June 25th, 2009 |
Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all our years away; they fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.
Isaac Watts—From Hymn # 680 in The Episcopal Church 1983 Hymnal
As a kid, I used to spend an occasional summer night collecting lightning bugs in a glass jar.
Okay, I say potato and you say patahto, I say tomato and you say tomahto, I say lightning bugs and you say fireflies. So let’s not quibble and call the whole thing off—the whole thing being my writing and you reading, and maybe even responding.
Needless to say, I no longer collect lightning bugs. Those days are long gone. But I do love sitting on my front porch, on a warm summer night, while the lightning bugs entertain me, and the evening disappears into bedtime.
These non-energy-consuming critters wink at me and then dissolve into the darkness. They also transport me back to past memories of those summer days where, as the song says, the living was easy.
These winking, disappearing lightning bugs also fly into my mind as a powerful metaphor connected with time and memory.
I find that my very own thoughts, feelings and insights are like those tiny lightning bugs. They fly through me, light up, and, unless I collect them when they appear, they disappear into some dark out-of-reach space.
I’ll bet you know what I am talking about.
This sort of thing happens with simple everyday things, like going to the grocery store. I get the idea in the morning that I should add milk to the grocery list, but when I come home from the Kroger, there’s no milk in the bag. And why is there no milk in the bag? You’ve got it. I didn’t write it down on the list when the idea popped into my head.
Then there are the more complex matters. I am out walking, or in the middle of a task, and I get an idea, or experience a feeling, and I say to myself that I should write it down because it’s insightful; it’s worthy of more intense scrutiny and speculation. But there is no time to capture it, no pad or pencil available to collect it. I vow to write it down later when I have a pen in hand and the time to scratch it out on a notepad. But when the time for scrutiny and speculation arrives, I can’t recall what it was that I wanted to recall.
Isaac Watts had it right when he wrote those penetratingly honest words sung frequently at a church burial service: Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all our years away; they fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.
To paraphrase Brother Isaac: Time, like a lightning bug in flight, bears all our thoughts, feelings and insights away; they fly forgotten, as a dream, unless I get them in a jar.
And so, as summer begins, I offer to you, my readers, a jar of captured lightning bugs.
Time In A Bottle
I remember taking our daughter Elizabeth to New York City when she was a child. We visited Rockefeller Center, took a tour and looked through a glass partition into the studio of the famous disc jockey “Wolfman Jack.” The music was piped out to us. I can remember the song, as if it were only yesterday. It was Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.”
If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every day
Till eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you
On June 14, Judy and I celebrated our fifty-first wedding anniversary. That’s 18,615 days—time spent together as husband and wife (give-or-take a few leap year days).
Where did those days go? No computer hard drive could capture all the memories from those years. So many of those memories are lost to me. They have, like those crafty lightning bugs, gone dim and slipped beyond my grasp. They have disappeared into that well some call eternity.
Nevertheless, some memories are still within my grasp. They light up inside my jar.
Time Put Together Like A Jigsaw Puzzle
Those 18,615 days of marriage were not days spent together, because there were periods of separation.
All human relationships are pockmarked with separations. Just as there is distance on the clock between minutes and hours, so too are people separated from one another over time.
As I think about it, all the separations we experience in our lifetime are in some strange way preparing us for death—our final separation from life. One must learn well from separations, in order to die with any real dignity.
On Sunday, Judy and I will drive over the mountains and into Lexington, Virginia—that part of the world where we first met on a blind date. (Believe it or not, Judy remembers that date. I can find it on a card she once gave me with her picture glued upon it. The date was September 25, 1954.) There, we will be taking a course on The Vietnam War offered by the Washington & Lee Alumni College.
In January of 1960, I sailed out of the San Diego harbor on a ship carrying a reinforced marine infantry battalion. I left Judy behind with our seven day old son. It was the saddest day of my life. Within a couple of hours, in a high sea, I remember vomiting over the side of the ship. I was more than seasick; I was already homesick.
This course on the Vietnam War will help me reassemble the jigsaw puzzle pieces of that tour of duty spent during the time when our country began waging war in Southeast Asia, along with the subsequent pieces of my life later spent as a counselor to veterans, an antiwar activist, and a Christian attempting to follow the Prince of Peace.
Sacrifice Zones
I just participated in a confrontational demonstration in the Coal River Valley here in West Virginia. It involved civil disobedience (I didn’t get arrested this time.) Caught up in it, I remembered a term I had encountered a number of years ago—“sacrifice zones.”
Back in the 1980s and 90s, when I worked in the Diocese of North Carolina as the director of Christian Social Ministries, I got involved with folks who lived in the rural area of Warren County, just north of Raleigh.
Warren County was economically poor with a large black population. In 1982 the Environmental Protection Agency gave permission for a landfill to be located there. It was filled with 60,000 tons of contaminated soil, the result of the illegal spraying of oil-containing PCBs on North Carolina roads.
When that landfill was planned, it triggered massive demonstrations involving civil disobedience, primarily by black religious and civil rights leaders who saw this landfill, for what it was—a raw and blatant example of environmental racism.
The dumping of these dangerous PCBs occurred because the Environmental Protection Agency allows for what they call “sacrifice zones.” That means certain areas of our nation, most always poor areas, can be designated as dumping for dangerous substances. It also means that certain areas of development, deemed important to the nation, can be designated as sacrifice zones.
I got involved with citizens in Warren County in the early 1990s. They were rightly concerned that the landfill was poorly constructed, leaking, and a danger to the people living there. Their effort led to an eventual expenditure by the state of over $17 million to repair and detoxify the area.
I think West Virginia could well be called one of the nation’s largest sacrificial zones, all because we are a poor state that just happens to sit on coal.
West Virginia—The Nation’s Gigantic Sacrifice Zone
The New York Times recently described mountaintop removal as “Appalachia’s Agony.”
For those of you who do not know what mountaintop removal is, it’s just plain blowing up a mountain to get to the coal below. No burrowing a hole for deep mining, like in the old days, just wanton destruction of the entire mountain. And, I should add, covering streams—polluting the water supply—filling the air with coal dust—making residents vulnerable to dangerously overloaded coal trucks—subjecting people to blasting noise—and, in short, making life miserable for people living near the site by destroying the place they call home and the environment they hold dear.
Massey Energy, like other coal companies, has the power to make West Virginia a sacrifice zone. They can buy politicians and judges with their luxurious lobbying. That power was the target of the Coal River Valley demonstration.
There is a school right next to the Massey operation in the Coal River Valley. Above the school is a slurry pond containing millions of gallons of sludge—waste material from the removal of the coal. A sudden break in that pond would flood everyone in that valley.
That thought brings to mind February 26, 1972, when a slurry pond collapsed in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, and killed 125 people and left 4,000 people homeless.
I was privileged to be asked by the mountaintop removal coalition to open and close the demonstration with remarks and prayer. Dr. James Hansen, the nation’s vociferous global warming prophet, was there. He, and all the speakers, had to yell over the roar of Massey employees who screamed in an attempt to drown us out.
I was encouraged by the folks gathered to stop mountaintop removal. But I was saddened by the fact that I could not, as I had once done, stand with the workers and their families who are fearful of losing their jobs in an economy addicted to carbon energy, and a nation with little to offer them when coal finally goes the way of the dinosaurs.
You see, sacrifice was at the heart of both my standing with workers back in 1989, and my troubled dilemma of now having to be on the other side of their wrath.
Bob Kinkaid, writing in the Daily Yonder, calls for West Virginia to plan for a future “sacred zone” rather than a sacrifice zone; a noble economic and moral goal.
Companies, With A Knife To Our Throat, Divide Us
In 1989, I joined a delegation of religious leaders who sat down in front of a coal mine in Southwest Virginia and were arrested. The miners were seeking a decent and fair contract from the Pittston Coal Company, the same company that owned the mine and slurry dam at Buffalo Creek.
Over 2,000 miners, after months of nonviolent protest (a new organizing posture for coal miners) were able to keep their jobs with a decent contract. It felt good to have a Bible study with some of them the night before the arrest. One miner put his house up for my bond.
On the other hand, the protestors in the Coal River Valley had angry faces and refused to shake my hand when I sought conversation. I understand that. They fear they’ll lose their jobs. What they deny is the fact that mountaintop removal, relying on monstrous machines and a reduced labor force, has been responsible for the loss of as many as 100,000 jobs and only employs about 1% of the entire West Virginia workforce.
On top of that, the coal industry, big business and their organizational allies are pouring money into lobbying efforts to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act. This act would give workers easier access to a union election, shield workers from union-busting activities, and protect employees from being fired for their efforts to organize a workplace.
The strong environmental presence of Dr. Hansen, green movement folks, and many young people who may be more environmentally aware than they are labor-sensitive, brings to the forefront of the mountaintop removal protest the issue of global warming.
Coal, once seen only as a dangerous industry for folks in coal communities, is now being seen as a global threat to an overheated world–an apocalyptic situation for the next generation. And, with no real plan yet in place for all the green jobs that promise to replace the dirty coal jobs, it will be a very painful transition between now and the time when a nation has an economic plan in place to protect both the environment and the families who are now dependent upon King Coal for their livelihood.
June 23—A Memorable Date
The demonstration here was on June twenty-third. It marked a number of anniversaries.
On June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. marched in Detroit and gave practically the same “I have a Dream” speech he would give two months later in Washington.
On June 23, 1966, black students were arrested in Granada, Mississippi, for trying to integrate the white section of a movie theater. They were charged with “inciting a riot.”
On June 23, 1972, Life magazine published a photo of children running from a U.S. napalm attack in Vietnam, one child naked and screaming.
In my remarks to the Coal River Valley folks, I called attention to that fact and pointed out that Dr. King’s dream was for children of all colors—for their health and safety. The students in Mississippi were willing to be arrested for their dream—a just society. And the children fleeing napalm should remind us that war, military or economic, based in greed and exploitation, is harmful to children and all living creatures.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus asks the question: “Which of you, if your son or daughter were to ask for bread, would give that child a stone? Or if that child would ask for a fish, would receive a snake?” And so I ask: When our children ask for an education and health care, would we give them a slurry dam, a hazardous environment with water unfit to drink, wash in or be baptized with?
And if we believe, as Matthew writes, that faith in God can move mountains, is it possible to have a faith that doesn’t move mountains—a faith that only destroys the mountain of greed that proves hazardous to our health and welfare?
The Turmoil In Iran
I am not ready yet to comment on perhaps the most important story in the news. And I am not talking about South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s affair with a woman in Argentina. The big story is in Iran. I think President Obama is right in his careful approach to the disturbance there, and I want to emulate it. No one can condone a violent response to protest, and I certainly don’t. But a measured response on our part is wise, considering our history in Iran. Our part in the overthrow of a freely elected Iranian prime minister in 1953, and our support of the Shah and his SAVAK security force, is history we must remember before considering any precipitous action.
With the Vietnam War much on my mind, I wonder how our government would have reacted if Iran, or any other nation, had passed resolutions when students were shot down at Kent State and beaten by police in Washington. Or our contested election in 2004. I think I know what our reaction would be. What happened here, and now in Iraq, will be settled at the grassroots level. I trust the people on the ground. They need no help from our CIA or a blast from our Congress.
June 25th, 2009
June 4th, 2009 |
You will find no camouflage clothing in my wardrobe.
There are no hunting rifles or knives in my closet.
You may see me walking in the woods, but I’ll not be tracking down a covey of quail for supper.
There are no antlered deer heads mounted on my office wall.
I do not have a photo album with a picture of me sitting next to a dead bear I’ve hunted down in the West Virginia woods.
I have no plans for an African safari in Botswana to kill a lion or an elephant.
That said, I’ll add that I am not in the business of demonizing hunters. In fact, I prize their passion and, at some level, understand and even appreciate why they do what they do, beyond tracking meat to eat.
Hunting is actually a marvelous metaphor for the human enterprise. From our entry into this world and our departure out of it, we are all hunting for something. The hunt can be as mundane as searching for a pair of shoes. It can be as profound as what Viktor Frankl labeled “man’s search for meaning.”
Today, here in Charleston, West Virginia, the sun is playing hide-and-seek amidst the clouds. Outside my window I see a man on a ladder cleaning windows. My overhead fan whirrs away. The phone is silent, at least for the moment. Judy is at the farmers market hunting for a geranium for a friend and some local strawberries for our table.
Today I will also be hunting. I’ll be hunting for words, foraging in the thicket of my own soul, like a hunter trying to bag a wild turkey. That means I’ll be writing these Notes.
Understand, if you will, that writing is my way of praying and meditating. It’s a hunt I go on out of my personal longing for revelation, soul-satisfying truth, and direction. It’s that time and place where words connect my different and often conflicting daily experiences.
Words, like wild game in the woods, often pop up like a covey of quail that surprises and electrifies me. When they do, I try to bag them. At times the words, like a fox running from a hound, flee and hide from sight. And, as strange as it might sound, there are times when the words target and capture me. How strange and mysterious is the game I track.
I love to hunt-and-peck, and, like any hunter, I am pleased to bring home and share what I bag with family and friends.
Hunting A Target At A Church In Wichita
Last Sunday, Scott Roeder went hunting, not in the Kansas woodlands but at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita. His target was Dr. George Tiller, who had a long history of performing late-term abortions.
I’ve written more than once about my own views regarding abortion and its place in the overall picture of a woman’s reproductive health, and her rights associated with that health, so I won’t belabor the issue here.
It is enough to say, blurring intentionally the categories of pro-life and pro-choice, that I am in every sense pro-life by being pro-choice.
I support Roe v. Wade as the law of the land, and contribute to WV Free—an organization “dedicated to reproductive justice and reproductive options.” And, obviously, when anyone who espouses a pro-life position, without the qualification of choice, picks up a gun and shoots a doctor or a health care provider I see that act as both immoral and illegal.
Of particular concern to me are the hot, incendiary words used by the opponents of abortion in this ongoing cultural, religious and legal battle over abortion. Do they contribute and even incite the violence we witnessed in Wichita?
What better place to examine this issue than Fox Network’s own commentator, Bill O’Reilly who, along with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and a host of local talk-show clones, epitomizes the right-wing political attack team. O’Reilly is the master of hot, incendiary talk and one must ask the question, has he gone over the free speech line and in effect yelled fire in a theater, thus causing a death in a church?
While never advocating the killing of anyone, O’Reilly’s words have been turgidly explosive. Bill O’Reilly has attacked Dr. Tiller over two dozen times by calling him a baby killer, linked him to rapist and child abuse, and compared Tiller’s work to “the kind of stuff that happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union.” Tiller, says O’Reilly, is the moral equivalent of al-Qaida.
God knows, I am a First Amendment freak and not in favor of barring O’Reilly or any other talking mouth from radio or television. I believe rather strongly, however, that folks should either talk back to them on the air (hard to do since they interrupt, shout and verbally abuse people who challenge their opinions) or turn them off at home, or request a channel change in the multitude of public places where someone else decides what channel gets aired.
St. Francis of Assisi is quoted as having said: “Preach the Gospel, and if you have to, use words.” In other words, start preaching what you believe by living it. That’s well and good, but like the blacksmith who forges iron, I too am a smithy—a wordsmith who can’t shun using words. Even St. Francis fashioned words to reinforce the truth of the message he lived.
Like any wordsmith, I have a responsibility to exercise care with words, particularly when speaking spontaneously and passionately, as I so often do.
However, of this I am sure, no matter how careful I am in forging words, no matter how well I know my audience, I cannot ultimately be responsible for what people hear when I speak or write. Nor can I be responsible for what others do with my words. I can hope for the best, but I may have to live with the worst.
Anyone venturing into speech, however, would do well to recognize that words can inspire people as well as ignite them—again, for better or for worse.
What we know about communication is that there may very well be some folks on the receiving end of speech ready, as individuals or as part of an organization, to pounce on a speaker’s passionate words and hammer them into violent behavior. Zealots and people who are mentally unstable (I believe Mr. Roeder’s act was rooted in both) can be found in political, religious and ideological circles. A polluted word that drips into a deep well of hatred can poison very quickly a person and a community.
When a community is polluted with hateful, overheated language, the temperature of honest debate will inevitably rise and surely boil over, as we saw with Mr. Roeder.
There’s no need to make scapegoats of people like Bill O’Reilly, but I can’t help but believe that he, along with others, have gone to the community well and deposed a vial of poison, heaped full and overflowing, that has left all of us more vulnerable to violence.
Empathy
Bill O’Reilly often concludes his show by introducing listeners to an unfamiliar or rarely used word, like panjandrum. Get a jolly out of that one. The word means “self-important, overbearing, or a pompous person.” This Bill-the-professor moment comes just before his final reminder that the spin stops with him and that he is looking out for us.
Have you ever heard such malarkey? What a pestiferous (a Bill word) bag-of-wind.
I’d like to inject another word—one that seems to be getting a lot of play these days.
The word is empathy.
The subject of empathy is being bantered about as a result of President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Maria Sotomayer for the Supreme Court.
Prior to her appointment, Obama made it clear what he wanted in a nominee. He wouldn’t choose someone who thought that justice was “about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook.” He would look for someone, he said, who would understand “about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives — whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation.”
And then came the “E” word—empathy. “I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving as just decisions and outcomes. The nominee should not only be qualified by legal standards. The person should embody empathy.”
President Obama wrote about empathy in his book, The Audacity of Hope: “It is at the heart of my moral code and it is how I understand the Golden Rule - not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes.”
It seems strange that I should have to articulate a case against the evil of torture, as I have done many times in these Notes, and now have to argue a case on behalf of empathy as a valued virtue and critical qualification for a public official.
Since when did torture require a prosecutor to argue against a government’s defense? And when did empathy need an advocate to argue for her existence as a critical component for a democratic government?
As Puck, the little elf in Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Nights Dream, says, “What fools we mortals be.”
I suspect empathy requires an advocate when a nation’s atmosphere is polluted with fear. And let me tell you, the good old boys fear this gutsy Hispanic woman. She has them projecting their own racist feelings onto her. On top of that, they can’t bear the fact that her life experiences might translate into legal opinions that could very well threaten their privileged way of life.
President Obama’s words echo Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes words and they certainly ring true to me: “The life of the law,” Holmes says, “has not been logic; it has been experience.”
Judy and I frequent a local Chinese restaurant where we go through the ritual at the end of the meal of cracking open the Chinese fortune cookie. On our last outing there, the little piece of paper stuffed inside my twisted cookie read: “In order to discover who you are, first learn who everybody else is. You’re what’s left.”
My experience leaves me with the conclusion that I can never step into someone else’s shoes no matter how hard I try. It’s takes a psychic shoehorn to get into my own experience. I can, however, at least attempt to discover who these other people are who live outside my skin, outside my experiences, and outside my limited vision.
I can sit down to a Puerto Rican meal—a whole plate of fried plantains, a big serving of pollo en fricase, topped off with a slice of piña colada cake, but that will not in any way guarantee me the ability to know what a woman of Puerto Rican descent, raised in the Bronx by a mother after her father’s death, knows. I speak, of course, of Judge Sotomayer. What I can do is pray for a dose of empathy and perhaps I’ll find it by listening to Puerto Ricans at the table.
A number of years ago, I was a part of a church delegation that went to Puerto Rico to listen to the testimony of native Puerto Ricans who were suffering under years of United States colonial domination. Days of testimony provided personal evidence about the poverty and the dependency felt by the people willing to step forward and put their experiences into words. The record of those hearings was later presented to the Decolonization Committee of the United Nations.
The church has now entered the season of Pentecost—that time when Christians remember that an ineffable God is somehow readily available to mysteriously and graciously bless human beings with an empathetic spirit. It is an indescribable spirit capable of overcoming the limits of logic, and the lonely isolation that plagues people separated over differing life experiences. It is a spirit which drives a person to listen to and discover other people through their experiences so as to better understand oneself.
Like the Chinese fortune cookie says: “In order to discover who you are, first learn who everybody else is. You’re what’s left.”
Perhaps what’s left is a person blessed with an empathetic spirit—an enquiring and discerning spirit. And, I might add, the kind of empathy crucial for our survival as a nation.
President Obama’s concern for empathy is evidenced by his selection of Ms, Sotomayor. It is also on display right now as he travels through the Middle East reaching out to the Muslim world. Empathy and hope always walk hand in hand in search of justice and peace.
Distracted By The Marshmallows In Our Life
Here’s a final word on a rather light subject, with serious implications. It’s about children and marshmallows.
In the May 18 issue of The New Yorker, an article by Jonah Lehrer tells the story of a scientific study done in the late nineteen-sixties at the Bing Nursery School on the campus of Stanford University. It involved a group of four-year-olds and marshmallows.
The children were allowed to pick a marshmallow from a plate of goodies and were told they could eat now or wait while the instructor left the room and receive two when she returned.
The point of the exercise had to do with delayed gratification. The results indicated that about thirty percent of the kids were able to exercise self-control and resist eating the marshmallow. In follow-up studies, it was shown that giving in to the temptation and indulging in instant gratification led to adult problems associated with distraction.
The crucial skill for self-control was identified as “strategic allocation of attention.” Which means that the children capable of diverting their attention somewhere else, such as singing a song or covering their eyes or pretending to play hide-and-seek, were able to resist short-term gratification for long-term rewards.
The professor in charge of the experiment says this: ‘Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.” An adult lesson taught by the behavior of children.
Which means that when I resist a trip to Ellen’s to purchase ice cream, in order to keep focused while banging out these Notes, I’ve done something worthwhile with my time.
I sure hope that’s not a lot of malarkey. And if it is, please cut me some slack and show me a little empathy.
June 4th, 2009
May 9th, 2009 |
The playwright, David Hare, got me thinking about walls this week. That happened after I read his marvelous article on Israel/Palestine, “Wall: A Monologue,” in the April 30 edition of The New York Review of Books.
The article is about the 486 mile wall that has cost Israel some $2 billion, gobbled up more than 3,700 acres of Palestinian land, and has resulted in cutting down102,000 trees.
Hare writes: “The Berlin Wall was built to keep people in. This one, they (Israelis) say, is built to keep people (Palestinians) out.”
As I think about it, there are all kinds of walls, physical, psychological and emotional. They are built by individuals, nations, neighborhoods, organizations, and religions.
I want to use this issue of Notes to bounce a few things off the wall hoping to make some sense out of the various walls that all of us run into, build, attempt to climb over, and occasionally find enough passion and courage to tear down.
Graffitied Walls
In shadowy confines, hidden from moon beams, the graffiti artist goes to work. With spray paint he etches his message on a wall that has no power to resist an indelible acrylic assault. His message awaits a morning passerby on the way to work.
While in the Greek City of Ephesus (now Turkey), I saw what is thought to be an ancient example of graffiti. Carved into the mosaic pathway is a handprint shaped like a heart with a number pointing to a nearby brothel.
There’s no need to visit Turkey to see graffiti. It’s as close as the restroom you frequent while on a auto trip. You know, those Magic Marker scrawlings on bathroom walls.
And if you go up on the Internet, you can even see a collection of graffiti. Some are familiar, pretty earthy, humorous, and even philosophically profound.
• A familiar men’s room urinal wall etching: We aim to please, you aim too please.
• A Kentucky high school bathroom: They paint the walls to cover my pen, but the bathroom poet strike again.
• A female New York political cynic, with humor: If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.
• One for all the deep thinkers on the road: Love and fear drive anger and expression. If you write it on the wall, you either love it, fear it, or crave it.
If you were a fly on the wall of my third floor office, you’d know that I’m a wall-writer too. For full disclosure’s sake, I’ll tell you about the wall I write on these days.
Facebook Wall
The wall I write on is a Facebook wall. For the uninitiated, here’s a brief explanation.
Facebook is an Internet web service that can be used to connect with other people, particularly friends. A person can create his or her own page and then post pictures, personal information, messages and announcements. Since joining, I have connected with people I haven’t seen for years. It’s been fun and informative.
Here’s where the wall comes into the picture.
At the top of the web page, there is a box, upon which I can write messages that will be posted on my “wall.” Those succinct messages then are available to my list of friends out there in cyberspace. They can then respond by writing messages on my wall. Call it a band of Facebook graffitiites, without spray paint.
Last week, for example, I wrote the following: A new Pew Forum study reports that 54 percent of the people who go to church at least weekly say that torture is justifiable. Shocking but no surprise. In my experience most church-goers support the death penalty. We Christian pastors have much work to do. Jesus was tortured but never espoused torture. Should we replace coffee hour with a waterboard experience to convert folks? Just kidding!
A friend, picking up on the dark humor expressed in my waterboard comment (Outrageously dark behavior requires a strong dose of dark humor.), suggested that perhaps an appropriate place for the torture would be in a baptismal pool with the message, “give up torture or else!”
She got me thinking with that comment. When I baptize someone, I am, indeed, baptizing them into death—death to a way of life that embraces, even celebrates, violence, and accepts, even condones torture. I am also welcoming that person into a church community committed to live, and even die, if necessary, in active resistance to all forms of tortuous behavior and violent vindictiveness.
Baptism isn’t an ecclesiastical insurance policy that rewards holy-water-dunked Christians with a ticket for the journey across the River Styx. God knows I’m not Charon the ferryman steering the fortunate folks to some heavenly bed-and-breakfast place, and the unwashed to some slime covered, health-department-condemned greasy spoon.
Baptism is the occasion when I introduce the newly water-splattered person to Christian sisters and brothers who refuse to get their jollies from any form of blood sacrifice. But I don’t kid myself about how deeply enculturated we Christians are when it comes to looking for a pound or two of revenge justified either for the good of God or country.
The Pew survey indicates that the more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists.
And here’s the part of the survey that becomes the mirror on the wall to any churchgoer who asks the question: “Who’s the fairest of them all?”
The most likely folks not to support torture are those who don’t affiliate with any religious organization (only four out of ten).
At a Duke University coffeehouse, someone wrote this on a women’s room wall: There is nothing so pure as the kindness of an atheist.
On Monday, Judy and I leave for a trip to Concord, New Hampshire, where we will celebrate around daughter Debby’s graduation from nursing school. Interestingly enough, speaking of walls, on the Tuesday following her entrance into the nursing profession, she will leave for China and a trip to The Great Wall of China.
Perhaps, on our trip, I should pack a Magic Marker and, while stopping for gas, write my own graffiti message on the men’s room wall. What to say? What to say?
Don’t torture me with a religion that thinks it’s okay to waterboard people.
Talking And Listening Walls
When Judy and I moved back to Charleston, we made a deal with a wall, or, you might say, closed a deal with a church which has a wall as a part of its outside garden.
I am talking about St. John’s, the church I served years ago—the parish which Judy now attends. The wall I am referring to is a columbarium built into the garden wall outside the parish hall. When death forces us up against the wall, as it does with all of us, we will go into that wall, hopefully, with peace and the blessings of friends and family.
In the play, “Tuesdays with Morrie,” Morrie, on his deathbed asks one last favor of his dear friend Mitch.
“I’ve picked a place to be buried…After I’m gone, I want you to come and visit…when you have some time. Bring a blanket. Pack a lunch.”
Mitch always brought lunch—egg salad, Morrie’s favorite—on his visits as he accompanied Morrie through his battle with Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
“Bring your lunch” says Morrie, “sit…and talk with me. Tell me your problems. Tell me what’s going on in the world.”
But, says, Mitch, “it’s not gonna be like we’re talking now because…you won’t be able to talk back.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” says Morrie. “After I’m dead, you talk…I’ll listen.”
Walls talk and walls listen.
One need only visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington to get a full-blown experience of a talking-listening wall. The names on that wall talk to us about the sacrifice that war requires—the blood-sucking, vampire-like war that drained the precious blood from so many people.
Back at the start of the Iraq War, I was a part of a West Virginia delegation that took a canvas-like wall to Washington. It was filled with the names of those who had died, up to that point in time, in Iraq. We unrolled it in a field adjacent to the Vietnam Memorial Wall. I felt the connection as people passed by—one wall speaking to another.
I would do well to go again to Washington to listen to those names carved into that granite Wall. They still speak to anyone ready to listen. I would, of course, like Mitch, talk to that Wall about what’s going on in the world. The Wall would have to hear my complaints about the additional US troops that are on their way to Afghanistan.
I have prayed at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Think of it, praying to a wall—weeping in front of a wall as if that wall could ingest one’s tears, and comfort and instruct those who cry.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall is America’s Wailing Wall. It is there to listen and to speak, even though its stone is silent—except for those with ears to hear.
Something There Is That Doesn’t Love A Wall
Mentioning the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem drives me back to David Hare’s article on the wall dividing Israeli and Palestinian villages and cities. Observations about that wall have deep overtones for all the walls we build or confront.
Robert Frost’s oft quoted poem, “Mending Fences,” points to the tension between the word wall and the word fence. The narrator in the poem says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall—That wants it down.” Not so, says his neighbor, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
In what has been traditionally called “The Holy Land,” language matters—naming is a critical endeavor. As Hare points out, “Words become flags, they announce which side you are on.” Israelis refer to the wall as the “separation fence,” while Palestinians use the term “racial segregation wall.”
On the one hand, Frost’s narrator could well be a Palestinian who sees a wall—a barrier which isolates, stigmatizes, and chokes off social and economic contact. On the other hand, the neighbor could well be an Israeli who sees a fence—a boundary that offers definition, distance, and protection.
Whether you see the wall or fence as a necessity, a violation of international law, a land grab, a practical attempt to stop the violence, or, as Sari Nusseibeh puts it “the perfect crime because it creates the violence it was ostensibly built to prevent,” will ultimately depend on which side of the edifice you live.
There is much to learn from all this wall-talk, because each and every one of us find ways to wall ourselves off from other people—particularly those who don’t look like us or think like us. In like manner, we often stonewall new information and new contacts that might confront our old viewpoints and prejudices.
When this occurs, David Grossman, the Israeli novelist, whose writing I prize, warns us about the dangers of walling ourselves off as individuals, and as a nation. Behind our fortified walls, he says, “we have terrible trouble imagining any other reality than the one we live in. You become habituated, you cannot believe there is another way of life. And so effectively you become a victim of the situation.”
When we allow ourselves to become victims, says Grossman about Israel, but it could well be the United States, “we hand our fate over to the security people, we allow the army to run the country, because we lack a political class with a vision beyond the military. Survival becomes our only aim. We are living in order to survive, not in order to live.”
The Dividing Wall Of Hostility
The words from the African-American spiritual point to a profound truth: “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” But it is also true that religion can be toxic—hazardous to our health, as individuals and as a nation.
Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer, says that the greatest good fortune for Ramallah, the West Bank town where he lives, is that it is not mentioned in the Bible. Hare writes: “Nothing divine happened in Ramallah. What a stroke of luck for any town that wants to survive! Not to be named in any Holy Book.”
Hare’s observation is right-on. For years I have quietly objected to the term “Holy Land” to describe that portion of the world I knew as a child as Palestine, and now called Israel. And why, you say? Simply this: All life and all places are holy, and that’s precisely the message that the great religions espouse when they are faithful to their own message.
Warning: When you wall off and designate one place or one nation as holy, that place become more important than any other place and, therefore, it becomes the ground over which people fight in order to possess it.
I mentioned Ephesus above. Let me mention it again, as the destination for the Apostle Paul’s letter found in Christian Scripture.
Paul was greatly concerned about the animosities and divisions in Ephesus that had separated the followers of Jesus from other Jews. He let them know, in no uncertain terms, that Jesus had come to break down “the dividing walls of hostility,” and they’d better do likewise.
His message had cosmic implications pointing to the fact that this Christian way of life was intended to break all barriers, not with retaliation or revenge, but with love and justice. Good medicine for a case of toxic religion.
For Your Wall
Consider your bulletin board or your refrigerator as your wall. With the banking situation as it is, clip this little ditty, compliments of Jonathan Swift.
A baited banker thus desponds,
From his own hand foresees his fall,
They have his soul, who have his bonds;
‘Tis like the writing on the wall.
May 9th, 2009
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