Veteran's Day

I am sorely conflicted about Veteran’s Day.  I honor the service and sacrifice of my parents—both who served in World War II.  I recognize the suffering of veterans who are returning today with terrible wounds, physical, mental and spiritual.  But I can’t buy the line that our military is “fighting for our freedom”, and that we should therefore support whatever war effort we happen to be about.  I can say that in World War II, freedom was at stake.  The Civil War.  The Revolutionary War.   But where was our freedom at stake in Viet Nam, in Mexico, with Spain, let alone in Grenada, Panama or the many proxy wars we funded and directed in Central America?

During the lead up to the second Iraq War, I was living in Philadelphia. We were supposedly debating as a nation whether to go to war at all (something we know now was a lie), and in the last week before the vote in Congress, there were two different sets of rallies.  There were rallies against the war.  And then there were rallies to “Support the Troops”.   Before any of our troops were engaged in a war we had not yet begun.  Before we officially made the decision to unleash destruction on a nation poorer than ourselves.  A war that killed tens of thousands of civilians, and God knows how many troops on both sides (or all sides, as the civil war was unleashed).

It makes supporting our troops much more complicated, doesn’t it?  We want to help the returning veterans, who have been victimized by the war.  But they—and, more importantly, we (who paid for the war and did not stop it)—are also perpetrators of the violence.  They are complex human beings, many of whom have experienced horrible things, and many who have done horrible things. Reducing them to simply heroes diminishes their humanity. As does reducing them to simply victims, or reducing them to simply perpetrators.

How do you love and support someone with that weight of humanness about them?  We can’t really ask that question until we ask ourselves a similar one: how can we live with ourselves, as individuals and as a nation, we who carry that weight of evil and good in us? 

In my spiritual tradition, the way commended and commanded is reconciliation, and oh, what a beautiful word and terribly hard way it is.  We have reduced that way too often to saying “I’m sorry” and the other deciding whether or not to forgive.  But the places where true reconciliation has been tried—I’m thinking of South Africa, North Ireland, Argentina—it means being fearlessly honest and public about what has happened.  And then facing the pain of finding a way to live together again.   Will we ever seek reconciliation with the people of Viet Nam or Iraq?  Will we ever be able to seek reconciliation in our nation, we who are so polarized over so many things?

My parents were of the generation that didn’t talk much about the war, although little bits of it leaked out from time to time.  More than ten years after my father’s death, my older brother and I realized that our father had told each of us stories about the war that he did not tell any other of his children.  This poem is about the one he told me.  It’s helpful to know that my father grew up speaking German at home, and had the misfortune to go to kindergarten in 1917, when we were at war with Germany, and children were told they would be hit if they spoke it at school.  Later, he served in the US Army Air Corps during the war and occupation in Germany, where his native tongue was an asset to his native land.  

 

FATHER, WHY ME?

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.

My mom also served in the war, and although she did not see combat, she worked at an air force base where pilots where French and British young men were trained as bomber pilots.  I’ve often wondered how many of those French pilots died bombing their own country, in order to free it.  The impetus for this poem came from seeing a photograph of my mother in uniform at the base.  The indented stanzas are spoken in a different voice than the narrator of the poem.  The voice is not a specific person, but more the voice of the air base itself.

YOU STAND TO THE SIDE, MAY 1944

in your WAC uniform,                                               

cap just a bit jaunty,
your smile aching to discharge.
You’ve seen the future
from this air base in Georgia
and you want to get out.                                

            The German prisoners shouted

            and beat on the walls
            all night, until the commander
            sent men down with sticks
            to quiet the faces. Soon after,
            the southern birds began to chirp…

No one can know a woman   

who knows she is going
back to live with her parents,
work all day at Kresge’s,
come home and clean.
No one touches the skin under the skin.
 
            The French pilots peed off the plane, singing
            ‘Oui-oui on the runway’, their boyish faces
            ruddy in the round wind.  We knew
            their deaths before they died, we

wondered if any last words

passed between them

and their loved ones,

            waiting in the houses and towns

            for the freeing bombs their boys dropped…

 It was your first foray into you:

your self away from family,
deaths only you could know.
Day after day, you watched the pilots
from your tower, called out their numbers
with your radio, tried not to imagine
them slowly drifting to earth
in a silk parachute, their eyes
and hands and shoes shot off.
 
            The men who were due to ship out flirted

the most; their eyes seemed to leak

sunshine. At dusk, they would fly

their planes at treetop, as if

            by defying death in practice,

            they could defy when it came

blasting from a Krupp Flak 36,

the deadliest tall gun the Nazis had.

You came back to Austin

in one piece, your uniform stashed
away, the letters burned
with the trash.  You took up
your old job, counting the numbers
every day, then walking home
to eat supper, wash dishes,
make the beds of the roomers,
listen to Grandma’s rants,
pray the Rosary on your knees,
hope for a life outside your own.
 
            When the war was over

            the equipment shipped out,

            and the paperwork filed,

            we disinfected the barracks:

            walls, floors, the slats

            that held the mattresses.

            We heard they were going to convert

            it to a prison, a dormitory for

            migrant peach pickers, some kind

            of training camp for boys coming home

            with less than two arms or two eyes…

 Like Dad, you didn’t talk much

about the war.  If you mourned
the men you hand known, or missed
your fellow WACs smoking cigarettes
outside the barracks, you kept
it hidden from your children
like the Easter chickens you kept quiet
until the morning we received them: birds
dyed pastel blue, red, green and yellow.
But the way you laughed when
we saw the photo, the way you
would pick it out of the album
and hold it close to your face
meant someone else was standing there:
who were you posing for, mother,
on that winter day in Georgia,
your hair peeking out from under your cap,
your painted lips ready to speak?

 

Be justice. Be beauty. Be reconciliation.

Patrick

The Amazing Race

I do not watch Reality TV.  I do not like it.  In a box. Or with a fox.  As my writer friend Sheila O’Connor has said, reality shows are more scripted than any other story presented.  All the “honest” “real time” looks at people acting on the shows are meticulously crafted to fit the 46 minutes in the time slot, and perfectly matched with the trembling momentous sound track.  Not to mention that the way to win on the Bachelor, Survivor or Big Brother is to lie, plot, be dishonest and back stab.

My wife and I love to watch “The Good Wife” on Sunday evenings, for a variety of reasons: great cast, constant plot twists, and characters whose morality is not cut and dried.  During football season, the start time depends on when the late football game ends, which is usually later than scheduled, which means 60 Minutes is delayed, and then The Amazing Race is delayed, so when we turn to CBS at the scheduled time, we usually get the last 10 minutes or 15 minutes, or God forbid, 20 minutes of teams of racers working out their marital or friendship or work relationship problems while doing stunts in Austria, Kenya, Costa Rica, or the exotic country du jour.  I’ve tried to figure out the appeal of the show, besides the obvious one of feeling superior to the people who in it (a character defect of mine that’s not hard to summon forth).  I haven’t found it.  Maybe it’s a sense of “seeing” a country without being there.   Maybe it’s imagining that we could do the stunts required: sing an opera piece, drive a race car, walk on coals or whatever they do.

What is especially infuriating to me is that the “natives” of the country the racers are in are always colorful, unthreatening and helpful. In fact their whole role in the story is to serve as helpers for the valiant Americans on their journeys of adventure.  They are never fully human, they don’t really act: either in the theatrical sense of inhabiting and expressing a character, nor in the human sense of having agency or power.  They can frustrate one of the pairs of racers, they can assist one of the pairs, depending on the script.  But they are as important to the story as the setting or props are.

I know I’m being especially cynical tonight.  It does make me wonder what this show—or any of the reality shows that are beamed around the planet—have to say about the projection of our values and our power.  What do they say about how we see the rest of the world?  On the basest level, it indicates that we see the world as our playground, and that the rules of engagement can and should be the same wherever we find ourselves.   Our rules, obviously.

I have lived and worked in neighborhoods in the US that—had they better hotels—could be a location for a reality show.  They tend to be presented in the media as exotic, colorful even dangerous.  A perfect place to have an adventure, especially if you don’t have to deal with the people as people.  When we lived in Philadelphia, a member of our community center’s board was a drug and alcohol counselor in the suburbs.  A group of parents of teenagers asked her to help organize a tour to our neighborhood, so that other parents could actually the places where the drugs their children used were sold.  We laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation—I mean would you want us to arrange a drive-by shooting to happen on the tour, to heighten “the reality” of the situation?  To my knowledge, the trip never happened.  But the insult—the inability to see people in our community as human, as complex, mysterious beings—still rankles me.  

Recently an article about a marvelous mural we did in our community led with this sentence: “The blighted corner of Lake Street and Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis just got a giant pick-me-up in the form of a 3,000-square-foot mural adorning La Mexicana Grocery.”  I’m grateful the writer covered the story.  I just wish she had talked to a few folks who live and work near the corner.  “Blighted” would not be the word we picked.  Folks here would be as realistic about the problems of the community as anyone, but the reality they see would include the beauty, the hope, the longing for justice that the community has as well.

(See the whole piece at: http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/230088101.html)

 

A fuller article on the mural (notice the different lead) is at: http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/news/2013/10/28/new-minneapolis-mosaic-mural-dedicated-lake-street

The dedication of the mural coincided with the opening of our youth photography show “Under Construction”.  (I’ll send a link to the show, once there is one!).  Our neighborhood was full of construction projects this year: street closures, bridge closures, big machines, detours, the whole works.  The young people took photos of that construction, but also looked at how the world is constructed, how a community is built.  The poem below is not finished, but meant to honor their vision of reality: one both realistic and hopeful.  The quote from a Machado poem is on the big mural; it’s also the way the people in our community--and I think many of the places "visited" on the Amazing Race--seek to live.

Be justice.  Be beauty.

Patrick

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

 

Se hace el camino al andar

Golpe a golpe, verso a verso

José Antonio Machado

Hand by hand, eye by eye,

the children build the world.
A picture of a tree growing out
of a sidewalk, a photo
of a bridge closed for repair,
a flower hidden behind a fence.
They cut tiles to create mosaics
of monarchs and beetle bugs,
They plant tomatillos and jalapeños
to conjure into salsa, they ask questions.

Some of their parents may be deported.

Some of their friends may not live to be adults.
And yet their eyes keep seeking
that which is broken, not to deny
its power or pass it off as funny,
but to see the light that is already
at work, turning its cavernous dark
into hope.   Look at their work. Look
at the eyes they see beyond the world. 
They do not recreate the reality
they see, but the reality they need.
They make their way,
they make ours, blow
by blow, verse by verse.

HISTORY AND HISTORY

We just got back from our “25^th Anniversary European Tour”, which was marvelous.  I developed a bit of a pinched nerve in my neck, which affects my writing hand, so this will be short.  

One thing that impressed us was that the difficult side of history was not as hidden as it usually seems to be in the US.  We went to memorials for the Irish Famine (really a genocide, since Ireland exported food during the late 1840’s), the deportations under the Vichy government during WWII, Anne Frank’s house.  All very moving, and alongside beautiful buildings.

I’m thinking of the city where I live, Minneapolis, which obviously has a shorter history than Paris or Dublin. There are historical markers and historical buildings here, but, at least in my experience, you really have to seek out any memorials to the taking of Native lands, or the cruel treatment of immigrants or workers.  I wonder what a “Deportation Memorial” would look like here.

We have a reputation for being a-historical in this country, and that’s a loss.  It wasn’t always easy to hold in my mind that the great buildings in the square in Brussels—so beautiful in the day and unbelievable at night—were financed by the African slave trade, which was being remembered in an exhibit in the cathedral a few blocks away. But it was possible to see the beauty, to lament the great injustice, and to just be in there in the presence of both.

I want to live that tension wherever I am.

Be justice. Be beauty.

 
Patrick

REMEMBER WHAT WORK IT TOOK TO GET HERE

Today is the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington, and a lot of words have been written about what it meant and what it means today.  I was 10 years old at the time, and to be honest, I don’t know how much of my memory of it is from that day, and how much of it from watching news and movies and reading books about that day.  I saw the PBS documentary “March” last night, and it brought up a lot of feelings: joy at seeing the faith of people in the midst of struggle, sadness and anger about how much still needs to be done, amazement at the organizational work (before the time of computers, cell phones and faxes) and the breadth of people who participated.

Monday is Labor Day, and I come at it with honor and anger as well.  I am honored to have known people who worked incredible hours, often at great danger, to fight for the rights of working people.  I am honored by the workers today—immigrants and non-immigrants, documented and undocumented—who pick and prepare our food, care for our pre-schoolers and seniors, repair our roofs, clean our offices and tend our gardens.  And I am angry that those very important jobs are among the lowest paid.

I am struggling with what to say in my sermon this Labor Day weekend.  In a lot of churches I’ve served in, it has been the custom to pray for all veterans on Memorial Day weekend, and at times include a hymn with a national theme.  We have done that in our current congregation.  But I don’t remember any big emphasis on lifting up the labor movement on Labor Day. Part of that is my own cowardice.  Remembering veterans usually gets approval from the congregation; talking about the labor movement and you hear “we shouldn’t be political in the church”.

And yet, whatever we say about our military is political.  Not every veteran is a hero or has made sacrifices, and most of our military adventures are not about protecting our “freedom”, but our power.  How often has the church acted like a cheerleader for the military, and how does that affect our soul?

The bible is full of calls to justice, and promises of its fulfillment. There’s more references to economics in the bible than to prayer (and a lot more than about sex, which is what we in the church get hung up on).  And there are this “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12) from 1963, from 1863 and from 2013 that are still marching, still organizing, still working to get us to the place we were meant to be.

Be justice.  Be Beauty.

Patrick

GOD BLESS THE CHILD

My wife and I like to watch the BBC News that comes on PBS at 10 pm in Minneapolis.  A different perspective, more international focus.  But last night, as you might imagine, the news was all about the baby prince that had been born.  Live shots outside the hospital, the “reaction of the world” and so on. We switched to the local “news leader” and got the usual mix of mayhem and misdemeanors, followed by a cheerful, indeed chirpy weather report (low humidity is on its way!), and a sport reporter’s righteous indignation about a baseball player being suspended for the year for steroid use (“I’m shocked! Shocked that gambling is going on here!” declaimed Inspector Renault)

I hope the Third in Line to the Throne has a blessed life.  I hope the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge get some help with their interrupted sleep (I imagine they will).  Having raised two daughters, I know the joy and the travail of that great work.

But seriously, is this child more important than all other babies born July 22, 2013?  Is his life going to make that much of a difference?  We say in this country that we are all equal, but we know that circumstances of birth make such a difference.  A child born in an affluent neighborhood has a leg up in so many ways in relation to a child born in a poor neighborhood. 

I’m not discounting family values or individual initiative nor the power of people and communities to change.  But Grosse Pointe, Michigan has received a lot more political and economic favors than Detroit, Michigan, no matter how much people scream about those receiving food stamps.

We humans have built an economic system and a political system in which there are many winners and many, many more losers. We humans built it, not some unseen hand or divine idea.

There’s been a lot written and said about Trayvon Martin—whether George Zimmerman saw him as a threat because he was black.  I haven’t heard or seen much that maybe Zimmerman saw him as a threat because he was young.   So many of the youth in our parish have related stories about being followed in a store, or stopped by police, because they are with a group of other youth.  So many youth feel judged by adults in their community.  True, many of these are people of color, but even the white youth have had that experience. 

It is so easy to see “the other” as a threat, and when there are more than a couple of “them”, our fear rises up.  One reason we run a youth leadership program at our church—where youth go into the neighborhood and engage adults—is to help break down adults’ fears of youth.   I hope we’re making a difference.  “Stand your ground” with a gun usually begins with “this is my ground and not yours” in the mind.

I’m not Pollyannaish about the world (look it up, young people!), but I want to see the world today as a blessing—for the little prince and for all the little ones we call human beings.

Be blessing. Be justice.  Be beauty.

Patrick

P. S.  Here’s the beginning of a poem of mine in progress, about the role of fate.  I’d love to hear ideas about where to take it:

CHANCE

Maria was born in Reynosa

and Mary in McAllen; one has
the right to drive across the Rio Grande,
the other the right to swim across the Rio Bravo.

Abraham was born a Christian

and Ibrahim a Muslim, and both
believe the other will live forever in hell.

Delwyn got to the party a half hour

after the fight broke up, but just
in time for the bullet.  A tornado
took Paulette’s good tree, and left
the bad one standing…

THINKING ABOUT FREEDOM

I was in Philadelphia a couple weeks ago, where we had lived from 1993-2005.  Part of the beauty of that city is being able to buy a coffee and sit in the park next to Congress Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was voted upon.  Not to mention seeing Betsy Ross’ house, where Ben Franklin lived, and on and on.  And Rocky, of course.

There’s also a lot of contradictions about our national conception of freedom in Philly.  There were people active in the Underground Railroad, and there were people who hunted, harassed and killed them.  Philadelphia was the capital during George Washington’s time as President, and photos of recent excavations of the house he lived in showed the quarters for his slaves, right across the street from where the stirring words were ratified: “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

On a hot day, after walking around the historic area, I went in the air conditioned interpretive center, and watched a movie filmed around 1976, where key players of the Independence movie met up 200 years after the revolution, and then re-told the story of those days and years of the founding of our nation.  A couple things struck me: one was the scene of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a more somber moment than its raucous passage.  One of the voices said something to the effect that “we thought we were signing our death warrant.”  I tend to forget at times what courage that took to be so publicly identified with the cause.

The other thing that struck me was that, except for a brief segment about appointing George Washington as commander of the army, very little of the story presented was about the battles, the military, the war itself.  Rather it was about the ideas.  The idea of government based on the consent of the governed.  The idea of liberty for all, as compromised as that was in reality. 

I think about that today because many Face Book posts I saw this morning were about “thanking the troops for our freedom”.  I have become more and more wary of that sentiment.  I understand and honor the sacrifice that many of our troops make.  But I worry about our core belief as a nation that it is our military that makes us free.  I could argue that war may have been inevitable to win independence from England, and that war was inevitable to end slavery.  I can make the case that by the time we entered World War II, we had no choice. But so many of our wars that have been promoted as protecting our freedom are not about that at all: the Mexican War, the wars against the native nations, the Spanish-American War had nothing to do with freedom, but with gaining land and projecting our power.   Our recent adventures: Iraq, Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama—how was our freedom protected there?  You could make the case that the initial invasion of Afghanistan was needed to weaken Al Qaeda, but can you make the case that our 12 year occupation is about freedom?

I would like to see posts today about Thomas Paine and Abigail Adams as defenders of our freedom. I would like to hear the commentators at “A Capitol Fourth” and “Macy’s 4^th of July Fireworks” leave the military out of it for just one day, and lift up Sojourner Truth, Eugene Debs, Bayard Rustin, Clyde Bellecourt and Cesar Chavez as defenders of our freedom.  I would like to have an honest discussion in our nation about why we spend more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, and I would like to have a discussion about why our nation—the land of the free and the home of the brave—has been involved in more wars than any other nation since the end of World War II.

My parents both served in World War II, and I honor their service.  I know people who have come back from wars who suffered terribly, and we need to do all we can to help them heal.  But I would love to see this Independence Day, or one soon, be an independence from our love affair with war.   And I especially would love to see me, and my fellow Christians, live out our freedom maker’s call to love our enemies.

A happy and reflective 4^th of July!

Be justice.  Be beauty.

Patrick

ART FOR COMMUNITY’S SAKE

I’ve been in Philadelphia over the weekend, visiting arts group and talking with artists and community members about how art can transform communities.  Philadelphia is known as the city of murals, and you wouldn’t be disappointed if you came with the expectation to see a lot of them.  There are huge multistory murals on main streets and in downtown, and there are large and small murals in many, many neighborhoods.  A lot of that is done through the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program (http://muralarts.org/).  I’ve seen many of the wonderful murals they have commissioned, cajoled or inspired, but today I saw what has become my favorite: a garbage truck mural!  A city garbage truck—picking up recycling to be exact—right in the middle of 11^th Street near Lehigh!

I spent some time at the Village of Arts and Humanities in north Philadelphia (http://villagearts.org/).  It is located in a neighborhood that has—or had—a lot of empty lots.  A lot of lots.  Many of these have been transformed by the organization to be gardens of different types: vegetable gardens, where youth and elders were watering (before the thunderstorm broke through the 90 degree heat).  Gardens with mosaic benches and sculptures.  An open air stage.  There was nothing going on when I was there; and there was everything.  There was nothing going on when I was there; and yet, because of the art and the space it created for people, it felt inhabited.

Some of the murals in the Village area were on buildings whose backyards were full of junk and weeds.  Some were on vacant buildings.  Most people in the Philadelphia area probably never venture to see the great art work there, because it’s in “a rough area”.  I last saw the area 8 years ago, when I was still living in Philly, and some things have not changed: beautiful community-created art next to abandoned buildings.  In some ways, that is exactly where art should be: calling attention not primarily to itself, but to the community that created it and lives in and around it, and their longing for justice, healing and love.

I suppose you could ask if all the effort that went into creating the gardens and sculptures and murals and other public art made any difference.  I sometimes ask myself that about our Semilla Community Arts Program and the ministry of our church in general.  But when I was walking through the uninhabited inhabited beauty of those gardens today—smelling the flowers, and stopping under the shade trees, and even keeping an eye out for rats as I walked through an overgrown jungle of weeds—I had no doubt.

Be beauty.  Be justice.

Patrick