Posts filed under 'Peace'
January 17th, 2008
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky. (Psalm 85)
Moishe the Beadle said to a young Elie Wiesel that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer. (Night, Elie Wiesel)
If this is right, then, as the Beadle knew, it is our questions that draw us close to God, not our answers. And not even God’s answers. Because God’s answers–when they are not merely our own answers thrown up against the sky–dwell in mystery and misapprehension at the depths of our hearts until at some tear in time, or at the end of our life, or in the next, they bloom, and seem to have always been understood. On that soil questions and answers are indivisible.
But if this is true about questions, well, then our search must not be for the grand answer(s) but for the right questions. Because questions make a path to the garden of mystical truth where love and faithfulness spring up from the ground and where righteousness and peace kiss.
Now, this is of course a mystical move but how else can I "understand" things I can’t understand? How else can one endure the brutish side of humans and still have faith? For Wiesel, who witnessed and suffered the unspeakable, God was killed in Birkenau, and Auschwitz. And even though I believe what the young Wiesel held true, how can I argue with his giving it up? And while I believe that the life of Christ holds the key to the questions of suffering and violence, in the presence of Wiesel I could not speak a word, but only listen and grieve.
January 9th, 2008
"On January 1, 1953, at age 44, Mildred Norman Ryder adopted the name Peace
Pilgrim, put on a pair of canvas sneakers, donned dark blue slacks, blouse, and a tunic - on which she had sown her new name - and set out to walk the length of the USA leaving from Pasadena, CA. She chose blue for her clothing because it is the international color of peace. She chose Pasadena because she wanted to set off walking ahead of the Rose Parade where thousands of people could see her. On that first trip, in the midst of the Korean War, the Cold War, and at the height of the McCarthy era, she walked 5,000 miles from California to New York, from coast to coast and from border to border, sharing her message of peace."
A quote from Mildred as to the timing of her walk.
The world situation is grave. Humanity, with fearful, faltering steps, walks a knife-edge between abysmal chaos and a new renaissance, while strong forces push toward chaos. Yet there is hope. I see hope in the tireless work for peace of a few devoted souls. I see hope in the real desire for peace in the heart of humanity, even though the human family gropes toward peace blindly, not knowing the way…I think that those of us who have found the way to peace, should be shouting it from the housetops.
For almost three decades, from 1953 to 1981, Mildred crossed the USA seven times, including two trips to Hawaii and Alaska, as well as Mexico and Canada. (See Marta Daniels’ article on the Peace Pilgrim)
November 13th, 2007
Since I mentioned Siegfried Sassoon in the last post as a kind of “anti-Flanders” poet, it’s only right I post a poem.
Survivors
No doubt they’ll soon get well;
the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’ —
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They’ll soon forget their haunted nights;
their cowed Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.
Soaked in sarcasm…but he did have the right.
He was full of heady idealism when he enlisted at the outbreak of the first world war. And his early poetry pictures war as a noble enterprise. But when he got to the front, got to the trenches, saw the limbs and smelled the stench of violent death, and when his comrades and some of his family became casualties, he began to examine his adopted idealism and his poetry turned from a romanticization of the war to its portrayal in language with razor-edge reality.
His friend, Robert Nichols, another poet and soldier, quotes him as follows:
“Let no one ever, from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell, and those who institute it are criminals. Were there even anything to say for it, it should not be said; for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages.”
November 11th, 2007
Perhaps I wasn’t really listening, perhaps I too was caught up in a kind of collective amnesia over the evil of war that seems is at its height this time of year. Perhaps I was too caught up in the spirit of the poppy that sees any kind of detraction from the geist of this commemoration, or ritual, as treasonous.
But this year, upon listening to a reading of “In Flanders Field” I was repelled. Please understand, I hold no disdain, only sympathy, for the veteran who read it and I have only sincere sadness for the war dead the poem regards. And for the Canadian poet of “In Flanders Fields,” Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, (1872-1918), I hold no aversion, only a grievous sort of empathy.
Not so for the poem. It’s a disaster. It’s terminal message, a message we have enduringly embraced perpetuates our plague. (Just for the record John McCrae, for reasons known only to himself, threw the poem away. It was retrieved by a fellow officer.) It reads:
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
While the living fight the wars, it is the dead that sustain war. Always the dead. We are manacled to the dead through errant patriotism, through a kind of Don Cherry vindicatory vision of justice, and through our inability to see our enemy as human.
The poem cries out…humans on our side have died, and they were not like those who killed them, they were like us, they loved and experienced beauty. And now, slaughtered in war, it is up to us to avenge them; up to us to “hold high the torch” and to “take up the quarrel.” (Quarrel?) And if we fail, “break faith,” the dead will have no peace.
The poem is mythologized blackmail. And we will always succumb to the lure of war as justified revenge no matter what the original “quarrel,” unless we begin to forget.
It is time for some selective forgetting. It is time to forget the spirit and message of this poem and insert some poetry from Siegfried Sassoon. Sasoon, also a decorated WW I veteran, exposed not merely the horror of war, but its meaninglessness.
Is it possible to have the dexterity of heart and mind to compassionately remember the war dead, without in any way honouring and legitimizing war? Well, not if we adhere to the message of ” In Flanders Fields.”
Unless we wish to remember war’s pointless destruction, the epithet, “Lest we Forget,” perpetually serves war. An open-eyed “lest we remember,” must be our new commemoration.
October 31st, 2007
Credit PM Stephen Harper for officially welcoming the Dalai Lama, a first for Canadian politics. Leaders of the past Liberal government, hyper sensitive over Chinese opposition, met the Dalai Lama in the back of a Roman Catholic church. Also credit Jason Kenny (Multiculturalism) for speaking without reservation against Chinese oppression. And credit the Dalai Lama for acknowledging the Canadian overture.
But also credit the Dalai Lama for chastising Harper over the Afghanistan war, as he had done with Bush over Iraq.
The Dalai Lama, in his characteristic low-key charismatic way, cautioned Harper that violence begets violence, and said, “I always believe non-violence is the best way to solve problems.”
There’s little ambiguity about the Dalai Lama’s pacific stand regarding national conflict, and his non-violent message in general. So, as a Christian, I ask myself, who better represents and reflects the life and teachings of Christ, the Dalai Lama or our current (evangelical) Christian leaders?
August 27th, 2007
…righteousness and peace will kiss each other. (Psalm 85)
Righteousness is a word that probably needs a reclamation project behind it. But here’s a start: Righteousness is relaxing into God. It’s relaxing into the giver of creation, the giver of earth, body and soul. It’s the kind of relaxing that you might call love. And just maybe, you do love, because you find that God is the kind of God who wants to recline with you.
Peace is a word we have a decent handle on. But let me try this for a definition: Peace is the pain you feel when you see some misguided brothers strap on bombs and walk into marketplaces. Peace is the sadness you feel for people who hate each other.Peace is the anguish you experience for both victimizer and victim, because both are your neighbours. Peace is the unexpected experience of inner travail over violence of any type. Peace is a kind of fatal freedom that dizzies you because you’ve been relaxing with God.
Righteousness and peace kiss each other in those times we love God and neighbour intently and equally. Maybe, with any luck, and a visit from grace and mercy, we might experience this kiss once or twice in our lives.
August 21st, 2007
I’ve wondered sometimes, how much I contribute to keeping war alive. Does the steam of my half-conscious half-baked desires rise and add to the ethane that war breathes? Does war seep out of our my pours in my grasping after never-enough. Do I breath war into the atmosphere through my impatience; impatience that can set me off envisaging the infliction of wounds on the head of some mere place-stealer.
And what about resentment? How free am I from this time bomb?
Can I liberate myself from resentment without the sense that I am absolving someone who harmed me? A sidestep that misdirects energy and creates no new possibility. Can I keep an experience of being hurt, slighted, snubbed, overlooked or worse, from hardening into resentment? which will always lead to some kind of retaliation.
I’m convinced that resentment holds within itself any and all forms of conflict and the combustive capacity to set off all kinds of wars. And resentment always sustains wars, because while wars are fought by the living, or at least, the still existing, it’s the dead on each side that fuel them.
But this much I’ve contemplated and now believe. That when the dry vapours of resentment, anger and ill intent become saturated by disarmed hearts, peace will condense and rain down and wash over our faces.
This is the dew point of peace. Enough disarmed hearts to soak and quench resentment and hatred.
From where will these hearts come? How do we demilitarize our hearts to where they are innocent of retaliation and free of resentment?
Imagine the imagination of a disarmed heart. The kind of imagination that sees possibility in laying weapons aside, that sees defeat as being an opening, that understands that being killed is not nearly the final word.
August 13th, 2007
“Scatter the peoples who delight in war” is a line out of the Psalms but it could have been a line from a Michael Franti song. A latecomer to his music, I was initiated last night, at the tale end of the Edmonton Folk-Fest.
Franti, bare-footed, and looking a bit like what you might imagine an old testament prophet looks like, and sounding like one, (except of course when he does Sesame Street nostalgia) is a new anti-war voice that is hard to dismiss. Because even if you don’t like his incessantly pro-peace, avant-garde reggae-rock, he is someone who has pointed his body in the direction of his words and taken, as he puts it, “the risk of peace.”
He’s gone to Iraq, sung on the streets of Baghdad, sung in Palestine and Israel, and because he supports troops–but not the war–he has sung to U.S. soldiers.
He’s not naïve about the complexities of conflict. You get the impression that he’s a listener and that as a result knows where to aim. He’s able to discern the big systems that delight in the dividends of war from the those of us caught up by them.
I grew up in the wake of “Universal Soldier” and “For What It’s Worth,” but I’m trying to think of anybody since Peter, Paul and Mary, Buffy Saint Marie, occasionally Dylan and Neil Young, that’s been as unshakably single-minded in trying to undo war and violence.
Franti, energetic, disarming, a presence, a hot band, danceable message-music, and a following, plus a realistic grasp on the Iraqi war…will he make a difference?
August 3rd, 2007
Have been waiting to see what would become of Logan Laituri’s Christian conversion and subsequent convictions. They appear to be holding.
Spring 2005, back from the Iraqi front-lines, through the love and influence of his girlfriend’s family, Laituri became a Christian. He took the gospel seriously–especially the part about loving enemies–and was willing to go back to the front-lines but with the proviso that he would not carry a weapon.
Not surprisingly he was reprimanded by his superior as an enemy of America. Somewhat surprisingly, well, perhaps not, he was viewed by his girlfriend’s Christian-conservative father as misinterpreting the bible concerning war.
He tried applying for conscientious objector status but somehow the paper work kept getting stalled. Instead he was assigned to a detachment that would not deploy to a war zone. Then in October of 2006 his term of service ended. Today, he’s without the girlfriend but not without a voice.
A few weeks ago, in an open letter to his fellow Americans running for the office of the presidency, he wrote:
Over four years, 4 billion dollars, and 3,000 lives ago, our nation was drawn into a conflict that few of our number now believe was initiated with our collective interests or values in mind. As a proud and decorated veteran of this conflict, I have suffered for and served my country with distinction and honor. However, my dreams and quiet moments have been mercilessly violated by the voices of the victims of our national terrorism. In Iraq, their liberation has cost as many as 655,000 Iraqis their lives. Their cries, and those of their families, have been uttered amidst a flood of sweat, tears, and all too much of their own blood.
A voice is a small thing compared to a state war machine. But I still believe the world turns on small things.
Logan Laituri’s story was published last year in Geez
July 26th, 2007
Perhaps this post might be an encouragement and even a shot of hope across the bow of your life.
You see, I’ve discovered the secret to life in all its dimensions. And it’s this:
One really excellent decision will cancel out the idiotic decisions of a lifetime and help you make less idiotic decisions in the future.
I made an excellent one 21 years ago today.
Granted, it wasn’t always easy. (This being a second go for each of us.) Even our wedding (shown below) was rather surreal. Almost as though we were observers.
Still, as we’ve walked this married path, we’ve gradually inhabited ourselves, (you’ll have guessed where most of the credit must go for this) becoming, I believe, increasingly more of who we are and who we were meant to be through a long journey of self-discovery, which, ironically, must always be done through partnership.
Here’s to excellent decisions for all.
Next Posts
Previous Posts
Front Porch Pictures
