AWE

I’m at the end of a very challenging, stressful couple of weeks, and am relieved that I don’t have to produce anything today.  My wife and I had a nice breakfast downtown, and went to the library to pick up some art books for her.  Besides being co-pastor with me at our church, she is now the artist-in-residence as well, creating beautiful murals in our church and community with people who maybe never saw themselves as artists, and now are flourishing.

Books on language were near the art books, so I picked up a couple.  I love my mother tongue.  I don’t like how many English speakers think the whole world should speak our language, or that it’s better than other tongues.  But I love my mother tongue.  Partly because it’s so weird, and its origins so complex. From Sanskrit to Indo-European, to all the Germanic and Roman and Celtic tribes fighting it out and figuring it out, to words brought in from so many languages.  I stand in awe of what the language can do. 

These are the words of a young woman named Fatima, part of a group poem written by youth in our neighborhood called “The hardest thing I’ve ever done…”  It’s included in a new literary journal The Phoenix of Phillips that our church is putting out. *

“The hardest thing I’ve ever done … was leaving the place where I was born to come to a country that I’ve never been before. To leave my grandpar­ents behind and having the thought that I would never see them again. Calling my grandma once I was here and trying to hold back the tears, being able to explain to her why I didn’t tell her that I needed to leave.”

Nothing fancy, just beautiful language, beautiful heart.

Because there has been so much pressure on me lately (granted, a lot I put on myself), it has been hard to see the awe around me.  Today’s cracked open my eyes, my heart and my imagination.  I see the sun easing its way back north a month past the solstice.  I hear a scientist on Science Friday on NPR say, “we now know there are black holes ten thousand million times the size of the sun!”  Ten thousand million!  That’s 10,000,000,000 for us analogs.  Some estimates put the mass of the sun at 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms.  That’s  4,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds, more or less.  (Now, that just changed as you are reading this: the sun is losing mass at the rate of about 10 million tons per second. All without diet or exercise!)

Which means there are black holes that are roughly:

44,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds.

If I understood the scientist well, black holes do not lose mass.  And yes, I know that mass does not equal weight!

They are an estimated 100,000,000,000,000 microbes living in and on our bodies (ten times as many little one-cell friends as we have cells).   Without them we can’t digest food, or have an immune system.  With them, we sometimes get so sick we die.

And yet, in the midst of this enormity, there is the joy of playing with one little organism, my great niece Addison on Wednesday, as she has now learned to run—like a drunken cowgirl—all over creation.  It was at the funeral for her great-grandfather Stan. Who knows how many great (10¹⁰⁰⁰?) ancestors she has, or how many great (10^{10, 000}?) descendants she will have.   And yet even “all the hairs of her head are counted” by the Great Creator.

It makes all my stressing over the last several days seem kind of silly.  Not to mention all the petty resentments and fears we hold onto in our world.

Wow!

Be beauty. Be justice.  Be awe.

Patrick

* For those in the Twin Cities area, The Phoenix of Phillips debuts January 29 at 6 pm at the Midtown Global Market, Lake Street and Elliot Avenue in Minneapolis.

TO SUIS OR NOT TO SUIS

There’s been a lot written about the attacks in Paris, about what they mean about our world, and what the world’s response should be.  I’m more than a little worried about our response.  Every time the West feels like it has been victimized, it tends to feel it is righteous, if not innocent.  Believing oneself righteous can easily lead to believing one’s actions are righteous, no matter what.  The atrocities our country has committed after 9-11-2001—Abu Ghraib, torture, the invasion of Iraq, the tens of thousands of civilian deaths—dwarf the truly heinous nature of the acts of 9-11.  And yet, many in the US and the West consider ourselves to be justified in our response.

I’m also worried when we make it all about freedom.  Because then we are the good guys.  We are the defenders of freedom, and we frame the narrative as “these intolerant terrorists want to destroy our freedoms”.  Freedom of speech, religion and expression are something I value highly, and I am grateful that I live in a society that protects them to a great extent.  But our record on promoting freedom—especially in other countries—is a mixed bag, to say the least.  When we make it all about our freedom, we overlook the complex nature of violence in the world today, and too often find it easy to use violence as a response to violence, causing further enmity and strengthening the hand of those who benefit from hate.

The motivation of those who committed these heinous crimes in Paris is complicated, and we would do well not to reduce it to slogans.  Part of that is opposition to the West’s policies—economic, political and especially military. I don’t mean to imply that somehow we are responsible for the actions of the murderers. But I do mean to say that we are responsible for our part in creating the conditions that cause terrorism to grow.

(The use of the term “terrorist” has been so misused, that I hesitate to even use it any more.  Its use has been corrupted so that it essentially means “what they do to us is terrorism” and “what we do to them is fighting terrorism”.  After 9-11, we increased funding to the Colombian military—one of the worst human rights violators in the hemisphere—in order for them to “fight terrorism”.  We call the indiscriminate bombing of Israeli towns by the Palestinians as terrorism, but not the deliberate mass bombing of Palestinian civilian areas by the Israelis.)

I’m not sure if I want to “Je Suis Charlie”. I will defend their right to publish what they want, but the racist and intolerant tone of some of their work isn’t helpful. Satire will usually use a sledgehammer instead of a nail clipper—I get that.  But while we are free to write or print or say anything we want to, we are also responsible for the consequences of our words. Including the consequences we didn’t mean to happen.

Instead of saying “Je Suis Charlie”, I would rather say, “Je Suis Nigeria”, where thousands were murdered by Boko Haram during the same time as the atrocities in France, to very little mourning or action by the world.  I would rather say “Je Suis the Poor”, because as Congress and our state legislature convene, they are conveniently left out of the discussion.

But to be honest, I need to say “Je Suis America”; because I am—we are—and thus share responsibility for all that is done in our name.

Be justice.  Be beauty.  And I think, be wary of slogans.

Patrick