving someone.

The Perpetuity Of Violence And Nonviolence

I’d like to think that there are some safe places in my world. The local coffee bar where I can savor a hot beverage and feel the warm conversation with friends? How about the church where I can sit quietly alone or sing with a congregation? A lecture hall?  A movie theater?  A park, or a path in the woods, or even a familiar sidewalk?

The red doors of a church have long been thought of as a beacon in a busy world, inviting entrance for sanctuary, safe space for people searching for spiritual and physical security. Sad to say, most of those doors are locked most of the time.

The human situation, being what it is in the 21^st century, we all know there are no safe places anywhere in this world. Perhaps that is one of the underlying motives behind the passion for interstellar space travel.    

We arm ourselves, put drones in the sky, hire security guards, and install cameras and protective systems, to reassure us that the places where we live and frequent are safe. Ironically, beneath all that protective weaponry and armor, designed to create safe zones, we know that those safeguards are in place precisely because there is no such thing as a safe place, nor will there be. Is it too late to learn the lesson that our weaponry will not be able to guarantee that the world will be safe?  

The shocked survivors of violent attacks often say, “How could it happen here?” As if the place where they happen to be exists in a bulletproof bubble, a sanctuary, or a refuge immune to the violence that happens some other place, not here.  

Despite the loss of safe space, and the seemingly overwhelming proliferation of violence, as we are witnessing in Syria, and here in our own country—killings over loud music and a cell phone movie call—human beings persist in working to make the world a safe place. The human spirit is remarkable in its perseverance for a safe nonviolent world.

On Martin Luther King Day, I shunned community celebrations. Home alone, I thought about his family, and, interestingly enough, I remembered his mother, whose life and death are crowded out of the January celebrations. Lost to many people’s memory is the fact that Alberta King was shot and killed in 1974 while playing the organ in the very church, Ebenezer Baptist, where Dr. King had served as pastor. I remembered, also, that the King family did not want the shooter to be put to death.

The perpetuity of violence is a perpetual American nightmare that punctuates our nation’s history, one that robs all of us of the safety our souls search for so desperately. The only antidote, I swear to God, is an active way of life, personal and national, that gives witness and credence to another kind of perpetuity—the perpetuity of nonviolence, a dream worth embracing if there is to be any semblance of hope for a safe and peaceful future.

Playing It Safe And Taking Risks

I could well make the case that our lives are lived in tandem between playing it safe and, on the other hand, taking risks. Think about playing it safe. Being safe for fear of being sorry for having taken a particular risk, or made some kind of commitment.

There are those times where we hide behind silence, fearful of telling people, even close friends, what we are thinking or feeling. Fearing the loss of a job, or a friendship, or public censure, or even death, we censor ourselves. And so we hide what we cannot reveal for fear that we might be wounded, even beyond repair. As the old saying goes: Better to be safe than sorry. You don’t get hurt if you play it safe. Or so we tell ourselves. But, if we are honest, we have to face the fact that there is an inner hollowness inherent in a risk-free life. Refusing to take a risk leaves a person hollow—intact but incomplete. 

Playing it safe is also a way to avoid personal commitments—encounters that might well deepen and enrich our lives if only we could take the risk that a commitment involves.

I have a minister friend who shied away from addressing controversial issues for years. It was too risky. He constructed numerous reasons for avoiding speaking out on important issues. The church shouldn’t engage such issues, he said; church is about spiritual matters. My parishioners aren’t ready to engage the issue. My family might get hurt; I might even lose my job or be passed over for other positions when the time comes. I am a pastor not a prophet.

Then one day my friend’s wife reminded him that he wasn’t getting any younger, that he had only a few more years of ministry left to speak up about the injustices surrounding gays and lesbians in the parish and community, some of his friends. Isn’t it time, she said to him, to risk speaking about what I know you really believe in your heart?

And so he did. He made news, not only inside his church but also in the community at large. I only wish I could tell you that he didn’t have to pay a price for finally speaking out. Some people left the church, he had to read angry letters sent to him and printed in the newspaper. He received a death threat. Risky behavior can be costly, but I do know he took enough from his action to fill whatever hollowness had been fostered by his silence, and he traded fear for peace. The scars from the battle became combat medals.

A Gold Medal To An Old Lady In My Neighborhood

Lots of people have their eyes pealed on the Winter Olympics being held in Russia, but I am not one of them. I abstained. It is not because I have a disdain for the winter events. I love watching them, even that strange little game, curling. No, there are other reasons why the Olympics have gone dark in my house.

Building Sochi’s Olympic Park, Russia ripped up neighborhoods, and displaced people. Hundreds of dogs left behind have been shot. President Vladimir Putin talks about “traditional values” but discriminates against the GLBT population. Putin has made a universal event his own propaganda piece, masking his military support of the Syrian government’s slaughter of people. Sochi thumbs a Russian nose in the face of the bordering Caucauses, a region Russia invaded in the 1800s and has controlled and oppressed ever since.

The United States did not attend the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow because of the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. I’m not looking for a perfect nation to host the Olympics, none exist, included our own, but this one deserved a similar boycott. There is a time to draw a line, and the line should have been drawn on this one. The 2014 Winter Olympics should never have been held in Sochi.

I do wish I had an Olympic gold medal to give to someone whose name I do not even know. She walks in my neighborhood. Picture her. She is old and bent, gray-haired, and carries plastic bags from a local store. I say bent because she is straight, right up to her waist, where her body takes a sharp turn toward the ground. Her back, frozen in place, she sees only the ground at her feet, unable to look forward. No matter the weather, or the state of the world, she walks, and I watch, marveling at her grit, a performance beyond expectation. I am always looking for profiles in courage, and she is that for me. Bent, but not broken, is a worthy destination for my own soul during these cold winter days.  

The State Of The Union & The State Of One’s Soul

Going to sleep at the switch, or sleeping through the revolution, might fall into the category of avoidance, but sometimes sleeping on something serves a valuable purpose. Unresolved issues, put to bed, often times are resolved when the sun rises at the start of a new day. I have had more than two weeks to sleep on my agitation over the President’s theatrics at the end of his State of the Union address. I need to unearth that buried nut.

President Obama, at the very end of his State of the Union address, called attention to Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg who was sitting next to the First Lady. It’s customary for presidents to honor people for their achievements by singling them out.

Remsburg is an Army Ranger who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Blown out of his vehicle, he was found in a canal, underwater, with shrapnel in his brain. Blind in one eye, he is slowly recovering his ability to speak and walk again.

Looking at this young man, deployed ten times to combat, and listening to President Obama lionize him, triggering a long congressional applause, I was profoundly troubled. I thought, “Lewis, what you’re watching is a disgrace, manipulation at its worst.” When the State of the Union Address climaxes with a staged Hollywood ending—a ploy for a patriotic finale over war that should never have been fought—and while one veteran commits suicide daily, not having recovered like Sgt. Remsburg, something’s wrong.

I went to bed wondering if anyone would understand my ire, whether even my closest friends would appreciate my criticism. Could I even find words to express how I felt, without being seen as insensitive, not appreciative of this man who lost so much of himself while serving his country? Wouldn’t it be better for me, and others as well, if I’d just swallow my bile and go nighty-night in search of a pleasant dream? Bury that nut.

Even though I say, “I don’t care what anyone says, I must say what I have to say and do what I must do,” there are still those moments in my life when I do care. Even though I try to live into that line of the St. Ignatius prayer, “To give and not to count the cost,” I do have those moments when I think about the cost associated with speaking out or acting up, and am tempted to lay my head down on a pillow of silence.

As it so often happens, while you hesitate to speak, someone else does it for you. Peter Beinart, in The Atlantic online edition, spotted the manipulation and called the singling out of Remsburg “entirely inauthentic.” Describing this wounded warrior as a man who “never gives up and he does not quit,” the President triggered a two-minute standing ovation from some of the same people who sent the good sergeant to the slaughter. Beinart writes, “If Obama had been brave, he would have cited Remsburg as an example of why he, and the other political leaders, should never again send Americans to fight, die, and be maimed in wars of choice.”

I applaud Peter Beinart for writing what he wrote, however, unlike him, I would have fashioned another scenario. Sergeant Remsburg, if he had been a guest in the gallery with the First Lady, would not have been called out as a hero. Look, when the bomb went off under his vehicle, he just happened to be the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time in a war that was all wrong—a waste. It was a war that every American should regret for the lives it cost and the money and resources it wasted.

President Obama only had to say that all the troops in Afghanistan would be home by the end of this year—all the troops, no one left behind. Forget the theatrics, the agonizingly long ovation, choreographed to make everyone feel good about the man in the gallery whose life has been wasted, sacrificed on an altar dedicated to Mars, the God of war.

Wounds And Scars

I haven’t read any of Harry Crews’ articles or books for years. A wild man with a violent and troubled past, he was a truth-teller reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor, writing stories full of bizarre and grotesque Southern Gothic characters. He died in 2012, but I bumped into a slice of his writings on the web a few days ago. It jumped off the screen and made a beeline right for my heart. It read, “There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means a hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”

Five months after Judy’s death these words describe a profound truth about grief. Her death was a wound so deep, so penetrating, so soul shaking that I thought I would bleed to death emotionally. The Gospel account of the crucifixion of Jesus describes a sword being thrust into his side as he hung on the Cross. Blood and water poured from the wound. I shed no blood over Judy’s death, but there has been water—lots of tears shed from a deep well inside me. A love so marvelous, when lost, leaves a wound.

I don’t believe we human beings can dodge things that are capable of wounding us, at least not for very long. Life has a way of hunting us down. It is part of the human condition to have been wounded. But, why me? But, better still, why not me? Taking risks, over whatever is important in one’s life—whatever is not worth compromising one’s self over—or making commitments, whether they are personal or in a public setting, are the marks of a life well lived. Having no scars indicates no risks have been taken, no sacrifices made, no passions pursued, no life worth celebrating, just regrets.

Sharing my insight about wounds and scars with a friend, I told her that I viewed my scar from Judy’s death as a tattoo inscribed with the words JUDY I LOVE YOU. Her reply: That’s a tattoo that deserves the addition of two hearts entwined around it.

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