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April 23rd, 2014  |   

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The Sound Heard From Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 “Black Box”

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These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is Prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

T. S. Eliot—The Dry Salvages

 Run Silent, Run Deep For Answers

A Bluefin 21 robotic sub is searching along the Indian Ocean sea floor for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370’s black boxes that contain the plane’s flight recorders.

The plane has vanished, along with its 239 passengers. Friends and relatives are left behind, looking for answers. Debris is nowhere to be found. Aviation experts are confounded. Reporters and commentators are running out of questions.

Ping…Ping…Ping…Ping…that’s all that was left of the once sturdy Boeing 777.

Soundings tell us that parts of the Indian Ocean are as deep as 24,000 feet. The Bluefin 21 is capable of diving 15,000 feet, no deeper. That’s the Empire State Building perched on top of itself 12 times. We are talking about uncharted, remote, dark areas of the sea. In enormous fathoms of water, the mystery surrounding the plane is hard to fathom. It is, indeed, the mystery that has captured our attention.

Following pings, in search of black boxes, is a profound illustration of the human quest for answers. Somehow, if we follow the pings, we will get answers to the mysteries that surround the disappearance of Flight MH370. If we can dive deep, we will get answers. Follow the sound, and it will lead us to answers. At least, that’s the promise, the hope.

The title of a book and movie about WWII submarines seems appropriate—Run Silent, Run Deep. But keep in mind that taking soundings and running silent and deep doesn’t guarantee that answers will be found. That goes for flight data boxes, the mystery of the human condition, and even final answers about the nature of God. Most often, hints and guesses will have to suffice when it comes time to make commitments that count. 

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I Want A Greek Salad And A Pair Of Earplugs

I am out for supper at a restaurant here in Charleston. A three-piece band fills the room with sound. People at the bar have turned on their outdoor voices—loud, as if they were screaming for their team at a sporting event. In fact, many of them are yelling at the eight huge television sets attached to the wall displaying a variety of games.

The people at the next table raise their voices as if they were a thousand miles away from one another. They are loud and they interrupt one another. At another table, there is a man talking on his cell phone. I’m an unwilling participant in the conversation because every word he utters finds its way to my table.

I have to scream my order at the waitress. What I want is a Greek salad and a pair of earplugs. What I crave is some silence with my meal. Perhaps, while waiting for my salad, I might approach the musicians and request that that they play some white noise. You know, the music of gentle rainwater or forest sounds, sprinkled with piano riffs, guaranteed to wipe away stress, even promote sleep. The woman who gives me a massage has a bevy of white noise CDs.

Strange, don’t you think? If I was really hungry for silence, I could have stayed at home, fixed my own meal, and luxuriated in plenty of silence, been inundated with clear, clean silence. And yet I have come to this restaurant, labeled a sports bar, where loud fuchsia and neon purple shades of noise are on tap.

Perhaps I need to decode the noise, probe for an answer as to why all these people have come in off the street to be a part of the chaos, and what draws me here from my peaceful, quiet home.

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Searching For The Right Words

I want some words. I have to find some words, don’t I? The words I have just heard from the person on the other end of my phone necessitate some response, don’t they? I just can’t go stone cold silent, can I? If I have to fish for the right words, I don’t even know which pond to go to.  This isn’t a game of Scrabble, is it, where I have to piece together authentic dictionary words that will be valid, and adequate for the occasion?

The woman on the other end of the line is a long-standing friend. She has just been diagnosed with breast cancer and she is afraid. Cancer is the C-word, the ice-cold word that chills anyone on the other end of a doctor’s diagnosis. Cancer loves to dress up in a gown made of 100 percent genuine fear. It hates to be undressed.

I get a word-a-day sent to me through an Internet service. Where is a word for today’s caller? The barricade of silence is tempting to hide behind. The bag of clichés I’ve heard all my life, especially in religious circles, seem too formulaic, too shallow.

I have been here before with people traumatized by sickness, and death or some earthshaking crisis that has them fumbling with emotions that lie well beyond the location of a dictionary.

Where do I go to find what I need right now—words, answers to the idiopathic riddle that has penetrated my friend’s breast? What word can be uttered that will quell her fear and quench her thirst for healing and more life, yes, more life?

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Big Bursts And Unseen Currents

I have just finished reading “Olive Kitteridge,” the award-winning novel by Elizabeth Strout. It was the assigned book for a seminar I will be attending this weekend. Ms. Strout will be there to speak, field questions, and engage in discussion with us. I am looking forward to it.

Olive dominates the book; she bedevils, charms, irritates, yet fascinates people. You can’t take your eyes off her. She can bruise and berate, then turn right around and beguile and bewitch whoever is on the receiving end of her mercurial temperament. Extraordinary in her wretchedness and worth, she is, in fact, just plain ordinary. Which mean that you could meet her anywhere, like the small village in Maine where she lives, or the place where you live. In fact, I have met her many times over the years at various times and places. Her wisdom seeps through the cracks and crevices of her armor-plated skin. The enigmatic truth is that Olive is both comfortable and yet ill at ease in her skin.    

Here’s Elizabeth Strout’s favorite character, Olive. “She knows that loneliness can kill people—in different ways can actually make you die. Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as ‘big bursts’ and ‘little bursts.’ Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee’s, let’s say. Or the waitress at the Dunkin’ Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business really.”

Judy, a tiny woman, was a big burst in my life, God almighty, a huge burst in my life that kept me afloat. Now that she has died, I am cursed with a new and awful kind of silence, yet blessed in a strangely inexplicable way. The empty, silent space creeps up on me like a thief in the night, yes, the night. It comes, however, not to take something from me, but to offer me a gift. It is permissive in that it gives me empty, silent, dead time to probe those unseen currents I’ve too often rushed over with my busy schedule in hand.

Since the love of my life no longer shares this time and space with me, through words and touching and a comfortable peaceful silence that didn’t require words, I must go on without her.

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Brother Fear And Sister Courage

For the past 50 years, as an ordained minister, I have been privileged to accompany many people through “the valley of the shadow of death.” They were friends, parishioners, strangers, and family members. I have always known that those journeys were anticipatory of my own death. I discovered quickly, in the presence of so many people, that there were lessons to be learned, and passed on right there in the midst of the trauma.

And always there was the subject of fear and courage, these seemingly disparate and irreconcilable human experiences. Rather than seeing fear and courage as oppositional, I have, over the years, come to understand that they are, instead, complementary. You can’t have one without the other. There is no such thing as courage if it does not have a subject to encounter and stand up to, and that subject is fear.

Judy and I both feared her cancer. How could we not fear that ugly creature? It threatened to separate us forever. But I can tell you in all honesty that Judy was one of the most courageous people I have ever known. Courage, however, would not have had a chance to take root in her if fear hadn’t entered the scene when the doctor spoke the C-word 28 years ago. How strange is that, and yet it is true.  

Is it too much to say that facing up squarely to the fear was a liberating experience? Is that absurd? I don’t believe so. Time and time again, and I saw it in Judy, a terrible cancer or some other life-threatening disease became the occasion for rethinking and affirming what’s really important in one’s life. As nasty as cancer can be, it can engender a protest against all that is superficial and unworthy in one’s life and work.

Dr. Arthur M. Kleinman, Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School gets right to the heart of the matter. “What serious illness does is that it shakes us out of the everyday. It stops our usual pattern of coping in life, which is usually not to see what’s around us, and it forces us to see a lot of things.”

The good doctor goes on to say: “It’s not just illness—any catastrophe does this. All of a sudden we get shaken out of our normal explanatory models, and we search for some sort of understanding of where we are, what’s happening.”

Put quite simply, in my own words, trauma is the turf upon which courage grows. And here I once thought that not even a weed could grow in a field full of fear. I now know better. Brother Fear and Sister Courage are twins living in the same household. The courage to be, the courage to live, the courage to face sickness and death, the courage to persevere, the courage to love, the courage to create, the courage to tell my friend just diagnosed with breast cancer that the fear she now knows may very well be her introduction to Sister Courage.

In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, these words are attributed to Jesus: “Blessed is the one who has suffered and has found life.” Not bad, I do believe, but those 11 words are a huge challenge in a world where there is so much suffering and death, and so few explanations of the suffering and death.

And so the search continues. 

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White Noise For Dark Days

One of my favorite songs out of the 60s was Paul Simon’s “The Sound of Silence.” He began writing the song right after President Kennedy was assassinated. Simon has said that he created the song in his bathroom where he would sit in quiet darkness, with only the soothing sound of tap water running in the sink. “Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.”

Silence was a redemptive gift, a welcome relief in the midst of the darkness that hung over a war in Vietnam, the assassination of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and the Kennedy brothers, and the sound of riots in Watts and Detroit and other cities across the country, caught in the insanity of racism and violence.

I notice, bemoaningly, that television news programs have become noisier and noisier and noisier. The pitch is pulverizing; the voices are loud; and when there is more than one commentator, everyone talks at the same time, and no one can finish a sentence because someone will certainly cut him or her off.

We have had lots of dark news recently. Hundreds of people have been killed in a mud slide, an avalanche at Mount Everest, an epidemic of the dreaded Ebola virus in Africa, the Malaysian plane crash, not to mention the KKK shooting in Kansas, and a spate of high school shootings around the country. If it bleeds, it leads. That’s the guiding principal in the newsroom. 

News, reported as “Breaking News,” is enough to break our sprits, or else desensitize us to violence. Either way, the end result is disastrous. I think sometimes that we all are in need of some white noise to counter the sensory overload that warps all good judgment. We have to run silent and run deep if we intend to make any sense of our lives.

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Do No Harm After Harm’s Been Done

Three media events have been on my mind this past week. They do not involve prominent figures that continually capture media attention ad nauseam, like Rush Limbaugh and Lindsay Lohan. They are stories about ordinary people, like the folks you find in Olive Kitteridge’s hometown in Maine.

One is Mindy Corporon, whose father and son were shot dead by a crazed former KKK leader at the Jewish Community Campus in Kansas City. I was moved by her words, her Christ-like posture. “It was a horrible act of violence,” she said, “and my dad and my son were at the wrong place at the wrong time for a split second. We want something good to come out of this.”

The second news item came via pictures from Iran. The pictures were taken to record the hanging of a man who had killed a boy in a knife fight. There he stood, on a chair, with a rope around his neck, his mother watching and weeping. In Iran a family member of the victim becomes the executioner by kicking the chair out from under the man. What followed was shocking in a way that turns the word shocking on its head. The mother of the slain boy, Koukab, stepped forward, said she had been living in a nightmare since her son’s death and had been unable to forgive the convicted man, even though Islamic law calls for forgiveness. And then she slapped the killer, said “forgiven,” and removed the rope from his neck. Both mothers then found time to embrace.

The third media event that captured my attention was the Boston Marathon, run one year after the fateful explosion that killed and maimed people at the finish line. Having run twice in that event, it holds a personal interest for me. Since last year’s tragedy, the term “Boston Strong” has dominated the news. I love Boston, and the people who refuse to let a bomb destroy their persevering spirit. I do believe Boston, and the nation, will be even stronger if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the young man who was involved with his brother in committing this awful crime, is spared the death penalty. Perhaps the Iranian mother’s action could serve as a model for us, still caught in the barbaric clutch of capital punishment.

The medical profession is guided by an old principle—“First, do no harm.” Dr. Kleinman claims those words with a powerful observation. “Imagine if after September 11, we had said: ‘The first principle we are going to have is first do no harm. We are going to act in some ways, but we are not going to do a greater harm, a greater injury.”

Is violence the aphrodisiac that drives our lust for more of it?

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