a spirit not of fear . . .

I found out this morning that the brother of a college friend was killed in the theater in Aurora, Colorado. He was there with his two daughters; they survived, but he did not. The connection doesn’t change how I feel about the killings, or how I ache for those who lost their lives or lost loved ones in the tragedy. For whatever reason, however, it makes me want to speak up even though much has already been said.

Alongside of the shock and compassion that follows an event like the shootings, we as Americans spend a great deal of time and energy looking for causes and explanations; we also look for ways to feel safer. A friend of ours organized a group to go last night to see the Batman movie in Raleigh. The event had been planned for a couple of weeks. After some discussion, they decided to go on with their plans -- and they were the only ones in the theater on a Saturday night. I realize there is more than one way to interpret the empty seats, and I think one of the reasons many didn’t darken the doors for The Dark Knight Rises is they were afraid it would happen again.

And it might. But, as people of faith, we can’t stay home.

I don’t mean you have to go see Batman; I do mean we cannot choose to participate in America’s newest national past time since September 11: running scared. Thanks to the fear-mongering by our press and politicians, we have been encouraged -- even trained -- to be frightened and led to believe that we are all walking targets who are going to be picked off in time if we don’t stay scared.

Paul wrote to Timothy, his young protege, and said,

I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.  For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands,  for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control. (II Timothy 1:5-7)

Granted, he was speaking to Timothy’s trepidations about starting out in ministry, still I think the admonitions carry over: we were neither created nor called to live our lives out of fear. Yes, this world is filled with scary stuff. Yes, we have no guarantees of protection. And -- not but -- AND we have been given a spirit of power and love and self-control. We are called to make meaning of our lives, to carry the light into the darkness and remember the darkness cannot put it out.

So let us speak out.

Speak out in favor of limiting access to weapons that do nothing but kill people. We need more courageous people who will stand against the money that has been able to buy our politicians thus far. Assault rifles are not for hunting. Freedom is not the issue. We have been given sound minds. Let us move beyond our cultural inclination to run to opposite poles and scream at each other, which only adds to the violence. Let us use our God-given self control and do what is best for all of us, rather than choosing only to protect what we see as ours.

Speak out against the media who sensationalizes events such as these and makes the perpetrators famous. The shootings were news. The endless chatter that follows is not. In 2002, Gus Van Sant directed a movie called Elephant that chronicled a high school shooting. The film came out after the tragedy at Columbine. In his review of the movie, Roger Ebert wrote:

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used.

We have been given sound minds, as some translate Paul’s words. Why, then, are we so easily swayed by those who fill the airways with mindless drivel and incendiary rhetoric. When the media move to place blame and find fault, as they will once the stories of heroism and compassion wear thin by their measure, let us think otherwise. Let us choose to power off our televisions and empower one another to even greater acts of compassion and solidarity.

Above everything else in our lives, we are called to love. Paul had words about love, as well:

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)

I’m not saying anything new, I know. But I wanted to say something.

Peace,
Milton

once below a time

I know.

Every blogger in America is working on something to say as we near the anniversary of September 11, 2001. I remember that crystal blue Tuesday morning as Ginger and I drove up the Southeast Expressway from Marshfield heading into Boston for a day of appointments. I remember the gradual awareness that the sky was more empty than clear, that cars were beginning to pull over and stop along the freeway, that WBUR was bearing awful, even unbelievable news of what was happening in New York, and then D. C., and then in a field in Pennsylvania. I remember parking the car so she could go and visit a parishioner who was dying in the hospital and I could go for my doctor’s appointment, which meant we had to leave each other and then find each other again without much help from our cell phones. I remember sitting in the Chili’s in Hingham unable to eat as CNN played the loop of the planes hitting the Towers endlessly. And I remember going with Ginger that night to open up the sanctuary at North Community Church – our church in Marshfield – so people could come and sit or pray or simply be together.

The story of that day began eight days before: September 3 – Labor Day, which was the day I went into the free fall that I learned to name as Depression. The storm clouds had been gathering for some time, but I had not given them much heed. For the previous decade, Labor Day had marked my last day of summer before I returned to teaching high school English. That September I had planned to step out of the classroom, since we had moved too far away for me to continue to drive back to Winchester High School, and I was going to write as if it were my job. Instead of walking into a new chapter of my life, I crashed and found myself more broken than I knew. In the days that followed September 11, I remember seeing an image of a man falling from one of the Towers. I knew how he felt. I had never felt the kind of despair and shame and worthlessness that swallowed me that day, though I am sure I was not the first one in the world to feel it.

In his memoir, The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days, Frederick Buechner began by speaking of his childhood before his father’s suicide as “once below a time,” using a phrase he borrowed from Dylan Thomas.

“Once below a time,: he says in his poem “Fern Hill,” meaning, I assume, that, for a child, time in the sense of something to measure and keep track of, time as the great circus parade of past, present, and future, cause and effect, has scarcely started yet and means little because for a child all time is by and large now time and apparently endless. (9)

I find meaning in the phrase by taking it quite out of the context of both men because it has little to do with my childhood or coming of age, but more to do with coming to terms with the covered up wounds and wrongs that had festered and darkened until they pulled me down below a time where I struggled to breathe and remember who I was. It was almost eight years before I began to feel as though I was upon a time once more. I did not find my way back as much as I was found by God’s love and grace incarnated mostly through Ginger who clung to me with sacred tenacity even though my depression cost her perhaps more deeply than it did me.

As we were getting ready for church on September 9, Ginger said, “If you can, I think you should ask for prayer this morning.” When the time came to share our joys and concerns, as we like to say, I raised my hand and did my best to say I needed prayer because I was depressed in ways I had never been. After the service, one person came up and said, “I know how you feel. I feel that way, too. I just didn’t know we could talk about it out loud.” What I learned that day I have relearned many days since: my pain, however deep and profound to me, is not unique. There is a reservoir of grief, despair, and loneliness that connects us all. When I think it is about me, all I can see is the endless darkness that falls below time. When I understand I am a part of a spectrum of pain and joy, both unspeakable, I have the chance to stumble into grace.

In the days that followed September 11, we all hung our flags on our fences and porches and found solidarity for a few weeks that has eluded since, for the most part. Much of the world offered resonating words. One French newspaper carried the headline, “Nous Sommes Américains” – we are all Americans. Yet, our solidarity soon focused our fears in a way that made us quick to tell the rest of the world they were not us, nor were we interested in being them. Our grief and pain were not things they could understand. To those in Rwanda and Uganda and Congo, to those who had survived Hitler’s death camps, to those whose cities had been bombed in Germany and Vietnam, to those who had lived through despicable regimes in Chile and Cambodia, we have not sought resonance but too often have made it seem as though we feel our pain has somehow superseded them all.

Ten years on, we have let our fear get the best of us and it has torn us to pieces.

In 1994, when the Towers still stood, David Wilcox wrote a song called “Show the Way” that I wish were our national anthem (and, yes, I know I have quoted them before):

you say you see no hope
you say you see no reason we should dream
that the world would ever change
you're saying love is foolish to believe
'cause there'll always be some crazy
with an army or a knife
to wake you from your day dream
put the fear back in your life

look, if someone wrote a play
just to glorify what's stronger than hate
would they not arrange the stage
to look as if the hero came too late
he's almost in defeat –
it's looking like the evil side will win
so on the edge of every seat
from the moment that the whole thing begins

it's love who mixed the mortar
and it's love who stacked these stones
and it's love who made the stage here
although it looks like we're alone
in this scene set in shadows
like the night is here to stay
there is evil cast around us
but it's love that wrote the play
for in this darkness love can show the way

so now the stage is set
don’t you feel you own heart beating in your chest
this life's not over yet
so we get up on our feet and do our best
we play against the fear
we play against the reasons not to try
we're playing for the tears
burning in the happy angel's eyes

it is love who makes the mortar
and it's love who stacked these stones
and it's love who made the stage here
although it looks like we're alone
in this scene set in shadows
as if night is here to stay
there is evil cast around us
but it's love that wrote the play
for in this lifetime love can show the way

He’s right. It’s not over yet. After all, it’s only been ten years.



Peace,
Milton

fearless love

I went to sleep last night after hearing President Obama announce the killing Osama bin Laden and woke up to any number of blog posts and commentaries already written. You people need less sleep than I do – and I’m running on fumes. Those of us who love to put words to paper find moments such as this begging for us to write something while, at the same time, I wonder what I have to say that will add constructively to the virtual Tower of Babel filling everything from Facebook to Twitter to the Huffington Post. My reality is writing is part of the way I process what I see happening in the world and in my life. Though I would love to feel that I am saying something original and profound, I’m willing to own that I’m mostly writing to help me sort things out and choosing to do that in conversation with whomever chooses to join in because I believe we sort things out better together than on our own.

Osama’s death doesn’t change much of anything as far as I can tell. Even early this morning, one of the headlines at the Huffington Post talked about the possibility of reprisals from Al Qaeda. We are not safer because we killed him. We will still have to take off our shoes at the airport, still spend a ridiculous amount of money on national defense, still have to listen to our politicians whip themselves (and us) into a frenzy of fear to try and get elected as the one who can protect us. We are still running scared. Some have talked about his death as closure for what happened on 9/11, but their statements beg the question as to what is being closed. The grief is not over. His death replaces no one, nor does it measure us as some sort of equitable revenge. Ghandhi’s oft-quoted words find particular resonance today: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” Nothing is solved or healed or bettered by killing Osama. We got revenge, not justice. The satisfaction will be short-lived.

I am left particularly incredulous by those who chose to “celebrate” his death, particularly those who clothed that celebration in Christian terms, as though this was some sort of victory for Jesus – that would be the same Jesus who said, unequivocally, “Love your enemies.” I’m pretty sure assassination was not one of the ways he imagined that love being expressed. Osama’s death is not a religious victory not a triumph of Christianity over Islam. We are not in a holy war. Our nation has chosen to participate in an increasing spiral of violence the consequences of which are far from over. Bin Laden didn’t represent Muslims any more than Fred Phelps or Terry Jones speak for all of Christianity. His presence and actions in the world called us to check our character and our resolve as Christians to show whether or not we are willing to follow Jesus in difficult and dangerous days. We appear to be about as reliable as Peter in the courtyard.

Here’s the part in the post where I begin feeling the creeping resignation that those who share similar views will read on and those who don’t will either stop reading or take time to send some sort of comment to tell me I am idealistic or naïve and even God knows there comes a time when you have to open a can of Whup-ass on those whom you see as enemies. I despair because most of the posts I read today – and perhaps this one – weren’t written with the expectation of a genuine conversation about how to live out our faith. We are writing to be heard more than we are writing to listen, which is the way in which Christianity in America has become most acculturated: we operate by the same polarizing, violent rules of conversational engagement that paralyze our country.

Since early this morning I have had a David Wilcox song on my mind called “Show the Way.” The opening verses say,

you say you see no hope
you say you see no reason we should dream
that the world would ever change
you're saying love is foolish to believe
'cause there'll always be some crazy
with an army or a knife
to wake you from your day dream
put the fear back in your life

look, if someone wrote a play
just to glorify what's stronger than hate
would they not arrange the stage
to look as if the hero came too late
he's almost in defeat
it's looking like the evil side will win
so on the edge of every seat,
from the moment that the whole thing begins

it is love who makes the mortar
and it's love who stacked these stones
and it's love who made the stage here
although it looks like we're alone
in this scene set in shadows
like the night is here to stay
there is evil cast around us
but it's love that wrote the play
for in this darkness love can show the way

As I spoke of this song, a friend reminded me of another Wilcox song written when the AIDS epidemic was the designated dividing line among Christians called “Fearless Love.” The song tells the story of someone in a protest stand-off between the two sides. The verbal violence escalates to someone throwing a stone and hitting a man who was HIV postitive on the head and causing him to bleed. The person holding the sign of judgment was then confronted with what to do about the bleeding person at his feet.

your mind snaps back to where you stand
your church is here to fight a cause
and at your feet a fallen man
whose head is cradled in his arms
though his blood contains his death
and though the lines are drawn in hate
you drop your sign of Bible verse
and help the wounded stand up straight

oh yes the high religious still will scorn
just like that did all that time back
they'll say you helped the other side
they saw you haul that soldier's pack
but now how could you carry that man's sign
in your heart the choice was clear
you didn't join the other side
the battle lines just disappeared
when fearless love, fearless love
fearless love makes you cross the border

“Nothing changes just because one guy gets killed, even if it is Osama,” said one of my eighth graders as he came into class this afternoon. Fearless love, however, changes all of us.

Peace
Milton

can I get a witness?

T. S Eliot’s amazing poem The Waste Land has found me twice in the last few days.

First, let me confess. I love the poem and I am moved by the poem, but I am far from understanding it. Still, it keeps coming after me. The first touch was at school, reading Robert Cormier’s novel, The Chocolate War, in which Jerry Renault, the young protagonist, tapes a poster in his locker that borrows a line he attributes to Eliot’s poem (I have since learned it is from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock):

Do I dare disturb the universe?

Jerry is trying to figure out his place in the universe, as well as working to discern whether the point is to stay under the radar or to make choices that offer a chance for more than one might reasonably expect out of life. I made mock ups of the poster, as it is described in the book, and handed them out to the class when we got to the chapter where it is mentioned. They looked as confused as I feel trying to make sense of Eliot’s Latin and German. I have more time with them.

The second instance was in my reading this afternoon of Mary Gordon’s Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels, which was a gift from my friend, Sonya. Part of what I liked about Gordon’s connection to the poem was that it grew out of a confusion of her own.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” These words from Eliot’s Waste Land involved me in an interesting misreading that went on for several decades. I had habitually misread the plural “ruins” as the singuar “ruin.” I was shocked to find out what I had done, and not pleased with Eliot’s words: I preferred my own invention. I had interpreted the line to mean that the words were a preservation against personal ruin. But “ruins” suggests a public spectacle – like the Parthenon or the Acropolis – and what would be the point of shoring fragments against these colossal wrecks? Such an act becomes an act of witness rather than of self-preservation.

Gordon and Eliot know what Jerry is beginning to learn: when we disturb the universe we set things in motion we can neither predict nor control. Life is less cause-and-effect, in any sort of direct sense, and more of a Ray-Bradury-butterfly effect: who knows what comes of the choices we make other than every little move matters. I wrote a few words in the margin next to the last sentence of the paragraph as quickly as they came to me:

This is the watershed of Christianity in America.

At the risk of sounding too self-congratulatory, I think I may be on to something. Between pitches for the pledge drive this afternoon, I listened to some government official talk about the rising terror threats aimed at our nation. I don’t doubt that there are people in the world who want to do us harm and I also don’t doubt that cranking up the Fear Making Machine is good politics as the midterm elections draw near. Regardless of who is doing the mongering, the call to fear is the call to self-preservation: we must do what it takes to (God, I hate this phrase) “secure the Homeland.” Give up rights. Take away rights. Damn the torpedoes and the consequences. Forget talking softly and get something bigger than a big stick. The bottom line quickly becomes utilitarian, mercenary, and cynical. If self-preservation is our core value, the circle of those we can trust will only grow smaller, whether we’re talking about our country or our Church.

Till I read Gordon’s words, I had never thought of bearing witness as the opposite of self-preservation. When I saw the word “witness” in its context, I thought of the organization, Witness.org, which sums up its mission in the slogan, “See it. Film it. Change it.” For the last twenty years, they have been giving cameras to people in parts of the world no one sees so they can tell their stories in hopes, not of self-preservation, but of radical change.

Jesus kind of change. Gordon, again:

The radical challenge of Jesus: perhaps everything we think in order to know ourselves as comfortable citizens of a predictable world is wrong.

Much of the conversation in American Christianity has to do with how we save the church, or how we change the church. The conversation may be well intentioned yet it is a conversation centered in self-preservation. We want to keep our doors open. We want to be at the center of things. We want to be culturally significant. We talk a lot about correcting the universe, but not so much about disturbing it.

When we come to church, we come looking for comfort, for hymns we love, not for disquietude. I love being a part of a community of faith where often is heard an encouraging word, and I wonder if we would do well to hang one of Jerry’s posters behind the Communion table to remind us that life is about as predictable as the God who breathed it into us and that our mission has nothing to do with being God’s Gatekeepers and everything to do with going out into the highways and byways and bring everyone who is hungry to dinner.

But there’s more.

I’m not trying to be a travel agent for a guilt trip here. I’m trying to voice my own disquietude born of my reading today, which means I have to go back to Gordon one more time. She is responding to the parable of the Prodigal Son, particularly the encounter between the father and the older brother, in which the father says,

“Everything I have is yours.” The good boy is not left bereft. But what has been lost has been found. What is acknowledged here, what is given the greatest weight, is the terrible blow of loss. The loss has seemed final, and then: reprieve. Resurrection. A new chance. A rebirth whose wage is celebration. “We had to celebrate and rejoice.” had to: an injunction, a duty. The duty of celebration.

And the story ends here. With an assertion of the rightness of celebration. The propriety of joy.

When we, as American Christians, read the parables we would do well to cast ourselves as the older brother, the rich man walking past the beggar, the jealous workers, and any other part that describes those who see themselves as the dutiful and the deserving. Everyone of the parables sounds the same disturbing note: we are called to live generous and joyful lives.

And trust God will take care of us all.

Peace,
Milton

sunday sonnet #7

I spent the weekend in the Blue Ridge Mountains helping with a retreat for Holy Covenant UCC from Charlotte, so I was not at my church for worship or World Wide Communion Sunday. The focus of the retreat was on the Psalms. Nancy Allison, a longtime friend and the pastor at Holy Covenant, pointed out that the references in the Psalms to being “sheltered under God’s wing” were talking about something that wasn’t permanent: a respite before a return to the realities of human existence. I am back down the mountain now and preparing to face the week ahead.

As I drove down the mountainside,
the radio waved a warning
of terror attacks both far and wide
and thunderstorms a-forming.

One puffy cloud in the evening sky
Stretched softly like a wing,
The Rock of Ages drifting by,
and I could not help but sing,

“Tune my heart to sing thy praise” --
words I know by head and heart
that say the living of these days
calls us to courage and to art.

Safety is not a fertile thing;
out of our pain we learn to sing.

Peace,
Milton

stop, look, and listen

I went to a workshop this afternoon at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke because I’m taking my kids there in a couple of weeks to see the exhibit called “The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl.” I have to say I was surprised at how many different ways vinyl records could be made into art beyond the recordings, album covers, and liner notes. Some of the art was about the record and some used the records to make the art.

One of the latter, Dario Robleto, spoke to the group of teachers gathered for our afternoon enlightenment. He said one of the things that informs his art is the “DJ culture,” as he called it, which, he said, has been around a long time. The “principle of Dj-ing,” as he called it, is to take the fragments of life you find around you, the shards of the past, and make a new thing.

He showed us pictures of his work from a collection called, "Sometimes Billie Is All That Holds Me Together.” He took pieces of clothing that he found – some by the side of the road – and repaired them, grinding and melting vinyl records of Billie Holiday songs to make the buttons. And then he took the refurbished clothing, or at least most of it, and put it back into circulation. Another was called “Shaker Apothecary.” This time, the title was quite literal: he built a Shaker apothecary cabinet. Playing off of the shaking of the Shakers down to the shaking of the dance crazes 0ver the years, he ground vinyl records of the dances and mixed them with “matiching” botanicals (“The Hustle” with Devil’s Claw Root and “Peppermint Twist” with Dandelion Root, to name a couple.), I suppose as the cure for what ails us.

Someone asked if he knew how to make buttons or cabinets before he got the ideas for the projects. “No,” he said. “When I decide what I want to do, I go learn how to do it.” I listened to him and thought, “He’s moving slow enough to pay attention so that he sees pieces to pick up the rest of us have walked by. – and he’s taking time to learn what he needs to learn to communicate.”

Monday morning I heard an interview with Lee Hamilton on NPR as I was driving to work. Hamilton has been involved with US foreign policy, both in and outside of government, for over forty years, going back to LBJ, and is now retiring from his position as head of the Woodrow Wilson Institute for Peace. During the Cold War, he was one of our negotiators with the Soviets. When asked about Iran, he leaned back in his memory to answer:

I think Iran is a much more complicated government than we think it is in this country. The hostilities between the two countries are very deep on all kinds of issues, not just the nuclear issue. And the big challenge we confront now is: How do you establish an authentic channel of communication, sustained over a period of time, to address these problems?

Let me go back a minute. I was in the Congress during the period the Soviet Union was in control. We used to have meetings with the Soviet parliamentarians. I'd get up and read a speech. They'd get up and read a speech. At the end of the speech, we'd toast each other with Vodka and say we were for peace in the world and prosperity for our grandchildren, and nothing would happen. And we kept doing that year after year after year after year.

Then something changed. And what changed was we put the speeches away and we began to talk with one another about the issues. That was the beginning of the thaw. It took us forty years to get there. The point is that - and it applies to Iran - the problems are exceedingly difficult, but you've got to keep trying to solve them, even though you're not making much progress at the time.

He, too, was taking time to pick up chards of hope trampled into the dust of despair to see what new could be made. Robleto talked about setting his art free by taking it back to where he found it and then letting it do its thing. Hamilton did much the same thing when he allowed himself to humanize the people sitting across the table from him, rather than see them as Soviets. They listened to each other, they talked to each other, following the same dynamic as Robleto’s art installations: set it free and see what happens.

Art set free, whether manifested in a melted record or a thawed relationship, is fearless. Good art takes time; fear is always chasing a deadline. There’s no time to listen or look, much less create. You have to run scared, and unable to trust. I thought about the kids I’ll be bringing to the museum in a couple of weeks. Teaching is a lot like melting records to make buttons and talking to Russians for forty years because I have to put my art out there, if you will, and rarely get a chance to the impact, or to be around when those caught in the crossfire of being an American teenager find a better place. The fear that lurks is less about the kids and more about failure. Our standardized test culture, though perhaps well intentioned, feeds the fear: we only have time to pass the test.

As I walked through the exhibit this evening, I could already hear some of my kids whining about how boring the museum is and wondering in a poor stage whisper why they have to be there. But I will trust that one day long after both the exhibit and I have been replaced, someone with whom I share a classroom in these days will see shards of his or her own, the worn seeds of creativity and hope, and will take the time, outlasting the fear, to contribute a verse, a painting, a melody, or maybe just another button.

Peace,
Milton

the mixed lot of being human

I stopped by the bookstore this afternoon, after spending the day at a workshop to learn how to use the software supplied by our yearbook company, with the hope that Mary Gordon’s book, Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels, had come out in paperback. (These are not hardcover buying days at our house.) I heard about the book when it first came out and have been anxious to read it. Since there was only one copy and it was hardback (no paperback just yet), I did the next best thing and stood in the “Religion” aisle of the Barnes and Noble and read the introduction.

It rocks. Come on, paperback.

One line, in particular, grabbed me such that I wrote it down in the little notebook I carry with me: “When I try to understand a flavor of fear I do not share . . . ” The line kept coming back to me as I drove home, listening to news that the Senate balked on repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” or finding out tonight they were equally as uncourageous when it came to the DREAM act, because I don’t understand the flavor of fear that flails against gays and lesbians, or immigrants. When I sat down to write, I found the introduction, thanks to Google Books, and read the whole sentence.

When I try to understand a flavor of fear I do not share, the impulse that produces the traditional fire-and-brimstone preaching and the even more contemporary don’t-worry-be-happy versions, I imagine that people who are in its grip feel the way I do when I’m experiencing turbulence on an airplane.

Her incarnational and faithful logic also comes through in an interview I found from Bill Moyers’ Faith and Reason. (Yes, this is going to be one of those posts with long quotes.)

And I think that I have to go back to a religious position, which is that if reading the Gospel means anything, if Jesus means anything, it's about seeing everybody, every human being as Jesus. That's what makes sense. That -- therefore, every human being is of enormous value. Every human being is sacred. So it seems to me the only thing that stops me from going out and shooting people in Hummers is a religious belief that, even though I don't like them, they are sacred and valuable in the eyes of God. And that does stop me. Because I could really, you know, go out on quite a spree.

The line about the Hummers will get a smile out of Ginger. One more:

But I think it's very important to understand that-- and I guess the reason I like Christianity, I thought it was a hit-- is that it is incarnational, that Jesus is flesh and spirit. One of the things, details, that I like in the resurrection account is after Jesus comes back, he eats broiled fish. They actually tell us -- they give us a menu. Luke gives us a menu. He ate broiled fish. So in his glorified body, he is still with other people, with an appetite for specific food. I think the genius of Christianity is that it insists on a physicality, which is sacrilized . . . [a]nd I think Christianity, at its incarnational best, honors the mixed lot of being human.

As Americans, we have been running scared since September 11, 2001. (Actually, I think it started much earlier, but we broke into a sprint nine years ago.) Since then, we’ve been doing what frightened people do: lashing out at whomever we can find to blame, trying to show how strong we are and that we can fight back, looking for someone to blame, and making sure everyone knows how big and tough we are. We have done little to abate the things out there that are truly frightening.

I’m reading The Crucible right how with my eleventh and twelfth graders. Arthur Miller does a masterful job of showing how the flavors of fear that infect us all can easily blend into a toxic recipe of tragedy and destruction, causing us to lose sight of our commonalties and seeing only the devil in each other.

What Gordon reminds me is the Incarnation is God’s way of saying, “I’m with you.” Jesus’ time on earth inextricably linked Creator and creation in a way they had not been before, answering Joan Osborne before she even had the chance to ask, what if God was one of us. We, too, are one of us. Us includes the immigrants, the gay and lesbian soldiers, the screaming fundamentalists, along with Hezbollah and the Hummer drivers. Oh – and I guess I should include Congress in that number as well.

That’s a tough one.

Here where we live, in the Baskin-Robbins of Fear, we can only find courage together, just as we can also band together as an hysterical, witch-calling mob. We can incarnate the fear, or we can remember:

listening is the opposite of fear
welcoming is the opposite of fear
justice is the opposite of fear
peace is the opposite of fear
courage is the opposite of fear

and love chases fear away.

No wonder lashing out in anger draws a bigger crowd. This is hard work.

Peace,
Milton

we are not alone

In my new vocational incarnation, I am reading more, both books I’ve had stacked around for awhile and those I’m reading again with students. My tenth grade class is reading one of my favorite novels, Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, which tells the story of Stephen Kumalo’s search for his lost son. Kumalo is my favorite character in literature and the story is full of faith and humanity, as evidenced by this exchange between Kumalo and Father Vincent, his friend.

My friend, your anxiety turned to fear, and your fear turned to sorrow. But sorrow is better than fear. For fear impoverishes always, while sorrow may enrich.

Kumalo looked at him, with an intensity of gaze that was strange in so humble a man, and hard to encounter.

-- I do not know that I am enriched, he said.

-- Sorrow is better than fear, said Father Vincent doggedly. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.

-- And where have I arrived? asked Kumalo.

-- When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house, said Father Vincent in that symbolic language that is like the Zulu tongue. But when a house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house. (140)

Perhaps the passage has haunted me because the words sorrow and house show up in the same passage. Sorrow is spreading like ivy across our family as we watch Reuben, my father-in-law, fall deeper into Alzheimer’s. The doctor said he has moved from the “severely moderate” stage to “moderately severe,” and lest that sound like medical semantics, we can expect his disappearance to deepen in days and weeks rather than months. We are losing more and more of him and I, like Kumalo, do not know that I am enriched. What we do know is it is time to bring him to us.

Ginger and I are making plans for her parents to come and live here in Durham with us by the end of the summer. Rachel is his primary caregiver and will soon not be able to do it on her own, so the arriving of our sorrow brings us to a place where it is time to gather in close and cling to each other, borrowing from a lyric I wrote long ago. The practical implications of the decision begin with our becoming real estate tycoons for a time, selling their house in Birmingham, ours here in Durham, and buying a larger place to accommodate us all. (Anyone want to buy a house?) My recent job change brings with it the unexpected blessing of significant time off this summer; it looks as though I will spend a good bit of it in some sort of moving van.

There is plenty of fear to go around: fear of Reuben’s continuing digression, fear of their moving for the first time in a half a century, fear of how all of this gets paid for, fear of whatever else might happen. The sorrow, as in the story, is not far behind. Elizabeth Bishop is right: the art of losing isn’t hard to master. Sharing a house with Reuben will be giving absence an address in a way, his familiar yet vacant shell sitting down to dinner with us each evening. As he continues to forget, we, his family, are charged with re-membering both him and ourselves, putting the pieces back together on a daily basis, rebuilding what continues to fall apart.

Even as I write about it, I don’t know what to expect, or how to expect it.

The tenth graders wrote essays today, looking at the same passage I quote here, along with a couple of others that didn’t come from the book to give them something to bounce off of. Here are two of them:

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. – Ambrose Redmoon

There is much in the world to make us afraid. There is much more in our faith to make us unafraid. – Frederick W. Cropp

As I read them, I can hear Julie Miller singing in the background,

you have come by way of sorrow
you have come by way of tears
but you’ll reach your destiny
meant to find you all these years
meant to find you all these years

The reason I keep coming back to Stephen Kumalo is his story says what Cropp’s quote says: there is more in our faith to make us unafraid, even to make us bold. From where we are in the story right now, things only get worse for Kumalo, as far as circumstances go, and his compassion and faith only deepen. Father Vincent knows of what he speaks: sorrow makes for strong building blocks when it is shaped by courage and love. Part of the journey for Stephen is to a deeper understanding that he is not alone, either in the depth of his pain or the struggle for change.

The same is true for us.

We are not the first to watch helplessly as a loved one fade away before our eyes. We are not the first to struggle with the financial realities of what it means to be family. We are also not the first to trust that God is with us, as are a significant cloud of witnesses and fellow travelers. We are not alone.

We are not alone.

We are not alone. I might do well to let that begin most any paragraph I write because fear’s insidious intent is to erase that truth. We are not alone. I say it and remember it is as true for you as it is for me. In the midst of my real estate and reality, I am called to look up and offer a hand to you in your pain, even as I receive your offering.

We are not alone. What can separate us from the love of God? Will Alzheimer’s or distance or housing sales or debt? Will questions or sleeplessness or sorrow or fear? No. Nothing will separate us from a Love that will not let us go. We are not alone.

We are not alone.

Peace,
Milton

what's in a name

It was on January 3, 1899 that The New York Times used the word "automobile" in an editorial, the first known use of that word in English.

What would eventually come to be known as automobiles were still very new items, and the first mass production of them in America was two years away. The New York Times seemed equally disturbed by the machines themselves and the fact that there was no good word for them. It concluded: "There is something uncanny about these new-fangled vehicles. They are all unutterably ugly and never a one of them has been provided with a good, or even an endurable, name. The French, who are usually orthodox in their etymology if in nothing else, have evolved 'automobile,' which, being half Greek and half Latin, is so near to indecent that we print it with hesitation."
-- from The Writer’s Almamac

what's in a name

one of the first tasks given
to our first human beings
was to name the creatures
that surrounded them
from hydrax to hippopotamus
aardvark to arachnid

creation on a first name basis

we’ve moved on beyond zebra
to try and name our own devices
machines and ideas that fill
up our minds and cities
faster than we can come to
terms with our inventions

existence in the crush of anonymity

the world is exploding with
both hatred and hope
stand here and call me
by name by my name
and I will call yours then
together we will name Love

the Love that named us first

Peace,
Milton

i've got to use my imagination

I’ve been trying to keep up with the news around the Nigerian man who tried to light some type of explosive on a plane landing in Detroit on Christmas Day. I’ve been trying to keep up mostly because I’m getting on a flight to Austin on Wednesday to go to the memorial service for my friend David, and I want to know how much earlier I’m going to have to go to the airport to get through security. Trust me, when they start “randomly” pulling people out of the line for special attention, this man with the shaved head and the earrings is usually one of them.

The latest I’ve heard is the airlines are telling people they can’t get up or have anything in their laps during the last hour of a flight. What I know about what happened last week had to do with something the guy had strapped to his leg that he was trying to light. I’m not sure how telling people they can’t go to the bathroom, watch a movie on their laptop, or read a book would have stopped him or is going to make my flight any safer, other than it helps, perhaps, because we all feel as though the airlines are doing something at least. We stand on the cusp of a new year and we appear to be fueled by the same old fear. As David Wilcox wrote:

you say you see no hope you say
you see no reason we should dream
that the world will ever change
you say that we are foolish to believe
‘cause there will always be some crazy
with an army or a knife
to wake you from your daydream
put the fear back in your life

Not so many nights ago, we sang together, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,” and here, on the fourth day of Christmas, even the four calling birds sound suspect. I heard one Senator talk of perhaps “preemptively striking” Yemen since the man on the plane was suspected of going there for training. Forget the calling birds, French hens, turtle doves, and even the partridge; trade them all in for sitting ducks.

Yes, I know it makes sense to be scared. If we look at things rationally, there are people out there who want to hurt us, who want to do harm. Our situation calls for something more profound, more substantive than rationality. The sensible response would be to say we must hurt them before they hurt us, or at least take our pound of flesh for whatever harm they manage to inflict. We are learning from our responses over the last eight years that neither of those rational responses does more than foment both fear and violence. Trying to make them as scared of us as we are of them doesn’t solve a thing, nor does it make us feel any more secure.

Fear may make sense, but it doesn’t make faith, as Wilcox sings:

it is Love that mixed the mortar
and Love that stacked these stones
and it’s Love that sets the stage here
though it looks like we’re alone
in this scene set in shadows
as if night is here to stay
there is evil cast around us
but it’s Love that wrote the play
and in this lifetime Love will show the way

We must move beyond the rationality of fear, or the irrationality of deciding all Muslims are terrorists or the rest of the world is just jealous of us, to the realm of faith and imagination, to a place where we allow ourselves to trust we can expect more from ourselves as human beings than an eye-for-an-eye existence, to a place where choose to respond in love rather than lashing out. Though 2009 appears to be ending on the same note as most of the last decade, the reality that will be 2010 doesn’t have to be pre-determined.

Those of us who choose to call ourselves followers of the One we also call the Prince of Peace would do well to also choose imagination over irony in the days to come. I’m getting on the plane Wednesday morning because I am going to gather with those whose lives were touched by David’s incarnation of God’s love in a way that led us to live imaginatively, believing the truth of our existence lay in something deeper than the reality of the headlines. Davy knew the reality of deep personal pain and yet chose love rather than lashing out. Wednesday night you can find a whole baseball stadium full of those who are both recipients and carriers of that love. Violence, like fear, is a lack of imagination. Peace is not naïve (though I am often told so), it is what love looks like when it is lived out.

I’m going to retell a story. (Hey! That’s new.)

A number of years ago, a missionary to Lebanon spoke at a church where I was serving. At that time, the violence in Lebanon was akin to what is happening in Israel and Palestine. After her talk, one woman in our church said to her, “We will pray for your safety.”

“Please don’t,” the missionary replied. “If you pray for me to be safe, I won’t get to go back because it’s not safe. Pray for me to be faithful.”

Life is not safe; but we knew that. Even on the fourth day of Christmas we know we are already following Jesus to the cross. On more than one occasion, he talked about what our faithfulness would cost us. His love was unflinching, all the way to his death. And his death was not the last word. If we can trust enough to imagine the skies filled with angels singing to the shepherds, or love strong enough to roll away the stone so Jesus could talk to Mary in the garden on that first Easter morning, can we not also imagine we could be faithful enough to wage a peace that would change the world?

Yes, I know out of two thousand years hardly any of those have known peace. Yes, I know those who would hurt us aren’t playing by the same rules. Yes, I know force feels like the only viable option.

That doesn’t change my question.

Peace,
Milton

what's the word

I’m looking for?
(Not that anyone has asked
for a word, you understand)

Still – the swirl around
the swine flu has left me
looking for a word or two
with which to respond . . .

I could say something
about malaria, or cholera,
or tuberculosis, or hunger –
all bigger killers we could do
something about, but

that too quickly begins to
sound (and feel) superior.

I could repeat what I read
on the church sign driving
to work: “God is in control.”

And then I drove past a car
that had fallen into the ditch.

Most every time an angel
appears in a Bible story,
he says the same thing:
“Be not afraid,” as if that
would be enough.

Tone, you know, travels
across time and scripture
about as well as it does
in email; still -- I can’t help
but hear something other
than a command.

And I wonder . . .

how I might give my
word wings of compassion
and the lightness of love
whatever it might be.


Peace,
Milton

saying thanks in the dark

After a day full of thanks and food, I sat down to write and was found, once more, by one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, W. S. Merwin. (Thanks, Christine.)

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is.

Reading the poem again – particularly that last two lines – has brought me to a new conclusion: the opposite of fear is not courage, but gratitude. We are most fully human when we are most deeply grateful.

One of our Thanksgiving traditions is to go around the table before we eat and each offer something for which we are thankful. My friend Terry, who plays harmonica on my Christmas story, said he learned again this year how much joy and sorrow are connected and was thankful to be living in the middle of them. Everyone around our table was acquainted with grief, as I’m sure was true wherever meals were shared today. Sorrow and sadness are ubiquitous in our world. Therefore, if Terry is right (and I’m betting he is), joy is just as far reaching. We, then, are left with a choice: we can look into the night, dark though it is, and wonder what is coming next to get us or we can look up at the stars shining in the dark and say, “Thank you.” And it’s a choice we have to make again and again, broadcasting our gratitude in every direction, thanking God and thanking one another.

May we be those who choose to say thank you and wave, dark though it is.

Peace,
Milton

running scared

We took Ella walking in the middle of the night last night, so I didn’t get my daily dose of Jon Stewart, so, when I got home tonight, Ginger and I watched last night’s episode of The Daily Show, which included this report from John Oliver at both McCain and Obama campaign rallies.



The clip made me laugh (“Oh, that was an unfortunate time for a slip-up.”) and it made me sad; sad, because Oliver is right that our biggest commonality as Americans appears to be our fear and we appear to be mostly frightened of each other.

I don’t know what to do with that. So I guess I have to say it got me riled up a bit as well.

2 Timothy 2:7, as I learned it years ago from the King James, says, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” That doesn’t sound like much of anyone I hear talking about this election, Christian or otherwise. We seem to be running scared to the polls, afraid of what the other side is going to do to America.

The problem is we seldom make good choices when we’re scared, election year or not.

It’s news to no one, unless you’re here for the first time, that I’m going to vote for Barack Obama. But I’m not voting for him because I’m scared of John McCain or Sarah Palin. I disagree with them on many things, I don’t see them as the best choice we have this time around, but I’m not scared of them or of what they might do. Things are going to change, regardless of who wins. The government is going to do some things I like and some things I don’t regardless of who wins. America is going to have to cope with its changing place in the world regardless of who wins. But America is not who gives us a spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind. To allow fear to control our votes is not to vote for, but against. We rarely say, “Yes” out of fear; we say, “No,” hoping it will keep us safe.

When we go vote, may we do so with a spirit of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. May we be mindful that those who are voting differently are not enemies to be feared, but fellow citizens to be regarded, regardless of how they choose to see us. May we not run scared, but move with intentionality and resolve. And may we never run into John Oliver when he’s doing interviews.

Peace,
Milton

fearful or faithful

As I listened to the news today, I realized our church has a choice to make.

What caught my ear was the story about the man who walked into a church in Knoxville, Tennessee and opened fire on the congregation. He left a four page note in his truck, part of which said he thought he had lost his job because of “liberals and gays.” The Knoxville Police Chief said:

It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred of the liberal movement.

My first emotion was one of deep sadness for the dear people in that congregation. As I drove on, I began to think of the similarities between the Knoxville Church and our congregation here is Durham:

• college town
• Southern city
• small congregation in a somewhat secluded setting
• liberal congregation

and I thought, “We have a choice to make as to whether we will be led, in the coming days, to act on our calling or play to our fears since, if the zip code had been different, that church could have easily been ours.

I was teaching at Winchester High School when the shootings at Columbine took place. In that instance, similarly, we were the same high school in a different zip code. One of the things I loved about the school was the corner on the second floor where all the kids threw their book bags when they got to school. To me, it signified the comfort and safety level of the students. They didn’t expect anyone to steal stuff and, for the most part, no one did. The first day of school after Columbine, the edict came that glorious stack of bags had to be removed because it was a security threat. In their fear, the administration removed the best monument to safety and community on the campus. It didn’t help and it didn’t go unnoticed.

About a week later, one of the other English teachers handed me an essay from one of her students. He was a senior who, for as many days as he had walked into the high school, always wore a long black coat. For that matter, all of his clothes were black. He was reclusive, cynical, intelligent, and often hard to reach. He admitted to all of those things as he described himself in the essay. He also went on to say as he watched the stories on the two boys who did the shootings in Colorado, he was struck by how the descriptions the reporters gave of the boys could very easily have been said of him. And he wondered out loud why he didn’t want to come to school and shoot everyone. He then went on to talk about the teachers who pushed him to be a better writer, about the art and drama classes, about the school community that made him feel safe.

He didn’t say anything about getting rid of the book bags.

Our little church is a wonderful and wounded collection of people who are deeply committed to our God and our city. We are a liberal congregation – on purpose. Many of our community have ended up there because it is a fellowship that feels safe and welcoming. We need to choose to understand our congregation is to be relished rather than defended. If we start posting deacons at the door to keep an eye out for threatening looking people, we will not be taking precautions, but we will be losing part of ourselves. Every Sunday morning, Ginger says, “As we say here at Pilgrim and in the UCC, ‘Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.’”

Whoever you are. Those words are our stack of book bags. We can’t afford to scare ourselves out of that invitation.

One of the stories that sticks with me is of a missionary to Lebanon who was in the States and preparing to return to Beirut. After a speaking engagement, someone said to her, “We will pray for you to be safe.”

“Oh, no,” answered the missionary. “If you pray for our safety, we might never get back to Lebanon. It is not safe. Pray that we will be faithful.”

This Sunday, and the ones to follow, we have a choice to make: be fearful or be faithful. Let us all pray for one another.

Peace,
Milton

fear factor

One of the food blogs I read regularly is Smitten Kitchen. I don’t know who writes it, but it is among the most beautiful and accessible of the blogs that take food seriously. In one of her recent posts, she asked people to talk about why they were afraid to cook. Her list set me to thinking about fear in general and, for some reason, my thoughts fell into rhyme.

Fear Factor

It’s my favorite room, but that’s not true for some;
when it comes to the kitchen, those some come undone,
who’re afraid to sauté or to simmer or sear,
who’d opt for some take out and grab a cold beer.

We’re all scared of something – it doesn’t have to be cooking
that makes our palms sweat or sets us to looking
with eyes of suspicion and stares of disdain.
No, it’s much more than food that sets our fears aflame.

The things that are scary go past breads and béarnaise,
beyond cupcakes and corn (you know some call it maize),
to the questions and quandaries that fester and foment
in both fears for a lifetime and fears of the moment.

Some fears are big, like tornadoes or earthquakes;
some fears are small—think of hangnails and toothaches.
A snake or a spider can send some running to hide,
while a few are afraid of things battered and fried.

Some are scared of the dark, or of turbulent weather
And others that N’Sync might just get back together
Some are frightened of hula hoops, hot wings, and horses,
Others scared of their marriages, some of divorces,

Some are scared of Al-Qaeda, some of Al Roker,
Or that they might be doused with their kid’s Super Soaker;
Some are scared of the new, some afraid of the old,
Others fear that their neighborhoods should be more patrolled.

Some are scared they will die, some are scared they will live;
Some are frightened the blood drive will ask them to give.
Just the thought of a needle can give others a chill,
and then there’s the terror of the credit card bill.

The climate is changing, gas prices are rising –
perhaps, that we’re fearful is not so surprising:
nuclear warheads can make us afraid --
that Celine Dion songs are allowed to be played;

Cat-burglars, kidnappings, foreign attacks,
cockroaches, coal mines, that mole on your back;
Outsourcing, outside, and some outboard motors,
slick politicians and party-line voters;

Insurgents, incumbents, wifi, and water,
on particular days – your own sons and daughters;
foreclosures and Fox news, dark streets at night,
lumberjacks, lawyers, and airplane flights;

Kleenex and Clorox, Keanu Reeves movies,
people who still say things like “far out” and “groovy,”
botox and beetles, eviction, ebola,
satellites, cell phones, and sugar-free cola;

Loneliness, failure, new places, old wounds,
arthritis, amnesia, rejection, blue moons,
chemicals, cholera, downed power lines,
clear cutting, kudzu, signs of the times;

TV evangelists, late night news anchors,
hankers and flankers and cankers and bankers,
being buried alive or left somewhere for dead,
hybrids and hotheads and the not-so-well-read;

I’m fearful of stopping lest I leave something out;
I’ve yet to mention Google or gout,
or governments – see, there’s so much to fear:
the Yankees, umbrellas, poodles, cashmere.

Whatever our fears, we all have our reasons
for running and hiding, for living in seasons
of conflict and doubt, of turmoil and stress
because of the things that make life a mess.

The fears are quite real, and so are our choices
to push through the scared and find other voices
To speak to our fears without acquiescing
to all that is frightening, but instead keep ‘em guessing.

Whether frightened of food, or afraid of the dark,
of undersea monsters or dogs that don’t bark,
one simple reminder can keep us prepared:
before you can be brave, you’ve got to be scared.

Peace,
Milton

close guantánamo

God has not given us a spirit of fear;

but of power, love, and of a sound mind.
(2 Timothy 1:7)

On January 11, 2002, the first prisoner arrived at Guantánamo Bay. Since then approximately 775 people have been detained there. 405 have been released, leaving about 305 people still in custody. The facility costs over $100 million to run each year (meaning we’ve spent over a half a billion dollars so far) and, in the course of six years, only ten people have been charged with crimes. One person, an Australian, pleaded guilty. Eighty-six percent of those detained in Afghanistan were not captured by US forces in combat, but were turned in by Afghan citizens for the reward money. The youngest known prisoner – excuse me, enemy combatant – is thirteen; the oldest is ninety-eight. (*These facts came from here, here, and here.)

There are several good reasons to close the detention camp at Guantánamo that run the gamut from pragmatic to philosophical, but I just want to talk about one: we are doing something to people from other countries we would not tolerate being done to our own citizens. We’ve put them in prison across an ocean and not on our soil (so they wouldn’t fall under full US jurisdiction), called them “combatants” instead of prisoners of war so we didn’t have to abide by the Geneva Conventions, made it almost impossible for them to get any kind of legal representation, and held most of them without telling them why they are in custody. I don’t care how damn scared we are of Osama bin Laden, or how justified we feel in answering violence with violence, what we are doing to the people at Guantánamo is wrong and we should stop.

Jesus was simple and direct: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He said nothing about doing unto others to keep them from doing unto you. What he knew was treating each other as we wish to be treated is how perfect love casts out fear. Six years in Guantánamo shows us how fear casts out love. One of the pieces I saw supporting the detention camp started by pointing out that no US citizens were being held there. The implication seemed to be it was OK to do whatever we needed to do because they weren’t us. Is that really the choice we want to make?

I’m wearing orange on January 11, as are many Americans (I hope), as a statement of solidarity with those who wish to see Guantánamo closed. I understand there are many levels to the political and militaristic rhetoric around this issue on both sides. I understand we can read statistics in any number of ways. I also understand we live in a dangerous world. Six years of detention later, however, I don’t think we’re significantly safer because those guys have been locked up in Cuba.

Six years ago, my oldest nephew would have been about the same age as the youngest person detained at Guantánamo. In that six years, Ben finished high school, went on to college, even studied a semester at Oxford, and will graduate this summer. He wasn’t born in Afghanistan or in poverty, so he didn’t grow up hearing about al Qaeda. He didn’t grow up in a country that has stood at the crossroads of war and conquest for centuries. My nephew is going to graduate from college and the Afghan guy is still sitting in Gitmo. If he had lived all these years in Afghanistan, I don’t imagine he would have ended up at Oxford, but I feel as though we, as a nation, have robbed him and many others of lives they might have had because of our fear. We had been do unto in the September 11 attacks and we wanted to do unto in like fashion. It has served none of us well.

We are doing damage at Guantánamo. We can stop and we should.

May we live in and treat one another (all the one anothers) with a spirit of power, love, and a sound mind.

Peace,
Milton

cry wolf

“Forget about fairy tales,” she said
as we entered Wolf Hollow.
“They will make you frightened
of the wolves,” she said, as though
we were looking at docile dogs
through two layers of tall fence.

Gracie our youngest, descendant
of the wolves I’m told, is frightened
by the early freedom thunder
of fireworks a couple of blocks away.
She shakes as though she might
wear out her skin from the inside
and lays down on my feet

while I’m trying to write.
“Forget about the fireworks,” I say.
“They are too far away to hurt you.”
She is not convinced and flinches
with every rocket red roar. I can’t
fence out bombs bursting in air.

Fear can look foolish on the face
of another. Incredulity can incite
insensitivity. “Be not afraid,”
we say, like Gabriel to Mary,
an unmarried, pregnant teenager
who hid his words in her heart.

Faith can look foolish, too.
Making believe was hard work
in the face of her fears, both real
and imagined. It looks easy
when we tell the story now
because the angels are long gone.

I can’t forget about fairy tales or fear
anymore than I can stop making
believe. That woman knows her wolves
as well as Mary did her angels.
Gracie and I can only hear the boom
in the distance and wonder what’s next.

whom would jesus torture?

I’ve got something I’ve been carrying around for a few days I have to get on the page.

Last Wednesday, the NPR program Here & Now aired a segment on a congressional hearing on our government’s practice of “extraordinary rendition,” which sounds like more like a critique for a performance on American Idol than it does something that deserves congressional attention. As cool as it sounds, it’s not fun and games at all. Rendition is the practice of our government finding ways to hand over political prisoners to governments that will torture them for us, since our constitution forbids us from treating people that way. Our government has sent people to Syria and Egypt, among other places, just because we suspect they know something – not because we have anything more tangible than a hunch – and let those governments beat the living daylights out of these people.

If that doesn’t send a chill up your spine, wait until you hear what Michael Sawyer, a former CIA officer who helped create parts of the program, had to say in the hearing. When he was asked about the fact that many innocent people had been rendered, he said, “No one really cares what happens to these people. Let me rephrase that: I don’t care what happens to them.”

William Delahunt, one of our Massachusetts Congressmen, asked, “What about those who are ultimately proved innocent, even after being tortured.”

“Well, mistakes are made.”

“So they’re mistakes,” said Delahunt.

They’re not Americans; I really don’t care.” Then Sawyer laughed.

The congressman who had invited Sawyer defended his stance by saying something about our living in a time of war and having to do these things. He’s got it backwards: we are at war because we do these things. If our fear and anger has reduced us to people who don’t care about anyone’s life but our own, then we are not so easily distinguishable from the terrorists we are so determined to exterminate. Yes, I know we live in a dangerous world and there are people who would like to do us harm. I saw the Twin Towers fall just like Michael Sawyer did. But I refuse to accept his definition of reality. Torture will never sow the seeds of peace.

Yesterday, I found this new poster on the Amnesty International web site:


I like the sentiment, yet I have to say believing in America isn’t going to change much. These are days that call for an extraordinary rendition of our faith, a brazen articulation and incarnation of Jesus’ words:

“Love your enemies; be good to those who hate you.”
“Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
“Love everyone as I have loved you.”

Do we think Jesus was being hyperbolic or sentimental or unrealistic? Do we assume somewhere along the line the caveats he added at the end of those imperatives were somehow lost in translation? (“Love your enemies; be good to those who hate you – unless, of course, you can find someone else to torture them.”) At the heart of our incarnational theology is the reality that all of humanity is connected. When people die in Darfur, we die. When our government arranges for people to be tortured, we are tortured. Jesus pointed that out as well:

“When you do it unto the least of these, you do it unto me.”

Torture is wrong. Rounding up people on the basis of fear and suspicion and flying them halfway around the world to throw them in prison without any rights is also wrong. Justifying any of it with the idea of making the world safer for us is both wrong and misguided. Jesus never called us to be safe. He didn’t call us to take care of ourselves first. He did call us to love the world, over and over again.

I don’t know if Michael Sawyer is a Christian, so I can’t speak to the ethic that guides him. I also don’t expect our government to be Christian in its actions because it’s not Christian. I do pray that American Christians will grow in their courage and compassion to be peacemakers instead of seekers of safety. The people being tortured are someone’s father or brother or son, someone’s wife or mother or daughter. Before they are suspects, or enemy combatants, or even terrorists they are human beings just like me. Whether they choose to be a neighbor or an enemy, they are people whom Jesus called me to love.

I can’t condone their torture under any circumstance.

No, that’s not an easy statement to live with. Our world is dangerous and there are people who would like to do damage to as many Americans as possible. That’s the life they have chosen. I have to decide whether my choices will be determined by my fear of being hurt by them or by my commitment to follow Jesus’ life and teaching.

You would think the choice was obvious.

Peace,
Milton

response

I’m thankful I woke up this morning late enough to miss NBC’s airing of the video of Cho Seung-Hui that he mailed before he started shooting people in Blacksburg. I don’t want to see it. I know I don’t need to. What I did read were the anonymous comments from one angry person to Tracy’s wonderful post at Spilt Milk. If you could scream when you write, this guy was yelling at the top of his lungs about how crazy and angry all the Muslims were. I don’t think he saw his own irony. I read a sad story on Raising Yousuf about a Palestinian woman’s difficulty leaving the Amsterdam airport just because she was a Muslim woman.

The level of violence we reach in the name of “securing the homeland,” or whatever name we use to say we want to be safe, makes me angry. To avoid adding to the violence and turmoil, the best things I know to do are add a new recipe and turn to poetry.

Response

Fear is hand delivered:
trench-coated high
schoolers, hijackers,
car bombers,
suicidal shooters.

Fighting to feel safe
is like eating gravy with a fork.

Get on a plane.
Go to class.
Drop off the kids.
Cross the street.
See what happens.

Life doesn’t follow
an ascending trajectory.

Fearing and fighting
are not our only options.
We can choose faith --
drop our guards
and our guns.

We won’t feel safe, secure
or even in control.
Waging peace
has never been
for the faint of heart.

Peace,
Milton

common bond

Besides trying to figure out how to create another sidebar on my blog, I spent a good part of the evening reading how various folks have responded to the killings at Virginia Tech. My heart aches for the families and friends of those who were killed, for all the VT students who never imagined their college days would be so indelibly marked by such an horrific tragedy, and for the school and city officials who have become the targets of so much of the rage that can’t find any other resting place.

We woke up this morning to Matt and Meredith sitting on the campus lawn in Blacksburg with a “special report.” They, along with who knows how many different media outlets, both large and small, descended on the college so we all could have up to the minute coverage. They went to commercial with a special logo and subdued music. One of the reporters did a small piece interviewing a handful of students and closed by saying something like, “They are still trying to figure out how to get on with their lives.” They’re going to be trying to figure that out for a long, long time.

The phrase that hung with me was one I heard repeated several times today: this was the largest killing spree in our nation’s history. Hyperbole or not, the statement is jarring. In all our years as a nation, not until 2007 did we have a day when a person killed over thirty people at once and then killed himself. For all practical purposes, he was a suicide bomber. Blacksburg, it seems, is not that far from Baghdad.

Our local news tonight began drawing lines from Boston to Blacksburg, making note of the kids from New England who were killed. Part of what the news people incarnate is our desire to not let those folks hurt alone. We want them to know this is our pain, not just theirs. Some from our neighborhood died too, we say. In a week that marks the anniversaries of the deaths at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the shootings at Columbine, we are all working hard to be galvanized by our pain, to share the weight of sorrow, to walk together through the valley of the shadow.

It’s good and important work.

We come together because we find comfort and strength, because we can incarnate love and grace to one another; because it hurts too damn much to be alone. Here, at the heart of our pain, comes the call to widen the circle of those who hurt like we do. Hardly a day goes by that thirty people don’t die in Iraq because of a suicide bomber. The people in Jerusalem and Gaza live with the same fear. This week the same thing has happened in Algiers and Afghanistan. Three hundred and thirty die everyday in Darfur. Everyone who dies is someone’s daughter, mother, son, father, friend. Our shared grief is the common denominator.

Since I grew up far away from my extended family, I didn’t go to a family funeral until I was almost out of high school. My first funeral during my seminary pastorate was only the second funeral I had ever attended. The funeral director in town was a retired minister and a great guy. He saw the raw fear in my eyes as I met with him and the family. “Come by in the morning,” he said, “and I’ll show you what to do.”

The man who died was a poor country man. His wife found him on the floor when she came back in from the garden. They were dirt poor. If they had lived in the city they would have been homeless. In the country, they lived in a shanty that was falling down around them. I drove up to their house and the widow met me at the door. I was at a loss as to what to do and, as she expressed her sorrow, I blurted, “I know how you feel.”

She stopped crying and looked up at me with astonishment. “Do you really?”

“No,” I stammered. “I don’t. I just didn’t know what to say.”

About that time, one of the women of the church – a widow for twenty years – knocked on the door and came in all in one motion. She kept moving until she was sitting next to the woman and had her arm around her shoulder. “Vergie,” she said.

“Thank you,” said the woman.

I watched the two women hold the sorrow like an infant, as though they had given birth to hope in that moment. After a little while, the woman looked up at me and said, “He was a good man.” And she began to tell me stories.

I have no idea what it feels like to be a student at Virginia Tech any more than I can grasp what it feels like to live in Baghdad or Darfur. In the past couple of years, I’ve stood with two close friends at their parents’ funerals. I don’t know what that feels like either. What I do know, from being with those friends, is it mattered I was there. It mattered that I called, that I noticed, that I reached out. I’ve missed some of those moments in the lives of other friends and it mattered when I didn’t show up as well.

When we talk about Darfur, the prevailing response, often, is we feel overwhelmed by the distance, by the problem, by our own pain. That we can feel a sense of solidarity with the students in Blacksburg gives me hope that we can find a sense of connection and commitment to the pain beyond our comfort zone. Grief does not have to drive us to fear or isolation. Clamoring for safety doesn’t bring much in the way of comfort. Compassion – voluntarily entering one another’s pain – is how we both grow and heal.

Peace,
Milton