bewteen friends

My mind is all over the place.

Perhaps I would state it better to say my mind has been bombarded by several things that have set it swirling. I can’t help thinking about what is happening in Gaza; part of the reason it bothers me is I feel helpless to do anything about it. I think I feel that way about much of what is going on in the world. I was going through the various blogs I read this morning and read this from Randy:

I was listening to NPR on my way to work this morning, as is my wont. They were discussing the crisis of the moment, which is the story about how big bad Israel is attacking the poor innocent people of Gaza.

Randy and I have never met, though we communicate from time to time. Though we rarely come to the same conclusions about most anything, we stay connected, for which I am grateful. What hit me about his post, more than any conclusion he drew, was his phrase, “the crisis of the moment.” Maybe part of my sense of helplessness is I feel as though we live in such a state of cultural ADD that we don’t pay attention long enough to allow ourselves to be moved into action by our compassion.

One of my Christmas presents was a subscription to the UNTE Reader, a unabashedly lefty magazine that always gives me something to think about. In the latest issue, Richard Just has written an article entitled, “On Our Watch: The world is inundated with stories about the genocide in Darfur. So why haven’t we stopped it?” He talks about all that has been said and filmed and written about the mass murders and rapes and tortures there and then asks:

What has gone wrong? Did we, over time, grow immune to the images and the testimonies? Did we give too much weight to what seemed like the conflict’s complexities, and too little to the raw human suffering that was taking place before our eyes? Did we put too much faith in the United Nations and too little in ourselves? Did we allow our elected leaders to seduce us with airy statements congratulating us on our passion, when they should have been consulting with generals about how to get soldiers onto the ground as quickly as possible? True, we were poorly served by a small-minded president and his bungling administration. But did liberals demand the right things of him? Did we push for what would really save the people of Darfur? Or did we get trapped by the inclinations of our worldview, and advocate for too little?

My friend Jimmy, writes about his recent trip to New Orleans to help folks still recovering from Hurricane Katrina:

Each person I met during the week had a story of how Katrina changed their lives.. Some left the city before and returned months later to find all they ever had was gone. A few I met had to be rescued from the roof of their homes as the water filled the neighborhoods in moments. Regardless of the story there is still much to be done in New Orleans to return folks to their homes. As of last week, there were 150,000 homes in New Orleans that need to be renovated, rebuilt or razed. Only 8,000 building permits were completed in 2008, at that rate it will take at least ten years to complete the rebuild of New Orleans and at least a generation to restore the city. As time moves further from the date of the storm, more and more folks will forget about the folks in New Orleans rebuilding their homes and communities.

In the last of today’s readings, I found this paragraph in Ron Martoia’s Transformational Architecture: Reshaping Our Lives as Narrative, which talks about much of Christianity’s focus on getting people into heaven over doing God’s transforming work in real time:

What if Jesus came to address human need, to bring shalom, to dole out free “pink spoon” samples – and in the process have people join his family, a family that lives together in harmony and love? Is it possible our whole construal of salvation is so other worldly that we don’t know how to read the [biblical] text honestly and as a result aren’t sure how to help the world?

I have more questions than I know what to do with. Instead of trying to answer them all, or even voice them all, I want to point to two things I also found tonight among what I’ve already mentioned that are helping me to move beyond hopelessness to a place where I can better see how I can incarnate compassion.

One I found also on the UTNE site: a link to a blog written by Hope Man, an Israeli living near the border of Gaza, and Peace Man, a Palestinian who lives about ten miles away in Gaza. Their answer to what is going on around them is to write together and to get to know one another, because they said hardly anyone knew people on the other side of the border. I remember years ago reading that the peace process in Northern Ireland began to take hold in large part because there were Catholic and Protestant women who crossed into No Man’s Land everyday to pray together, convinced that their burgeoning friendships could make a difference.

The second is on my friend Jimmy’s blog. His latest post not only tells about how New Orleans is still reeling, but describes how he plans to respond. He is, among other things, a carpenter. The winter weather and the frozen economy have left him with time, so he is planning to go to New Orleans for a month to rebuild all he can. He is raising money to cover his family’s expenses so their lives can go on as he helps to put the lives of others back together. I love the audacious compassion that comes through in the title of his post: “Help Me Rebuild New Orleans.” Please help him if you can.

Though the presidents and generals can give the orders to drop the bombs, they appear to be unable to wage peace. The media is prisoner to the “crisis du jour” and unable, for the most part, to tell us stories that foster hope and action for longer than a day or two. Friendships are what change the world – the relational commitments to enter into one another’s pain, to listen before we speak, to allow our lives to be filled with hope and trust and loyalty based not on doctrine or policy or ethnicity, but on the love between friends.

OK. I’m better now.

Peace,
Milton

I've just got to use my imagination

in the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God . . .

and the Word became flesh
and dwelt among us

Those familiar words from John, along with the rest of the first seventeen verses of Chapter One, were the text for Ginger’s sermon. As she talked about the Word – the Logos – she offered a twist on the translation, looking at word roots:

in the beginning was the Logic of God
and the Logic was with God
and the Logic was God . . .

and the Logic became flesh
and dwelt among us

John was saying what happened in the Incarnation gave us a look into the mind of God, into the way God thinks. The God of Creation and Incarnation is one who thinks relationally enough to become human and say things like, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” As she talked, another translation ran through my mind

in the beginning was the Imagination
and the Imaginaton was with God
and the Imagination was God . . .

and that Imagination became flesh
and dwelt among us

I thought about it again tonight reading a piece on the Israeli attacks in Gaza by Gene Stoltzfus, Director Emeritus of Christian Peacemaker Teams. Before I quote him, I have to set it up a bit. Last night, Jon Stewart did his own bit on situation, called “Strip Maul,” in which he showed clips of various American leaders – George W. Bush, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Jon Corzine, Mark Sanford, George Will, and Michael Bloomberg -- giving unabashed support to Israel’s response to violence with overwhelming violence. Bloomberg “brought it home” by saying:

If you’re in your apartment and some emotionally disturbed person is banging on the door screaming, “I’m going to come through this door and kill you,” do you want us to respond with one police officer, which is proportional, or with all the resources at our command?

A couple of things. One, the Palestinians are not emotionally disturbed or crazy. The people who are being killed in the Israeli attacks are mostly civilians – now over 500 of them – who have nowhere to hide. Two, if all the imagination our leaders can muster to respond to what is happening is to validate the violence, we are in serious trouble. What they describe is not what is happening. Here is a video clip from CBS News.



With all of that on my mind and heart, I was glad to come across Gene Stoltzfus’ statement because I could see some of God’s imagination seeping through his very thoughtful and faithful words. And I quote:

Today I grieve over what is happening in the region of Gaza. Is there anything I can do? Am I limited to government statements, last minute diplomacy, or immobilizing personal outrage? How do I respond from this place of despair? What do I tell the children? Is this the time when the posture of prayer may provide the oppenness toward a solution waiting for recognition?

When people are pressed to the limit of their flesh, they find a way to struggle. The people of Gaza -- whose democratically elected government more powerful nations rejected and who have been suffering under Israel's crippling blockade -- are not the first people to do so. Suicidal missions happen in most wars. Soldiers serving a cause in which they believe -- freedom, empire, democracy, or religion -- know they may die for the cause. They believe, sometimes with positive outcomes, that their sacrifice might reach beyond the limits of today's reason into tomorrow's solutions.

Where do those of us outside of Palestine and Israel, those of us who reject violence, turn for a resolution? Thousands of boardrooms, staff meetings, and grand peace councils set up to deal with crises like this have not produced solutions. As diplomats desperately grope for chimeral ceasefires, those involved in the conflict feel despair and guilt over lost opportunities. Will solutions ever come from diplomacy or councils? Will the sixty-eyar stalemate continue for another forty years -- a full century of explaining the conflict to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim children?

Or can the Gaza crisis of 2008-2009 ignite our imaginations? Can we believe that our collective imaginations might help? Have we received one more opportunity to sharpen our senses for what divine mystery wants to reveal to us?

Religious and secular people committed to social justice and peacemaking are suspicious that meditation belongs only to the pious and those who hide behind spiritual exercises to avoid engagement. This split between people of action and people of prayer is a false dichotomy that appears in every tradition. If political analysis or raw activism could have provided the basis for peace in this region of God's earth, it would have happened long ago. What has been lacking is the acknowledgment of unknown forces at work among and through patterns of violent conflict in Israel and Palestine.

The war in Gaza today invites me to prayer. I share our common desperation for a breakthrough. I don't promise that prayer will enlighten my imagination in a fresh way. I will try because I know that liberation from false myths of security is born in times of violence. When a sign or a nudge to action comes, I hope I have the courage to follow it. And if it comes to you or me, we can share it with the people in the peace councils, in diplomatic corps, or organizations -- share it with all the people on this journey with us. We may be here for just such a time as this.

Surely we are in this world to do more than justify the violence we see around us. This particular sentence challenges me:

I will try because I know that liberation from false mythis of sercurity is born in times of violence.

To see possibility in such an intractable conflict is Imagination become flesh. Perhaps it was what John had in mind when he said, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it out.”

May we be infected by the inextinguishable imagination of our God.

Peace,
Milton

gaza

Today has been a full day and tonight is a short night because I have to be at work at 6:30 in the morning. I have a great deal I want to talk about from church today, but I have to set it aside because my heart is heavy as I watch what Israel is doing in Gaza. I realize I’m hitting a hot button and that the issue is incredibly complex and yet what doesn’t seem complex to me at all is Israel is using extreme and excessive force to destroy people who don’t have much power at all. Yes, I understand Israel considers Hamas to be a terrorist group. I also understand our American government has given them the vocabulary to justify what they are doing with our words and actions in Iraq. I know the struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinian feels like an intractable problem. I know what is already an emotionally charged conflict is exacerbated by that faction of Christian theology that sees Israel as somehow special and untouchable. And what I keep coming back to is if you are the one with most of the power, then you hold a greater share of responsibility, and even accountability, when it comes to how you use and abuse that power.

What I really want to do, rather than editorialize, is ask you to look at the following stories and see what is happening. Here are links to

• the BBC (and an analysis)
• National Public Radio
• Reuters
• Alternet
• Al-Jazeera
• and a blog written by a Palestinian woman who lives in Durham and is communicating with her family in Gaza.

As I read through the articles, I found myself pulled back to an old Steve Earle song I learned at the beginning of our invasion of Iraq:

Jerusalem

I woke up this mornin' and none of the news was good
And death machines were rumblin' 'cross the ground where Jesus stood
And the man on my TV told me that it had always been that way
And there was nothin' anyone could do or say

And I almost listened to him
Yeah, I almost lost my mind
Then I regained my senses again
And looked into my heart to find

That I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem

Well maybe I'm only dreamin' and maybe I'm just a fool
But I don't remember learnin' how to hate in Sunday school
But somewhere along the way I strayed and I never looked back again
But I still find some comfort now and then

Then the storm comes rumblin' in
And I can't lay me down
And the drums are drummin' again
And I can't stand the sound

But I believe there'll come a day when the lion and the lamb
Will lie down in peace together in Jerusalem

And there'll be no barricades then
There'll be no wire or walls
And we can wash all this blood from our hands
And all this hatred from our souls

And I believe that on that day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem

I want to believe that, too.

Peace,
Milton

heart breaking news

Gaza is one of the Palestinian Territories on the border between Israel and Egypt and a part of the land taken by Israel in the 1967 war. Conditions these days have continued to worsen because of an Israeli blockade on the area that has not allowed even food and fuel to get into Gaza. Reuters has a good article on the situation here. They also give some good background facts:

HISTORY OF THE TERRITORY:

Gaza has been continuously inhabited for more than 3,000 years. It was a crossroads of ancient civilizations and a strategic outpost on the Mediterranean. The Bible says Samson died in Gaza while destroying the Temple of the Philistines.

It is believed to be the burial place of Prophet Mohammad's great grandfather.

The Ottoman Empire ruled Gaza for hundreds of years until World War One when it came under British rule along with the rest of Palestine. It came under Egyptian control in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli war that led to Israel's creation.

Gaza's population tripled in 1948-49 when it absorbed about a quarter of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees displaced from areas that are now part of Israel.

Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war and ended its military presence there in September 2005, having removed 8,500 Jewish settlers from 21 enclaves after almost four decades of occupation.

Israel resumed ground operations in June 2006 after militants from Gaza tunneled across the border and captured an Israeli soldier, who is still being held.

Just one year later in June 2007, Hamas Islamists took control of the Gaza Strip in fighting with their secular Fatah rivals, triggering the closure of front-line crossing points. Aid agencies warned of growing hardship for ordinary people.

More recently Israel closed its borders with Gaza, cutting fuel supplies to the territory's main power plant and petrol stations and stopping aid shipments that include food and other humanitarian supplies. The closure raised international concern over a potential humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Israel said the blockade is a bid to curb rocket salvoes fired into Israel.

LIVING IN GAZA:

About 1.5 million Palestinians live in Gaza, more than half of them refugees from past wars with Israel and their descendants. Gaza has one of the world's highest population densities and demographic growth rates.

Most Gazans live on less than $2 a day. Israeli security closures curbing cross-border trade and access to jobs and Western sanctions imposed after Hamas came to power in early 2006 have hit the Palestinian economy hard.

Gaza's creaking sewage system became the latest casualty of Israeli sanctions aimed at getting Hamas to halt militant rocket fire from the impoverished territory. Officials at the local Palestinian water utility said more than half of Gaza's population had no running water this week.

Heba of Contemplating From Gaza, one of the blogs I read, wrote an article on her personal experience here.

Last night, someone blew holes in the border wall between Gaza and Egypt, allowing thousands of Palestinians the chance to cross over and get sorely needed food, fuel, and other supplies. Here are two video reports, from Reuters and Al-Jazeera.





Since it took me awhile to find much focus on the situation among American media, I thought I would pass this along.

Peace,
Milton

I don't know

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, Look! This is something new? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
-- Ecclesiastes 1:9, 10

If I had to pick one book of the Bible as my favorite, Ecclesiastes would be the odds-on favorite. The Poet’s sense of what it means to be human, with its rich mixture of hope and despair, has always spoken to me. Like a lot of folks my age, my first introduction to the Poet’s words was in a Byrds’ song. Turn, turn, turn.



Speaking of music, it was forty years ago two days ago that Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, perhaps the most original rock record ever made, first took to the airwaves. I still have the original vinyl record, complete with paper cut-outs, that I purchased as a ten year old. On June 3, twenty years ago, I bought the CD as soon as the record store opened. The BBC aired the first part of an anniversary documentary where they recruited musicians to go into the Apple studios and remake the songs using the same equipment as the Beatles did in 1967, which is less powerful technologically than the Garage Band program that came with my MacBook. The narrator commented that some of the artists recruited dropped out because it was too complicated. What was done could not be done again.

It was forty years ago today that the Six Day War began between Israel and its Arab neighbors. I’d never noticed the chronological proximity of the two events until this afternoon. I don’t know of even one of the forty years since when the fighting has not continued. NPR is in the middle of an excellent five part series on the causes and consequences of the war. What was done is being done over and over and over.

Thanks to Cynthia, this story from USA Today was new information to me:

Three years after a U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, only one major U.S. building project in Iraq is on schedule and within budget: the massive new American embassy compound.

The $592 million facility is being built inside the heavily fortified Green Zone by 900 non-Iraqi foreign workers who are housed nearby and under the supervision of a Kuwaiti contractor, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report. Construction materials have been stockpiled to avoid the dangers and delays on Iraq's roads.

"We are confident the embassy will be completed according to schedule (by June 2007) and on budget," said Justin Higgins, a State Department spokesman.

Here are few more details from The Nation:

On the other hand, the latest is that the facilities for the 8,000 people scheduled to work in the vice-regal compound will be completed on time next year. Doubtless the cooks, janitors and serving staff attending to the Americans' needs and comforts in this establishment, which is said to exceed in luxury and appointments anything Saddam Hussein built for himself, will not be Iraqis either.

According to Knight Ridder, "US officials here [in Baghdad] greet questions about the site with a curtness that borders on hostility. Reporters are referred to the State Department in Washington, which declined to answer questions for security reasons." Photographers attempting to get pictures of what the locals call "George W's Palace" are confined to using telephoto lenses on this, the largest construction project undertaken by Iraq's American visitors.

Our government’s assessment that a fortress is somehow the way to freedom leads me to my best new thing of the day: discovering poet Wislawa Szymborska, also thanks to the folks at NPR. (Here are some of her poems.) She was born in Poland in 1923 and has lived in Krakow since 1931, living through World War II and the Soviet occupation. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Here’s part of what she had to say in her acceptance speech:

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they "know." They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don't want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments' force. And any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

Regardless of the angle from which any of us views the state of affairs in our country and in our world, we have those who would call themselves leaders proclaiming their superior knowledge of The Thing To Do as reason why they should be in charge. We have allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the definition of a leader as one who does something (anything), rather than one who thinks and discerns. Szymborska continues:

This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself "I don't know", she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

I don’t know. Those are not merely words of ignorance, weakness or failure. On the contrary: they are words of hope, relationship, and imagination.

The world - whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? We just don't know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world - it is astonishing.

There has always been wars and arrogant leaders and death and disease and love and hope. In our turn, turn, turn what is new is us. This is our time. Perhaps we could do something other than repeat what has come before by saying we don’t know what will happen next.

I don’t know.

Peace,
Milton

P.S. -- There's a new recipe.

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