Even In Quiet Places

+
"I like to live in the sound of water, in the feel of mountain air.  A sharp reminder hits me: this world is still alive; it stretches out there shivering toward its own creation, and I'm a part of it. Even my breathing enters into an elaborate give-and-take, this bowing to sun and moon, day or night, winter, summer, storm, still –- this tranquil chaos that seems to be going somewhere. This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it. This motionless turmoil, this everything dance."  - Wiliam Stafford, "Time for Serenity, Anyone?"
from the book *Even in Quiet Places*

What If We Did Go Home and Visit God?

Villot Delacroix


"God is a Woman and She is Growing Older"
"Turn us, O God, back to You and we shall return."

Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig

Who or what is God? Where shall we look for God's presence? Our sages and philosophers are by no means unanimous in their response. But they do concur on one matter: who or what God truly is ultimately unknowable. God is The Hidden One, the one who conceals His face, the Infinite, Unmeasurable One—unknowable, unfathomable, indescribable.

Yet, these same sages also dare to try to capture our people's experience of God in images we do know, and can comprehend. Mystics went as far as to sketch God's form: the primordial man. Each of God's attributes were associated with a specific part of His body. Biblical commentaries gave us images of God weeping at the sight of Egyptians drowning; bound in chains forced into exile with His people. Liturgy shows us God as an immovable Rock; as a shield; as the commander of a host of angels; as a shepherd; and on the Days of Awe, the prayer book focuses upon the images of God as father and as King.

All of these images are metaphors or allusions—never meant to be taken literally, merely meant to point us toward something we can imagine but never really see.

Today I invite you to imagine God along with me. I invite you to imagine God as a woman, a woman who is growing older.

God is a woman and she is growing older¹. She moves more slowly now. She cannot stand erect. Her face is lined. Her voice is scratchy. Sometimes she has to strain to hear. God is a woman and she is growing older; yet, she remembers everything.

On Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of the day on which she gave us birth, God sits down at her kitchen table, opens the Book of Memories², and begins turning the pages; and God remembers.

"There, there is the world when it was new and my children when they were young." As she turns each page she smiles, seeing before her, like so many dolls in a department store window, all the beautiful colors of our skin, all the varied shapes and sizes of our bodies. She marvels at our accomplishments: the music we have written, the gardens we have planted, the stories we have told, the ideas we have spun.

"They now can fly faster than the winds I send," she says to herself, "and they sail across the waters which I gathered into seas. They even visit the moon which I set in the sky. But they rarely visit me." There pasted into the pages of her book are all the cards we have ever sent to her when we did not bother to visit. She notices our signatures³ scrawled beneath the printed words someone else has composed.

Then there are the pages she would rather skip. Things she wishes she could forget. But they stare her in the face and she cannot help but remember: her children spoiling the home she created for us, brothers putting each other in chains. She remembers seeing us racing down dangerous roads—herself unable to stop us. She remembers the dreams she had for us—dreams we never fulfilled. And she remembers the names, so many names, inscribed in the book, names of all the children she has lost through war and famine, earthquake and accident, disease and suicide⁴. And God remembers the many times she sat by a bedside⁵ weeping that she could not halt the process she herself set into motion. On Yom Kippur, God lights candles⁶, one for each of her children, millions of candles lighting up the night making it bright as day.⁷ God stays awake all night⁸ turning the pages of her book.

God is lonely, longing for her children, her playful ones. Her body aches for us⁹. All that dwells on earth does perish. But God endures¹⁰, so she suffers the sadness of loosing all that she holds dear.

God is home, turning the pages of her book. "Come home," she wants to say to us, "Come home." But she won't call. For she is afraid that we will say, "No." She can anticipate the conversation: "We are so busy. We'd love to see you but we just can't come. Too much to do."

Even if we don't realize it, God knows that our busyness is just an excuse. She knows that we avoid returning to her because we don't want to look into her age-worn face. It is hard for us to face a god who disappointed our childhood expectations: She did not give us everything we wanted. She did not make us triumphant in battle, successful in business and invincible to pain. We avoid going home to protect ourselves from our disappointment and to protect her. We don't want her to see the disappointment in our eyes. Yet, God knows that it is there and she would have us come home anyway.

What if we did? What if we did go home and visit God? What might it be like?

God would usher us into her kitchen¹¹, seat us at her table and pour two cups of tea. She has been alone so long that there is much she wants to say. But we barely allow her to get a word in edgewise, for we are afraid of what she might say and we are afraid of silence. So we fill an hour with our chatter, words, words, so many words. Until, finally, she touches her finger to her lips and says, "Shh. Sha. Be still."

Then she pushes back her chair and says, "Let me have a good look at you." And she looks. And in a single glance, God sees us as both newly born and dying: coughing and crying, turning our head to root for her breast, fearful of the unknown realm which lies ahead.

In a single glance she sees our birth and our death and all the years in between. She sees us as we were when we were young: when we idolized her and trustingly followed her anywhere¹²; when our scrapes and bruises healed quickly, when we were filled with wonder at all things new. She sees us when we were young, when we thought that there was nothing we could not do.

She sees our middle years too: when our energy was unlimited. When we kept house, cooked and cleaned, cared for children, worked, and volunteered—when everyone needed us and we had no time for sleep.

And God sees us in our later years: when we no longer felt so needed; when chaos disrupted the bodily rhythms we had learned to rely upon. She sees us sleeping alone in a room which once slept two.

God sees things about us we have forgotten and things we do not yet know. For naught is hidden from God's sight.

When she is finished looking at us, God might say, "So tell me, how are you?" Now we are afraid to open our mouths¹³ and tell her everything she already knows¹⁴: whom we love; where we hurt; what we have broken or lost; what we wanted to be when we grew up.

So we change the subject. "Remember the time when... "

"Yes, I remember," she says. Suddenly we are both talking at the same time; saying all the things the greeting cards never said:

"I'm sorry that I..."

"That's alright, I forgive you."

"I didn't mean to..."

"I know that. I do."

We look away. "I never felt I could live up to your expectations."

"I always believed you could do anything," she answers.

"What about your future?," she asks us. We do not want to face our future. God hears our reluctance, and she understands.

After many hours of drinking tea, when at last there are no more words, God begins to hum, "Aiyiyi-yi-yi, yiyiyi-yi-yi-yi, yiyiyi-yi-yi-yi¹⁵."

And we are transported back to a time when our fever wouldn't break and we couldn't sleep, exhausted from crying but unable to stop. She picked us up and held us against her bosom and supported our head in the palm of her hands and walked with us. We could feel her heart beating and hear the hum from her throat, "Ah ah baby, ah ah baby, aiyiyi-yi-yi, yiyiyi-yi-yi-yi, yiyiyi-yi-yi-yi."

Ah, yes, that's where we learned to wipe the tears¹⁶. It was from her we learned how to comfort a crying child, how to hold someone in pain.

Then God reaches out and touches our arm, bringing us back to the present and to the future. "You will always be my child," she says, "but you are no longer a child. Grow old along with me...the last of life for which the first was made¹⁷."

We are growing older as God is growing older. How much like her we have become.

For us, as well as for God, growing older means facing death. Of course, God will never die but she has buried more dear ones than we shall ever love. In God we see, 'tis a holy thing to love what death can touch¹⁸. Like her, we may be holy¹⁹, loving what death can touch, including ourselves, our own aging selves.

God holds our face in her two hands and whispers, "Do not be afraid²⁰, I will be faithful to the promise I made to you when you were young²¹. I will be with you. Even to your old age I will be with you. When you are grey headed still I will hold you. I gave birth to you, I carried you. I will hold you still²². Grow old along with me...."

Our fear of the future is tempered now by curiosity. The universe is infinite. Unlimited possibilities are arrayed before us still. We can awaken each morning to wonder: What shall I learn today? What can I create today? What will I notice that I have never seen before?

It has been a good visit. Before we leave, it is our turn to take a good look at Her. The face which time has marked looks not frail to us now—but wise. For we understand that God knows those things only the passage of time can teach: that one can survive the loss of a love; that one can feel secure even in the midst of an ever changing world²³; that there is dignity in being alive even when every bone aches. God's movements seem not slow to us—but strong and intent, unlike our own. For we are too busy to see beneath the surface. We speak too rapidly to truly listen, and we move too quickly to feel what we touch. We form opinions too fast to judge honestly. While God, God moves slowly and with intention. She sees everything there is to see, understands everything She hears, and touches all that lives.

Ahh, that is why we were created to grow older: each added day of life, each new year make us more like God who is ever growing older. That must be the reason we are instructed to rise before the aged and see the grandeur in the faces of the old²⁴. We rise in their presence as we would rise in the presence of God, for in the faces of the old we see God's face.

This aging woman looks to us now like... like... a queen: her chair a throne, her house dress an ermine robe and her thinning hair²⁵, shining like jewels on a crown.

How often do we sit in the house of prayer, far from home; holding in our hands pages of greeting cards bound together like a book, hundreds of words we ourselves have not written. Will we merely place our signatures at the bottom and drop the cards in the mail?

God would prefer that we come home. She is waiting for us, ever patiently until we are ready. God will not sleep. She will leave the door open and the candles burning waiting patiently for us to come home.

Perhaps one day...perhaps one day we will be able to look into God's aging face and say, "Avinu Malkeinu, our Mother, our Queen, we have come home."

******

Sermon Notes:

1. Lamentations 5:21

2. A medieval liturgical poem included in the weekly Sabbath service in an Orthodox prayer book, shows us that we may imagine God, even if we cannot see Him. The poem proceeds to describe God as a young man and as an old man:

I tell thy praise, though I have not seen thee;
I describe thee, though I have not known thee.

Through thy prophets amidst thy worshipers
Didst Thou show forth thy majestic splendor.

Thy greatness and thy power
They traced in thy mighty work.

They imagined thee, not as thou art really;
They described thee by thy acts only.

They depicted thee in countless visions;
Despite all comparison thou art One.

They saw thee in both old age and young age,
With the hair of thy head now grew, now black;

Age in judgment day, youth in time of war...

Daily Prayer book, translated by Philip Birnbaum, Hebrew Publishing Company, New York, 1977, p. 416-7.

3. The term "The Book of Memories" appears in the Unetane Tokef prayer, one of the most important prayers on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (quoted below), see also Psalm 139:16 for the image of the "book",

Let us declare how utterly holy is this day...Thou openest the Book of Memories
and it reads itself; every person's signature is contained in it.

4. See note 3

5. This list of causes of death is modeled after another portion of the Unetane Tokef prayer (see note 3), "...who by water, who by sword, who by beast, who by earthquake, who by plague..."

6. The Rabbis say that the Shechinah (God's presence) sits at the bedside of an ill person.

7. On the eve of Yom Kippur, Jews light one Yizkor ("Memory") candle for each deceased family member.

8. It is the custom among some Jews to stay awake throughout the night on Yom Kippur.

9. Jeremiah 31:19, quoted in the liturgy for Rosh Hashanah.

10. From the Unetane Tokef prayer (see note 3), "Our origin is dust and dust is our end... But You are King, the everlasting God."

11. Syd Lieberman in "A Short Amidah" imagines sitting in a kitchen drinking schnapps (liquor) with God. Kol Haneshama: Sabbath Eve, The Reconstructionist Press, Wyncote, PA, 1989. p. 184

12. Jeremiah 2:2, quoted in the liturgy for Rosh Hashanah.

13. "What are we? What is our life? What our goodness? What our power? What can we say in Thy presence?" from the liturgy for Yom Kippur (Union Prayer Book II, The Central Conference of American Rabbis, New York, 1962, p.176).

14. Psalm 139 and from the Yom Kippur liturgy,

Thou searchest the innermost recesses and probest the deepest impulses of the heart.
Naught is concealed from Thee nor hidden from Thine eyes.

The Union Prayer Book II, op. cit. p. 224.

15. This melody is the refrain of the short confession on Yom Kippur.

16. Hannah Senesh begins her poem, "To My Mother," with the words, "Where have you learned to wipe the tears?"

17. Robert Browning, from his poem "Rabbi Ben Ezra."

18. From an unpublished poem by Rabbi Chaim Stern.

19. Leviticus 19:2b "You shall be holy, for I the Eternal God am holy." This is part of the scripture reading on the afternoon of Yom Kippur in a Reform synagogue.

20. Proverbs 3:25a, quoted in an Orthodox Jewish prayer book.

21. Ezekiel 16:60, quoted in the liturgy for Rosh Hashanah.

22. Isaiah 46:4, quoted in an Orthodox Jewish prayer book.

23. The Rev. Al Carmines wrote in his song, "Many Gifts One Spirit"

God of change and glory
God of time and space
When we fear the future
Give to us Your grace.
In the midst of changing ways
Give us still the grace to praise.

24. Leviticus 19:32, part of the Yom Kippur afternoon scripture reading in Reform synagogues.

25. Exodus 34:6, central to the penitential liturgy of Yom Kippur.

26. Avinu Malkeinu means "Our Father, Our King." God is addressed this way in one of the most well known litanies recited on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Yearning for Blessing

"We should beware of branding cities and civilizations as "evil or "sinful" in the Christian sense. As we have seen, the Jewish tradition has a more pragmatic attitude toward sin, regarding it as an unfortunate fact of life. In the Talmud, the Rabbis refer to the "evil inclination" (Yeytzer ha'ra). This did not mean a chronic yearning for absolute wickedness. It was closer to what Freud would later describe as libido, an instinct for life that is the source of our energy and desire. The "evil inclination," as we have seen, could be creative. The Rabbis noted that on the sixth day of creation, God pronounced his work to be "very good" and concluded that this was the day on which he had created the evil inclination in humanity:

An behold it was very good. This is the evil impulse. Is the evil impulse good? Yet were it not for the evil impulse no man would build a home, nor marry a wife, nor beget children, nor engage in trade. Solomon said: "All labor and all excelling in work is a man's rivalry with his neighbor."

By attributing the civilized arts to the descendants of Cain, the restless wanderer, the Bible recognized that civilization is built as well as destroyed by anger and discontent. Much of our God-given energy can erupt in creativity and the life-enhancing arts as well as in uncontrolled hatred and egotism. The secret is to learn how to master and channel the power that lies coiled at the root of our nature, waiting to spring and recoil upon us. Instead of using it like Cain to destroy, we can deflect it and make it a source of blessing.

-- In the Beginning
A new interpretation of Genesis

by Karen Armstrong

For all things sing you ...

The Old Bill

bread of adversity

Truly, o people in Zion, inhabitants of Jerusalem, you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when he hears it he will answer you. Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself any more, but your eyes will see your Teacher. And when you turn to the right or to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you saying,'This is the way, walk in it' . . . [Isaiah 30:19-21]

veni sancte spiritus

Been doing a lot of reading/thinking about prayer lately. Came across this from the 13th century:

Come Holy Spirit. . .
Cleanse what is soiled,
Refresh what is dry,
Heal what is wounded,
Bend what is rigid,
Warm what is frozen,
Guide what goes astray.

And this from Julian of Norwich [14th century]:

God, in your goodness, give your Self to me, for you are enough for me. To be worthy of you, I cannot rightly ask for anything else. If I were to ask less, I would always be in want. In you alone do I have all.

Amazing how essential stuff doesn't change that much over 7 or 8 centuries.

Indefensible prayer

You come and go. The doors swing closed

Ever more gently, almost without a shudder.

Of all who move through the quiet houses,

You are the quietest.

We become accustomed to you,

We no longer look up

When your shadow falls over the book we are reading

And makes it glow. For all things

Sing you: at times

We just hear them more clearly.

[Rilke]

Milton’s ‘On Time’

Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race,
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace;
And glut thy self with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more then what is false and vain,
And meerly mortal dross;
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain.
For when as each thing bad thou hast entomb’d,
And last of all, thy greedy self consum’d,
Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss;
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood,
When every thing that is sincerely good
And perfectly divine,
With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine
About the supreme Throne
Of him, t’ whose happy-making sight alone,
When once our heav’nly-guided soul shall clime,
Then all this Earthy grosnes quit,
Attir’d with Stars, we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.

–John Milton, On Time first published in: Poems (1645)

(the original manuscript bears the subtitle: “To be set on a clock case.”)

[Permanent link]

Love Among the Angels

LOVE AMONG THE ANGELS

HOW ANGELS SLEEP
Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the Living. They know so little about what it's like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude. The first time a girl named Alma puts her hand just below your bottom rib; about this feeling, they have only theories, but no solid ideas. If you gave them a snow globe, they might not even know enough to shake it.

Also, they don't dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is a result of something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.

PRIVATE MATTERS. It's true that they don't have a sense of smell, but angels, in their infinite love for the Living, go around smelling everything in emulation. Like dogs, they don't feel bashful about going up and sniffing each other. Sometimes, when they are unable to sleep, they lie in bed with a nose in their armpits, wondering what they smell like.

THE ARGUMENTS BETWEEN ANGELS. Are eternal and lack hope of solution. This is because they argue about what it means to be among the Living, and because they don't know they can only speculate about the nature (or lack thereof) of God.

BEING ALONE. Like the Living, angels sometimes get tired of each other and want to be alone. Because the houses they live in are crowded, and there's nowhere to go, the only thing an angel can do at such moments is shut his eyes and put his head down on his arms. When an angel does this, the others understand that he is trying to fool himself into feeling alone, and they tiptoe around him. To help things along, they might talk about him as if he weren't there. If they happen to bump into him by accident, they whisper: "It wasn't me."

FOR BETTER OR WORSE. Angels don't get married. To begin with they are too busy, and secondly they don't fall in love with each other. (If you don't know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?)

The way they live together is not unlike a fresh litter of pups: blind and grateful and denuded. This is not to say that they don't feel love, because they do; sometimes they feel it so strongly that they think they're having a panic attack. In these moments, their hearts race uncontrollably and they worry that they are going to throw up. But the love they feel is not for their own kind, but for the Living, who they can neither understand, nor smell, nor touch. It is a general love for the Living (though being general doesn't make it any less potent). Only from time to time does an angel find in herself a defect that causes her to fall in love, not in general, but in the specific.

(from The History of Love - A Novel -- by Nicole Krauss)

**
We spent the weekend in the mountains. A blessed respite and relief and retreat. A chance to get ozonated and to see my dear oldest son. To visit a dear and familiar waterfall and an ancient forest.
To restore the memory and conviction that life is love and connection with the occasional punctuation of battle and loss and fear and terror. To consider that every thought is a prayer and a meditation, so to make thought and prayer more intentional and more out of surrender and conversation with God and things and spirits Godly. To remember to trust intuition and memory - to consult hunch and imagination and not get too tempted down the roads where fear waits to ambush.

***
{A Poem In Progress}

Prayers

1) Memories passed down to me by my mother.
Her own silence, sticky and uneasy plagued by ghosts
Prayers looking more like
"things I can't say or shouldn't say out loud"
Self-censoring
Policing
"If the girl I was saw the woman I've become she would be disappointed."
Don't speak out of turn.
Be correct.
What am I supposed to hear?
What am I told to believe and supposed to say but punished for saying?
What if what I say or speak doesn't look like what is in or on my heart?
Not till later, that is.
Not till despair or near-despair.
In the land of plenty, a wasteland -
a desert
and inner desolation of dammed up words and tears
that never fall or are told.

2. Memories passed down to me from my father.
Building churches
Churches and buildings.
Making.
Doing striding walking standing sitting -
Tapping and humming.
Never still.
Showing up and owning
Conversation
But a prayer must be in a book
Must be codified and signed on to.
Must.
Until, must and should no longer hold logic
Everything thrown from a mountaintop
Dashed onto the rocks below
The prayer of destruction
Like a mad Psalm
A whirling psalmist
Raging at God
and not even knowing it.
The right hand being wounded, thus being unfamiliar with the left hand's doing.

3. Intentional.
All-Saints' celebration walks towards us
As usual, in costume.
(If you can call its ambling that)
Out in the country, pumpkins and corn, the decorative variety black orange tan ;
clearly not the kind for eating.
Ghosts and spider webs suspend out of trees
A large acrylic spider grips a mailbox.
All saints and all souls
Pray without ceasing.
Pray as an emptying out the heart's spent contents
Pray from the habit of confession and of asking
A dogged habit of attempted honesty
Difficult daily truth telling
in matters insignificant.
That which I mean to do and say
The words I push out
reluctant paratroopers hesitating at the drop
Words stumbling on the heels of the words that went before.
All the people who speak in me
and don't
Couldn't
Wouldn't
God and all the helpers
Lead me.

***

Fantasists

I'm going to post up a few things and scoot. Off to the mountains for a few days for some change of scenery. Scott Horton revisits honor, human rights and the perils that the torturing nation calls down upon itself by virtue of its lack of vision. Horton has become an ever stronger and clearer voice on these subjects -- and his writing and thinking are above everything else I have seen on the web. Our national imagination is held captive to a naive fundamentalist-minded President and a paranoid and power hungry Vice President. They are a terrible danger to us and must be brought to law.
Where has Congress been?? Chris Dodd gave a stirring speech on the floor of the Senate today. Where's Hilary? Where's Obama? This country cannot afford a celebrity President. We need someone who is willing to make hard and unpopular stands and return us to the rule of Law. We need someone who has his own moral compass intact and functioning. Who is willing to stand up for the good in all human beings. Isn't this what a "Christian nation" should be?

****

He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

–Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (1929)

[Permanent link]

***

October 26, 2007

Imaginationland by Scott Horton

I had a very full calendar today and was not able to take some time to browse the websites I usually hit until I sat down in the train going home approaching midnight. And then, as happens only very infrequently, I found a post which is simply too important to be a blogpost. It’s an insight into what our nation has become, and how much further it promises to slip. It focuses on the sorts of developments which sit about us and do unrecognized and unthought-about, though at our great peril. It’s offered up as today’s entrée at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. Read it all, twice. But here are some key segments:

My original concern with torture was moral and sprang from Abu Ghraib. It never occurred to me that the US would be doing it before. Poring over all the data, it became simply impossible to deny that Abu Ghraib was not an exception to the rule, but a horrible, predictable result of an existing torture policy that spread beyond the limits Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted. My second concern with torture is that much of our actionable intelligence may have come from it. Think of what that means. Much of it may be as valid as that nuclear bomb in New York City or the notion that Abdallah Higazy was a member of al Qaeda.

We may have entered a world, in other words, where the empirical reality of our national security is less important than the imaginationland that every torture regime will create. We may therefore be sacrificing our liberties for a phantasm created by brutality spawned by terror. We don’t know for sure, of course. But that’s what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace “the dark side” almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger—the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up. And since they have utter contempt for the role of the Congress in declaring war, we and the world are helpless to stop them. Every day we get through with them in power, I say a silent prayer of thanks that the worst hasn’t happened. Yet. Because we sure know they’re looking in all the wrong places.

The torture issue is still with us, corrupting our society in the most pernicious and fundamental ways. It rots from within, destroying our institutions and the moral fiber of leaders who succumb to it. Those who dismiss or downplay this issue are dangerously deluded.

My good friends over at the Princeton Theological Seminar have invited me to give some remarks on the evening of November 15. I’ll be talking about the torture issue, how people of faith can address it (specifically how John Donne and William Wilberforce did), and how it is corrupting our national and popular culture. If you’re in Central New Jersey, think about stopping by. I’ll put up more details later.

[Permanent link]

We're Always One Of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

"You're not one of us."
"I don't think I'm one of them, either," said Brutha. "I'm one of mine."
-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

*****

"...our knowledge is always incomplete....
At present we are men looking at puzzling reflections in a mirror.....
At present all I know is a little fraction of the truth..."

I Cor 13:9-12
J B Phillips trans.

****
highly recommended to the infinite degree

TURBULENT CLERIC has a post up detailing the punishments for deviancy in various different countries. Of course, the word that stands out most starkly is DEATH.

Posted by MadPriest

****

Taking Seriously the Possibility of Grave Social Sin

The Reverend Canon Dr. Joseph Cassidy, Principal of St Chad's College at Durham University, England, has written an essay that is an absolute must read. Although he identifies his "own theological and ethical instincts" as being "decidedly conservative on most issues," Canon Cassidy wonders why, given the importance of comprehensiveness, humility and openness within Anglicanism, we cannot allow the Episcopal Church to push the boundaries of inclusiveness:

...So here's what puzzles me: Given all this openness, why can't we allow or even authorise the Episcopal Church to experiment with including gay lay-people, gay deacons, gay priests and, yes, gay bishops? Why can't we allow the Episcopal Church to experiment with same-sex/quasi-nuptual blessings? Why can't we ask the Episcopal Church to undertake, on behalf of the rest of the Church, a ministry of discernment within and alongside the various gay and lesbian communities? Why can't we enable the Episcopal Church to push their idea of baptismal inclusiveness to the hilt to see whether it enhances holiness? Why can't we do that? What is the real risk of doing so and what is the real risk of not doing so?

In one sense, the answer is obvious: we can't because many Anglicans in many provinces think the question is closed; others think the timing isn't right; others think more theological reflection needs to occur before testing things in the field; others (hopefully only a few) write off the whole thing derisively as a pandering to modernity.

I take seriously what the Episcopal Church is trying to do. Unlike some, I do not believe that the Episcopal Church are a bunch of uncritical liberals, glibly and mindlessly embracing contemporary values as if they were obvious Christian values. My own theological and ethical instincts are decidedly conservative on most issues, but I do see the Episcopal Church taking a costly road, which admittedly is capable of jolting the foundations, and which would inevitably cause friction. I cannot but see a serious attempt to act with integrity. And that goes for all sides.

In one sense, I'm not surprised that this is occurring in the US, but I wouldn't put it down to Episcopalian American liberalism. Rather, in a culture still barely coming to grips with a long and horribly-recent history of slavery, racial segregation, and racism, it should be impossible for the Church not to wonder whether we're doing it again - only this time to another group identified as different in a different sort of way. That's not American hubris, but real humility, an awareness of the possibility of grave sin. Because, if there's any chance whatsoever that we're doing it yet again, then not to take it seriously, not to take the possibility that we, the Church, might be caught in a long, deep cycle of social sin - well that's dangerous to the soul, a real sin of omission, one that can be profoundly destructive to a great many people. In any event, taking it seriously means testing it, testing the direction the Episcopal Church is moving in to see whether it is 'of the Lord'...

What will be the reaction from those who are convinced that there is no possibility that actions of TEC are "of the Lord"? The bible. Here's Canon Cassidy's response:

...On some issues, though admittedly on only a few (say slavery, usury, the subservience of women to men, perhaps even capital punishment some day), we have departed from clear ethical prescriptions or clear permissive stances in both the New and Old Testaments. We did so for good reason, and we did so by appealing to other scripturally-based principles; but if we are to hold to the inerrancy of Scripture, it is essential, though far from easy, to distinguish between those affirmations whose truth is revealed for the sake of our salvation and those other matters that reflect the then-current faith of the people of Israel or of the early Church as it as developing. Once a single exception is made, then the possibility of further exceptions must be considered. Of course, if individuals aren't willing to grant the need to exercise such hermeneutical judgement, then the conversation is liable to falter before it begins...

He continues with a discussion of "ethical experimentation":

...I think it necessary to say explicitly that ethical experimentation is not imperiling people's souls. To think otherwise is to challenge our Creator, who made us fallible and far less than omniscient. We must explore and discover and create a moral universe, because morality is all about agency: morality is not 'out there' waiting to be discovered. Morality isn't codified in the way nature operates (natural law is about something quite different and is fundamentally about reasonableness, not normative patterns in nature). Giving credit to Aristotle, the good is what good people do. The challenge is to remain true to the dynamism of Christian discipleship, to stay on the road, rather than to stop along the way. And that means testing boundaries; it means sometimes re-receiving the received in a different way from the past...

Canon Cassidy also emphasizes something we have recently discussed here; the importance of building relationships:

...In all this, I am reminded of Stanley Hauerwas's article in Sanctify them in the Truth, where he challenges us to begin to think about such issues not with theology, but through friendship; and, in this case, through close, soul-to-soul friendships with gay people. This is an eminently experimental, and an uncommonly generous, approach. Unless we're willing to do that, unless we get a chance really to see the good that is claimed to occur in gay relationships, we're lacking some important hard data for doing serious theology. It's one thing, for instance, to debate whether it's right to practise medicine on the Sabbath, whether such things shouldn't be done on another day; but it's quite another thing to witness the joy of healing on the Sabbath, and then to wonder about the rules. And Hauerwas suggests that, when you are close friends with gay people, you might experience stories that sound strangely familiar, stories of being lost, of having felt excluded from God's grace, of self-hatred and disgust; stories of all these being transformed by unearned love; stories that sound tellingly like the Christian story; stories that suggest that we might all be part of the same story and so belong together. And you may also discover that, in hearing these stories, the Christian community is built-up, strengthened, nourished - which, for Hauerwas, is key for the discernment of whether homosexual relationships are good: Do they build up the community? And this question can't be answered in an a priori, abstract manner - not with serious Christian brothers and sisters claiming conflicting data. At the very least, such experiences ought to give one pause; and if they give one pause, the theological journey begins - you've got some real data to do a bit of theology. And the theological journey isn't a matter solely for those in favour of full inclusion; it's not just up to the Episcopal Church to prove their case, as Windsor seemed to imply. No, the theological challenge is for everyone: how do we account for these data? Perhaps the theological challenge is principally for those against: How do you account for these conflicting data? These data cannot be dismissed; they can be explained differently, but not dismissed. In the laboratory, conflicting, unexpected data are often the beginning of a discovery. True, experience does not lead ineluctably to understanding. Without asking the right questions, without having the right sort of hunches, without realising the significance of parts of our experience, no understanding emerges. No doubt these experiences of alleged grace can be understood in different ways, as I said, but they cannot be dismissed without risking calling something gracious something evil. And Jesus rather famously warned us about that. In fact, Jesus was himself a victim of precisely that sort of attitude....

He then confronts an issue that has been at the heart of many of the frustrations that have recently been given voice here at Jake's place; the matter of who is making the decisions:

...if you say further that, because of such disagreements, bishops need to be chosen from the heterosexual or celibate end of the things so that they can be symbols of unity, then you need to address gay people not by having bishops talk to bishops about gay people, but address gay people more directly - that is, if we're honest about gay people being part of the church.

I say this because the only good reason I can think of for asking the Episcopal Church to hold back, or to turn back, is if gay members of that church authorise their church to do so, by saying that they are willing as a group to suffer continued exclusion, at least for the time-being. In other words, unless we excommunicate sexually active gay people, they are part of our church: it is not up to us to exclude them from such things as episcopal governance, for they are us -- unless we have classes of membership, say a class for the more righteous and a class for the less righteous. But if we don't segregate people in such ways, it would be for them to decide sacrificially to exclude themselves as the cost of being part of a worldwide communion that cannot or will not change any time soon - if that's the right thing...

...We can only put that question to gay Christians with integrity if the rest of the Church is willing to act as sacrificially as we are calling others to act - which means, I think, that the Church has to be willing to abide by the answer gay people will give to such a request - an invitation to everyone to exercise real spiritual freedom, to reach for real holiness, to act as though we all had profound trust in our God who wants us, who requires us, to work our way through tough ethical issues. I say this because it may be supremely difficult for those who have been excluded to sanctify their continued exclusion by accepting this as a cross to be borne, as God's will for them for the time-being. Because that's what we're asking. If the Church has got it wrong, we, the Church, are asking those whom we have victimised to let us victimise them a bit (or a lot) longer for the sake of the Church; and we're saying that this is Christ's will for the time-being. And, strange as it may sound, as followers of the crucified and risen Jesus, this may well be what is being asked of them, of us. But they need to be asked...

Do take a few minutes to read the complete essay. What did you find noteworthy?

From Father Jake Stops the World...

***

I Believe Help Thou My Unbelief

On the Epistemology of Faith {Three Quarks Daily}

Phillip H. Wiebe reviews John Bishop's Believing by Faith:

Bishop revives the idea advanced by William James more than a century ago of following one's passions in religion when intellectual issues cannot be decided. Bishop offers a sophisticated statement of the conditions necessary for a responsible act of "taking as true" some claim for which evidence is incomplete or ambiguous, and in the course of so doing not only engages some recent interpretations of faith in James's famous "The Will to Believe," but also clarifies recent advocacy of the view that belief in the existence of God can be properly basic. He describes the book as arising out of an attempt to examine alternative concepts of God to the classical one in which God is considered to be the "supernatural, omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent Creator ex nihilo" -- the omniGod" (p. ix). Although he keeps classical theism in view, Bishop attempts to set out conditions for embracing virtually any theistic stance. His frequent reference to evangelical Christian faith, which requires putting faith in God as revealed in Jesus the Christ, suggests that he expects this version of theism to be familiar to his readers. Evangelical Christianity arouses strong passions -- for and against -- and it is often presented by adherents as something one might "believe by faith," so it serves Bishop's objectives. I will return to this topic.

One of the merits of Bishop's work is his drawing attention to the felt difference in human experience between such broadly cognitive-affective states as taking a claim to be true in practical reasoning, and other related states of mind such as believing a claim, trusting it, and accepting it (35-41). His discussion of the limited circumstances under which we can generate beliefs lends credence to the view that a central concept in understanding religious commitments is holding claims as true, rather than believing them. Bishop's phenomenological analysis of human acts belonging to religion adds to the knowledge of ourselves as unique, natural agents. Bishop is not the first to draw attention to important distinctions embedded in facile uses of such terms as 'faith' and 'believe', but his remarks strike me as especially insightful. The title of the book might lead one to expect an articulation of religion using these overused terms, but he does so without them. "Believing by faith" is not an effort expended in order to "make oneself believe" some claim for which the evidence is inconclusive, but consists of taking a claim to be true for practical purposes. This is the fideism that Bishop defends for those he describes as "reflective believers," that is, people who are interested in justifying their religious acts.

Posted by Robin Varghese

****

At first , belief is existential -- I catch ahold of something. and then (perhaps) we find evidence for belief. But first , you've got to leap. Belief doesn't even necessarily LOOK for evidence. It is an inner state, a consciousness that informs and teaches. The object of belief isn't important. Something deep down in the heart has been stirred up and is moving and stretching itself. It has its own process and its own timing. It wakes up and then finds that it has a task , a purpose. It was created with something to do.

***


“To change, a person must face the dragon of his appetites with another
dragon, the life-energy of the soul.”
-- Rumi

“A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear;
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.”
-- W.H. Auden “Look Before You Leap”

“Everything has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do. "
--Rumi

The Wall Within

"My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honour. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or a country, I grow cold and distrustful; a shudder comes over me, for already, while most of my fellow men are still weeping with rapture and enthusiasm, still cheering and venting protestations of brotherhood, I see blood flowing and cities going up in flames."

--Hermann Hesse

****
Ken Burns' The War has been at the back of my mind for awhile. I watched most of it a few weeks ago, out of sequence but still compelling for those of us who grew up in the shadow of our veteran dads, wondering about 'The War' that we all knew about but the larger mystery was why none of our dads ever talked about this war, this great achievement.

The media criticism I leave to those who have that sensibility ( see Obsidian Wings and The Next Hurrah)

I found the series a compelling meditation. My father (and his friends and our relatives) never talked about "the war" in the decades following. It's unspoken presence was the background music to most of our family's life together. I read about, watched films about and studied WW1 and WW2 but the personal aspects always contained so much mystery for me. Later, when my father got lost in the bottle for awhile and would rant and rave (when drunk) about "all the boys who died in the war" I just thought that it was bizarre. That script would then lead to the pointing finger and "if it weren't for the atomic bomb YOU (point for emphasis) wouldn't even BE here."

It is just recently (he's now 83) that he talks about the war all the time. He recently told me that he was in the first wave of army that went into Hiroshima after the atom bomb. Well, I never knew that. A lot of pieces of my life make more sense now. I asked him how old he was when he walked post-nuclear Hiroshima. He was 19. No one knew about PTSD. Hell, those of us raised in the 50s were raised by a bunch of guys with PTSD. And our politics and culture reflected it. The personal and the political are on different wave-lengths, but they are different and complementary ways of telling the same story. Burns isn't trying to make THE comprehensive WW2 series. How could he? His style is from another era, his vision as well. But, like he has said in interviews, we have this brief window before the guys like my old man die.

10 years ago they were still angry and not sayin'. Now, there's a little grace period where they want and need to tell their stories. If we listen well, and put their perspectives together with other things we have come to know and understand, perhaps people can learn still. I wept through a lot of the "war in the pacific" footage. The thousands of dead - the hellish conditions. I had no idea what my dad went through. He never said, and he was just 19 just a kid. How our family survived at all is amazing. I think the stories need to be told. Thanks to Ken Burns for doing it. May we not wait 60+ years to tell the tale of this current horror. It's the not telling that creates further horrors.

***

Just as last week I posted Judy Grahn's "A Woman Is Talking to Death", this week, I'd like to post another PTSD, 20th century lament, Steve Mason's "The Wall Within" .

Growing up, we spent every Veteran's Day and every Memorial Day in the town cemetery. I was in the Girl Scouts and marched in the color guard, white gloves and all. I got the gist of it, but I didn't understand because I was a kid. But all of us kids saw our father's faces, and the holy ground we stood on made its own impression.

****

The Wall Within

"Delivered at the commencement of the National Salute II in Washington, D.C. on November 10, 1984, as part of the official activities prior to the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial ("The Wall) as a national monument. It honors the personal list of love and loss that each American has marked in his/her heart. Poem entered into the Congressional, January 30, 1985." Johnny's Song: Poetry of a Vietnam Veteran. Steve Mason. (May 1986). Bantam Books.

The Wall Within

Most real men

hanging tough
in their early forties
would like the rest of us to think
they could really handle one more war
and two more women.
But I know better.
You have no more lies to tell.
I have no more dreams to believe.

I have seen it in your face
I am sure you have noticed it
in mine;
at the unutterable,
unalterable truth of our war.

The eye sees
what the mind believes.
And all that I know of war,
all that I have heard of peace,
has me looking over my shoulder
for that one bullet
which still has my name on it--
circling
round and round the globe
waiting and circling
circling and waiting
until I break from cover
and it takes its best, last shot.
In the absence of Time,
the accuracy of guilt is assured.
It is a cosmic marksman.

Since Vietnam,
I have run a zigzag course
across the open fields of America
taking refuge in the inner cities.
From Mac Arthur Park
to Washington Square
from Centennial Park
to DuPont Circle,
on the grassy, urban knolls of America
I have seen an army of combat veterans
hidden among the trees.
Veterans of all our recent wars.
Each a part of the best of his generation.
Waiting in his teeth for peace.

They do not lurk there
on the backs of park benches
drooling into their socks
above the remote, turtled back
of chess player playing soldiers.
They do not perch upon the gutter's lip
of midnight fountains
and noontime wishing wells
like surrealistic gargoyles
guarding the coins and simple wishes
of young lovers.
No.
I have seen them in the quiet dignity
of their aloneness.
Singly, in the confidence
of their own perspective.
And always at the edges of the clearing.
Patrolling like perimeter guards,
or observing as primitive gods,
each in his own way looks out to the park
that he might "see" in to the truth.

Some, like me
enjoy the comfortable base
of a friendly tree
that we might cock one eye
to the center of the park
toward the rearing bronze horsemen
of other wars
who would lead us backwards to glory.
Daily, they are fragged
by a platoon of disgruntled pigeons
saying it best for all of us.

And with the other eye,
we read the poetry of America the Beautiful
as she combs her midday hair
and eats precise shrimp sandwiches
and salad Nicoise catered by Tupperware--
and never leaves a single crumb.
No wonder America is the only country
in the world which doesn't smell like food.

...and I remember you and me
picnicking at the side
of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the rain
eating the Limas and Ham from the can
sitting easy in our youth and our strength
driving hard bargains with each other
for the C-ration goodies
we unwrapped like Christmas presents.
Somehow it really seemed to matter
what he got versus what you got.

It wasn't easy trading cheese and crackers
for chocolate-covered peanut butter cookies!
And the pound cake--Forget about it!
I knew a guy would cut a hole in it
and pretend it was a doughnut.
For six months I watched that
and refused to ask him about it.
I did finally. And you guessed it.
He hated pound cake.
And remember the water biscuit
that came in its own tin?--
I think they had the moxie to call it a cookie--
it came with the marmalade
and was made by that outfit in Chicago
we promised to burn to the ground someday.
Damn, how did your buddy, the animal,
ever eat that crap?
Then, we'd happily wash down the whole mess
with freckly-faced strawberry Kool-Aid
straight from the canteen
some days there'd be goofy grape
(anything to keep from choking
on the taste of purified water).
Bleck.
But somehow I sensed all the while
that I'd never be able to forgive myself
for enjoying your company so much
or being so good at the game we played.

We were the best--you and I.

In our parks
there are whole other armies of veterans
mostly young and mostly old
but always ageless
who are not alone.
They share with their families
and their friends
these open-aired
above-ground time capsules
of our national culture.
They read aloud to themselves
and their children
from the plaques and statues
monuments and markers
those one-line truths
of our common experience
as if there could be a real significance
in words like Love and Hate tattooed
on the clenched, granite fists of America.

Sometimes, when I am angry
it seems as if I could start my own country
with the same twenty Spill and Spell words
we shake out at the feet of our heroes
like some crone spreading her hands
over the runes prior to a mystic reading.
Words like:
peace and sacrifice, war and young
supreme and duty, service and honor
country, nation, men and men and men again,
sometimes God and don't forget women!
Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines and freedom.

Then, just as quickly, the anger passes
and reverence takes its place.
Those are good words, noble words, solemn
& sincere.
It is the language of Death
which frightens me;
it is unearthly to speak life concepts
over the dead.
Death is inarticulately final
refusing forever to negotiate.

That, and the awesome responsibility
we place eternally on our fallen
teenage sons,
seems unbearably heavy
against the lengthening prancing
shadows of Sunday's frisbees.

Apparently, there is no period
which can be placed after sacrifice.
All life is struggle.
an act of natural balance
and indomitable courage.
As it is with man
so it is with mankind.

If we permit Memorial Day
to come to us every day,
we ignore the concept of sacrifice
and dilute its purpose.
When we do that
we incur the responsibility
to effect change.
If we are successful,
the sacrifice has renewed meaning
It seems there is no alternative to life.
But there may be to war...

The values of our society
seem to be distributed in our parks
and find only confusion and sadness.
Strange, I have observed no monuments
to survivors.
No obelisk to mark the conflict
of those who risked
and lived perhaps to fight again
or perhaps to speak of peace.
Nowhere, yet, a wall for the living.
There is no wonder
guilt is the sole survivor of war.
We do not celebrate life after combat
because our concept of glory
lives neither in victory nor in peace
but in Death.

The are plaques at the doorsteps
of skyscrapers;
in New York on the 10th and the Avenue
of the Americas it reads:

IN MEMORY OF THOSE

FROM

GREENWICH VILLAGE

WHO MADE THE SUPREME SACRIFICE

IN THE KOREAN CONFLICT

1950-1053

In Nashville's Centennial Park
in a shaded wood
to one side of the Parthenon
built to scale and to the glory
which was Greece,
a small statue stands;
it is inscribed:

I GAVE MY BEST

TO MAKE A BETTER WORLD

1917-1918

I stood there one fall
ankle deep in leaves
and looked up at the night sky
through a hole in a ceiling of trees
wondering how much better the world
might look from up there.

From the moon
only one manmade object
can be viewed by the naked eye:
The Great Wall of China
(a tribute to man's functional paranoia).
It's a peculiar perspective
because we're a lot closer
and the only manmade object we see
is THE Wall in Washington, D.C.
(the veterans' solemn pledge to remember)

There is one other wall, of course.
One we never speak of.
One we never see,
One which separates memory from madness.
In a place no one offers flowers.
THE WALL WITHIN.
We permit no visitors.

Mine looks like any of a million
nameless, brick walls--
it stands in the tear-down ghetto of my soul;
that part of me which reason avoids
for fear of dirtying its cloths
and from atop which my sorrow and my rage
hurl bottles and invectives
at the rolled-up windows
of my passing youth.

Do you know the wall I mean?

I learned of mine that night in the rain
when I spoke at the memorial in Washington.
We all noticed how the wall ran like tears
and every man's name we found
on the polished, black granite face
seemed to have our eyes staring back at us,
crying.
It was haunting.
later I would realize
I had caught my first glimpse
of the Wall Within.
And those tears were real.

You and I do not walk about the Wall Within
like Hamlet on the battlements.
No one with our savvy
would expose himself like that
especially to a frightened, angry man.
Suicide loiters in our subconscious
and bears a grudge; an assassin
on hashish. We must be wary.
No. We sit there legless in our immobility
rolling precariously in our self-pity
like ugly Humpty Dumpties
with disdain even for the king's horses
as we lean over the ledge to write
upside down with chalk, bleached white
with our truth
the names of all the other casualties
of the Vietnam War
(our loved one)
the ones Pentagon didn't put in uniform
but died anyway.
Some because they stopped being who
they always were
just as truly as if they'd found
another way to breathe.
Others, because they did die
honest-to-God casualties of the
Vietnam War
because they lost the will
to breathe at all.

My mother gave her first recital
at Carnegie Hall at age eleven.
Sometimes, when I was a boy
I'd watch her play the piano
and wonder if, God, after all, was not a woman.
One evening when I was in the bush
she turned on the 6:00 news
and died of a heart attack.

My mother's name is on the Wall Within.

You starting to get the idea?
Our lists may be different
but shoulder to shoulder
if we could find the right flat cloud
on a perfect, black night
we could project our images
upon a god-size drive-in theatre
wide enough to race Ben Hur across
for a thousand years...

Because the Wall Within
adds up the true cost of war...

We can recite 58,012 in our sleep
even the day after they update it,
but how many of those KIA had kids?
How many of them got nice step-dads?
Whose wall do they go on?

And what about you vets
who came home to your wife and kids
only to divorce her because
there wasn't anyone to be angry at?
How many dimes
have you heard long-distance fathers
dropped into the slot
to hear how another man
was raising your children?
Yeah, Yeah, I can hear you hollerin',
"Put it on the wall! Put it on the wall!"
Damn right, it's on the wall...
And you remember how that came down?
you told the three year old
his daddy loved him
and his mommy loved him
and nothing would ever change that.
But it did anyway.
But not because you didn't love him enough,
but because you loved him too much
to be a part-time daddy.
And you couldn't explain that to him
because you couldn't explain it to you.
What the hell? I mean who were you,
Spinoza? You came home a twenty-two-year-old
machine gunner for chrissake,
you did the best you could.

PUT IT ON THE WALL!!

And somewhere, in an art gallery, maybe
is a portrait of American Grieving Parenthood.
Handholding, Rockwellian caricatures
of wisdom and forbearance
and oh yes, pride
sitting on the front porch
of the township
waving their lemonades
at the Greyhound bus driver.
Baloney. The names go UP!
Because every time you can't find Mom,
you damn well better call Doc Smith
'cause she's up on the second floor again
sitting on the floor in Johnny's closet
smelling his Varsity sweater
with the sleeves around her shoulders
sobbing something maybe only Johnny ever
understood.

But don't worry about dad,
who never fished again,
or watched a ballgame on TV again
and won't talk to anyone this year
between the ages of thirty and forty.
He's doing fine.
He just doesn't exercise
as much as he should,
but Doc Smith assures us there's no medical
reason why the folks should have
separate bedrooms;

Dad just likes to read a lot these days.

If you and I were men of common conscious
we might agree on a collective dedication
to our Walls Within.
As for me
they could all read:
This wall is dedicated
to mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers,
wives, husbands,
sons, daughters,
lovers, friends,
and most of all dreams
of the men and women
who risked it all in Vietnam
while you continued to lose them
during and after the war
with less a chance than they for a parade
and no chance at all for an explanation.

You lost them to bullets, internment,
drugs, suicide, alcohol, jail, PTS[D]
Divorce, but never never did you any of you
ever lose them to the truth
which is now being shared
across this great nation
in such an act of spontaneous
moral courage, its like many never
have been seen on any battlefield
in the history of mankind....

Amen to that, brother.

***********************

You can find "The Wall Within" in the book (or cassette) entitled Johnny's Song: Poetry of a Vietnam Veteran by Steve Mason (May 1986).A Bantam Book.

The dedication reads:

"Dedicated
to all of us
who know the true cost
of war
and have paid the price."

Steve Mason died at age 65 on March 25th, 2005 in Ashland, OR of lung cancer from AO exposure. Steve was a decorated Vietnam Veteran, poet, Poet Laureate of the VVA (Vietnam Veterans of America) and spokesman for so many.

Komm Du

Komm du, du letzter, den ich anerkenne,
heilloser Schmerz im leiblichen Geweb:
wie ich im Geiste brannte, sieh, ich brenne
in dir; das Holz hat lange widerstrebt,
der Flamme, die du loderst, zuzustimmen,
nun aber nähr’ ich dich und brenn in dir.
Mein hiesig Mildsein wird in deinem Grimmen
ein Grimm der Hölle nicht von hier.
Ganz rein, ganz planlos frei von Zukunft stieg
ich auf des Leidens wirren Scheiterhaufen,
so sicher nirgend Künftiges zu kaufen
um dieses Herz, darin der Vorrat schwieg.
Bin ich es noch, der da unkenntlich brennt?
Erinnerungen reiß ich nicht herein.
O Leben, Leben: Draußensein.
Und ich in Lohe. Niemand der mich kennt.

You, the last I recognize; return,
pain beyond help that sears the body’s cells:
as I burnt in the spirit, see, I burn
in you; the wood, that for so long rebels
against the flame you kindle, comes of age;
behold, I nourish you and burn in you.
My earthly mildness changes in your rage
into a rage of hell I never knew.
Quite pure, quite planless, of all future free,
I climbed the stake of suffering, resolute
not to acquire what is still to be
to clad this heart whose stores had become mute.
Is it still I that burns there all alone?
Unrecognizable? memories denied?
O life, o life: being outside.
And I in flames—no one is left—unknown.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, Komm Du. . . (1926) in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 511 (1956)(adapted by S.H. from a transl. by Walter Kaufmann [presumed], Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 1975)(this was Rilke’s last poem, written about ten days before his death)

[Permanent link]

Rilke’s Last Encounter With an Angel

History knows several tales concerning great artists on their death beds, straining with superhuman strength to complete a final last work, a work filled with pathos and a great sense of mortality. The best known of these, perhaps, is the tale of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor, KV 626. In the Romantic era, the circumstances surrounding the creation of this work were mystified. Death, it was said, paid a call to Mozart to commission it, and Mozart fully understood the circumstances. He was, it was said, writing his own requiem. Of course, spoil-sport academics have since documented that the piece was commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg, who wanted to pass it off as his own, and who had used a series of cloaked intermediaries to disguise the fact that he was the patron. The Requiem is, nonetheless, a magnificent work, one of Mozart’s greatest. It would have that position with or without the legend. And notwithstanding Count von Walsegg and his artifices, one does have a great sense of reconciliation to death in this work. It is extraordinary in that respect, much like Bach’s great cantata “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit” (Actus Tragicus, BWV 106).

One has to wonder about Rilke’s last poem, “Komm du,” in much the same way. This was found as the last entry in his last notebook. It is accordingly unclear whether Rilke considered the poem to be a finished work or merely something in progress. In fact, there is a notation at the end which may be taken as a note Rilke scribbled to himself:

Verzicht. Das ist nicht so wie Krankheit war
einst in der Kindheit. Aufschub. Vorwand um
größer zu werden. Alles rief und raunte.
Misch nicht in dieses was dich früh erstaunte

Relinquishment. It’s not the way sickness was
once in childhood. Procrastination. A pretense
in order to be greater. Cries and murmurs.
Don’t mix into this the things that surprised you early on.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 511.

So I don’t take it as a given that the work was brought to fruition in Rilke’s mind. Nevertheless, this poem is amazing. It is one of the greatest poems in the German language, or in any other. And it has the distinctive character of finality about it, not in the sense of being completed, but rather of being a last work. It does not reach to being completed. To the contrary, it aims to be and is transitional, passing from one state to another. That indeed appears in the very first words, “Komm du, du letzter”: a voice summons or beckons. This poem wears the lack of finality like a sort of accomplishment in itself.

Rilke’s poems are notoriously complex and susceptible of differing interpretations. And that is particularly true for this one. Translating the poem is also highly problematic. In fact this was recently the subject of a fascinating series of exchanges in the New York Review of Books in which three different efforts to render the poem into English are discussed. Let’s consider first the voice in which the poem intones. It could of course be seen as the poet’s voice, and the “you” could be death. That may in fact be the most conventional reading. But it doesn’t strike me as the most plausible one.

For several reasons, I see this poem in the background of the Duineser Elegien. Rilke wrote that walking the land around the castle at Duino, he believed he encountered an angel. The incident was recorded in the memoirs of his hostess, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, from January of 1912:

Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, jutting to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs. These cliffs fall steeply, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Rilke paced back and forth, deep in thought, since the reply to the letter so concerned him. Then, all at once, in the midst of his brooding, he halted suddenly, for it seemed to him that in the raging of the storm a voice had called to him: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?)… He took out his notebook, which he always carried with him, and wrote down these words, together with a few lines that formed themselves without his intervention … Very calmly he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and replied to the difficult letter. By that evening the entire elegy had been written down.

Throughout human history there are no shortage of tales of poets taking inspiration from angelic figures, and indeed the concept of the poetic “muse” has this derivation. But I’m not aware of another incident in the twentieth century in which an angel appeared and offered the opening lines of a poem—indeed, the first Duinese Elegy, what turns out to be generally recognized as one of the great poems of the century. And while the elegy was dated by various correspondence to a January evening in 1912, Rilke did not in fact put it forward for publication until 1922, just four years before his death, and before the composition of “Komm du.”

But the voice that sounded at the cliffs of Duino is, in my mind, the same voice which is speaking in this, Rilke’s last poem. The key for this is a signature image: fire. “Wie ich im Geiste brannte, sieh, ich brenne” (l. 3); “das Holz hat lange widerstrebt,/der Flamme” (l. 4-5); “brenn in die” (l. 6); “unkenntlich brennt” (l. 13). In a celebrated letter from 1925, Rilke told one of his translators that she should not make the mistake of understanding the angel referred to in the elegies as a Christian angel. To the contrary, this angel was quite distinctly drawn from an Islamic tradition. Rilke writes that in the months before his trip to Duino, he had traveled in Spain and had been consumed with reading the Qu’ran and a book on the life of the Prophet Mohammed. It seems fairly clear that this occurred under the influence of his friend Lou Andreas-Salomé, whose husband, Friedrich Carl Andreas, was a leading scholar of Islamic culture in the Russian Empire, particularly including Naqshibandiyya. Rilke was absorbed with Islam, and it left traces throughout his poetry, especially in the Duineser Elegien–and in this poem. But to a modern reader, this is bound to seem trite and absurd, all this talk of angels. So we need to start by remembering that the Islamic angel is something quite different from the Hallmark greeting card variety.

In Islam, belief in angels is one of the six articles of faith. By Islamic tradition, angels are composed of light, they are intangible, beings, who lack a free will. Their sole purpose of existence is to serve God. Being made of light, they can assume almost any form, completely real to the human eye, and traverse a distance just as fast as light or faster. One of the angels, Ezra’eil (عزرایل) is associated with death and dying. By legend, he appears to the dying to separate them from their mortal remains. The angel is associated with fire, and is sometimes portrayed as burning (though in Islamic tradition, the quality of fire more properly belongs to the jinn [ جني ] which does have a free will and is seen as something dark and evil). Hence, the use of the metaphor of fire throughout this poem can be seen as a Leitmotiv for the Duino angel. The key role of the angel is its ability to pass between the two worlds and to appear to and be understood by humans, or at least some humans.

Whereas the first elegy is marked by the angel’s challenge, the ninth elegy opens the question of death—and specifically how an artist should live and work with death in prospect. It presents the notion of life in two unclearly defined realms: one being the world of normal human existence, and the other being the ethereal realm of the angel, the unknowable world that exists beyond. The poet, Rilke tells us, obviously lives in the former world, but gains insight from the contemplation of the angel’s world. And in the ninth elegy, Rilke comes back to his angel as death. He calls the angel an “intimate companion.”

So in this final poetic work, Rilke again has heard his angel call to him. It is a time of separation and transition. “Bin ich es noch, der da unkenntlich brennt?” he asks, Is it still I who burns there unrecognizably? Rilke flags the state of transition (the curious word “noch”), he asks on which side of the “great unbounded realm” he stands. And the burning is of course an act of physical transformation; of change from flesh and bones to the Abrahamic dust and ashes.

But why would it be an Islamic angel? And why, if it is an Islamic angel, does Rilke use what his readership will certainly see as Christian images? Hölle (hell) and Geist (spirit), for instance, and the post scriptum’s reference to Verzicht? And why does he develop all of this in a Middle European, and thus Christian, poetical form? I don’t see clear answers to this riddle. In fact, much as I contemplate it, it all continues to be quite mysterious. But a few clear points emerge. Rilke is not satisfied with Christian doctrine and dogma, especially with respect to ontological questions. He finds the Islamic concepts and symbols to be more aesthetically compelling and better suited to his art. And he also holds the Islamic world and its culture in very high regard, and is sickened by the contemptuous attitudes of most Europeans towards Islam. It’s certainly not the case that Rilke is an inner convert to Islam.

But it is the case that he seeks a cultural, or perhaps a spiritual convergence in which Islam and the West are reconciled. (And indeed, from the time of his travels in Spain it was clear that he had the image of the golden age of al-Andalus before him. Spain, and that apogee of Spanish culture, were the reconciliation of Islam and the West.) Rilke’s voyage starts in a castle dramatically perched above the Adriatic Sea, on the soil of the Danubian monarchy. But within six years, that world had perished–and with it the entire social order that Rilke had grown to know. The forces of cultural pessimism were taking a deep political hold over Middle Europe. There was a feeling of despair about the old world and its values. And it is against this background that Rilke undertook his cultural peregrinations into the Islamic mind. It was a search for a different understanding, one closer to the poet’s inate sense of the roles of death and transfiguration. And that very curious message seems wound up in this last poem, just as it weaves its way through the Duineser Elegien. The poet meets death, to be sure. But the poet is also very concerned about cultural reconciliation and is stirred by a very troubled vision of the struggle that Europe and the world have ahead of themselves. These qualities make for a work which is more modern than romantic. This poem is an ultimate act of transcendence.

[Permanent link]

Enlightenment

THANK YOU AND OK!: An American Zen Failure in Japan, by David Chadwick

“I carried David Chadwick’s Thank You and OK! in my backpack to and from work for a month. I looked forward to the moments I would be able to sit on the train and read a chapter or two. This book was perfect train reading except for when the momentary forgetfulness that accompanies a good book overtook me and I laughed out loud to the chagrin of my fellow passengers or when I nearly forgot to disembark at my stop.

“Anyone who has pursued a serious meditative practice for a length of time has probably witnessed the unchallenged methods that can plague spiritual institutions of long standing. In Chadwick’s book he reveals these tendencies without judgment but with detail, humor, and kindness. Chadwick’s description of the monks and their rapport is extremely engaging because it is without glamour or rapture. It reads like a very authentic slice of monastic life. Equally compelling are the anecdotes from his English language students and the diverse perspectives from every walk of Japanese life.

“Most American travelers have a unique view regarding personal space and individuation. Whether we travel to China, India, or Japan, we notice that we are not so good at blending in because we are taught to stand out and be individuals. Thank You and OK! shows us a thoughtful American who gracefully enters a Japanese community with respectful warmth and with results that are anything but predictable. It is an adventure I highly recommend.”

—Elizabeth Doshi, Foreign Rights and Permissions Coordinator

****

This book was written at least a decade ago, but it is a timeless classic that I have shared with my son's generation . Chadwick is a wonderful writer who also authored "Crooked Cucumber" the bio of Suzuki Roshi .

This thing that makes the book fun is the author's humility and humor as well as the wonderful eye of the stranger who sees everything like a Martian dropping to earth. The gentle fun of the book points us towards the truth that as far as we go and as hard as we search for enlightenment, we are actually searching for something that is within us. Wherever we are, we must face into our own hearts and minds, our own fears and humiliations.

I participated in a conversation once where people were talking about their fears, lying awake and imagining all the things that could go wrong. One person said that yes she used to do that but doesn't any more. She was asked what she did to change, and , thinking for a moment, she replied, "Well I guess everything I worried about has happened." The interesting thing is, it's never so bad as your imagination makes it. Just like the joy of anticipation is many times so much more delicious than the event itself.

The recent NYTimes bestseller, "Pray, Eat, Love" with it's passion! enlightenment! exotic experiences and locales! Good food! No money worries! falls flat next to "Thank You and Ok!"

I just didn't believe her. Maybe her experiences were real, and had something to teach us in their sharing, but the voice we hear in "Thank You and Ok!" isn't trying to be the hero of his story. It isn't really about him. Like a good observer or interviewer, he kind of disappears and we are left with what it is that he is seeing , feeling, experiencing and reflecting upon. And that reflection reflects --- me and everyone that I know. The spiritual journey with all it's hilarious pitfalls, stupidities, heartaches, misunderstandings, and gentle openings of heart and mind.

Enlightenment. "It's not what you think."

***

"The Catch-22 of Zen."—Daniel Leighton, author of Faces of Compassion

“Asked why Zen was brought from India to China, master Zhao Zhou replied, 'The oak tree in the garden.' This is exactly what Chadwick gives us here—no grand sweeping statements about the 'real' nature of Zen or Japan—just specific experience rendered with a peculiar intensity that lingers in your memory. The writing is excellent. The artistic integrity is the very finest.”—Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"Totally delightful—fantastic couch potato Zen. Chadwick saves you the trouble of going to Japan by making all the mistakes for you."—Jack Kornfield

***

Technology

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau

©2007 G.B. Trudeau

Three Are Ye, Three Are We

This story is from the now discontinued but well remembered Subversive Christianity blog.

I love this parable by Tolstoy.

Once a learned Bishop was traveling by ship from Archangel to the great monastery at Solovetsk. As the ship neared an obscure island along the way, the captain told the bishop that three old hermits had spent their entire lives on it in deep prayer. The bishop was intrigued, and insisted on visiting the hermits. So the captain dropped anchor and the bishop was rowed to the island in a small dinghy.

The three hermits were ancient, with white beards down to their knees, and they were dressed in rags. They greeted the bishop, bowing to the ground. He blessed them, and then asked them how they served God on their tiny bit of island. They replied that they had no idea how to serve God. They just served one another. Well then, the bishop asked, how do you pray? They replied that they simply lifted their arms heavenward and chanted: "Three are ye, three are we, have mercy upon us."

The bishop was alarmed at all this, and he spent the rest of the day teaching the three aged hermits the Lord's Prayer and the rudiments of theology. But they were slow learners, and the bishop had to keep repeating his lessons.

As the sun was setting, the bishop bade the hermits farewell and returned to the ship. But as it sailed away from the island, he saw something that filled him with awe and fear. The three hermits were running after the ship, on water, as if they were on dry land. When they caught up with the ship, they bowed down and humbly begged the bishop to remind them of how the Lord's Prayer went, because they'd already forgotten it. The bishop crossed himself and, in tears, told the hermits to continue with their old way of praying because they had no need of his poor instruction. Then he bowed deeply before them, and asked for their blessing. After giving it, the hermits ran back across the sea to their island, and a light shone until daybreak on the spot where they were lost to sight.

In the Latin West, since at least Augustine, theology--sometimes called the "science of God" by its practitioners--for the most part has been understood as episteme--science and reasoning--with just a dash of gnosis--silence, contemplative insight, grace. Western theology, from Augustine, through Aquinas and the Scholastics, through Reformation thinkers such as Luther and Calvin, to present-day ones (many of whom are of an evangelicalistic bent), seeks to explain the ways of God by employing methods and categories derived from philosophy and the sciences. To be a theologian, therefore, you've got to be real head-smart. Theology becomes theory. Theology becomes systematic. Theology becomes "cosmological" or "natural." Theology becomes comprehensive. Theology, if one isn't real careful, becomes God-in-a-Box.

But in the Greek East, theology has almost never been seen as an episteme-heavy "science." Instead, theology is primarily gnosis. Its proper origin is the heart, not the head. The rule of thumb was formulated in the 4th century by Evagrius Pontus: "The one who has purity in prayer is true theologian, and the one who is true theologian has purity in prayer." The point isn't that episteme is to be foresworn by Christians, but rather that talking about God needs to come from right living as well as right thinking. Merely reading a lot of theology books (as I do) doesn't make one a theologian. Living a godly life (as, God help me, I don't), even if one's never read a single theology book, bestows a gnosis that enables one to experience God in the heart as the three old hermits in Tolstoy's parable did. And that makes each of them more of a theologian than the learned bishop who thought it his duty to tutor them. Heart knowledge, not merely or even predominantly head knowledge, is the key. That's why the Orthodox tradition sees St. John the Evangelist as the greatest of all theologians, and is extremely wary of Western-style systematic theology.*

This is a bitter pill for many academic theologians and book-munchers (like myself) to swallow. But it seems to me that we'd do well to ask ourselves a couple of questions. Which do we really yearn for in our heart of hearts: to write learned tomes and deliver acclaimed lectures, or to sprint on water? Which is more revelatory: knowing how to say the Lord's Prayer in Coptic, or childlike prayers such as "Three are ye, three are we..."?

_______

*I wonder, by the way, if this isn't part of the reason why so many people in my own Anglican tradition feel a deep affinity with Orthodoxy. Anglicanism, after all, is also wary of systematics.

***

I felt the need for a beautiful picture, like the one at the top of this post of Skellig Michel.

I'm in a workshop all day tomorrow.

I got to drive out of the city today up to where there was a horizon and mountain glimpses. The clouds were in motion whipping up erratic patterns . Traffic moved fast. I'd never been to that part of the state. Just a glimpse of beauty but it represented a shift from the personal ("my experience") to a broader field of experience that was felt and shared. I thought of all the people alive on earth right now and all that I had to feel grateful for.


Eternal Friend,
Witness that I forgive anyone
Who hurt or upset me
Or who offended me
Damaging my body, my property
My reputation
Or people that I love;
Whether by accident or on purpose;
With words, deeds
Thoughts, or attitudes;
In this lifetime
Or in another incarnation -
I forgive every person,
May no one be punished because of me.

(from Torah Journeys, by Shefa Gold)

Between Voice and Presence

Rumi's
"Laziest Son"

A man on his deathbed left instructions
For dividing up his goods among his three sons.
He had devoted his entire spirit to those sons.
They stood like cypress trees around him,
Quiet and strong.
He told the town judge,
“Whichever of my sons is laziest,
Give him all the inheritance.”

Then he died, and the judge turned to the three,
“Each of you must give some account of your laziness,
so I can understand just how you are lazy.”

Mystics are experts in laziness. They rely on it,
Because they continuously see God working all around them. The harvest keeps coming in, yet they
Never even did the plowing!

“Come on. Say something about the ways you are lazy.”

Every spoken word is a covering for the inner self.
A little curtain-flick no wider than a slice
Of roast meat can reveal hundreds of exploding suns.
Even if what is being said is trivial and wrong,
The listener hears the source. One breeze comes
From across a garden. Another from across the ash-heap.
Think how different the voices of the fox
And the lion, and what they tell you!

Hearing someone is lifting the lid off the cooking pot.
You learn what’s for supper. Though some people
Can know just by the smell, a sweet stew
From a sour soup cooked with vinegar.

A man taps a clay pot before he buys it
To know by the sound if it has a crack.

The eldest of the three brothers told the judge,
“I can know a man by his voice,
and if he won’t speak,
I wait three days, and then I know him intuitively.”

The second brother, “I know him when he speaks,
And if he won’t talk, I strike up a conversation.”

“But what if he knows that trick?” asked the judge.

Which reminds me of the mother who tells her child
“When you’re walking through the graveyard at night
and you see a boogeyman, run at it,
and it will go away.”

“But what,” replies the child, “if the boogeyman’s
Mother has told it to do the same thing?
Boogeymen have mothers too.”

The second brother had no answer.

“I sit in front of him in silence,
And set up a ladder made of patience,
And if in his presence a language from beyond joy
And beyond grief begins to pour from my chest, I know that his soul is as deep and bright
As the star Canopus rising over Yemen.
And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm
Of words sweeping down, I know him from what I say,
And how I say it, because there’s a window open
Between us, mixing the night air of our beings.”

The youngest was, obviously,
The laziest. He won.

* * *

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

Or cultural system. I am not from the East
Or the West, not out of the ocean or up

From the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
Composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

Am not an entity in this world or the next,
Did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

Origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
Of the traceless. Neither body nor soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
Worlds as one and that one call to and know,

First, last, outer, inner, only that
Breath breathing human being.

There is a way between voice and presence
Where information flows.

In disciplined silence it opens,
With wandering talk it closes.

–Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Rumi) (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی), Masnavi-ye Manavi (ca. 1265)(Coleman Barks transl.)

[Permanent link]

***

A Rumination on the ‘Laziest Son’

No Comment
Scott Horton

If we had to craft a list of the ten greatest poets of human history, then certainly this thirteenth-century Muslim theologian, who began his life in modern day Afghanistan and ended it in what later became Turkey, would have an assured position on the list. And as for universality—what better measure than the fact that in 2004, Rumi ranked in surveys as the best read poet in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and, thanks to the brilliant translations of Coleman Barks, the United States. As with any Rumi poem, this one has many layers of meaning to it. But here’s my understanding.

Like Boccaccio’s ring story in the Decameron (the third from the cycle of the first day) or Lessing’s parable from Nathan the Wise (act 3, scene 4)– this choice of virtue among three sons should be immediately understood (and certainly would have been understood by a contemporary of Rumi’s) this way: which of the three faiths “of the Book” is the true faith? The father is, of course, the God of the Book, and the sons, “tall like Cypresses,” are Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Rumi echoes that in the follow-on (”Not Christian, Jew or Muslim…”) And to this question Rumi offers several answers, mostly laden with irony. He tells us that professed belief counts for little, particularly if not sincerely held. “I can know a man by his voice,” says the eldest son, who is promptly ejected from the contest. (But compare this with the wiser man—as Rumi reminds us, the clay pot must be tapped to test for a crack; the buyer who relies on the outward appearance alone is a fool). And, like Boccaccio and Lessing, he says that it is our conduct that matters and must ultimately provide the basis for a judgment.

But on this point the irony of a Sufi mystic kicks in. For conduct, Rumi takes “laziness,” for which here I see the introspective process of truth-seeking that is Rumi’s hallmark, and that of the Mevlevi Brotherhood which he helped define. It involves discipline and rigor (”disciplined silence”), but to the uninitiated it must, of course, seem nothing but “laziness.” (”Mystics are experts in laziness.”) Can you hear the laughter? Rumi mocks himself, or at least, shows that he has a sense of humor.

Importantly, Rumi warns us against demonization of the outsider, of the nonbeliever (the “boogeyman,” who, he reminds us through the voice of a child, “has a mother, too.”) The man who distinguishes among his species on the basis of outward labels (claims to be Muslim, Christian or Jew, for instance), is a fool. What counts is not this profession of faith but the conduct and the content of the character of the individual. And conversely, those who draw distinctions through the species on the basis of these labels are fools, for the real truth-seekers can be found in each community.

But back to our question. Who is the chosen son? In the end we learn that it is “the youngest son,” and the youngest of the three faiths is, of course, Islam. But this is not Rumi’s ultimate meaning. The true answer is to point to the false premise of the question. The answer lies in what unites, not in what divides humankind—what ties humans one to another and to the world in which they live. A Sufi faithful would know this as the doctrine of the oneness of God, tauhid. Hence, the right answer: “there’s a window open/ Between us, mixing the night air of our beings.” Those who are driven by differentiation and false pride for their religious choice—whatever the religious choice—have failed the test in the most miserable way.

And on this point, Rumi, Boccaccio and Lessing—the Muslim, the Catholic, and the Protestant who launched the drive for the emancipation of Europe’s Jews—see things very much eye-to-eye. But their message is a vital one for our day. We live in an age in which thoughts of crusaders and caliphates have been resurrected for shameful and blood-drenched purposes. This must be overcome with urgency.

In our day the Middle East is riven with bloodshed and violence, and the immediate prospects before us are for more violence still. Against this we must strive to remember Rumi’s message: a plea for tolerance, compassion and respect for the ties that bind humankind. The land in which Rumi once walked spans the present zone of conflict—from his native city of Balkh in Afghanistan to his final home in Anatolian Konya. This land is in great need of Rumi’s vision and compassion. And that is no less true for the United States, where the poison of religious bigotry seeps ever closer to the groundwater. I hope we all can find that way “between voice and presence” of which Rumi writes. We need it badly. “With disciplined silence it opens/ With wandering talk it closes.” Rumi wants us to make one resolve: to find the tools to keep that window open. There is nothing that humanity requires more urgently than this.

Originally published on Balkinization, Dec. 30, 2006.

[Permanent link]

I Nearly Lost Compassion For My Captors

From Just a Bump in the Beltway;

Boddisatva Vow

Dalai Lama Visits Northwest D.C. Shelter

By Michelle Boorstein and Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 19, 2007; 3:18 PM

Twelve women, homeless and struggling with sobriety, clung tearfully to each other in the presence of the world-famous monk. The Dalai Lama spoke warmly to each of them as he beamed and bowed his way around the room. He poked briefly at the metal stud adorning one woman's chin, an accessory which, he admitted later, left him feeling "a little cautious."

"We are same human beings, we all have the same good potential. It's very important to realize that," the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet told the circle of residents, who are part of a weekly meditation program at the N Street Shelter near Logan Circle in Northwest Washington.

Speaking to a larger crowd at the shelter moments later, the exiled spiritual leader extolled the benefits of compassion. Like the women of N Street, he noted, "I myself am also homeless."

The shelter visit this morning marked the last day of the Dalai Lama's five-day sojourn to Washington, which otherwise focused mostly on politics, diplomacy and ceremony. The maroon-robed monk, a 1989 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, met privately with President Bush on Tuesday, and on Wednesday was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal, in recognition of his decades-long struggle for autonomy and religious freedom for the people of Tibet.

From the women's shelter, he was driven to the State Department for a meeting with Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte, his last official business before leaving the United States today.

Wherever he went, there were crowds and adulation, from the Capitol Rotunda to the West Lawn of the Capitol to the gala hosted last night by the International Campaign for Tibet and its board chairman, actor and longtime Buddhist Richard Gere.

But at the shelter, where the Dalai Lama conducted a brief small "teaching" with the meditation group and then a larger session that included residents, former residents and shelter donors, his talk of empathy -- especially for the poor -- took on a special relevance.

"The practice of compassion is of immense benefit," the Dalai Lama said to about 300 onlookers. Gesturing to a few rows filled with shelter residents, he said the women were his "gurus."

Several of the women said they had benefited enormously from the shelter's meditation program, which they said stabilized them and helped make it possible for them to stay away from drugs and alcohol and regain mental health.

******

Gospel

The Dalai Lama tells the story of meeting with a Tibetan monk who'd just been released from years of forced labor and redoctrination in a Chinese prison camp. The monk's ordeal had left him in pretty bad physical shape.
While talking to the Dalai Lama, the monk let slip that he'd come close to disaster three or four times during his imprisonment.
"What happened?" asked the Dalai Lama, expecting tales of near-execution, torture, punishment.
"I nearly lost compassion for my captors," the monk replied.

Where Is God In This?

Let Everything Happen

By Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

*********

Real Silence

By Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Silence is the simple stillness of the individual under the Word of God. We are silent before hearing the Word because our thoughts are already directed to the Word, as a child is quiet when he enters his father’s room. We are silent after hearing the Word because the Word is still speaking and dwelling within us. We are silent at the beginning of the day because God should have the first word, and we are silent before going to sleep because the last word also belongs to God….

Silence is nothing else but waiting for God’s Word and coming from God’s Word with a blessing. But everybody knows that this is something that needs to be practiced and learned, in these days when talkativeness prevails. Real silence, real stillness, really holding one’s tongue comes only as the sober consequence of spiritual stillness.

Life Together

**********

Housing Shortage

Naomi Replansky



I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
I tried to step carefully
And to think softly
And to breathe shallowly
In my portion of air
And to disturb no one.

Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it.
I take to myself more and more, and I take nothing
That I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds,
All over and invading; I clutter this place.
With all the apparatus of living.
You stumble over it daily.

And then my lungs take their fill.
And then you gasp for air.
Excuse me for living,
But, since I am living,
Given inches, I take yards,
Taking yards, dream of miles,
And a landscape, unbounded
And vast in abandon.

You too dreaming the same.

Source: The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994,
via www.soulflares.org

Via Inward/Outward

We All Have Our List of Casualties

Randi Rhodes

I found this information on Sideshow this a.m. :

Get well soon, Randi Rhodes. I don't usually have time to listen to her show but I tend to leave AAR on when I'm in front of my computer - but when I heard Lionel sitting in for her, I just turned it off. Sorry, I just can't listen to him. But right now I'm listening to John Elliot and he says Randi was attacked last night while she was walking her dog. She wasn't carrying a bag and was just in sweats, and she was beaten up pretty badly and had some teeth knocked out. Elliot is saying it sounds like it was neither a sexual assault nor a robbery and he suspects it was political. The way things are going, he could be right.

***
UPDATE :

I note that some spots around the blogosphere have picked up the story about Randi Rhodes being attacked "in a park". In fact, she was attacked near her apartment on Park Avenue. The good news is that Sam Seder will be subbing for her today. You can send your get-well wishes to AAR. (Sammy will also be sitting in on The Young Turks Friday and Ring of Fire on the weekend - he also did RoF on October 6th, which I believe is available for free download.)

**
I immediately thought of the long poem "A Woman is Talking to Death" (originally posted on Maggie's Metawatershed Blog)

This poem is long, but worth taking a deep breath and plunging into. Especially if you're a woman. Or an "outsider" of any stripe. You KNOW what this poem is all about. It is a profoundly spiritual poem. When I read the gospels nowadays, I shake my head in amazement that "The Church" and "Religion" has gone so far afield from the presence of Jesus Christ. Jesus was always scanning and walking the periphery. He always went to the marginal the unimportant the unempowered the wounded the crippled the widow the prisoner the least of these. The poem writes out of the heart of the experience of knowing that healing may not be curing, and for some, our place is always on the outside looking in. Which is not a place without its truth and its consolation and its spiritual light and power.

****
Further update:

I was going to look up a few background links on other attacks on liberal talk show hosts, such as the famous murder of Alan Berg, but Talking Radio has a nice summary in their story on Randi Rhodes. (Thom Hartmann mentioned the other day that someone had shot out his car window, too.) Apparently, Drudge posted a link to it and the comment thread is full of wingers either denying the possibility that a right-winger would ever do such a thing or exulting that someone did so. (I see Charles has collected a few.) Oh, and a lot of "people get mugged in New York all the time" stuff - but Park Avenue isn't exactly an unsafe neighborhood, folks. (via) Meanwhile, AAR now reports that "The reports of a presumed hate crime are unfounded. Ms. Rhodes looks forward to being back on the air on Thursday." And The New York Daily News is saying that Rhodes is not claiming to have been the victim of a crime, but to have fallen, according to her lawyer. (Thanks to JHB for the tips.)

***
How intriguing. I look forward to hearing about what actually happened.
Interesting how the story goes forward.

***

A Woman is Talking to Death
- by Judy Grahn

One
Testimony in trials that never got heard

my lovers teeth are white geese flying above me
my lovers muscles are rope ladders under my hands

we were driving home slow
my lover and I, across the long Bay Bridge,
one February midnight, when midway
over in the far left lane, I saw a strange scene:

one small young man standing by the rail,
and in the lane itself, parked straight across
as if it could stop anything, a large young
man upon a stalled motorcycle, perfectly
relaxed as if he'd stopped at a hamburger stand;
he was wearing a peacoat and levis, and
he had his head back, roaring, you
could almost hear the laugh, it
was so real.

"Look at that fool," I said, "in the
middle of the bridge like that," a very
womanly remark.

Then we heard the meaning of the noise
of metal on a concrete bridge at 50
miles an hour, and the far left lane
filled up with a big car that had a
motorcycle jammed on its front bumper, like
the whole thing would explode, the friction
sparks shot up bright orange for many feet
into the air, and the racket still sets
my teeth on edge.

When the car stopped we stopped parallel
and Wendy headed for the callbox while I
ducked across those 6 lanes like a mouse
in the bowling alley. "Are you hurt?" I said,
the middle-aged driver had the greyest black face,
"I couldn't stop, I couldn't stop, what happened?"

Then I remembered. "Somebody," I said, "was on
the motorcycle." I ran back,
one block? two blocks? the space for walking
on the bridge is maybe 18 inches, whoever
engineered this arrogance. In the dark
stiff wind it seemed I would
be pushed over the rail, would fall down
screaming onto the hard surface of
the bay, but I did not, I found the tall young man
who thought he owned the bridge, now lying on
his stomach, head cradled in his broken arm.

He had glasses on, but somewhere he had lost
most of his levis, where were they?
and his shoes. Two short cuts on his buttocks,
that was the only mark except his thin white
seminal tubes were all strung out behind; no
child left in him; and he looked asleep.

I plucked wildly at his wrist, then put it
down; there were two long haired women
holding back the traffic just behind me
with their bare hands, the machines came
down like mad bulls, I was scared, much
more than usual, I felt easily squished
like the earthworms crawling on a busy
sidewalk after the rain; I wanted to
leave. And met the driver, walking back.

"The guy is dead." I gripped his hand,
the wind was going to blow us off the bridge.

"Oh my God," he said, "haven't I had enough
trouble in my life?" He raised his head,
and for a second was enraged and yelling,
at the top of the bridge—"I was just driving
home!" His head fell down. "My God, and
now I've killed somebody."

I looked down at my own peacoat and levis,
then over at the dead man's friend, who
was bawling and blubbering, what they would
call hysteria in a woman. "It isn't possible"
he wailed, but it was possible, it was
indeed, accomplished and unfeeling, snoring
in its peacoat, and without its levis on.
He died laughing; that's a fact.

I had a woman waiting for me,
in her car and in the middle of the bridge,
I'm frightened, I said.
I'm afraid, he said, stay with me,
please don't go, stay with me, be
my witness—"No," I said, "I'll be your
witness—later," and I took his name
and number, "but I can't stay with you,
I'm too frightened of the bridge, besides
I have a woman waiting
and no license—
and no tail lights—"
So I left—
as I have left so many of my lovers.

we drove home
shaking, Wendy's face greyer
than any white person's I have ever seen.
maybe he beat his wife, maybe he once
drove taxi, and raped a lover
of mine—how to know these things?
we do each other in, that's a fact.

who will be my witness?
death wastes our time with drunkenness
and depression
death, who keeps us from our
lovers.
he had a woman waiting for him,
I found out when I called the number
days later

"Where is he" she said, "he's disappeared."
"He'll be all right" I said, "we could
have hit the guy as easy as anybody, it
wasn't anybody's fault, they'll know that,"
women so often say dumb things like that,
they teach us to be sweet and reassuring,
and say ignorant things, because we don't invent
the crime, the punishment, the bridges
that same week I looked into the mirror
and nobody was there to testify;
how clear, an unemployed queer woman
makes no witness at all,
nobody was there for
those two questions: what does
she do, and who is she married to?

I am the woman who stopped on the bridge
and this is the man who was there
our lovers teeth are white geese flying
above us, but we ourselves are
easily squished.

keep the women small and weak
and off the street, and off the
bridges, that's the way, brother
one day I will leave you there,
as I have left you there before,
working for death.

we found out later
what we left him to.
Six big policemen answered the call,
all white, and no child in them.
they put the driver up against his car
and beat the hell out of him.
What did you kill that poor kid for?
you muther****ing nigger.
that's a fact.

Death only uses violence
when there is any kind of resistance,
the rest of the time a slow
weardown will do.

They took him to 4 different hospitals
til they got a drunk test report to fit their
case, and held him five days in jail
without a phone call.
how many lovers have we left.

there are as many contradictions to the game,
as there are players.
a woman is talking to death,
though talk is cheap, and life takes a long time
to make
right. He got a cheap cheesy lawyer
who had him cop a plea, 15 to 20
instead of life.
Did I say life?

the arrogant young man who thought he
owned the bridge, and fell asleep on it
he died laughing: that's a fact.
the driver sits out his time
off the street somewhere,
does he have the most vacant of
eyes, will he die laughing?

Two
They don't have to lynch the women anymore

death sits on my doorstep
cleaning his revolver
death cripples my feet and sends me out
to wait for the bus alone,
then comes by driving a taxi.

the woman on our block with 6 young children
has the most vacant of eyes
death sits in her bedroom, loading
his revolver

they don't have to lynch the women
very often anymore, although
they used to—the lord and his men
went through the villages at night, beating &
killing every woman caught
outdoors.
the European witch trials took away
the independent people; two different villages
—after the trials were through that year—
had left in them, each—
one living woman:
one

What were those other women up to? had they
run over someone? stopped on the wrong bridge?
did they have teeth like
any kind of geese, or children
in them?

Three
This woman is a lesbian be careful

In the military hospital where I worked
as a nurse's aide, the walls of the halls
were lined with howling women
waiting to deliver
or to have some parts removed.
One of the big private rooms contained
the general's wife, who needed
a wart taken off her nose.
we were instructed to give her special attention
not because of her wart or her nose
but because of her husband, the general.

as many women as men die, and that's a fact.

At work there was one friendly patient, already
claimed, a young woman burnt apart with X-ray,
she had long white tubes instead of openings;
rectum, bladder, vagina—I combed her hair, it
was my job, but she took care of me as if
nobody's touch could spoil her.

ho ho death, ho death
have you seen the twinkle in the dead woman's eye?

when you are a nurse's aide
someone suddenly notices you
and yells about the patient's bed,
and tears the sheets apart so you
can do it over, and over
while the patient waits
doubled over in her pain
for you to make the bed again
and no one ever looks at you,
only at what you do not do
Here, general, hold this soldier's bed pan
for a moment, hold it for a year—
then we'll promote you to making his bed.
we believe you wouldn't make such messes
if you had to clean up after them.

that's a fantasy.
this woman is a lesbian, be careful.

When I was arrested and being thrown out
of the military, the order went out: don't anybody
speak to this woman, and for those three
long months, almost nobody did; the dayroom, when
I entered it, fell silent till I had gone; they
were afraid, they knew the wind would blow
them over the rail, the cops would come,
the water would run into their lungs.
Everything I touched
was spoiled. They were my lovers, those
women, but nobody had taught us to swim.
I drowned, I took 3 or 4 others down
when I signed the confession of what we
had done together.

No one will ever speak to me again.

I read this somewhere; I wasn't there:
in WW II the US army had invented some floating
amphibian tanks, and took them over to
the coast of Europe to unload them,
the landing ships all drawn up in a fleet,
and everybody watching. Each tank had a
crew of 6 and there were 25 tanks.
The first went down the landing planks
and sank, the second, the third, the
fourth, the fifth, the sixth went down
and sank. They weren't supposed
to sink, the engineers had
made a mistake. The crew looked around
wildly for the order to quit,
but none came, and in the sight of
thousands of men, each 6 crewmen
saluted his officers, battened down
his hatch in turn and drove into the
sea, and drowned, until all 25 tanks
were gone. did they have vacant
eyes, die laughing, or what? what
did they talk about, those men,
as the water came in?

was the general their lover?

Four
A Mock Interrogation

Have you ever held hands with a woman?

Yes, many times—women about to deliver, women about to
have breasts removed, wombs removed, miscarriages, women
having epileptic fits, having asthma, cancer, women having
breast bone marrow sucked out of them by nervous or
indifferent interns, women with heart condition, who were
vomiting, overdosed, depressed, drunk, lonely to the point
of extinction: women who had been run over, beaten up,
deserted, starved. women who had been bitten by rats; and
women who were happy, who were celebrating, who were
dancing with me in large circles or alone, women who were
climbing mountains or up and down walls, or trucks or roofs
and needed a boost up, or I did; women who simply wanted
to hold my hand because they liked me, some women who
wanted to hold my hand because they liked me better than
anyone.

These were many women?

Yes. many.

What about kissing? Have you kissed any women?

I have kissed many women.

When was the first woman you kissed with serious feeling?

The first woman I ever kissed was Josie, who I had loved at
such a distance for months. Josie was not only beautiful,
she was tough and handsome too. Josie had black hair and
white teeth and strong brown muscles. Then she dropped
out of school unexplained. When she came back she came
back for one day only, to finish the term, and there was a
child in her. She was all shame, pain, and defiance. Her eyes
were dark as the water under a bridge and no one would
talk to her, they laughed and threw things at her. In the
afternoon I walked across the front of the class and look-
ed deep into Josie's eyes and I picked up her chin with my
hand, because I loved her, because nothing like her trouble
would ever happen to me, because I hated it that she was
pregnant and unhappy, and an outcast. We were thirteen.

You didn't kiss her?

How does it feel to be thirteen and having a baby?

You didn't actually kiss her?

Not in fact.

You have kissed other women?

Yes, many, some of the finest women I know, I have kissed.
women who were lonely, women I didn't know and didn't
want to, but kissed because that was a way to say yes we are
still alive and loveable, though separate, women who recog-
nized a loneliness in me, women who were hurt, I confess to
kissing the top of a 55 year old woman's head in the snow in
boston, who was hurt more deeply than I have ever been
hurt, and I wanted her as a very few people have wanted
me—I wanted her and me to own and control and run the
city we lived in, to staff the hospital I knew would mistreat
her, to drive the transportation system that had betrayed
her, to patrol the streets controlling the men who would
murder or disfigure or disrupt us, not accidentally with machines, but
on purpose, because we are not allowed out
on the street alone—

Have you ever committed any indecent acts with women?

Yes, many. I am guilty of allowing suicidal women to die
before my eyes or in my ears or under my hands because I
thought I could do nothing, I am guilty of leaving a prosti-
tute who held a knife to my friend's throat to keep us from
leaving, because we would not sleep with her, we thought
she was old and fat and ugly; I am guilty of not loving her
who needed me; I regret all the women I have not slept with
or comforted, who pulled themselves away from me for lack
of something I had not the courage to fight for, for us, our
life, our planet, our city, our meat and potatoes, our love.
These are indecent acts, lacking courage, lacking a certain
fire behind the eyes, which is the symbol, the raised fist, the
sharing of resources, the resistance that tells death he will
starve for lack of the fat of us, our extra. Yes I have com-
mitted acts of indecency with women and most of them were
acts of omission. I regret them bitterly.

Five
Bless this day oh cat our house

"I was allowed to go
3 places, growing up," she said—
"3 places, no more.
there was a straight line from my house
to school, a straight line from my house
to church, a straight line from my house
to the corner store."
her parents thought something might happen to her.
but nothing ever did.

my lovers teeth are white geese flying above me
my lovers muscles are rope ladders under my hands
we are the river of life and the fat of the land
death, do you tell me I cannot touch this woman?
if we use each other up
on each other
that's a little bit less for you
a little bit less for you, ho
death, ho ho death

Bless this day oh cat our house
help me be not such a mouse
death tells the woman to stay home
and then breaks in the window.

I read this somewhere, I wasn't there:
In feudal Europe, if a woman committed adultery
her husband would sometimes tie her
down, catch a mouse and trap it
under a cup on her bare belly, until
it gnawed itself out, now are you
afraid of mice?

Six
Dressed as I am, a young man once called
me names in Spanish

a woman who talks to death
is a dirty traitor

inside a hamburger joint and
dressed as I am, a young man once called me
names in Spanish
then he called me queer and slugged me.
first I thought the ceiling had fallen down
but there was the counterman making a ham
sandwich, and there was I spread out on his
counter.

For God's sake I said when
I could talk, this guy is beating me up
can't you call the police or something,
can't you stop him? he looked up from
working on his sandwich, which was my
sandwich, I had ordered it. He liked
the way I looked. "There's a pay phone
right across the street" he said.

I couldn't listen to the Spanish language
for weeks afterward, without feeling the
most murderous of urges, the simple
association of one thing to another,
so damned simple.

The next day I went to the police station
to become an outraged citizen
Six big policemen stood in the hall,
all white and dressed as they do
they were well pleased with my story, pleased
at what had gotten beat out of me, so
I left them laughing, went home fast
and locked my door.
For several nights I fantasized the scene
again, this time grabbing a chair
and smashing it over the bastard's head,
killing him. I called him a spic, and
killed him. My face healed, his didn't.
no child in me.

now when I remember I think:
maybe he was Josie's baby.
all the chickens come home to roost,
all of them.

Seven
Death and disfiguration

One Christmas eve my lovers and I
we left the bar, driving home slow
there was a woman lying in the snow
by the side of the road. she was wearing
a bathrobe and no shoes, where were
her shoes? she had turned the snow
pink, under her feet. she was an Asian
woman, didn't speak much English, but
she said a taxi driver beat her up
and raped her, throwing her out of his
car.
what on earth was she doing there
on a street she helped to pay for
but doesn't own?
doesn't she know to stay home?

I am a pervert, therefore I've learned
to keep my hands to myself in public
but I was so drunk that night,
I actually did something loving
I took her in my arms, this woman,
until she could breathe right, and
my friends who are perverts too
they touched her too
we all touched her
"You're going to be all right"
we lied. She started to cry
"I'm 55 years old" she said
and that said everything.

Six big policemen answered the call
no child in them.
they seemed afraid to touch her,
then grabbed her like a corpse and heaved her
on their metal stretcher into the van,
crashing and clumsy.
She was more frightened than before.
they were cold and bored.
'don't leave me' she said.
'she'll be all right' they said.
we left, as we have left all of our lovers
as all lovers leave all lovers
much too soon to get the real loving done.

Eight
a mock interrogation

Why did you get into the cab with him, dressed as you are?

I wanted to go somewhere.

Did you know what the cab driver might do
if you got into the cab with him?

I just wanted to go somewhere.

How many times did you
get into the cab with him?

I don't remember.

If you don't remember, how do you know it happened to you?


Nine
Hey you death

ho and ho poor death
our lovers teeth are white geese flying above us
our lovers hands are rope ladders under our hands
even though no women yet go down to the sea in ships
except in their dreams.

only the arrogant invent a quick and meaningful end
for themselves, of their own choosing.
everyone else knows how very slow it happens
how the woman's existence bleeds out her years,
how the child shoots up at ten and is arrested and old
how the man carries a murderous shell within him
and passes it on.

we are the fat of our land, and
we all have our list of casualties
to my lovers I bequeath
the rest of my life

I want nothing left of me for you, ho death
except some fertilizer
for the next batch of us
who do not hold hands with you
who do not embrace you
who do not try to work for you
or sacrifice themselves or trust
or believe you, ho ignorant
death, how do you know
we happened to you?

wherever our meat hangs on our own bones
for our own use
your pot is so empty
death, ho death
you shall be poor



—Judy Grahn, 1974

maggiesmetawatershed.blogspot.com

Shakers

God's Gift

"Shaker visual poetry" is a phrase used to describe the drawings that the Christian sect of Shakers made under the influence of the Holy Spirit. UbuWeb explains:

Between 1837 and 1850 ("known as the Era of Manifestations") the Shakers composed (or were the recipients of) "hundreds of … visionary drawings … really [spiritual] messages in pictorial form," writes Edward Deming Andrews (The Gift To Be Simple, 1940). "The designers of these symbolic documents felt their work was controlled by supernatural agencies … — gifts bestowed on some individual in the order (usually not the one who made the drawing." The same is true of the "gift songs" and other verbal works, and the invention of forms in both the songs and drawings is extraordinary, as is their resemblance to the practice of later poets and artists.

The above, from the early 1840s, is just one of many such "drawings."

Permalink

***
This artwork is really strange. Sort of, uh, extra-terrestrial. I wonder how they interpreted this art? Some of these American sects are so odd. I find it difficult to get inside the head or heart of what they thought they were being taught.

(Women's Christian Temperance Union). He was very excited about these movements. Putting myself in his position, I think of living in a small town in the early 20I have some letters from my grandfather to my grandmother about the abolitionists and the WCTUth century. My grandfather wanted to be an architect, but his family couldn't afford to educate him, so his education was a disappointment to him. These kinds of lectures and presentations that came to town presented something exciting to the townspeople. They could get all worked up over this idea or that movement. It was intellectually and morally exciting. Something was going to happen now. They were going to do something to set the world right.

Still the artwork sort of weirds me out as far as our friends the Shakers goes.

***

Bullying Will Continue

From Andrew Sullivan's blog

"All of the approaches to interrogation supported by President Bush as "nontorture" (head slapping, freezing temperatures, water boarding) qualify as torture under international law.

During my last year in Vietnam, 1968 to '69, I was in charge of US Air Force interrogation of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army prisoners. None of what Bush labels as legal was legal under the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is still a signatory. US Army, Marine, and Army of Republic of Vietnam personnel were constantly amazed at the interrogation results produced by the Air Force, and we were never allowed to touch prisoners, let alone head-slap them. Every human being has needs, and we learned those needs and exploited them. Neither Bush's bullying approach in the Mideast nor his unlawful interrogation program has worked. Sophisticated psychological methods are not being used by the Bush people, so the alleged "nontorture" bullying will continue,"

- Francis X. Stone, retired lieutenant-colonel, US Air Force.

Permalink

*****

"By now, it's clear that "We don't torture" is going to be George Bush's equivalent to "I am not a crook" or "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"--an embarrassingly transparent, obviously untrue statement that the speaker never would have even made in the first place if he hadn't been obligated to deny something that everybody had already figured out was the case,"

- Phil Nugent.

Permalink

Jewish In the Way the Olive Garden Is An Italian Restaurant

By the Book

By Hanna Rosin

THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY

One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

By A. J. Jacobs.

Illustrated. 388 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25.

If I were to write this review while trying to live biblically, here are some of the rules I would have to follow:

Love thy neighbor. Jacobs is a fellow journalist and thus a neighbor of sorts. I would have to strive to be as generous as possible, and point out right at the outset that this book is an inspired idea and that Jacobs is alarmingly adept at keeping the joke alive for 365 days.

Thou shalt not covet. I would have to confess my jealousy that Jacobs already had a movie contract in place before the book had even been published, and that even though I have spent much more time around young-earth creationists than he has, he thought of a much funnier way to describe them (people who believe in an earth that’s “barely older than Gene Hackman”).

Thou shalt not bear false witness. I would have to admit that every once in a while, as he wrote about walking down some New York street in a shepherd’s robe strumming his 10-string harp, or throwing small stones at a random suspected sinner, or eating crickets or burning myrrh each morning, I thought to myself, What’s the point, really?

But having a point is slightly beside the point. Jacobs is a stunt journalist, although that term seems belittling to the monumental self-improvement projects he subjects himself to. In his last book, “The Know-It-All,” Jacobs read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in an attempt to make himself smarter than his showoff brother-in-law.

In “The Year of Living Biblically,” he attends to the soul, turning himself from a guy who is “Jewish in the way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant” into a follower of “the ultimate biblical life.” This means spending a year strictly following a typed list of more than 700 biblical rules, including the obscure (don’t wear garments of mixed fibers, bind money to your hand, pay the wages of your workers every day) and the potentially awkward (don’t touch your wife seven days after her “discharge of blood,” bathe after sex and don’t tell lies, in their many variations).

Unlike Norah Vincent (who wrote a book about passing as a man) and Eddie Murphy (who made himself over as a white man in a classic “Saturday Night Live” skit), Jacobs does not take the undercover spy route. Instead he lives out the biblical high life in his usual New York surroundings, among all his wanton, gossiping, blaspheming journalist friends. The result is that he ends up sort of like Kramer on “Seinfeld,” a big weirdo who interrupts the normal patter of urban life. Lots of comic relief ensues. He accepts a hug from a homeless woman on the subway, who then accuses him of harassing her. He contemplates taking his cute nanny as his second wife. He grows a beard of ZZ Top-like proportions.

His efforts to obey the injunction against lying are an endless source of sit-com moments. He refuses to tell his son that an English muffin is a form of bagel, prompting a massive temper tantrum. He and his wife run into an old college acquaintance of hers at a restaurant. When the friend suggests they get their kids together sometime for a play date, he tells the friend he’ll “take a pass” because he doesn’t “really want new friends right now.” His wife, of course, wants to kill him.

The larger context for this book is that we live in age of flourishing biblical literalism, where a lot of Americans who don’t live in New York still believe the Bible to be literally true. Jacobs does make dutiful visits to an Amish community, Jerry Falwell’s church in Virginia and a new creationist museum in Kentucky. But his visits yield no tremendous insights about why the United States continues to be such a literal-minded nation, or what comforts people derive from refusing to read between the lines. They merely leave him feeling confused and depressed.

This is a New Testament nation, but most of the rules that make for good comedy are in the other book. So Jacobs’s most lively interactions by far are not with red-state America but with his own people: Mr. Berkowitz, the guy who comes over to check for shatnez, or mixed fibers; or his Uncle Gil, the inspiration for Jacobs’s project.

Gil is the person Jacobs fears he could become if he really took the project to heart. Gil, too, started out as a secular Jew on a spiritual mission. But then he got in too deep. He careered, Jacobs tells us, from acid head to Hindu to cult leader to born-again Christian to ultra-Orthodox Jew who gathers in the lost souls of Jerusalem. Jacobs has dinner with him, and leaves with the impression that Gil is “subtly dangerous.”

Jacobs comes closest to transcendence in a crowd of Hasidic men dancing ecstatically all night. But otherwise he skirts around the edges. The truly Orthodox would say you can’t do this alone, in your apartment, with your wife rolling her eyes. You need a community, not some stranger rabbis who drop by once in a while. Alone, Jacobs can ponder the big questions, but he usually turns them into a joke. (“If there is a God, why would he allow war, disease and my fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Barker, who forced us to have a sugar-free bake sale?”)

Jacobs begins the book by saying that if his new self met his old at a coffee shop they would think each other “delusional.” I’m not sure he makes the case for that much of a transformation. But here and there, through some surprisingly poignant moments, he sees through to the other side, and he stumbles his way to a working definition of what it might mean to become a better person.

At the start of the year, his mind cleansing is yet more sit-com fodder: remove the magazine with Jessica Alba in a skintight bathing suit, the wedding album picture of the friend with cleavage, the Celestial Tea box showing the hot geisha. Stop self-Googling. Don’t be jealous of Jonathan Safran Foer’s speaking fees. Don’t check your e-mail on the Sabbath.

But toward the end, he deepens. A friend e-mails him a YouTube clip of a newscaster who gets smacked in the head by a stage light and falls over. Jacobs can’t bring himself to “lol” as his friends do. He finds it upsetting. He spends 20 minutes trying to track down the newscaster’s e-mail address so he can ask if she’s all right, while at the same time worrying that he’s become some kind of “overly virtuous sap.”

After a year of praying every day he becomes by no stretch a believer, but someone who at least accepts “such a thing as sacredness.” Sometimes he can even envision a God who might watch over him and care what happens. As a teenager he convinced himself that even when he was alone in his house, the girls he had a crush on could see him, so he listened to David Bowie and brushed his teeth in a “rakishly nonchalant manner” to prove he was worthy of their attention. This is how he experiences God now.

God as Mean Girl. It’s not exactly biblical, but it’s not nothing.

For all I know, Jacobs is already back to his old ways He never gives the impression that, God forbid, his soul is at stake, or anything else of much importance. Certainly his isn’t the kind of transformation any real fundamentalist would accept. But for many of us who would never even try, walking with Jacobs is the closest we’ll come to knowing what it feels like to be born again.

Hanna Rosin is the author of “God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.”

****

This reminds me of Beverly Donofrio's book "Looking for Mary - Or , The Blessed Mother and Me."

"Stereotypes abound concerning pilgrims to the Bosnian village of Medjugorje (where the Virgin Mary has allegedly been appearing since 1981), who claim to witness all manner of miracles: spinning suns, medals of the Virgin turning to gold, Mary herself scurrying down a street in a gray gown. Donofrio's new book, which took shape as a series on National Public Radio, explodes these stereotypes. It begins when, against all logic, the author begins flooding her home with images of the Virgin. Donofrio follows a hunch by going to Medjugorje, as a writer rather than a devotee, but that pretense quickly dissolves. She becomes a believer, though not in any cookie-cutter, uncritical sense. Listening to a stern Franciscan berate pilgrims in Medjugorje, she says, "I do not want to be a crazy, sign-seeing, rose-smelling, rigid, right-to-life Catholic" and though she sees signs and smells roses before long, she avoids both insanity and rigidity. Donofrio forges her own relationship with Mary, expressed partly through the institutional Catholic Church and partly despite and around it. While the crises in her own life a troubled relationship with her son, a series of failed love affairs and unresolved ambiguities about an abortion propel Donofrio's quest, this chronicle does not read like an exercise in wish-fulfillment. It feels rather like the story of a woman who, after decades of seeking, found her mother, and through her, discovered herself."

{Amazon}

****

The main point is that Beverly begins her "Mary" collection as a kitsch poking-fun-at exercise. It is a sending up of belief and as assertion of her own disbelief.

As the book progresses, however, her life unravels and the very elements of life that propel a re-examination and an opening to her own inner hunger for meaning come to the fore.

And yet the book is still funny, ambiguous, embarrassed - the author never loses her own voice of bravado, defiance, silliness, self-deprecation and raw feeling. Going through a crisis doesn't mean that she is suddenly less irreverent. It's just that in the midst of irreverence, genuine reverence begins to creep in. It's one of those "Oh-shit-God-must-be-doing-this" moments. Her critical faculties do not desert her. They continue with adequate curiosity and wonder. Which is the fun of the book.

I think that most authentic searches begin with a sense of personal irony -- of sending up something or protesting it. Restlessness. The desire to get to the heart of the matter.

God does not need our defense. There is no harm in poking fun at the Almighty. If God needed our outrage and our defense he/she/it wouldn't be God. False Gods and Idols require constant defense, constant faux outrage.

G*d, however eludes our efforts to define and entrap.

The world, the earth and the heavens , are always greater than our efforts to apprehend them.

This gives us hope.

****

I Don't Think It, I Know It

Speaking Truth to Torturers

No Comment
BY Scott Horton

”I don’t think it, I know it”
Each time he is confronted with evidence of his own policies condoning torture, President Bush responds with the same phrase: “We do not torture.” It is a lie. A brazen lie. The American public now recognizes this (see next item). But in the etiquette of American politics, no one is prepared to say that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.

But now President Jimmy Carter speaks Truth to Power.

Asked by the CNN news channel whether he thought the Bush Administration had tortured suspects, Mr Carter said: “I don’t think it, I know it, certainly.” Confronted with Mr Bush’s public denial last week that the US had ever tortured detainees, Mr Carter replied: “That’s not an accurate statement if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honoured, certainly in the last 60 years, since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated.”

Last week, the New York Times obtained memos written by the US justice department in 2005. These argued that techniques such as simulated drowning, head-slapping and keeping detainees in freezing temperatures did not constitute torture and could therefore be used. But Mr Carter, 84, said: “You can make your own definition of human rights and say, ‘we don’t violate them’. And you can make your own definition of torture and say ‘we don’t violate it’.

“The president is self-defining what we have done and authorised in the torture of prisoners.”

Poll: Americans Agree, Bush is Lying About Torture
A Rasmussen poll shows that 42% of Americans believe that Bush’s assurances that America does not use torture techniques are false. 30% believe that Bush is speaking the truth. 28% are not sure.

Among the other conclusions, 27% state their view that America should feel free to torture those in captivity. This number is striking: it is almost exactly the same fraction of the American public which now expresses confidence in Bush’s performance of his job as president. And if those numbers really were to line up, we’d find a curious process of self-selection. The morally blind prefer to be led by a person who is morally blind.

Reading this poll, I was reminded by a passage of Scripture, Proverbs 29:18:

Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

Modern Biblical scholarship tells us that the language of the King James Bible is a bit off the mark; the original should be rendered, perhaps a bit less poetically, as

Where there is no revelation the people cast off restraint. But blessed is he who keeps the law.

The proposition is being demonstrated.

*****

From NO COMMENT:

Man is evidently intended to live in society; and because there can be no society among creatures who prey upon one another, it was necessary, in the first place, to provide against mutual injuries. Further, man is the weakest of all creatures separately, and the very strongest in society; therefore mutual assistance is the chief end of society; and to this end it was necessary, that there should be mutual trust and reliance upon engagements, and that favours received should be thankfully repaid. Now, nothing can be more finely adjusted than the human heart, to answer these purposes. It is not sufficient that we approve every action that is essential to the preservation of society: it is not sufficient, that we disapprove every action that tends to its dissolution. Approbation or disapprobation merely, is not sufficient to subject our conduct to the authority of a law… This circumstance converts into a law, what without it can only be considered as a rational measure, and a prudential rule of conduct. Nor is any thing omitted to give it the most complete character of a law. The transgression is attended with apprehension of punishment, nay with actual punishment; as every misfortune which befalls the transgressor is considered by him as a punishment. Nor is this the whole of the matter. Sympathy is a principle implanted in the breast of every man; we cannot hurt another without suffering for it, which is an additional punishment. And we are still further punished for our injustice or ingratitude, by incurring the aversion and hatred of all men.

–Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, essay ii, ch. iv (1779)

A Roman take on the Roman Church at a moment in history.

The source of this is a friend of a friend, living out west, commentary from Diocese of the Rio Grande.

***
From time to time, I've shared some pieces from Woerc, a publication of laicized Roman priests who assist those leaving the priesthood for the 'real world'. (I may be the sole Anglican member.)
Here's an article that may have some clues for us. It is dated in some ways, but cautions of value and questions of our own predicament are evoked. Pleas overlook the typos.

*
Luke Timothy Johnson, the Catholic scripture scholar at Emory U., observes that the New Testament contains two complementary images of the CXhurch which coexist in a kind of creative tension. One is "the household of faith". The other is the body of Christ. The first is more organizational and structural. The second is is more organic and mysterious.. The first evolved into institutions and offices and rituals aimed at maintaining good order and purposefulness. Thus the Church developed parishes, dioceses,buildings, orphanages,schools, bishops, priests, deacons, monasteries, convents, canon law, the curia,theologians and all the other elements of a well functioning household. You get the idea.

The second element is rooted in the wonderful insight that just as Jesus used his human body to walk and talk, to teach to heal, to love and confront, to suffer and die, so also he employs his mystical body, the Church, to enable his Spirit to continue his mission in our contemporary world. In St. Paul's image, some of us are eyes or ears or tongues or hands or feet or lesser parts, but all of us--cleric or lay, man, woman or child, rich or poor , sophisticated or simple--have an important role to play in continuing the work of Christ. It's rooted in our Baptism.

SO WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

Dr. Patricia O'Donnel Ewers is the current Chairperson of the National Lay Review Board created by the bishops four years ago at their Dallas meeting. At a recent talk,she was asked, "When the first Chairperson Gov. Frank Keating left, he complained that dealing with the U.S. bishops was like dealing with the Mafia. When his successor Judge Anns Burke left, she said the whole situation involved the most arcane political system that she, the wife of a Chicago alderman, had ever seen. What do you think you might say when your time comes?"

She replied that there's been an enormous change in the attitude of many of the bishops, which is hopeful. But true change will be slow, incremental, and probably not transformative.. The bishops and many priests were formed in a clerical culture which is deeply ingrained. The bishops were selected because they are manifestly committed to that culture. The clerical culture is a significant part of the problem.

The clerical culture has deep roots in the Church. Emperor Constantine not only legalized Christianity; he also provided a model for governance. The household of Faith became an upstairs/downstairs affair with higher and lower clergy, as well as aristocrats and commoners. A bishop might be thew son of a butcher, but he becomes acculturated as a prince of the Church. Those upstairs tend to see things quite differently from those below.

For example, seeing Cardinal Law's embarrassment and disgrace touched the hearts of the Vatican officials who gave him a basilica to care for. but they didn't see or hear the abused children, who were perceived administratively and impersonally not as deeply wounded individuals who would bear life-long scars from the abuse, but as part an ugly problem to be solved expeditiously with a minimal damage to the institution.

The clerical culture permeates some dioceses, but not all, and some parishes, but not all. It seems to be an occupational hazard for those who focus on the Church as the household of Faith. Orderliness is the norm. Canon Law and diocesan regulations are the guide. Consistency is the key.. Those are important values, but not the sole values. The messiness of and unpredictability of life intrude. there is refreshing wildness in God's Spirit. The Gospels are organic and lively. Sometimes the most unlikely members of the body of Christ have rare and wonderful talents and extraordinary ideas which erupt from deep and hidden sources.. The body of Christ needs the strength and rigidity of a good skeletal system, but it also needs the dynamism of the heart , lungs, nerves, colon, brain, muscles and other softer organs. Sadly, the connectivity and interaction is flawed today and the body of Christ is seriously sick.

HOW CAN HEALING BEGIN?

We need priests, not clerics. We need genuine communities, not ecclesial corporations. We need shepherds , not CEOs. We need people who focus not on privileges of ordination, but on the communality of Baptism. We need a Vatican III to recapture the spirit and vision of John XXIII. We need pastors who recognize and nurture and celebrate the giftedness of all their people. We need presiders at the Eucharist who realize that the words of the Eucharistic Prayer not only transform the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, but also in a deeply amazing way have the power to patiently transform this gathered community into the mystical body of Christ.

Talkin' Bout My Generation

Yeah baby.

Silence, Deep Listening, Openness

I will teach you the best way to say Torah: not sensing yourself at all, only as an ear listening to how the world of speech speaks through you. You are not yourself the speaker. As soon as you begin to hear your own words, you should stop.

--Dov Baer, The Maggid of Metztrich

James P. Carse
Breakfast at the Victory

***

"poor little Jesus"

"And that wasn't the end of it. There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "Business as usual." But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush."

Life of Pi
Yann Martel

Permalink

***

God as horizon of experience

(from the former SubversiveChristianity blog)

Readers might remember that a while ago there was a running discussion on this blog about whether God's existence could be demonstrated . I argued that the question was misplaced, because although God is real, it confuses things to say that God "exists."
This is because existence-language falls within a discourse-context geared to talking about temporally- and spatially-bound objects. ("Existence" is derived from existere, to stand forth, to stand out--a quality of objects.)

But God's reality is different from the mode of being of temporal and spatial objects that stand out from one another. The language appropriate for the one simply doesn't apply to the other. So attempts to demonstrate God's "existence" beg the question from the get-go, and they wind up in quite predictable dead ends. Either they demonstrate God's "existence" by implicitly reducing God to just another object -- that is, they "prove" the existence of God by reducing God to non-God -- or they fail to demonstrate God's existence -- which of course they must if they use the word "God" even remotely appropriately -- leading atheists to proclaim premature victory. What a mess.
From my perspective (one heavily informed by Karl Rahner, the Heideggerian Roman Catholic theologian who's the single most powerful influence on my thinking about God), philosophical and theological attempts to "demonstrate" God have it backwards. It's not we who do the demonstrating.

It's God. God is continuously self-revealing or self-disclosing to us, because God is the horizon of experience in general. God is a Transcendental, the Ground of all experiences (including the experience of existence), the necessary condition for the possibility of experience itself. Each experience, if read correctly, is a demonstration of God's reality.
In more theological terms, this is called "grace." The continuous self-disclosure of God as the horizon of experience is grace. (By the way, this understanding of God as the horizon of experience has deep roots. In the Christian tradition, the old tag "God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere" goes back at least to Anselm.)
This is, of course, an axiom of faith rather than an argument. But it is testable. If one examines common human experiences, one can make a case for the continuous self-disclosure of Divine Reality in and through them that makes them possible in the first place. To be human is to be motivated by a deep longing for meaning, love, freedom, beauty, truth, and purpose. All of us have experienced this longing, and all of us have experienced moments, fleeting though they may be, in which the longing has been fulfilled. How can the longing and the fulfillment be accounted for? They can be thought of in purely biochemical or psychological terms, in which case we'll not see them as referring to anything beyond themselves. But the moment we open ourselves to the mere possibility that the longing and its moments of fulfillment point to something beyond biochemical or psychological explanations, we allow ourselves, as Rahner says, to encounter the Mystery that lies at the heart of experience and makes experience possible.

This Mystery perennially calls us--the longing endures, the questioning remains, the hope for answers and fulfillment abides--and becoming fully human means opening oneself ever more to the call. As Rahner says, we are question marks. We are questions that God continuously asks, and our experience of this is a human "existential," one of the defining marks of being human.

and

"It must be made intelligible to people that they have an implicit but true
knowledge of God--perhaps not reflected upon and not verbalized; or better
expressed, they have a genuine experience of God ultimately rooted in their
spiritual existence, in their transcendentality, in their personality, or whatever you want to call it."

Faith in a Wintry Season: Interviews and Conversation with Karl Rahner in the Last Years of His Life, 1982-84, ed. Hubert Biallowons et. al. Crossroad, 1990. page 115

Seeking God through philosophical or theological arguments has a certain ring of inauthenticity to it, or at least suggests an artificial distancing. It's been wisely said that "demonstrations" of God never convince the unconvinced and do little to strengthen the faith of those already convinced. Philosophy and theology help us clarify our ideas about our relationship to the Divine. But the experience, the encounter, the moment in which one recognizes that all one's experiences are bounded and made possible by the continuous self-giving of God, comes first. God demonstrates. We respond.
Instead of engaging in interminable squabbles about whether God "exists," we'd be better off opening ourselves to grace-moments in our lives that point beyond themselves to Something greater than themselves. As Rahner says--and I agree--the Christian must be a mystic, or cease being anything at all.

Silence, deep listening, receptivity, openness: these precede worded creeds, and they certainly precede theology and philosophy. Or at least they ought.

Posted by A deacon, by the grace of God

****

“The theological analysis destroys the myth in just the same way as the ’scientific’ analysis, because theology is a psuedo-science. Christianity began to die in the moment when theologians began to treat the divine story as history -- when they mistook the story of God, of the Creation, and the Fall, for a record of facts in the historical past,” says Alan Watts. The past goes ever and back into nothing. Where does it lead? Not even to its Creator. “Time does not flow forward from a Creator who made the world; it flows backwards, like the tail of a comet, from a Creator who makes the world, and whom no one can remember.”

** *** **

Unacceptable Cowardice in the Face of Political Power

"We Do Not Torture"
Scott Horton
No Comment

This last week, the nation’s leading newspaper established that the Bush Administration continues to use torture techniques as a matter of formal policy, crafted at its highest levels. This comes more than three years following the exposure of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and more than two years after the Administration’s lies about the use of torture, unconvincing to start with, were finally exploded by the issuance of a series of internal reports. We face now a leadership stained with deceit and criminality. More importantly, it is a leadership which can never recognize nor admit its failings and moral errors. Hence, consistent with a tyrannical disposition, it acts to force all to accept its crimes as lawful, and thus to pervert the law and the institutions charged to enforce it.

The use of torture is a criminal act, and its systematic sanctioning by this administration is a matter of the utmost gravity for the country. The nation’s reaction to date fails to accord the issue the seriousness that it deserves; it constitutes a trivialization. The nation’s opinion-makers, and in particular its religious leaders must be held to blame. They fail to see the importance of the issue. And they demonstrate unacceptable cowardice in the face of political power. The only correct response is to speak truth to power, in the tradition in which the Dissenters of seventeenth century England came to use that term. But it reflects not only the tradition of the Dissenters, but also of the Established Church and of the Roman Church.

John Donne spoke for those two latter traditions when he condemned the practice of torture and called for its perpetual abolition:

Transgressors that put God’s organ out of tune, that discompose and tear the body of man with violence, are those inhuman persecutors who with racks and tortures and prisons and fires and exquisite inquisitions throw down the bodies of the true God’s servants to the idolatrous worship of their imaginary gods, that torture men into Hell and carry them through the inquisition into damnation. . . We presume, says [St Augustine], that an innocent man should accuse himself, by confession, in torture. And if an innocent man be able to do so, why should we not think that a guilty man, who shall save his life by holding his tongue in torture, should be able to do so?

And then, where is the use of torture? It is a slippery trial and uncertain. . . to convince by torture. For many says. . . he that is yet but questioned, whether he be guilty or no, before that be known, is, without all question, miserably tortured. And whereas, many time, the passion of the Judge, and the covetousness of the Judge, and the ambition of the Judge, are calamities heavy enough upon a man that is accused. If the Judge knew that he were innocent, he should suffer nothing. If he knew he were guilty, he should not suffer torture. But because the Judge is ignorant and knows nothing, therefore the prisoner must be racked and tortured and mangled.

Against the Abomination of Torture, sermon preached on Easter Sunday, April 17, 1625, at St Paul’s Cathedral, London.

We must address Power in its three aspects. First, to address those who hold high office in our representative government and thus are charged to make decisions on our behalf that govern the nation’s conduct in times of war, and in times leading to war. It is our moral obligation to firmly register our opposition to torture, our recognition of the fact that torture has been authorized and is being used, and our resolve to use all the rights we have in our society to obstruct and frustrate this criminal act which purports to be done in our name, as a nation. Second, to the people themselves, since the people are sovereign under our Constitution and are the final reservoir of national power—it is their values and concerns which should ultimately find expression on the nation’s behalf. Third, to address the very concept of Power itself, for Power has an ever-expanding impact on the lives of individuals in our nation and beyond its frontiers.

The truth which is to be spoken is a universal truth that reflects the natural law, the given law, our values and faith. It is a universal truth that love endures and overcomes; that hatred destroys. What a people obtained by love and in a posture of righteousness is retained, but what is obtained by hatred proves a burden and ultimately corrupts he who holds it.

Torture is a crime under the law, in the face of man and nations. We have, each of us, an obligation independent of the responsibilities of the state to insure the enforcement of this law; to denounce those who violate it; to reveal their acts of treachery and criminality and to insure their accountability and punishment. Torture is a crime greater than most because it corrupts the core of the state and our society. It is a rot which spreads quickly, destroying all the other values on which our life and interaction with others rests. Torture breeds secrecy; it breeds tyrannical expansion of the power of the executive; it imperils the institutions of the democratic state.

Look about you and note what is happening. The shadow of secrecy and corruption have descended over the institutions of a once noble state, suffocating them. Torture, secrecy and corruption operate hand-in-hand, reinforcing one another, and accelerating an existential attack on our society. Only through decisive action by individual citizens can this process be checked. Consider the words of Edmund Burke:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) in: Works of the Rt Hon Edmund Burke, vol. 2, p. 83 (H. Froude ed. 1891)

I commend three voices raised today in opposition to torture: The New York Times, Andrew Sullivan, and the surviving military intelligence officers of World War II. But tomorrow let your voice be heard, let it be in unison and without equivocation.

The New York Times

Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.

The Bush Administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.

After the attacks of 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the creation of extralegal detention camps where Central Intelligence Agency operatives were told to extract information from prisoners who were captured and held in secret. Some of their methods — simulated drownings, extreme ranges of heat and cold, prolonged stress positions and isolation — had been classified as torture for decades by civilized nations. The administration clearly knew this; the C.I.A. modeled its techniques on the dungeons of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union.

The White House could never acknowledge that. So its lawyers concocted documents that redefined “torture” to neatly exclude the things American jailers were doing and hid the papers from Congress and the American people. Under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Mr. Bush’s loyal enabler, the Justice Department even declared that those acts did not violate the lower standard of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

That allowed the White House to claim that it did not condone torture, and to stampede Congress into passing laws that shielded the interrogators who abused prisoners, and the men who ordered them to do it, from any kind of legal accountability. . .

For the rest of the nation, there is an immediate question: Is this really who we are?

Is this the country whose president declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and then managed the collapse of Communism with minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid accountability before American voters?

Truly banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions. Restoring the rule of law to Guantánamo Bay would not set terrorists free; the truly guilty could be tried for their crimes in a way that does not mock American values.

Andrew Sullivan, The Times of London

From almost the beginning of the war, it is now indisputable, the Bush Administration made a strong and formative decision: in the absence of good intelligence on the Islamist terror threat after 9/11, it would do what no American administration had done before. It would torture detainees to get information. This decision was and is illegal, and violates America’s treaty obligations, the military code of justice, the United Nations convention against torture, and US law. Although America has allied itself over the decades with some unsavoury regimes around the world and has come close to acquiescing to torture, it has never itself tortured. It has also, in liberating the world from the evils of Nazism and communism, and in crafting the Geneva conventions, done more than any other nation to banish torture from the world. George Washington himself vowed that it would be a defining mark of the new nation that such tactics, used by the British in his day, would be anathema to Americans.

But Bush decided that 9/11 changed all that. Islamists were apparently more dangerous than the Nazis or the Soviets, whom Americans fought and defeated without resorting to torture. The decision to enter what Dick Cheney called “the dark side” was made, moreover, in secret; interrogators who had no idea how to do these things were asked to replicate some of the methods US soldiers had been trained to resist if captured by the Soviets or Vietcong. Classic torture techniques, such as waterboarding, hypothermia, beatings, excruciating stress positions, days and days of sleep deprivation, and threats to family members (even the children of terror suspects), were approved by Bush and inflicted on an unknown number of terror suspects by American officials, CIA agents and, in the chaos of Iraq, incompetents and sadists at Abu Ghraib. And when the horror came to light, they denied all of it and prosecuted a few grunts at the lowest level. The official reports were barred from investigating fully up the chain of command. . .

Last week The New York Times revealed more. We now know that long after Abu Ghraib was exposed, the administration issued internal legal memos that asserted the legality of many of the techniques exposed there. The memos not only gave legal cover to waterboarding, hypothermia and beating but allowed them in combination to intensify the effect. The argument was that stripping a chained detainee naked, pouring water over him while keeping room temperatures cold enough to induce repeated episodes of dangerous hypothermia, was not “cruel, inhuman or degrading”. We have a log of such a technique being used at Guantanamo. The victim had to be rushed to hospital, brought back from death, then submitted once again to “enhanced interrogation”. George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase “enhanced interrogation technique”. By relying on it, the White House spokesman last week was able to say with a straight face that the administration strongly opposed torture and that “any procedures they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful”.

So is “enhanced interrogation” torture? One way to answer this question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the “third degree”. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation. The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948. The victims were not in uniform—they were part of the Norwegian insurgency against the German occupation—and the Nazis argued, just as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections (subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions).

The Nazis even argued that “the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement”. This argument is almost verbatim that made by John Yoo, the Bush Administration’s house lawyer, who now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. The US-run court at the time clearly rejected Cheney’s arguments. Base-line protections against torture applied, the court argued, to all detainees, including those out of uniform. They didn’t qualify for full PoW status, but they couldn’t be abused either. The court also relied on the plain meaning of torture as defined under US and international law: “The court found it decisive that the defendants had inflicted serious physical and mental suffering on their victims, and did not find sufficient reason for a mitigation of the punishment . . .”

The definition of torture remains the infliction of “severe mental or physical pain or suffering” with the intent of procuring intelligence. In 1948, in other words, America rejected the semantics of the current president and his aides. The penalty for those who were found guilty was death. This is how far we’ve come. And this fateful, profound decision to change what America stands for was made in secret. The president kept it from Congress and from many parts of his own administration. Ever since, the United States has been struggling to figure out what to do about this, if anything. So far Congress has been extremely passive, although last week’s leaks about the secret pro-torture memos after Abu Ghraib forced Arlen Specter, a Republican senator, to proclaim that the memos “are more than surprising. I think they are shocking”. Yet the public, by and large, remains indifferent; and all the Republican candidates, bar John McCain and Ron Paul, endorse continuing the use of torture.

One day America will come back– the America that defends human rights, the America that would never torture detainees, the America that leads the world in barring the inhuman and barbaric. But not until this president leaves office. And maybe not even then.

The Surviving Military Intelligence Officers of World War II
The Washington Post reports that yesterday the surviving military intelligence officers who led the nation’s most sensitive human intelligence gathering operation focusing on key Nazi figures during World War II gathered at Fort Hunt to discuss their experiences and to be recognized. The Department of Defense was expecting that the veterans would embrace the Bush Administration’s War on Terror policies. But what they got was an earful of outrage and criticism. I am proud to say that several of the men who stood and spoke are my friends:

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration’s methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance. Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army’s Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

“I feel like the military is using us to say, ‘We did spooky stuff then, so it’s okay to do it now,’ ” said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University.

When Peter Weiss, 82, went up to receive his award, he commandeered the microphone and gave his piece. “I am deeply honored to be here, but I want to make it clear that my presence here is not in support of the current war,” said Weiss, chairman of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy and a human rights and trademark lawyer in New York City…

“We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice,” said John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a career Foreign Service officer and ambassador to Denmark. The interrogators had standards that remain a source of pride and honor. “During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

[Permanent link]

Camus on the Values Worth Fighting For

Albert Camus, photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1957)

S’il est vrai qu’en histoire, du moins, les valeurs, qu’elles soient celles de la nation ou de l’humanité, ne survivent pas sans qu’on ait combattu pour elles, le combat (ni la force) ne suffit par à les justifier. Il faut encore que lui-même soit justifié, et éclairé, par ces valeurs. Se battre pour sa vérité et veiller à ne pas la tuer des armes mêmes dont on la défend, à ce double prix les mots reprennent leur sens vivant.

Though it may be true that, at least in history, values, be they of a nation or of humanity as a whole, do not survive unless we fight for them, neither combat (nor force) can alone suffice to justify them. Rather it must be the other way: the fight must be justified and guided by those values. We must fight for the truth and we must take care not to kill it with the very weapons we use in its defense; it is at this doubled price that we must pay in order that our words assume once more their proper power.

–Albert Camus, Chroniques Algériennes in: Essais p. 898 (Pléiade ed. 1965)(S.H. transl.)

[Permanent link]

Things We Practice but Don't Take Seriously

October 11, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

How China Got Religion

By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

London

THE Western liberal media had a laugh in August when China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs announced Order No. 5, a law covering “the management measures for the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism.” This “important move to institutionalize management on reincarnation” basically prohibits Buddhist monks from returning from the dead without government permission: no one outside China can influence the reincarnation process; only monasteries in China can apply for permission.

Before we explode in rage that Chinese Communist totalitarianism now wants to control even the lives of its subjects after their deaths, we should remember that such measures are not unknown to European history. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the first step toward the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years’ War, declared the local prince’s religion to be the official faith of a region or country (“cuius regio, eius religio”). The goal was to end violence between German Catholics and Lutherans, but it also meant that when a new ruler of a different religion took power, large groups had to convert. Thus the first big institutional move toward religious tolerance in modern Europe involved a paradox of the same type as that of Order No. 5: your religious belief, a matter of your innermost spiritual experience, is regulated by the whims of your secular leader.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the Chinese government is not antireligious. Its stated worry is social “harmony” — the political dimension of religion. In order to curb the excess of social disintegration caused by the capitalist explosion, officials now celebrate religions that sustain social stability, from Buddhism to Confucianism — the very ideologies that were the target of the Cultural Revolution. Last year, Ye Xiaowen, China’s top religious official, told Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, that “religion is one of the important forces from which China draws strength,” and he singled out Buddhism for its “unique role in promoting a harmonious society.”

What bothers Chinese authorities are sects like Falun Gong that insist on independence from state control. In the same vein, the problem with Tibetan Buddhism resides in an obvious fact that many Western enthusiasts conveniently forget: the traditional political structure of Tibet is theocracy, with the Dalai Lama at the center. He unites religious and secular power — so when we are talking about the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, we are taking about choosing a head of state. It is strange to hear self-described democracy advocates who denounce Chinese persecution of followers of the Dalai Lama — a non-democratically elected leader if there ever was one.

In recent years, the Chinese have changed their strategy in Tibet: in addition to military coercion, they increasingly rely on ethnic and economic colonization. Lhasa is transforming into a Chinese version of the capitalist Wild West, with karaoke bars and Disney-like Buddhist theme parks.

In short, the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers terrorizing Buddhist monks conceals a much more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. Beijing finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police forces, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?

It is all too easy to laugh at the idea of an atheist power regulating something that, in its eyes, doesn’t exist. However, do we believe in it? When in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, many Westerners were outraged — but how many of them actually believed in the divinity of the Buddha? Rather, we were angered because the Taliban did not show appropriate respect for the “cultural heritage” of their country. Unlike us sophisticates, they really believed in their own religion, and thus had no great respect for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions.

The significant issue for the West here is not Buddhas and lamas, but what we mean when we refer to “culture.” All human sciences are turning into a branch of cultural studies. While there are of course many religious believers in the West, especially in the United States, vast numbers of our societal elite follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores of our tradition only out of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong: Christmas trees in shopping centers every December; neighborhood Easter egg hunts; Passover dinners celebrated by nonbelieving Jews.

“Culture” has commonly become the name for all those things we practice without really taking seriously. And this is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” with a “medieval mindset”: they dare to take their beliefs seriously. Today, we seem to see the ultimate threat to culture as coming from those who live immediately in their culture, who lack the proper distance.

Perhaps we find China’s reincarnation laws so outrageous not because they are alien to our sensibility, but because they spill the secret of what we have done for so long: respectfully tolerating what we don’t take quite seriously, and trying to contain its political consequences through the law.

Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of “The Parallax View.”

The Golden Notebook

October 11, 2007

Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:29 a.m. ET

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- English writer Doris Lessing, who ended her formal schooling at age 13 and went on to write novels that explored relationships between the genders and races, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday.

Lessing, who turns 88 in just over a week, was born to British parents who were living in what is now Iran. The family later moved to what is now Zimbabwe, where she largely grew up.

She made her debut with ''The Grass Is Singing'' in 1950. Her other works include the semiautobiographical ''Children Of Violence'' series, largely set in Africa, that include the works.

Lessing's agent, Jonathan Clowes, said Lessing was out shopping.

''We are absolutely delighted and it's very well deserved,'' he said, adding she may not yet know that she had won the prize.

Her breakthrough was the 1962 ''Golden Notebook,'' the Swedish Academy said.

''The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th century view of the male-female relationship,'' the academy said in its citation announcing the prize.

Other important novels of Lessing's include ''The Summer Before Dark'' in 1973 and ''The Fifth Child'' in 1988.

Lessing is the second British writer to win the prize in three years. In 2005, Harold Pinter received the award. Last year, the academy gave the prize to Turkey's Orhan Pamuk.

A seasoned traveler of the world, Lessing has known many homes from Persia to Zimbabwe to South Africa and London.

''When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s,'' she told The Associated Press in an interview last year ago. ''What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?''

Lessing's family moved to a farm in southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe, in 1925, an experience she described in the first part of her autobiography ''Under My Skin'' that was released in 1944.

Because of her criticism of the South African regime and its apartheid system, she was prohibited from entering the country between 1956 and 1995. Lessing, who was a member of the British Communist Party in the 1950s, had been active in campaigning against nuclear weapons.

The literature award was the fourth of this year's Nobel Prizes to be announced and one of the most hotly anticipated given the sheer amount of guessing it generated in the weeks leading up to award.

On Wednesday, Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding such questions as why the ozone layer is thinning.

Tuesday, France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg won the physics award for discovering a phenomenon that lets computers and digital music players store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.

Americans Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

Prizes for peace and economics will be announced through Oct. 15.

The awards -- each worth $1.5 million -- will be handed out by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

------

On the Net:

http://www.svenskaakademien.se

http://www.nobelprize.org

****

When the Children Tire of Their Games

From Fred at Slacktivist;

Partial repost of "Torturing the Cat"

Repost: Torturing the cat

The following was originally posted on May 20, 2003 on my old Blogspot site. The permanent links to those archives have gotten bloggered, and since I'd like to be able to link to this post in the future, I'm reposting it here.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"The most critical time in the history of the world"

What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war -- or the end of the world.

-- Walker Percy, in The Last Gentleman

Jeanne d'Arc at Body and Soul lately has been fruitfully drawing on Chris Hedges' book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

The truth expressed in Hedges' title is true both forward and backward. Just as war can provide a sense of meaning, so too a lack of meaning -- or the desire to fill that absence -- can provide the cause for war.

A while back, Josh Marshall posted a nasty little piece of hate mail he received that illustrated this point.

It's the typical supercilious undergrad tone -- the kind of thing written by people who want to be Ben Shapiro when they grow small. But one sentence in particular (and yes, this is all one sentence, if not quite one thought) stood out:

This may be the most critical time in the history of the modern world much less of our country; and it is my fervent hope that the American People will remember and appropriately reward those, like you, who have chosen to use this opportunity to forward a political cause, and not incidentally their own careers, by attempting to sabotage an honorable effort to make the world a safer, better place.

You have to love the uppercase "American People" -- and I'm guessing this guy never expresses a hope without it being "fervent." But the important part here is the section I've put in bold -- that ours is "the most critical time in ... history."

Like many people who blindly support[ed] this war -- including perhaps many in the White House and the Pentagon -- the writer is desperate for his life to have some greater meaning or purpose than it apparently does. He hasn't quite managed to stare into the abyss, but he's taken a quick glance in its direction and seen something deep and dark and frightening that he doesn't quite know how to deal with.

"All flesh is grass," the prophet Isaiah said, and "the grass withereth." This guy, understandably, doth not want to wither. He wants his life to matter, to mean something. He wants to be remembered after he is gone.

He has given this war a metaphysical, religious significance. For him, the war isn't about oil, or "liberating" Iraq, or overthrowing an evil dictator. It's grander than that -- grander even than the dreams of empire that seem to be motivating Cheney, Perle and Wolfowitz. This war is an attempt to give his life meaning by turning our times into "the most critical time in the history of the modern world." If our times are meaningful, he hopes (fervently), then our lives must also be meaningful.

The writer gives his life meaning by taking a part in this great, epochal, transcendent struggle.

And note how easy, how undemanding of sacrifice, it is for him to play a role in this epochal, historic event. All he has to do is watch Fox News and fire-off the occasional sophomoric e-mail -- maybe even wave a flag, attend a corporate-radio rally, or rename some snack food.

This letter-bomber is not the only one narcotizing his existential crisis with an enthusiasm for "shock and awe." This is widespread -- it's one of the reasons it is nearly impossible to have a civil conversation with our fellow Americans who believe -- or want to believe, or need to believe -- Bush's baseless arguments for capricious war.

In terms of pure shock and awe, however, nothing in the Iraqi adventure compares to the gut-wrenching, paradigm-shattering, constitution-shredding shock and awe Americans experienced on September 11, 2001. As we watched the towers fall and the Pentagon burn we experienced shock, awe, and a powerful, inseparable admixture of fear, anger, sorrow, pride and love. But there was also something else, unseemly and almost unmentionable -- the perversely giddy rush of vicarious significance.

On September 10, 2001, as in Thoreau's day, the mass of Americans were living lives of quiet desperation but then -- as nearly every observer proclaimed -- everything changed.

A few writers took advantage of the anonymous forum provided by Salon's "forbidden thoughts about 9/11" feature to express this:

When the towers started collapsing and all chaos broke loose, I felt actual excitement. Here was an event that broke banality. Finally, here was something meaningful. I had grown so tired of the meaningless fluff our continent had become so enamored with. Here was an issue of raw emotions. I was glad that this was happening to snap people back into reality, to snap them back to mortality. My last sinful thought was that of genocide -- lets just send nuclear missiles to all of the Middle East and let it be done once and for all.

-- Name Withheld

Such feelings were of course taboo, but they were hardly unique to "Name Withheld." Josh Marshall's letter-writer, like many supporting the war on Iraq across the blogosphere, expresses the very same perverse thrill:

"I felt actual excitement ... here was something meaningful ..."

"This may be the most critical time in the history of the modern world ... "

The voices are different, the sentiments the same. Both are driven by a similar need to break through banality and ennui with the vicarious thrills afforded by war.

A whiff of something similar can be detected in the strangely envious plaudits baby boomers heaped upon the "greatest generation." Look a little closer and there's a hint there of something like "They're lucky. I wish we had a Hitler we could go fight." Little surprise, then, that mingled in with the horror of our own Day of Infamy was that taboo thrill and something like an unspoken, "At last."

We Americans are the wealthiest, most educated people the world has ever seen. We are a people and a nation to whom all things seem possible and every course of action is open.

What happens to a people to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a nation lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what it is waiting for is war -- or the end of the world.

The great struggle being waged by President Bush and his supporters is not really about making "the world a safer, better place." It's not even really about an imperial "Pax Americana." It's about the search for meaning by a people so bored, complacent, comfortable and desperate for significance that for them war gives birth not only to terrible beauty but to terrible joy.

This is why even dispassionate, prudential questions about foreign policy provoke outraged invective. Such questions are not merely seen as a threat to a policy position, but as a threat to a metaphysical, religious belief system.

"There comes a time in the late afternoon, when the children tire of their games," G.K. Chesterton wrote. "It is then that they turn to torturing the cat."

It is late afternoon in America, and tired at last of our meaningless games, we're looking for a new source of excitement.

Posted by Fred ClarkPermalink

Criminal, Ignorant and Murderous

The Archbishop of Canterbury seldom comments on US politics, especially unasked. Thus the following
story is noteworthy and clearly suggests he knows something the US media isn't telling us.

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/5876UK News

Williams say an attack on Iran would be criminal, ignorant and murderous
By staff writers
8 Oct 2007

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has said that those close to the Bush administration in the USA who want military action against Syria and Iran are guilty of “criminal, ignorant and potentially murderous folly”.

In words of extraordinary force for the usually mild-mannered spiritual head of the world’s 77 million
Anglicans, the Archbishop told the BBC on his return from a Middle East trip that “we do hear talk from some quarters of action against Syria and Iran” but that “I can't understand what planet such persons are living on, when you see the conditions that are already there.”

Dr Williams continued: “When people talk about further destabilization of the region and you read some American political advisers speaking of action against Syria and Iran, I can only say that I regard that as criminal, ignorant and potentially murderous folly.”

Anglican bishops and other church leaders have been unanimous in their opposition to more military
adventurism in the Middle East. The vast majority,like the Archbishop, also opposed the 2003 Iraq war.

The only voice suggesting that armed action against Iran might be necessary is the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir Ali, whose stance on a number of issues has increasingly contradicted those of his archiepiscopal leader. Dr Nazir Ali was a candidate for the post when Dr Williams was appointed.

Speaking of Iraq, Dr Williams told the BBC: “The events of the last few years have done terrible damage in the whole of this region and many people, I know, do not see the cost in human terms of the war which was unleashed.”

He said that action to stabilise Iraq was “urgent”. The Foreign Office issued a rapid response defending current policy.

Dr Williams emphasised: “Every child deserves to grow up in a home that is safe; every child deserves to grow up in a home where there are people around who can be trusted; every child deserves to grow up in a place where they can see a future that is peaceful for them.”

The Archbishop has also condemned terrorism and sectarian killing by militant groups of all kinds. And in a September speech in Johannesburg, South Africa, he urged both Christians and Muslims to participate creatively and humbly in secular civil societies.

Dr Williams declared: “Both our faiths bring to civil society a conviction that what they embody and affirm is not a marginal affair; both claim that their legitimacy rests not on the license of society but on God’s gift. Yet for those very reasons, they carry in them the seeds of a non-violent and non-possessive witness. They cannot be committed to violent struggle to prevail at all costs, because that would suggest a lack of faith in the God who has called them; they cannot be committed to a policy of coercion and oppression because that would again seek to put the power of the human believer or the religious institution in the sovereign place that only God’s reality can occupy.”

The Archbishop also cautioned: “Because both our traditions have a history scarred by terrible
betrayals of this, we have to approach our civil society and its institutions with humility and repentance.”

The Emminently and Imminently Delectable and Deleteable Alice $

"...our knowledge is always incomplete....
At present we are men looking at puzzling reflections in a mirror.....
At present all I know is a little fraction of the truth..."

I Cor 13:9-12
J B Phillips trans.

For By Such Conduct They Bring Shame, Disgrace and Ruin

Just A Reminder

06 Oct 2007

"Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner] ... I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause... for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country,"

- George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775.

Permalink

***

“I never compromised my humanity.”

You must read this Washington Post article about a group of World War II veterans who were interrogators of Nazi prisoners.

Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII

Interrogators Fought 'Battle of Wits'

By Petula Dvorak

Washington Post Staff Writer

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river,President Bush defended his administration's methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

"I feel like the military is using us to say, 'We did spooky stuff then, so it's okay to do it now,' " said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University.

When Peter Weiss, 82, went up to receive his award, he commandeered the microphone and gave his piece.

"I am deeply honored to be here, but I want to make it clear that my presence here is not in support of the current war," said Weiss, chairman of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy and a human rights and trademark lawyer in New York City.

"We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice," said John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a career Foreign Service officer and ambassador to Denmark.

The interrogators had standards that remain a source of pride and honor.

"During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone," said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. "We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."

***********

Righties cannot separate vengeance from interrogation. They defend torture not because it’s useful, but because it’s gratifying. ~maha

***
We had the British trying to terrorize us on our own soil, we had nukes aimed at us, we fought Nazis, but now we're facing a really bad enemy. (And here's that link you wanted: Bush's Torture Woes.)

~Sideshow

Grim Violence

Macbeth For the Age of Bush

Scott Horton

William Shakespeare, The Tragedie of Macbeth. Directed by Rupert Goold. Staring Patrick Stewart, Suzanne Burden and others. Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Ave., London.

In three decades, roughly from the end of the reign of Elizabeth I until the celebrated trial of the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham ending in 1629, England was deeply engaged with the question of torture. It was a delicate debate, for torture had been applied with royal approbation for centuries. But the genius of the English common law was steadily at work against it. The law restricted, qualified, reduced the cases in which torture could be used. And finally, in 1628, the final blow was struck against it, when the courts and bar assembled and formally declared in response to a royal interrogatory that torture was contrary to the law and must end.

Among the great lights of the Elizabethan and early Stuart Age, there was little difference of opinion: they were against torture. They had seen the terrible damage it worked on human beings and society, and they were convinced it was an ultimate instrument of tyranny which brought corruption and putrifaction to everything it touched. As Shakespeare told us in The Merchant of Venice, torture produced confessions, but not the truth—it secured whatever the torturer wanted to hear. And as I have noted elsewhere, John Donne’s great Easter Sunday sermon of 1625, Against the Abomination of Torture, appears to have been critical in shaping popular opinion against torture. But Shakespeare’s writing, while more subtle, was no less important to the movement. Shakespeare and Donne affected the educated class in much the way that Coke influenced the lawyers. And of the works condemning torture and demonstrating its ill effects, the first place goes to Macbeth, the tale of the moral disintegration of a Man of Power.

Patrick Stewart stars as Macbeth in a major new production running at the Gielgud Theatre. This is a performance of dazzling artistry, energy and daring. It is without any doubt the definitive Macbeth performance of our generation and something that merits a special effort to see. It is also a Macbeth for our age. Director Rupert Goold and his crew have meticulously developed and brought to the fore the strong anti-torture message that sits just below the surface in the work. There can be no doubt that they are presenting Shakespeare’s sentiments, though of course when he produced the play for James I in 1603, the Bard was required to be extremely discreet in how he approached it. This new performance demonstrates the gripping modernity of the piece. The play deals in the full panoply of modern warfare—it cuts a brisk, dramatic pace; it assaults the senses with “shock and awe” (or to be a bit more clinical, in the same way prescribed by the CIA’s Kubark technique). Sensory deprivation is followed by an assault upon every sensory organ, as torrents of sound and light fill the theater.

It has been common for centuries to see in Macbeth the story of a man obsessed with ambition—whose craving for power proves his own unmaking. That is certainly so. But the work is more nuanced. It has a very strong focus on a question which is now center stage for many Americans: what can a ruler do in the interests of state security? Are all tools on the table, including the ones from “the dark side,” as Dick Cheney would say?

Shakespeare has strong and certain views on this question. He tells us that a ruler who reaches to immoral means to retain his grip on power—in particular, to targeted killings and torture—is rendered illegitimate in the process. He is a “tyrant” (and that’s the word the Bard uses, repeatedly), and the people have the right to rise up and overthrow him.

Of course, Shakespeare has to keep his political wits about him in this process. He is very clever in the historical lesson he takes to make this point. The Bard puts himself on the right side of King James I: it is a Stuart progenitor who takes down Macbeth and restores a righteous monarchy at the end of the play.

In Shakespeare’s time the killing of a monarch was the ultimate horror. It could bring chaos and mayhem to a nation, reducing it quickly to fratricidal strife. And as the age of the Tudors gave way to the Stuarts, the threat of political assassinations constantly lurked in the background. Moreover, of course, the threat was quite focused: Catholics were the suspected terrorists and assassins of the period, and the persons held in arbitrary detention, tortured on the rack and with other implements, and executed were disproportionately Catholic. This echoes in Macbeth, where the killing of the King Duncan is presented as a matter of great crisis:

Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord’s anointed temple and stole thence
The life of the building

This is one of several points when the grim violence that is the constant theme of Macbeth takes on strangely religious tones. Shakespeare is admittedly not such a religious writer, but this language is noteworthy, and it reaches to the moral core of the play.

Macbeth works diligently to cloak his regicide. He frames Duncan’s servants as the culprits. And he acts preemptively against them and others whose loyalty he doubts as he moves decisively to claim the throne. Macbeth is admired, we learn, as a daring and decisive man of arms—he is the war-king; and he thrives in the state of conflict with the world about him. His governing philosophy is simple enough, and a later autocrat framed it this way: “You’re either with us or against us.” Macbeth strikes quickly against all who fail to embrace his leadership, and blood flows freely.

Johann Heinrich Füssli, Macbeth and Banquo Meet the Three Sisters (1802)

A misunderstanding of fate plays a role in this play. Shakespeare introduces the “weïrd sisters” who impart key messages to Macbeth at critical points in the play, and are frequently, and plausibly, portrayed as witches. (Of course the word Shakespeare uses is the Elizabethan English rendition of the Nordic word urðr, pronounced wurd, which means fate; that’s how he would have understood it.)

This is one of the most problematic, and most cliché-ridden, aspects of Macbeth. But Goold’s rendering is brilliant. He turns the sisters into nurses, though they seem to have very strange standards for dealing with their patients. They appear to be torturing them, and the fateful messages imparted to Macbeth are extracted through persons subjected to the nurses’ coercive interrogation techniques. The message is, it seems, always what Macbeth himself imagines and wants to hear confirmed. And it proves fatally flawed; it is his unraveling. Macbeth himself appears to conduct a brutal interrogation, trying to gain information on Macduff’s plans after his flight. Still his prey is allowed to live, unlike Lady Macduff and her children. And before her murder, Shakespeare puts these prophetic words in her mouth—the hallmark of the topsy-turvy moral world that Macbeth is creating:

I have done no harm.
But I remember now
I am in this earthly world: where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.

Indeed, throughout Macbeth the author makes of the victim on the verge of death a vehicle for the delivery of poignant truths. For the revelation that sits at the heart of the play is a simple one. What is the essential dilemma of the use of the dark arts? The ruler who uses them succumbs to their thrall. He becomes dependent upon the dark arts and is led to his personal destruction by them. Consider Banquo’s words shortly before his murder:

‘Tis strange:
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence.

Indeed, Shakespeare seems to take stock of a remarkable inventory of interrogation techniques. You might imagine that he has worked his way through SERE training. And most striking are his comments on sleep deprivation:

Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep, — the innocent sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

Goold and his company have given us a Macbeth for the age of Bush. Indeed, it left me thinking: how easy it would be to adopt Macbeth as an edifying account of the Bush years. The pieces fall so easily into place. Only one essential transposition is needed: Laura Bush will never make a Lady Macbeth. However, we have Karl Rove.

“What’s done cannot be undone,” the Bard wrote. But the tragedy of Macbeth ends with an indignant rising to restore moral order and natural right. It’s a satisfying ending, a worthy dramatic punctuation mark. As for the tragedy of Macbush, however, neither the rising nor the restoration can safely be foretold; but more bloodshed and warfare seen to be predictably in our future.

****
I recall the play "MacBird" at the time of the Vietnam War.
This version seems more content to revel in the metaphor rather than have to make the references so exact in their implied connections. The issues are similar and perhaps more universally applicable. The Vietnam war was specific to geography. Bush's "vision" is perpetual war, "holy war" and thus so much more sinister and dangerous, even beyond the terrors of the current theater.

Would love to see this play.

***

The Prophets Prophesy

"There are those in our own country too who today speak of the 'protection of country' - of 'survival.' A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient - to look the other way.

Well, the answer to that is survival as what? A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult!

Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being,"

- Judge Haywood, in the 1961 movie, "Judgment at Nuremberg."

****

"The secret authorization of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security. We must do whatever it takes to track down and capture or kill terrorists, but torture is not a part of the answer - it is a fundamental part of the problem with this administration's approach. Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them. Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America's standing in the world, not how you strengthen it. It's time to tell the world that America rejects torture without exception or equivocation. It's time to stop telling the American people one thing in public while doing something else in the shadows. No more secret authorization of methods like simulated drowning. When I am president America will once again be the country that stands up to these deplorable tactics. When I am president we won't work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution, we will be straight with the American people and true to our values,"

- Barack Obama, in a statement released today.

****

After reading the full investigative piece in the NYT today on how this administration decided on breaking America's historic ban on torture and then pursued a long, corrupting policy of ensuring that the interpretation of the law was politicized to keep torture alive, it is hard to disagree with Marty Lederman:

Between this and Jane Mayer's explosive article in August about the CIA black sites, I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation's recent history -- not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals -- lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers -- without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.

The way in which conservative lawyers, and conservative intellectuals, and conservative journalists aided and abetted these war crimes; the way in which the president of the United States revealed so much contempt for the law that he put a candidate to run the Office of Legal Counsel on probation before he appointed him in order to keep the torture regime in place, the way in which Republicans and Democrats in the Congress pathetically refused to stand up to these violations of American honor and decency in any serious way (and, I'm sorry, Senator McCain, but in the end, you caved, as you always do lately): these will go down in history as some of the most shameful decisions these people ever made. Perhaps a sudden, panicked decision by the president to use torture after 9/11 is understandable if unforgivable. But the relentless, sustained attempt to make torture permanent part of the war-powers of the president, even to the point of abusing the law beyond recognition, removes any benefit of the doubt from these people. And they did it all in secret - and lied about it when Abu Ghraib emerged. They upended two centuries of American humane detention and interrogation practices without even letting us know. And the decision to allow one man - the decider - to pre-empt and knowingly distort the rule of law in order to detain and torture anyone he wants - is a function not of conservatism, but of fascism. James Comey - one of the principled conservatives, like Jack Goldsmith, who actually supported the rule of law and American decency - put it succinctly enough:

"We are likely to hear the words: 'If we don’t do this, people will die,'" Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

"It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most," he said. "It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country."

A couple of things need to be stressed, because I've learned the hard way that intelligent people simply refuse to absorb what is staring them in the face, when what is staring them in the face is so staggering:

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics.

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House.

--Andrew Sullivan

***

A New Task Order from the Ministry of Love

Of all the ministries, one was the most frightening. Up until the last chapters of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ Winston had never even been inside of it. It was a forbidding place—windowless, surrounded with barbed-wire and hidden machine-gun emplacements. Its shrouded guards wore black uniforms and carried jointed truncheons, which they wielded whenever it suited them to do so. One simply didn’t visit the Ministry of Love. You went there when you had orders to go. Or, as we later learned, when you were dragged there as a victim. And what transpired there? Its was the temple dedicated to the cult of torture. Death might inevitably result from being sent there, but what counted was the agonizing final days or weeks before death came. Drugs, psychological experimentation, sleep deprivation and solitude. The Ministry of Love had perfected the art of destroying the free will, the character, the persona of those who fell within its clutches. Yes, they would die. But first, they would be reconciled to Big Brother. They would come to love him again.

****

Thus I rendered my assistance to the tyrant among the mighty gods and in this way he has rewarded me; for in every tyrant’s heart there springs this purest poison: that he cannot trust, nor even recognize, his friend.

–Æschylus, Prometheus Bound, v. 224-27 (ca. 450 BCE)(S.H. transl.)

[Permanent link]
***

The prophets prophesy
falsely, and the priests bear rule
by their means; and my people
love to have it so; and what will you do
in the end thereof?

–Jeremiah 5:31

[Permanent link]

Without God, Nothing is Possible

Resting in the In-Between

Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Rarely can we go anywhere without going through a transition space or time. In the Christian monastic tradition, the practice of 'statio' acknowledges the importance of times between times.... In her book about Benedictine spirituality, 'Wisdom Distilled from the Daily,' Joan Chittister explains that members of the community stop outside the chapel for a few minutes before entering for prayer. "The practice of statio is meant to center us and make us conscious of what we're about to do and make us present to God who is present to us. Statio is the desire to do consciously what I might otherwise do mechanically. Statio is the virtue of presence."

Using this Christian practice, we can reframe the many transition times and places we experience during the day. Instead of regarding them as wasted periods, unavoidable delays, or inconveniences, we can see them as divine invitations to stop, to recenter ourselves, and to become more aware of God's presence in the world around us. We can use transitions as opportunities to contemplate the things that matter to us, to give thanks for all the gifts from the Creator, and to prepare to connect with our loved ones. This kind of refreshing pause or mini-Sabbath does not have to be complicated or long. Just consciously choose to stop, close your eyes, and relax your body. Take a deep breath and as you exhale, let go of any anxieties. Shrug your shoulders or shake out your hands. Rest in the moment and know that this special moment will never come again. Savor it and give thanks to God.

Transition Times and Spaces: the Practice of Statio

***

I've been having this thought the past several days that nothing is possible without God. I'm not even sure what that means. Does it mean that I have to be conscious of God, think about God? Does it mean anything or maybe it's just some random thought.

It persists, so I assume that this message is for me. All that I take on as a burden, as a "now I must..." is something that I need to ask God's help with. It's the recognition that this is not a universe of one. There's two at least. The need to ask for help to admit that a burden is too heavy is not a disgrace. Life is not a weight lifting contest. God asks me to just remember who I am. To remember God to remember the real nature of things and not to get lost in solving imaginary problems all alone.

It's just another construct to be shed, moving from darkness to light.

Celebrate Anyway

+


"The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock 
the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress . . . 
The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the 
capacity for the erotic love of one human for another.  We can live 
without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the 
solitary nightmare of depression.

"Why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who 
generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting, and 
dance . . . There is no 'point' to it -- no religious overtones, ideological 
message, or money to be made -- just the chance, which we need much 
more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our 
simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration."


-Barbara Ehrenreich, *Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy*

+

Seven Sins

International Day of Non-Violence

Happy birthday, Mahatma!

I am honoured to address the General Assembly on the first commemoration of the International Day of Non-Violence.

The United Nations was created in the hope that humanity could not only end wars, it could eventually make them unnecessary. The founders hoped that our Organization could help stop violence by spreading a culture of peace, promoting tolerance and advancing human dignity.

These same ideals sum up the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, whose birthday we celebrate today. His peaceful struggles against unjust regimes in South Africa and India captured the world’s imagination.

When charged with agitation against the State in 1922, Gandhi responded: “Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed.”

In this way, by incorporating non-violence into everyday life, the Mahatma inspired countless individuals to lead better, more meaningful lives.

Mahatma Gandhi is also a personal hero of mine. Since I began my diplomatic career in India early in the 1970s, I have carried with me his definition of the seven sins: “Wealth without work; pleasure without conscience; science without humanity; knowledge without character; politics without principle; commerce without morality; and worship without sacrifice.”

The Mahatma’s inspiration is needed now more than ever. All around us we see communities increasingly mired in rising intolerance and cross-cultural tensions.

We see extremist dogma and violent ideologies gaining ground, as moderate forces retreat.

And we have witnessed lethal force being used against unarmed and non-violent marchers who exemplified the very spirit of the Mahatma’s teachings.

May this International Day of Non-Violence give us strength to advance true tolerance and non-violence at every level, from the individual all the way up to the State.

Surely there could be no better time to celebrate it than in these early weeks of the United Nations General Assembly -- an occasion when we come together as nations and as human beings united in our yearning for peace.

May this Day help spread Mahatma Gandhi’s message to an ever wider audience, and hasten a time when every day is a day without violence.

Amen.

Sadly, I'm having a hard time following Gandhi's admonition to hate the sin and love the sinner given today's Blackwater testimony and the astroturf blogs defending the violent mercs...

ntodd

****
Sorry for the dearth of posts. I have a lot of work and a lot of reading to do. Real reading. Like from books.

I've also been watching Ken Burns' "The War" which is very engrossing television.
The narrators are men and women from my dad's generation. If you were born in the 40s or the 50s, you'll fill in a lot of blanks, watching this series.

Don't miss. Emotionally wrenching.