A Better Choice
It was a few days after the 9/11 tragedy. We had done our best to shelter our not-quite-three-year-old daughter from the constant onslaught of images on the news, but there was no way to censor things entirely, particularly our conversations as the tragedy unfolded. How could this happen? Who would do such a thing? How were we to go on?
So it wasn’t too surprising when, as we got to the end of bath time that evening, she said: “Tell me about the splat in the sky.” Explaining horror to a very small child is not the easiest thing in the world, but I did my best. I explained that there were some people who lived far away who got very, very angry at our country. And because they were so angry they decided that they wanted to hurt as many people as they could, and so they flew some airplanes into buildings. And so many, many people were hurt, and we were very sad. She thought for a moment, squared her shoulders, and looked at me from there in the tub. “They should have made a better choice.”
They should have made a better choice. It’s OK to get mad, but it’s not OK to hurt people. Use your words. Look for a solution. Take a breath. Take another breath. So many of life’s tragedies could be avoided if we would all just adhere to the wisdom that we teach our toddlers.
The men who downed the planes should have made a better choice. Also the Bush administration should have made a better choice than to go to war with Iraq. And now, now there is Syria. And surely Assad (and/or his generals) should have made a better choice than to use chemical weapons. But could it be that we are, in fact, on the verge of making a better choice ourselves? Could it be that the governments of the world will manage to walk the fine line between allowing the unacceptable and committing the indefensible?
Probably it is too soon to get attached to hope. But there it is. In this particular moment, Wednesday, 9/11/2013, it seems like President Obama, Congress and various heads of state have acknowledged that there might be a better choice. That there could be solutions that don’t involve blowing things up. That it’s OK to be mad, but that doesn’t mean we need to hurt people. That we could pause, and take a breath, and work toward a solution that is better than what happens when you rely on hurting people to tell the world how you feel.
What will happen remains to be seen, but today I am praying for a better choice.
Violence Begets Violence
I’m sure you’ve heard the aphorism, that violence never solves anything. It is a good line, one I have previously used myself. In the
long view it even has some truth to it… violence often does lead to more and more complicated problems over time.
The problem with it is that in the short view (and most human beings live in the short view) it is demonstrably untrue. Violence can seem, for awhile, to have solved some problems rather neatly. Violence, be it the violence of a mob in Cairo or a planned strike under the cover of a mob in Benghazi… violence can seem a viable solution to a problem, even an attractive one. Why attractive? Because somehow we continue with the myth that killing people creates some kind of finality, some kind of closure, in a visceral denial that we are all interconnected and interdependent.
And yet, I’ve come to realize that there is a deeper truth about violence, one that, in my experience, comes as close to an absolute truth of anything I have ever encountered… and that is this. Violence begets more violence. When one violence is perpetrated, it created a continuing cycle that creates more and different forms of violence, spreading out in a wave from the initial point.
In fact, I wonder if there really are very many new initial points of violence, and if rather our reality is made up of a continuing harmonic of violence stretching back to the dawn of human time.
I also want to clarify what I mean by violence, for I am talking about far more than physical violence. I might strike you, which is an act of physical violence. In reaction to my striking you, you might go home and be emotionally violent to a spouse. That spouse might then tell a child that the God they learned about in Sunday School must be dead for such things to happen, perpetrating an act of religious violence on the child’s growing faith… And on, and on, and on.
We all live in these cycles and waves of many different forms of violence each and every day of our lives. It is a spiritual practice to intentionally seek to interrupt these waves of violence when they come our way. It is a spiritual practice to notice the wave, the form of violence that is perpetrated upon you, and respond with loving kindness. It is a spiritual practice to transform that violence within your spirit.
As one person doing this, the wave will likely crash around you and flow on… but as one of millions? Perhaps we can, one day, break the cycle of violence that has plagued humanity since the dawn of our awareness. Perhaps we can break the cycle in which, in this small part of this ongoing wave of violence, an Israeli-American committed an act of religious violence upon the Islamic faith, and then many enraged by that act committed these acts of physical violence upon Americans, leading us now to political calculations around another act of military violence upon Muslims.
Without such millions of people seeking to intentionally interrupt the waves of violence of all forms, we are stuck forever battered by the surf.
Yours in faith,
Rev. David
Games Without Frontiers
Like so many people I’ve been talking to these past two weeks, I am a complete Olympics junkie. You can only guess what has been occupying most of my nights for the past two weeks. For me, though, the experience of this year’s Olympic Summer Games has been missing something, and I struggled early on to figure out what it was.
And then I realized one night, the day after Usain Bolt’s amazing win in the men’s 100 meter race, that his medal ceremony was the very first time all week that I had heard a national anthem for a country other than the U.S. or Great Britain. “The Jamaican National Anthem,” I cried with glee. And suddenly, I knew what I was missing.
When Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern Olympic games, he did so with an understanding that nations that meet in battle on the sporting field would develop relationships with one another than might make them less likely to meet in battle in war. Athletes are sent representing their country of origin and asked to be in community with their colleagues from all over the world. Spectators are afforded the chance to marvel when people from other nations excel at their sports.
The world sat transfixed as Usain Bolt ran at these Olympics. It mattered very little whether one was Jamaican or not—his speed and ability were worthy of admiration. Similarly, I imagine people all over the world looking on in wonder as Gabby Douglas flew above the uneven parallel bars or as Rebecca Soni set a world record (and then broke it again the next day).
And while the United States did win a whole lot of medals at these games, the “Star Spangled Banner” was not the only anthem to be played in London. It was marvelous to see Usain Bolt singing along to “Jamaica, Land We Love.” I would have loved to see some others. Kazakhstan’s for example (did you know it was played six times at these Olympics?)—a web search for their anthem turns up the fake one from “Borat” more easily than their actual national song.
Maybe, just maybe, we could have learned something about these amazing athletes and the countries they call home, too. What was it like being the first women representing Saudi Arabia? We missed a golden chance to interview the two people who could have answered that question. How do the people of Malaysia feel about winning a diving medal for the very first time? Or the people of Grenada about their nation’s first medal ever?
Maybe we could have found out how the wars our own nation has fought for the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq have changed the lives of the athletes from those nations. Or learned from Japanese athletes about their country’s recovery from natural and nuclear disaster. Perhaps we could have developed some compassion for athletes from places where poverty and disease run rampant, where many people don’t know the source of their next meal, or simply where millions of dollars are not available for athletic training programs.
“Do you remember when Jim McKay did the coverage and they used to do a piece about an athlete from another country and something about the place they lived? It was a great way to learn about the world,” my friend Patricia wrote on my Facebook wall this week.
Yes, Patricia, it was a great way to learn about the world. It was a great way to break down the divisions we humans put up so often. It was a great way to cross the borders of difference and understanding. It was a great way to move us one step closer to the Olympic ideal of world peace, where nationalism is reserved for silly games and not war.
The Meaning of Memorial Day
I thought I understood the meaning of Memorial Day. I thought the military uniform hanging in my closet taught me the meaning of Memorial
Day. I thought that growing up the child of a soldier, and the grandchild of a sailor taught me the meaning of Memorial Day. But I was wrong.
I sensed the meaning of Memorial Day. A few years ago I preached a sermon about standing at the Vietnam Wall with my father, watching him trace names of friends across the wall. It was the only time I ever saw tears in his eyes. I saw my grandfather visit the Punchbowl WWII memorial in Hawaii, and I saw those same silent tears.
I thought I knew the meaning of Memorial Day… but I did not. Not until my wife came and told me that the television news had just reported the death of my friend, military partner, and former roommate in the Al Anbar province of Iraq on December 6th, 2006. It was not until I realized that I too would one day have a name to trace across a memorial somewhere, the name of Travis Patriquin, that I learned the meaning of Memorial Day.
While I do not believe in a spiritual place called hell, I think General William Tecumseh Sherman was right when he said that “War is Hell”. It is a hell that exists in this time, in this world, not in some metaphysical afterlife. I wish with all my heart we could rid ourselves of it… I wish for the day to come when we no longer send our young men and women off to walk through that hell. I wish for the day when our problems are solved by meeting, not by killing. It is rarely those who should be meeting that instead face the killing. I wish with all my heart for what military forces we have to become a tool of peace, not a weapon of war.
Clinton Lee Scott once said “Always it is easier to pay homage to our prophets than to heed the direction of their vision”. The true meaning of Memorial Day is not homage… it is not to honor those who have served, those who have died for our nation. Oh, that is what the media will tell us, what the President will say when he lays a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery in a few days. I expect him to strike a tone of “honor our dead, and standing resolute.” No, it is not honor that our war dead ask of us. Honor is the easy way out of the vision they call us to.
The true meaning of Memorial Day is to remember. It is to remember that the cost of war is almost always too high. The true meaning of Memorial Day is not to honor our dead, but to remember the price they paid. To remember the price their families pay. To remember the physical and psychic wounds that the survivors of war, on all sides, carry with them till the end of their days. To remember the lives never lived. To remember the horrors unleashed upon civilian populations by the tools of modern warfare. To remember…
I want to cease thinking of Memorial Day as if it were a holiday, for it is not. I want to end the Memorial Day sales and the picnics, the trips to the lake and the hamburgers and hotdogs with stars and stripes napkins. We should never “celebrate” Memorial Day. I want Memorial Day not to be a holiday, but rather a National Day of Mourning.
It began as “Decoration Day”, a day when families and friends would go to cemeteries and place flowers and flags upon the graves of those who had died in the Civil War. From those graves they heard, and they remembered the cost of war. I want to return to that spirit, so that the memory of the true costs of war is fresh in our minds, renewed annually… so that perhaps we can honor our dead by sending no more to join them.
Keep your Memorial Day plans, if you have them, but remember the “reason for the season”. We do not honor the casualties of war with flowers and speeches, but by truly and deeply remembering the cost of war when we contemplate sending our service members of today into harm’s way. We honor them by remembering that war is a hell that should rarely, if ever, be unleashed.
Remember.
Yours in faith,
Rev. David Pyle
www.celestiallands.org
Chaplain, U.S. Army Reserve
Paying Tribute
In her best-selling Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins imagines a world of the future—a dystopian reality in which North American society has been replaced with a world where workers toil for the good of a small elite, threatened with the use of force, and given hope only by the small chance of winning a deadly game.
What makes the world of The Hunger Games so eerie is that we can see remnants of our present-day reality in it—enough remnants that it scares us to think that maybe, just maybe, we are headed down a path towards totalitarianism.
And while The Hunger Games is a work of fiction and of fantasy, we would do well to understand the signs in our current society that make Suzanne Collins’ disturbing imagination all-too-real.
In The Hunger Games, teenagers, called “tributes,” from each of the oppressed districts are forced to fight to the death in a reality television show broadcast throughout the nation. Their gruesome deaths are entertainment for the elite people in the Capitol, and the entire nation is forced to tune in and watch their children die.
That certainly isn’t reality, is it?
The reality is that our nation exists in what Chris Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class, calls a state of “permanent war.” Hedges writes, “since the end of World War 1, the United States has devoted staggering resources and money to battling real and imagined enemies. It turned the engines of the state over to a massive war and security apparatus.” We are kept in a constant state of fear that mutes dissent in the name of patriotism and fuels a war machine that benefits a privileged elite.
Our wars require not only a steady stream of money—taken from our paychecks and pockets and diverted from health care, our social safety net, education, and infrastructure—but also a steady stream of young, able-bodied people willing to die for our country. All too often, they do.
I am not suggesting that the death of US troops is entertainment for the elite, as is the death of young people is in The Hunger Games. But their death serves to reinforce a status quo that there are people whose interests are served by our nation being at war. The death of brave young soldiers helps us silence objections to unjust wars being fought in our name, it helps us dismiss Occupy movement as “fringe elements,” and it helps us rationalize police brutality towards non-violent protesters.
Lest we appear unpatriotic, those of us morally offended offended by the deaths of US soldiers stay eerily silent about what is fueling those wars.
We cannot afford to remain silent about the fact that corporations are profiting from this state of permanent war, and those same corporations have wrested control of our political and economic systems.
As we approach our annual celebration of Memorial Day, we will pause to mourn the lives lost in service to our nation. It is right and good to do this. Once we are done with our moment of silence, however, we owe it to our soldiers to raise our voices.
We must insist on a society where people matter more than corporations. Where the lives of young people are not used as disposable input into a system of profit-making and wealth creation.
We must insist on a society where political power is checked and shared—and not allowed to run amok through Super PACs and corporate donations. Where the wealthy and the poor have equal access and equal voice, where money is not speech, and where corporations are not people.
We must insist on an economy based in love and compassion, rather than fear and greed. We must insist on an economy based in mutuality rather than coercion. We must insist on a nation that treats the “least of these” in the human family as if they were the divine in our midst.
We must raise our moral voices loudly, my friends. We might not find ourselves in the Hunger Games if we do not, but to create the future we want to see we cannot remain silent.
