Looking At The Wounds

June 24th, 2015  |   

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.  

Requiem for a Nun, by William Faulkner

The scar said—that which is written in the flesh is irrefutable.

My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir, by Brian Turner

**********

A Phone Call While Brushing My Teeth

My mouth is full of toothbrush. It’s 10:15 and my bed is inviting me to pay it a visit. No RSPV, just come as you are, and so I will; I’ll come as I am, tired.   

I hear the phone ringing in my bedroom. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I spit into the sink and rush to get the call. I am programmed; I have 51 years of stimulus and response training. I am no better than Gus, my neighbor’s dog, who comes for his bone.

The person on the other end of the phone is noticeably upset. I hear the predictable question, “Is it too late to call; did I wake you up?” I don’t tell her that my teeth are clean, but I do let her know that my bed has not yet claimed me.

What’s now being called a massacre, and a terrorist attack inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, is the reason for the call. My caller needs an ear into which she can pour out her grief. So, I listen.

For anyone in the midst of grief, over whatever circumstances, something more than an ear is required. When we are in that dark valley of the shadow of death, when the fear of evil overtakes us, so aptly described in the 23rd Psalm, after our lament, we long to hear a word of comfort, a word of hope.

As a priest, I am required by a Biblical charge to “comfort them which are in any trouble.” I can only do that in a genuine way if I shun simplistic, even Pollyannaish, answers that sound like an all-too-easy “everything will be alright.”

Before hanging up the phone, after having listened to my friend as carefully as possible, I simply say, “I don’t know what’s to come of this terrible tragedy.” Eager to climb into bed, I can only say, “Both of us will have to keep our eyes on the wounded, suffering people in Charleston for signs of hope.”

That’s my prayer, in my caller’s presence, before I lay me down to sleep.

The Face Of Evil

After a restless night in bed, I climb out of wrinkled sheets to the news that the search is on for the “monster” who has slaughtered people. When a hideous killing takes place, like this one, we want to know at least two things. Who was killed, and who did the killing? The curiosity that surrounds the killer is beguiling. We want to see the killer’s face so that we can focus our rage.

By the end of the day, that face will be in custody, after a woman in Selby, North Carolina, driving to work, spots him and calls for help, while she tails his car. Later, she will tell reporters that God meant for that to happen, and for her to receive from God the courage to overcome her fear.

The Wednesday night Bible study group at Emanuel AME Church welcomed a stranger. Why not? The Bible says “extend hospitality to strangers.” This stranger stayed in the study circle for an hour before killing them. Now we will see what he looks like.

On Friday morning, I fetched my paper from the front porch. The headline was a quote from Charleston, South Carolina mayor, Joseph P. Rile: “PURE, PURE CONCENTRATED EVIL.” Beneath those words was a picture of Dylann Storm Roof.

Without the picture, one could only imagine a monster, the ugliest of all human beings, with nothing less than a harsh, demonic demeanor. Instead, what I got at my breakfast table was as bland as my morning bowl of oatmeal. This 21-year-old face was pure white bread. The boy next-door. The kid who packs groceries at the local grocery store. This was the face that would face murder charges.

My breakfast, long digested, I am reminded of Adolph Eichmann, Hitler’s administrator of the concentration camps that resulted in the death of millions of Jews. When captured in Argentina, and returned to Israel for trial, his face turned out to be just another face-in-the-crowd, a stereotypical bureaucrat, a Mr. Peepers from the popular 1950s sitcom. 

Hannah Arendt the philosopher and political theorist, in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, coined the phrase, “the banality of evil” to describe this evil man—a monster dressed like the man on the elevator on his way to his office. Black suit, white shirt, dull tie, and studiously dark glasses.   

Looking at the picture of Dylann Roof challenges me to examine my own preconceived notions of what evil looks like. It is said that beauty is skin deep. It might equally as well be said that evil often lurks beneath the skin. It finds a trough to feed from in the human heart, where passion goes searching for a reason to exist, a purpose to live or die for. 

The pictures of Dylann Storm Roof taken from his Facebook page are disturbing, to say the least. The one of him pointing his pistol directly at the camera is chilling. While in the Marine Corp, I carried a 45 pistol, a model similar to the 45-caliber Glock pistol he holds. They aren’t easy weapons to fire because any target not within close range is very difficult to hit. If you are going to kill someone, you must be close to his or her face, close enough, face-to-face, to also see the massive wound inflicted by the weapon you have fired.

Looking Into The Wound

We are born into a land of grief that must eventually be reckoned with, even if not always acknowledged. If hope is to be found, it must be right there in the midst of that grief. It has to do with making peace with loss, all kinds of loss. Fifty years as a priest among people, inside and outside the church, inside and outside prison, I have a strong conviction that the search for hope inevitably leads us back to the very wounds that caused the grief. We must return to the scene of the “crime” to solve it.

I am not only speaking of personal grief, the kind I have wrestled with over the past 19 months, since Judy’s and my brother’s death. I am including the kind of mourning we human beings feel and express over the violence and death among people at a distance from us. We see it when people die we don’t even know personally, and when war and natural disasters sweep people away like a grim reaper swinging a sickle over wheat, some of it too young to be harvested.

Since those nine people have been cut down in that Charleston church, we have seen the predictable response to grief. People, most of them strangers to one another, from all walks of life, have come to the site where the wounds were inflicted, there to deposit candles, messages, flowers, prayers, and tears. We see it all the time when the grim reaper strikes, particularly in a senselessly violent fashion.

What wasn’t predictable was the response of the families of those who were cut down so violently. When Dylann Roof was ushered into the room at the jail where the judge set the bail, he heard the voices of some of the relatives of the people he had cut down with gunfire. The anguished pain over their loss was spoken, but Roof also heard something else. They forgave him. When I heard their words, offering him mercy and forgiveness rather than hatred, I knew it could only come from one place—their wounds. 

Rallying Around The Flag

Now we will talk about guns again, and because Roof found his mission in life beneath a Confederate flag, we will once again talk about that flag. Having lived in places where the Confederate flag was right under my nose, I have wished many times that it would go away, be relegated to a museum, not flying outside of South Carolina’s capitol or plastered on t-shirts and belt buckles and license plates.

This young killer’s goal, according to one of his friends, was to “start a civil war.” William Faulkner, with roots in Mississippi where the Confederate flag is a part of the state flag, is dead-on when he wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  

An old saying comes to mind, one I heard as a boy growing up in Baltimore, a very southern city, and later when I attended Washington & Lee University. “Save your Confederate dollars, boys. The South shall rise again.”  In other words, the Civil War, that left 620,000 people dead, didn’t end when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox. As long as the flag flies, we can be sure that peace has not been achieved.

Right now, and most likely for some time to come, we will rally around the flag—the Confederate flag of course. Support from South Carolina political figures, like Governor Nikki Haley, Senator Lindsey Graham, and a growing number of state legislators, just might cause the flag to be lowered and stored in a museum, along with the rusted bullets, uniforms, weaponry, and pictures from the Civil War era.

I feel sure that removing that flag from the capitol grounds will not diminish interest in it. As I write, retailers like Sears, Walmart and Amazon have banned the sale of Confederate merchandise, yet the sale of Confederate flags on-line has already mushroomed. If it is taken down in South Carolina, you can be sure that devotees of the flag will see it as just another Civil War lost battle that will mobilize them to fight even more vigorously. For people who resent government telling them what to do, they will cling tightly to their Confederate symbols on a flag, clothing, signs, bumper stickers, and tattoos. 

My Time In The Charleston Detention Center

Dylann Roof is now in the Detention Center in North Charleston, South Carolina, awaiting trial. Six years ago, I was in that very same facility. Watching him appear before the judge by video-feed at his bond hearing brought back memories of my time inside that jail, six years ago, when I visited my son Stephen, using the same video system.   

Only a few hours before visiting Stephen, I had stood by his side before a judge in a downtown Charleston courtroom. For the first time in his married life, Stephen had been unable to support his family because he was suddenly unemployed. Enmeshed in the bureaucratic legal maze of South Carolina paperwork, while struggling to find work, he had missed a hearing that would have examined and readjusted his support payments. We stood before the judge hopeful that he would give Stephen time to continue his pursuit of a job. I was there to let the court know that Judy and I would help with the children until he could once again make payments. The judge refused our plea. He abruptly sentenced Stephen to one year in the Detention Center.  

Sentenced in that courtroom, Stephen was only one of many who were marched off from the courtroom to jail that day. Out of approximately 50 people going before the judge, almost all of them were black. Found guilty of failing to pay child support, they were sent to a place out of reach of any job possibility.

In the parking lot, I noticed that a massive addition to the jail was under construction. Dylann Roof is now confined in that expanded facility. In the very next cell is Michael Slager, the white police officer who, like Roof, is awaiting trial for having stopped a black man, Walter Scott, for a broken taillight, and then shooting him in the back as he ran away. His family and friends surmised that Scott had fled because he feared being sentenced to jail for not having been able to pay child support.

Dylann Roof claimed allegiance to the former apartheid government of South Africa. Now he, along with another white man, policeman Michael Slager, will know firsthand about a criminal justice system that has all the markings of apartheid. It is a system that perpetuates itself at the expense of poor people, and particularly people who are not white. My work as a priest in that system, and watching my son go off to jail, confirms that fact. You want to see racism, turn your eyes from flags and look at our nation’s jails and prisons. Our country has pledged allegiance to racism behind bars.

A Fitting Tribute To Those Who Were Slain

Here’s what I hope for; it goes beyond the battle over a Confederate flag on the South Carolina capitol grounds. It has to do with the death penalty in South Carolina, and in our nation as well.

Governor Nikki Haley has sent a strong message that South Carolina will seek the death penalty for Dylann Roof. That will be complicated. The cost for a high profile trial is astronomical. South Carolina is, also, having trouble getting the drugs for lethal injection for the 44 people already on death row. On top of that, support for the death penalty has eroded. Nevertheless, Governor Haley may get her way. Putting a white man to death for killing a black man is rare. Killing Roof might just be an attempt to show the world that racism doesn’t exist in the South Carolina criminal justice system. She may, instead, look to the U.S Justice Department to do the dirty work, with the federal Hate Crime law. 

Given the fact that family members of the murdered victims have forgiven Roof, and the church has a long history of witnessing to nonviolence, it is time not only to take down the flag, but also to abolish the death penalty. No more killing for killing. That would be a marvelous way to pay tribute to State Senator Clementa Pinckney, who, right before he was gunned down, was at work with The Death Penalty Resource and Defense Center on legislative matters that pertain to the death penalty.

As for Governor Haley, she changed her mind on the issue of removing the Confederate flag; she could do the same when it comes to abolishing the death penalty, a penalty that has always been racist.

Calling Out Donald Trump

It took two big stories to bump the bumptious Donald Trump off the media center stage. Two dangerous criminals on the loose after a prison break, and the Charleston massacre, sent him off the airwaves and out of print. But, like humid weather, he is already back. The media, and much of the public, can’t take their eyes off “The Donald.”

While racism gets the lion’s share of conversation, his recent addition to the Republican list of presidential candidates gets a pass when it comes to the subject of racism. Media talking heads are bereft of courage when it comes to calling Trump out over his racist comments. They give him a free pass. Sure, he has entertainment value, and money.

Throwing his hat into the presidential arena, Donald Trump, like a dirty mop, spread his hatred all over the immigration situation, one that begs for a reasonable and humane solution. He called Latinos, who have crossed the border without proper papers, looking for jobs, murderers, drug addicts, and rapists, people who are destroying our American Dream.

Take note, those are the same racist terms used in the past to define black people.  Dylann Roof, prior to killing the people in Emanuel AME Church, said the very same thing. He was there to kill black people because they are “raping our women” and “taking over our country.”

The musical, “South Pacific,” says what needs to be said. You’ve got to be taught to hate and to fear. You’ve got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear. You’ve got to be carefully taught. Donald Trump’s words are from an old racist lesson plan that needs to be recognized and called out.

Casting Seeds

The Sunday following the shooting, I am asked to lead a discussion in a local United Methodist church. I, like my late-night caller, need an opportunity to talk with people about the tragedy in South Carolina. The Sunday before, I had led folks there in a conversation about hope in the midst of grief. Someone near-and-dear to that church is dying from cancer. Once again, grief and hope would be on the docket.

I look to the Bible for a way to approach the violence in South Carolina. What better place than the familiar passage about seeds from the Gospel of Mark. It’s the one that people were studying just before they were gunned down. Succinctly put, as the story goes, seeds are scattered everywhere. Some grow to fruition and some don’t. The question that begs for an answer is whether the seeds of love and justice that grew in Jesus can grow in us, personally and as a nation. In other words, can they take root in our wounds?

I remain convinced, after the class has dispersed, that the wounds are where the healing will take place.

Entry Filed under: A Fig Just Dropped Archives

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