WHOSE TERRORISM DO WE SEE?

After the obligatory gasping stories about how much snow and cold there is (Shocking! During winter, no less!), the first few stories on the CBS Evening News tonight were about terrorism and violence afflicting the world:

- President Obama’s plan to confront ISIS.

- Jeb Bush “breaking” with the two former Bush Presidents about Iraq.

- An inside look at ISIS’s ability to recruit young, disaffected men in many countries, from a reporter and the former number two man at the CIA.

- A report on the “American Sniper” trial, and then another “inside look” at real American snipers.

There is no doubt that the world is a pretty dangerous place these days: Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, and Palestine, just to name a few.  Plots and foiled plots in Canada, Denmark, France, the U.S. It does seem at times that violence and cruelty are winning.

What was interesting in all the news stories was what wasn’t being said.  No mention of our drone strikes in various countries.  The CIA spook turned terrorism expert—who has resolutely defended our torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo as justified—did not mention that ISIS grew out of the US invasion of Iraq, and the sectarian war that invasion ignited.  Jeb Bush was quoted on Iraq that saying he would have done a better job of providing security in Iraq after Hussein was overthrown.  What he didn’t say was that he would not have invaded a predominately Muslim country under false pretences. 

All of the stories put violence and terrorism as something others do, and that we have to confront.  Nothing about our role in all this.  To me, the most chilling was the report on “our” snipers, who can hit a “target” (that is, human being) from miles away, without being seen.  This may not be the exact quote about the effect on those being sniped, but it’s pretty close:

“When you have no idea where the shot just came from, and you see someone around your drop, that sends a very strong message.”

That message, of course, is terror: we can do to you what we just did to the person next to you. We killed him, and we can do that to you whenever we want.

The problem of terror and violence is real, and we need to confront it.  But as long as we see it only as something other nations and other groups do, and not see how our actions and those of our allies (including horrible regimes like Saudi Arabia) are part of it, we’re not likely to see it diminishing.   I don’t have an easy, or even a complicated solution to offer. I do know that seeing the truth, and telling it have to be at the foundation.

I just placed ashes on beloved parishioners’ foreheads, and reminded them of our mortality and the promise of resurrection beyond that.  Then my wife placed the same ashes on me.  I know the violence that lives in my heart, and I know how easy that is to come out in words, and in judgment of other people.  Confessing that in the presence of others is not the end of it, but I pray that it can be a beginning.

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be honest.

Patrick 

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

COLONOSCOPY AND SPIRITUALITY

I had a colonoscopy at the beginning of the Advent season, and for those of you who have been blessed with that experience know that it is not the procedure that is the trial as much as it is “the season of preparation”.  While the preparation time lasted around 18 hours in total, it seemed like a long time.  It is literally an emptying of the body, or at least the entire gastrointestinal system, so that the doctor doing the procedure can see clearly.

Since it’s been over—it was clear, so I don’t need another for 10 years—I have thought a lot about how hard it is been for me to do a similar emptying emotionally and spiritually.  My mind has been very cluttered and distracted for weeks, and on many days, my spirit has been more frantic than peaceful.  Even though the poems and scriptures I use during this time speak to me about letting go, and even though the darkness of the days in Minnesota during December invites surrender, it has been particularly hard for me to do so this year.

About a week or so ago, I asked—maybe out loud—“why is it so hard to be emptied spiritually when it was so easy to do so physically?”  And then I began to think about how easy it really was or wasn’t to go through the physical emptying.  And I had to conclude—it wasn’t all that easy!  I had to drink copious quantities of a mix (I’ll spare the details) that wasn’t pleasant, and then wait for it to do its work.  It meant feeling gross and disgusting.  It meant realizing over and over that “no, that was not the end of it” and “no, we haven’t arrived at the goal of complete emptying yet.” What made the ordeal possible in part was that I knew that it would be eventually over, and I knew it would be demanding, so I didn’t schedule anything else during those hours.  And I trusted that the health workers had my best interests at heart.

So how might that apply to my spiritual emptying?  I sure haven’t trimmed down my schedule—if anything it has been busier than ever, with eight productions of La Natividad, and extra activities at home and at work.  Even when I sat in the morning in darkness and tried to read or pray, my mind was often racing to what I needed to get done that day.  Even “getting in” my daily prayer and meditation began to feel like a chore—one more thing I had to get done.

What if I had decided that instead of a little input of the spirit each morning, I needed copious amounts, even to feeling over full?  What if paid attention to what was coming out of me, as much as I did when the colonoscopy prep happened?  I would have noticed more my resentment, anxiety and fear, for sure.  Perhaps even some self-judgment about my worth as a person and a spiritual leader.  I flushed my physical wastes down the toilet; but I’m not sure where my emotional and spiritual wastes have gone.  Maybe they haven’t left me, but are just hovering near me, waiting to get back inside.

Of course, spiritual cleansing is never over, unlike the short period of physical cleansing before a colonoscopy.  I’m never going to “be done with it.”  But if anything this Advent has taught me, it is that I need to trust more the healer who is bidding me do the cleansing, and to let go without worry, and without shame.  I will try to keep aware of that for the next ten years at least.

Be justice

Be beauty

Be empty

Patrick

KEEPING MASS IN CHRISTMAS

Of the many and various ways my spirit is afflicted over the Yuletide season are the strident calls to “Keep Christ in Christmas”, and its variant “Put Christ Back in Christmas”, as if the baby Jesus snuck off and was partying somewhere else, and we have to snatch him up and stuff him back into the feast, or else the time will simply not be redeemed.

These rallying cries are part and parcel of the program  of the currently reigning King Herod (remember, Jesus called him a “Fox”) in their never ending drumbeat to resist and defeat the “War on Christmas”, which rears it hoary head each 25^th of October or so, to remind us that “they” are out to destroy our faith, and we must resist, mostly by refusing to live by any of the fruits of the spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) when it comes to our brothers and sisters who think different than us.  Hear ye angels, the cry of the strident masses defending the faith:

“I will get mad at you if you say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”, and will righteously proclaim that ‘as for me and my family, we say MERRY CHRISTMAS!’  I am sorry (ed. Note: read “not sorry”) if that offends you.”

Apparently this ancient chant has the power to shame all heathens back into the fold, and we can all go merrily shopping for Christ-like gifts at all the imperial emporiums promising hundreds of door busters.

(I know, Ferlinghetti does this better—so look him up!)

The door busters of Jesus’ time were the boots and staves of the Roman occupiers, kicking in the doors of Jewish Palestinians, forcing their men into the army, raping the women, terrorizing the children.   The door busters of our time are the Taliban and the 2^nd Amendment Heroes shooting up school rooms, the barrel bombs of the Assad regime dropped on children, the narcos and politicos collaborating to kidnap and murder students, the police who kill unarmed black men, the ever tightened glove of hunger, violence and hate.

That is where Christ is found this Christ-mass, among those suffering masses.

I have no need to glorify “the masses” and make them into a righteous vanguard.  We are as human as human gets, and that gets pretty ugly.  But the little baby we so coo over at Christmas, loves ugly.  Loves brokenness, loves hurt, loves even death—not in the style of warm feelings, but in the style of hot actions to break the bonds and set the captives free.

(You blessed nullifidians: hang with me for awhile.)

Christmas was meant to be Christ-mass, and yes, in many ways it was started as a feast in order to co-opt the old harvest, solstice and even war gods.  I mean who, doesn’t like a baby (I mean for an hour or so, not a sick baby up every hour every night for a week).  Our Christmas is a mix of Norse, Germanic, Roman and more and more Nahuatl and African celebrations.  But the Mass part remains.

From a cultic point of view, the Mass meant a gathering of the faithful, often under persecution, in order to have their faith renewed. It meant hearing the old prophecies that

“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
    and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
and the calf and the lion will feed together,
    and a little child shall lead them.”

It meant praying for those in prison or in sickness, and then organizing missions to serve them. It meant honoring the dead who had lived for a better world.  It meant sharing a feast. And it meant holding to the courageous faith that:

“They shall not hurt or destroy
    in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.”

That is the mass of Christmas. That and Mary’s cry that God has

“Scattered the proud in their conceit,

Cast down the mighty from their thrones

Lifted up the lowly.

Filled the hungry  with good things,

Sent the rich away empty.”

That’s the Mass I want to see in Christ-mass.  It is the mass of mission, of turning the world upside down again, or right side back, so that the justice and mercy and love planted deep in all creation may flourish.

I want to share two pieces of liturgy this early Christmas-time morn (it’s 5:02 am at my kitchen table).  First Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

And Gustavo Gutierrez:

“The poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.”

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be a mass of hope and struggle.

Patrick

Christmas Under Another Name: La Natividad

We are in the midst of the 6^th year of La Natividad, a bilingual Christmas production that our church does in concert with the world-renowned In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater.  It is told from the point of view of an immigrant family in the neighborhood, and includes the whole of the Christmas story, most importantly murderous King Herod who is so afraid of this little child to be born.  In our telling, Herod tries to stop the immigrants from crossing a bridge, saying they aren’t allowed, they cannot work here, be here, belong here.  The “neighbors” in the play (actual neighbors in most cases), call out “mother—madre”, “hermano-brother”, “tia-aunt” in order to disarm Herod’s guards peacefully and allow everyone to pass.

We call it a play, a performance, but it’s more than that—it’s a procession of courage and joy through the most diverse neighborhood in the city, a neighborhood looked upon by many as “crime ridden” and “unsafe”.  And it is a political statement that the love of God shown by God’s people breaks down the barriers that divide us.  Barriers of race, religion, class, language, status, age—we can go on forever

I was interviewed about the show last night on local radio, and the interviewer asked me what I would say to those who say that such themes are not in their view of the Christmas story.  I can’t remember exactly what I said, but the basic thing I would say today is “read the book, would you?!”  Mary and Joseph have to leave their home in Galilee because Caesar wants to count everyone (for the purposes of taxing and conscripting into his wars).  They are rejected by Joseph’s kinfolk in his home town.  The little one is born among the most poor.  Then he is hunted by Herod, the puppet king of Rome, and the holy family has to flee to Egypt, where they are political refugees for seven years.  Yeah, it’s in there.

She also asked me how it was for children who had grown up in the show, and how that effected them (I chose “effected” over “affected” on purpose).  I talked about how people who have immigrated here, under hardship—and often persecution—can see their own life story in the Christmas story, and what a difference that can make.  They can see liberation and abundance coming, even in the midst of darkness, and see—and to a great extent be—God’s power working that in the world.

This is a poem that I wrote for La Natividad a few years back—the tricky angels, and the beasts with fins and paws and feathers can still be seen from December 11-21.  www.hobt.org.

One more thing: when I send an e-mail with La Natividad and spell check it, the first option given is “antiviral”.  Which I trust that it is: an antiviral against the brutality, division and fear in our land.

LA NATIVIDAD

Maria, you shop for tortillas, the tongue’s comfort,

a bed to lay the evening meal upon.  One eye out

for La Migra, one ear cocked for a shout, a boot,

a hard knock on the door.  You hear the bells

of tricky angels troubling, you listen to the voice      

of God that tells you your womb

is a quarry of bright diamonds, a pond

bearing wounded fish into the world. How

to explain that to a man who spends his days

talking to wood?  Finally, you walk. Together

and alone.  You take your feet and the child

feasting on your darkness and you carry

into the night, trusting that the dust you walk on,

the water you caress with your eyes

is the same dust, the same dew God

used to make the world, to make the man

and woman one and apart and free.

You cross a bridge, you don’t look back,

you march into the holy, abandoned rock

where beasts assemble and you wait. 

One by one the heavenly beings return,

with four paws and two, with wings

and fins and feathers, gathered to

watch the little one burst from you

and keep the silence love requires.

Look, Maria!  Listen! The voice of God

upon your lips.  Even your screams

turn the stars into dancing.

Be justice

Be beauty

Be antiviral

Patrick

Come and see how grownup these tricky angels are!

MY STRUGGLE WITH VETERANS DAY

Both my parents served in World War II, and were proud of their service.  Both had scars from that service, especially my dad, who saw combat duty in Europe.  As I’ve learned more about what veterans suffer with after war, I see a part of their suffering that often goes unnoticed is “moral injury”.  Moral injury is when your moral center is damaged because you’ve done something you know is wrong.  My father’s generation didn’t talk a lot about their experiences in the war, but one thing my father once said has stuck with me, probably because it was the only time he spoke it: “Sometimes in war you have to do something you shouldn’t do.”

Admitting to moral injury means having the honesty to admit your participation in evil and the humility to suffer through what that means.  It is the part of healing that rarely, if ever, gets publicity or calls for support or understanding.  Nearly every week, there is a TV news show that shows veterans bravely coping with physical injury, and the committed caregivers who work with them.  There are constant calls for us “to remember and support our veterans.”  Every NFL game last Sunday had some “Salute to the Troops”. Today Perkins is giving a free breakfast to past or present service members.  All these gestures are accompanied by the statement that they “did it for us”—to “protect our freedom”, usually.

I’m sure the breakfast was appreciated, but when was the last time you hear anyone talk about moral injury—in the news, in entertainment, or even in your place of worship (which should be the very place we talk about evil and heal from it)?  When have you seen a feature story or human-interest story about someone helping a returning vet to admit to the evil he or she had done, been forgiven for it, and be welcomed back into a community that has its own need to repent.

Probably never, I would guess.  Because for us as a society to offer that kind of help, we would have to admit that the evil done by our military was done for us and by us.  Which would mean that we have suffered moral injury as a result of our supporting and benefitting from what our nation has done in its wars.  My Lai, the tiger cages, Operation Phoenix (what a macabre irony that name is) and all the other atrocities done in Viet Nam are our atrocities.  Abu Ghraib, water boarding, drone strikes on civilians, Guantanamo are our shame.  The mining of Nicaragua’s harbors, the training of assassins at the School of the Americas in Georgia are our war crimes.

Often when I bring this up, particularly near Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day (or 4^th of July, which had nothing to do with the military), I am told “this is not the time to discuss that.”  But when exactly is the time to do so?  Is it just a pipe dream of mine that some day we the people will spend as much time remembering Hiroshima and Mozote as we do Pearl Harbor? Or spend even a fraction of the time remembering what we did on the other 9-11, facilitating a military coup in Chile on 9-11-1973?

Don’t want to think about all this?  Well let me ask what is to me what is one of the most problematic questions of all: Why is it that every country we’ve invaded since the end of World War II has been much poorer than us: Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, and including our proxy wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and Nicaragua? Not to mention our support of military coups and dictatorships in Iran, Dominican Republic, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, the Congo, Uruguay and on and on. What does it say that the richest country in the world goes to war against some of the poorest?  What does it say about our values?  (Of course we did plenty of invading prior to WWII, mostly of other Americans—Native and Latin Americans, that is).

My father was a member of the VFW, but stopped going in the late sixties and seventies.  He didn’t like the jingoism that seemed to dominate every gathering.  I also think he was struggling with the idea that his sons could be drafted to fight in Viet Nam, in a war that he came to see as unjustified, from top to bottom.  In the last decades of his life, I believe that he found the most important “welcome home”, which was forgiveness and reconciliation.

I know that it is hard to hold together gratitude for the sacrifice our troops make, and anger at what our troops have done, in our name.  But it can be done.  At least some Germans reflected this November 9, about the 25^th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall, and the 76^th anniversary of Kristallnacht.  Many, many Latin Americans love our country for its freedoms and opportunities, while detesting what it’s done to their lands.  I think we owe it to ourselves as a people and as a nation to try.

This poem is one of a series about my father, and was published in the Ilanot Review from Israel, in their issue about “Conflict” (which ironically, went on-line right at the beginning of the latest war between Israel and Palestine).

FALLING

A man hung from his parachute

like a seed softly whirligigging down,

shouting “Don’t shoot—I surrender!”                       

in the tongue of the enemy, your first tongue.

He had no way to reach

his weapon, but the men under

you did, and in a minute—though your voice

was raised and your rank commanded

obedience—it was the county fair

in Shreveport, in Pembina, in New Ulm                    

and New Prague, step right up, everyone                  

wins a prize, the lights flashing,

the girls all giggles, and bullets

and a ribbon for the man who hits the nose.

Then, silence, the head of the boy

on his chest, his body limp

in its harness, gravity doing

its work.  The son of German cousins—

perhaps the grandson of your grandfather’s friend—

spoiled blood over his uniform. Father,

why did you tell me this story

and not my brothers?

Your memories are like your hands:

big, calloused, open.

His boots newly shined, pulled him

down to the earth he finally

met as a shroud, a nothing,

a home. Your men did not speak.

They held their rifles across

their chests, as if bearing sick children.

*  * *

Today, I feel that to

            Be justice, and

                        Be beauty

We must mostly

                                                            Be honesty

Patrick