The Holy Innocents

Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which commemorates—if that is the right word—the slaughter of the boy children two years and younger by King Herod.  We might think of Herod as someone so evil and so crazy that he can’t be compared to anyone living today.  I don’t think so.  Herod is king, and is able to wreak his will on any part of his kingdom, but Herod’s kings—the ones who order him around—are rage and fear.  And entitlement is his queen.  There are a lot of Herods in the world today. Some we can put a face on—like Assad of Syria, who tortures children as young as six.  Some are impersonal, but just as deadly: poverty and malnutrition, gun violence and human trafficking.

Mi comadre, Pastora Heidi Neumark, wrote in her book “Breathing Space” about child sacrifice in the south Bronx. Not a sacrifice chillingly ordered by a Herod, but by a society that treats poor communities as environmental dumping grounds; a society that spends more on imprisoning young people in such communities than on educating them. I had the privilege of serving in the Bronx during part of the time that Heidi was there, and thinking about that time makes me remember two images, both of which have to do with windows:

The first is that the City of New York “dealt with” the amazing number of abandoned buildings by painting over the boards used to cover the windows, at least on the buildings that commuters could see from the highways or the trains.  They painted little domestic scenes of curtains fluttering and a flower pot resting on the window sill.  There may have even been more than one style of painting, so that the six story buildings didn’t look so uniform.

The other image is a window on Fulton Avenue and 170^th Street.  I would pass this abandoned building every day home from St. John’s Lutheran Church.  Out of the fifth floor window grew an Ailanthus tree, which also is called the “Tree of Heaven”.  It is not native to the United States, it was brought here as an ornamental, and it does particularly well in places of poor water and soil (like 5^th floors of buildings!).  The US Department of Agriculture’s web site speaks of this invasive species thusly: “Crowds out native species; damages pavement and building foundations in urban areas”.  No doubt true—we had an Ailanthus that broke through the concrete behind our church building in Philly (see my poem at the end).  

But for every day I drove by that tree, it was a symbol of hope: that something new would come out of the brokenness. The last time I was in the Bronx, that building had been renovated, and the streets seemed safer and cleaner, but the struggle for dignity and hope still has a long way to go.

This Christmas, and this Feast Day have gathered under the shadow of the shootings at the elementary school in Newtown, CT.  A sacrifice of the innocents, to which politicians and the media all respond by saying, “we cannot allow this to happen again.”  I’ve heard someone say several times on the news: “I can’t imagine what those families are going through.”  I don’t think that’s true.  I think we can imagine pretty strongly what it must be like to have a child murdered, and how terrible that is. That’s not the problem. The problem is that we can’t imagine creative ways to prevent these tragedies.  Whatever the “solution” to the “fiscal cliff” that gets coughed up by the Congress and President, it is still going to leave a huge deficit of imagination.

Why can’t we imagine that we as a nation can fully house, feed, educate and provide health care and security for all children, including those in urban areas who are felled by gun violence, one or two at a time?  Why can’t we imagine a loving respect for our planet that will dream up creative—and even fun ways—to counteract global warming?  How come it’s so hard for us as a people to imagine that we could actually repent of the evil we’ve done with our military, and work with others to resolve conflicts.

One more image from the south Bronx popped up as I was writing this, that of the doors at Heidi’s church.  When she first came to Transfiguration as their pastor, they would lock the doors on Sunday after all the members were in. (Thus doing incarnationally what we as church throughout the world do way too often.)  Heidi began to work with the youth of the neighborhood to paint the gospel story for that Sunday on the doors.  Imagining the fulfillment of the promise in paint.  (Readers in New York should check out Heidi’s church: http://www.trinitylutherannyc.org/)

I’m going to brag a little now.  Our church, St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Minneapolis (www.stpaulschurchmpls.org) finished our 17^th mural in Phillips this year. We’re also up to 30 mosaic planters installed around the community.  Most of them have stayed graffiti free; but when they’ve been tagged, we’ve gone out and re-painted, even to incorporating some of the graffiti into the art.  That’s a small part of our imagining a new community—a new heaven and earth, a la Revelation 21-22, if I may be so bold.  What I’ve found most inspiring about this is how excited our youth get when they’re working on creating something new (sometimes, too exciting—we’ve done a couple of “sidewalk murals”, if you get my drift.  Pretty colorful too, although too post-modern for my taste!)

I imagine a day in which there are no more innocents sacrificed.  I am realistic enough to know that I may never see that.  But I am hopeful enough to know that working for that, praying for that, expecting that is a good way to live.

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be imagination.

Patrick

P. S.  My spell check flagged “incarnationally” and offered only this alternative: “incarnation ally.”  Thanks to all my Incarnation Allies from 2012!

LATE AFTERNOON ON TIOGA STREET

 Ana is pulling out

her god-sisters hair on the stoop

while her little brother

picks up a chicken bone

& a piece of Pop Tart

& something like gum

from the sidewalk,

looks at each piece carefully

then stashes them

in the fold of his bulging diaper

for safe keeping,

future reference,

circumstantial evidence.

Next door, los primos

gutting the last row house

have just been shocked

by an illegal electric hookup

brought in from the alley

by the last set of squatters.

They stand smoking under the shade                          

of a renegade Ailanthus

that has burst through

a chink in the sidewalk

and now stands 20 feet tall,

providing the only respite for blocks.

Their hair points out

in all directions,

like flags of island nations

saluting a passing hurricane,

and the smoke they exhale

rises a bent offering    

up through the branched panicles

of the tree of heaven.

Across the street,

Cristina is reading the book

given her at day camp.

She sits on the stoop

of the storefront church

that half burnt

the night Peanut got shot.

The board up people

covered only half of the

“KNOW JESUS—KNOW PEACE” mural

and so as Cristina smiles—

her Mom is out of the hospital,

& her Dad has stopped using

& her Abuela’s Chihuahua dog

runs in and out of their front porch—

the late afternoon sun

strikes just half a painted flower

and letters which spell out

“OW JESUS”, “OW PEACE”,

And the Chihuahua

dog brushes her leg

each trip in and out of the house

until Abuela comes out

in her house dress

and lays Tiger’s evening plate            

of rice and beans

down on the steps.

SILENT NIGHT BROKEN NIGHT

I’ve posted several times about La Natividad, the Christmas event (Encounter? Experience? It’s hard to pin it down), that we do with In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater. Saturday night was the last night this year, but its heart continues to beat in me,

This year was all the more poignant, with the husband of one of the Mary’s in the play deported, with the deaths of Jim from the theater and Ralph from the church, the children killed in Connecticut, all the dying in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine and Israel, so many places. When I said my last words in the show, I opened my arms to say: "We open our arms to welcome this child, and all the children of the earth". This year my arms felt burdened with the promise, with the hope. But the story, the courageous people who walk the way of peace every day, and the Holy Child helped me keep them up.

Someplace during the last crazy three weeks, I shared with someone that one of the things I appreciate about La Natividad is that it is not afraid to hit the "minor" key, as well as the "major" key of the Christmas story. That is, we don't leave out the pain between Mary and Joseph, nor the terror of King Herod. I believe that because we tell the whole story, it makes the hope, the peace and the love more profound.

My poem below tries to get at the wonder of finding love and joy in the midst of struggle.

SILENT NIGHT BROKEN NIGHT

Maria stumbles on the road

into town and falls, baby first
on the baked earth.  Joseph
stares at his virgin bride,
his exile, his horn of plenty. He crouches
to help her up, but she shouts “No!”
He must apologize for the strange
look in his eyes, for handling her       
like a stone the moment he first
knew who made her weight.  The stars,

pin pricks on the skin

of heaven, look down upon
the children of earth, frozen
in the wounding that precedes hope.
No words redeem the time,
or take the pain away.  There is
sinew and bone break and breath.

Maria and Joseph look at each other
in the last dirt before Bethlehem.
Their eyes are cradles where no child
has yet been lain.  Joseph nods,
leans Maria into his shoulder,
and as the two rise as one, her water
breaks onto her robes and his,
his feet and hers, the dust, the stone,
the river under it all.

They walk, quicker now.  No

donkey, no angel, no choir.  Just
the hurried birth racing like wind.
Run, Joseph, procure a hovel;
walk fast, Maria, your pain summons;
stay, oh angel choir: there must
be more dying before this birth.

Here—the stable; here—hay

and straw enough. His skin will be
wrapped in the softest cloth. 
Poor men will bring songs
of lambs.  This child will
not tarry; his name rushes
headlong through the dark
tunnel. The word will go
out soon enough: no house
dare hold this child.

Be justice! Be Peace! Be Joy!  Be Love to All!

 

Patrick

The Kingdom of Night (written in the night on the solstice)

Today the world did not end.  Today the sky did not open and unleash a terror reign of judgment.  There were no raging armies loosed from heaven.  There were no horsemen unleashed.

But there was death.  Death that hangs like a cloud over hearts as they say goodbye. Goodbye to the twenty gunned down in Newton.  Goodbye to the grandfather, dead before his time.  Goodbye to the sisters fighting polio in Pakistan.  Goodbye to the children lost to dysentery, lost to suicide bombers, lost to drone strikes guided by a man sitting at a desk thousands of miles away.

There is way too much longing for apocalypse, especially among fellow Christians.  Too much longing for Jesus to come back as an avenger, a lawman, a hanging judge, and destroy all “those” who have not submitted to him. To much longing for God to reveal his true self as one of us: angry and deadly to his enemies, meek and mild to his friends.

Where does this come from, and where does it lead?  I can hate along with any human; I understand the deep desire to punish those who would hurt, especially those who would hurt the broken, the poor, the vulnerable, the young.  But I don’t understand how the Jesus I know—born to a refugee family in a barn, friend of everyone the world hated, the one who show us that God is love—how did he so quickly become the god of destruction?  Especially to those whose “crime” is that they were born to a Muslim household, or grew up in a remote village in China, or who were abused by the church as a child, and would not worship that God.

We have turned justice into punishment, so that we have little justice.

We have made revenge into a kind of holy rite, and so have been deadened to see how vengeance makes us perpetrators.

We have soldered God to an iron hymn of hate, and wonder why God does not come when we call.

And yet…

And yet…

There will be fires lit tonight, in backyards, and especially in the backyards of humble hearts.

There will be songs sung tonight, by choirs of angels, and choirs of beasts.

There will be soup and bread and cake devoured tonight, with gratitude and willful abundance.

 
Tonight my daughter Natasha will play a rabbit in La Natividad for the last time this year.  She works tomorrow, helping children who need a warm place to play basketball during the long nights in December Minnesota.
 
Tonight, musicians from Chile will sing songs of struggle and joy to a full house of warming pilgrims.

Tonight, a child will be born—many children will be born—in pain and in joy, in sweat and in blood, in hospitals and birthing centers, in little houses on the edge of little towns at the edge of the world, and yes, probably in a stable—and each of those children deserves our love, our protection, our hope and our joy as does the child born, born, born in Bethlehem. (And there probably will be a child born in today’s Bethlehem, born to a Muslim mother or a Christian father, born under the wall of separation, born to a fierce hope of freedom and peace.)

Today, we said goodbye to Ralph, a dear and generous man of our church, who died way too young.  But on this longest night in the northern hemisphere, I shout: Ralph lives!  He lives in the hearts of those who mourn him, he lives in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection, he lives in the swaddling arms of the God who is nothing if not love. Love. Love. Love.

Be justice. Be beauty. Be love.

Patrick

COURAGE AND CREATIVITY

Tonight is the third night of La Natividad, our co-production with our wonderful partners In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater, Inc. www.hobt.org.  I wrote to a friend a couple days ago that one of the things that make this performance unlike other tellings of the Christmas story is that it hits the minor key as well as the major one.  When you think of Christmas carols, aren’t most of them in major keys?  I love those.  But the ones that are in minor keys—What Child is This, Coventry Carol—are more moving to me, because they hit on the pain, the sorrow and even the terror of the Christmas narrative.  Especially on this weekend, with yet another massacre by gun in our minds, we need to have a place that tragedy can be told and hope still prevail.

La Natividad doesn’t shy away from the “minor” in its narrative.  It shows the pain of being demanded upon by the emperor, the sorrow of rejection and forced pilgrimage, and even the terror of Herod’s wrath, who cannot abide the idea of a holy child of peace.  It threatens his reign. And because it is set in the Phillips neighborhood of south Minneapolis, and many of the actors are immigrants who face sorrow, fear and even terror in their own lives, and yet are able to live with hope and courage.

I’ve been thinking about courage a lot lately, and its connection with creativity.  Artists who really move me usually hit me in a place that is not usual, and often not safe.  And maybe in a place that I don’t want to explore.  I think of Van Gogh, painting from the depths of his life, both the beauty and the agony.  I think of Victor Jara of Chile, who wrote of the everyday struggles of people and their hope. 

My advent devotion book has this little piece by Eduardo Galeano that I return to over and over, written about the reign of the military, the reign of guns in Uruguay.  I lifted it directly from this website: http://legacy.oise.utoronto.ca/research/edu20/moments/1976perez.html

Forbidden birds

“The Uruguayan political prisoners may not talk without permission, or whistle, smile, sing, walk fast, or greet other prisoners; nor may they make or receive drawings of pregnant women, couples, butterflies, stars or birds. One Sunday, Didasko Pérez, schoolteacher, tortured and jailed for "having ideological ideas," is visited by his daughter Milady, aged five. She brings him a drawing of birds. The guards destroy it at the entrance of the jail.

On the following Sunday, Milady brings him a drawing of trees. Trees are not forbidden, and the drawings get through. Didasko praises her work and asks about the colored circles scattered in the treetops, many small circles half-hidden among the branches: "Are they oranges? What fruit is it?" The child puts her fingers to her mouth: "Ssssshhh." And she whispers in his ear: "Silly. Don't you see they're eyes? They're the eyes of the birds that I've smuggled in for you."                        

Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire III, The Century of the Wind, 1988

En español: PÁJAROS PROHIBIDOS

“Los presos de la dictadura uruguaya no pueden dibujar ni recibir dibujos de mujeres embarazadas, parejas, mariposas, estrellas ni pájaros. Didaskó Pérez, maestro de escuela, torturado y preso por tener ideas ideológicas, recibe un domingo de 1976 la visita de su hija Milady, de cinco años. La hija le trae un dibujo de pájaros. Los censores se lo rompen a la entrada de la cárcel.

Al domingo siguiente, Milady le trae un dibujo de árboles. Los árboles no están prohibidos, y el dibujo pasa. Didaskó le elogia la obra y le pregunta por los circulitos de colores que aparecen en las copas de los árboles, muchos pequeños círculos entre las ramas: ¿son naranjas? ¿Que frutas son? y la niña lo hace callar, Ssshhhh, y en secreto le explica:

- Bobo. ¿No ves que son ojos? Los ojos de los pájaros que te traje a escondidas."

A lot of the commentators on news stories last night talked about: “how to talk with your children about a terrible tragedy.”  I think we adults may underestimate how much children already are dealing with, and often in more creative ways.  I remember my first trip to El Salvador during our war there, and how children who had to deal with their villages being bombed by helicopters, and family members and neighbors killed in front of their eyes.  I still have a colorful drawing from one of those children, which showed the helicopters, an execution in his little village.  It would never pass an art critic’s standard for technique, but as to both beauty and courage, it was unbelievable. One of the local organizers—the town was too poor to have counselors or psychologists—shared with us that when the children were able to draw their experience, it often was more healing than just telling it.  Out of the experience of creating something, they tapped into a well of healing inside of them, a well that flowed with courage, hope and love.

There is another quote I really like, from Scott Adams:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.

Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

I hope we can make a lot of mistakes this day and this year ending, the next one coming: mistakes of courage, mistakes of welcoming and having dialogue with those different from us, mistakes of trying out radical ideas of justice and peace. I hope.

 

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be courage.

Patrick

 

Happy International Human Rights Day, Thomas Merton!

Today is International Human Rights Day, a day not exactly celebrated with gusto by most folks in the US.  Sad, this year especially that the Senate failed to ratify the treaty on disability rights--the treaties modeled on our own Americans with Disabilities Act. In other words, men of the Senate (and I believe only men voted against it), we failed to ratify something that would have required us to do absolutely nothing different. Why?  Because, according to some, it would "interfere with parents' rights to home school their children".  Why? Because it means "surrendering our sovereignty".   Why?  Because it makes sense.

The first time I travelled to another country was in 1978, when I went to Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. We were in Mexico City on the 10th of December, and witnessed a demonstration of some very brave people calling for human rights abuses to stop.  That struggle goes on, as it does in so many places, and I just wish that my dear nation would be a leader in that--here as in other places.

Today is also the anniversary of the death Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, writer and one of the most acute observers of our time (even though he died in 1968).  Trappists live in silence most of the time, but Merton wrote some of the most insightful essays (and poems) about peace, justice and wounds of the modern world. Think about this quote from him:

“In our age everything has to be a ‘problem.’ Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

Kind of sounds like us today, doesn't it?  So much anxiety that we cling to our positions and refuse to even talk with "the other".  Or we glum onto whatever distraction that will divert us for awhile.  Merton called people to just sit in silence for awhile, and not worry about the contradictions of life, but just be.  He pointed out to me a bunch of times that contradictions, let alone paradoxes, will not kill us.

Merton has a great essay called, "The Time of the End is the Time of No Room at the Inn." (I'm pretty sure it's in his book "Raids on the Unspeakable". Rather than anticipating some kind of cataclysmic apocalypse (and unfortunately, some of my Christian brothers and sisters seem to long for the violence to begin), he helps us see that there are always forces--both inside and outside us--that want to stop the child of love, the child of peace, the child of justice and reconciliation from being born in us. 

So as we celebrate the birth of this child (and remember to see "La Natividad": www.hobt.org), I hope that we can let ourselves slough off some of our anxiety, and just sit there.  I have to discipline myself to stop doing stuff and just be for awhile, but this time of dark, of cold (at least in Minnesota), of waiting is a good time to try.

Be justice.  Be beauty.  Be silence.

Patrick
 

Forgive a Vet

TODAY IS PEARL HARBOR DAY

When my mother died and we were cleaning out her house, we found some things of my father’s that she had stored away.  One was a program for a banquet when he was serving in the army in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.  I don’t have it right in front of me, but what I remember is that it had the menu, it had the invocation, the speaker, the national anthem and so forth.  It was dated December 7, 1941. I am sure that the banquet was canceled. What happened to the food is anyone’s guess.  What happened to everyone on that island is not hard to figure out.  All of those men were touched, and transformed by the war that was to follow.

My father, like many men of his generation, did not talk a lot about the war.  One story he had told to all of the family was that he was in the Aleutians—closer to Japan than Hawaii was—because of the whim of his commander.  There were two National Guard units from Minnesota that were called up in late 1940 or early 1941.  Whether dad’s C.O. had seniority or not, and therefore got his wish, his wish had to relate to killing. But not of humans.  He was a hunter, and chose Alaska, because he always wanted to shoot a Kodiak bear.  I don’t know if he did or not, and my father has been dead now 16 years, so I can’t ask him.

The other unit was sent to the Philippines, and I wonder how many of them came back alive.  They must have arrived there in time for the Bataan Death March, in which so many prisoners died of disease, starvation or executions that happened nearly every day.  What would have happened if my dad’s unit would have gone there, instead of to the Aleutians?  Would I still be who I am?  Would I even be?

Dad was reticent about sharing stories about the war, and after his death, we realized that he had told some stories to only one son, and another story to another son. (I don’t know if he shared anything with my sister.)  He shared with my older brother, Michael, his experience with fighting the Japanese on one of the islands.  I’m not sure which island or exactly when, but what he told my brother was this: at some point, their morning detail was to go to the beach and bayonet the dead bodies of Japanese soldiers lying on the sand, with the hope of killing—or at least discovering—the live soldiers that hid among the corpses. 

My dad would have been around 30 when that happened, so he was a youth.  He had been through enough tough stuff in his life: the Dust Bowl and Depression, riding the rails, working in the CCC, being without a home, essentially for a period of time.  He wasn’t a naïve kid just off the farm.  But still, that experience of bayoneting the dead must have been very traumatic.

(You can read my poem that touches on this  “You Are My Father, My Son”, at my MN Artists page at: http://www.mnartists.org/Patrick_Cabello_Hansel). The next to the last stanza reads:

I witness this day with my hands:

your stomach turning, your young

eyes grinding down, as you

walk along the Aleutian shoreline,

turning each face over, one by one.

My dad was not like some vets, who sought out the companionship of others who had served in that way—he never went to VFW events, for example, that I remember.  As he got older, and became more spiritual, what I saw in him was a both a resignation that he did what had to be done during the war, and a recognition that he needed forgiveness.  He was proud of his service in defeating fascism, but as he told me once, in pain, “sometimes in war you have to do things you know are wrong”.

There has been so much emphasis on “Support the Troops” over the last couple decades; I suppose that some of that has to do with our national grief and shame that we didn’t support the troops coming back from Viet Nam like we should have.  I can’t imagine that anyone would not want to support their family members or friends or even strangers who are sent to war by us.  But its simplicity and the way it is hammered over and over into us, especially during the holidays hide some unpleasant truths.

One of those truths is that there are things our troops do in our name that should not be supported: invading countries under false pretenses, killing civilians, propping up unjust governments (as in Afghanistan).  I fully realize that war is never clean, and that international issues are very complicated.  But I am afraid that the impetus to support our troops can be so easily manipulated by leaders who desire war for all the wrong reasons.

In the time prior to the beginning of the second Iraq war, we lived in Philadelphia, and there were competing demonstrations, often on the same day.  The signs at the demonstrations against the invasion were mostly “No War” or “War is Not the Answer” and so on.  The only signs I ever saw at the pro-war rallies were “Support Our Troops”.  This was ostensibly during the time when we as a nation, and Congress in particular were deciding whether to go to war in the first place.  “Our troops” were not even there yet.  We claimed we were working internationally to stop the Weapons of Mass Destruction (that’s a whole ‘nother post, or a bunch of them). 

I am glad that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power, but I am not glad of the civil war our invasion generated, nor of the atrocities committed in our name.  Too often we cling to our belief that we are righteous and just.  That doesn’t just belong to the present.  There is a movement now to reframe the Viet Nam war as something just. It wasn’t.  1 million people died during our occupation.  We dropped more bombs on Viet Nam than all the bombs dropped by all the nations in World War II.  We defoliated half the country. All to support a regime that tortured its people, and stole its resources.

There is no doubt that many of our troops fought bravely and selflessly in both Viet Nam and Iraq.   There is no doubt that many of our troops suffered, and still suffer terribly. We should not forget them, and we should do everything in our power to help them.  But there is also no doubt that our troops—in our name—did terrible things.  Honoring them as heroes won’t help them get passed those particular wounds of war, and it won’t make us a better people, a more just nation.  There has to be a deeper healing, a more thorough accounting of what we have done as a people.

I believe that part of that has to do with reconciliation.  Those countries that have, and continue to have ways of bringing out the truth, and practicing reconciliation can be a guide.  I think of South Africa, northern Ireland, Argentina and so forth.  Their processes aren’t perfect, but where it has worked it has given perpetrators the chance to confess and victims the chance to hear, and if they choose, to forgive.  (For those of us who are Christians, isn’t confession and forgiveness at the heart of what we believe? And yet, we rarely use it when it comes to veterans.)

There are many calls to “hug a vet”, “welcome a vet home” and so on.  We can and should do that.  But I would like to issue a call today to “forgive a vet”.  We can’t do that in isolation from the pain and suffering they go through, and we can’t do that cleanly without confessing our role in supporting the wars, paying for the wars, not working hard enough to stop the wars.

I don’t doubt that if you do this publicly, there may be a great deal of pushback. It’s hard for any of us to admit we’ve wronged another, and it’s especially hard for groups of people, whether it be a church, an institution or a nation.  But I think it may work to bring healing and freedom, in the truest sense.  I’m willing to try it. 

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be forgiveness.

Patrick