Wars that are worth the cost?

I ran across an article about the "first" Memorial Day celebration in America, although I doubt there was a first. The idea of decorating soldiers' graves is very old. Also, the likelihood that only one person in the entire post-Civil War US thought about commemorating the dead seems to make our nineteenth century forebears seem a bit heartless. Add to that our obsession for defining firsts, and we cross the border into silly land.

But this commemoration was different. Recently-freed slaves led the movement to rebury and honor the Union dead from a former prisoner of war camp near Charleston, South Carolina. The day is brought to life in an essay by Yale historian David Blight about the birth of Memorial Day at the end of the Civil War.

The first Memorial Day celebration took place in Charleston, South Carolina in 1865. The city that started the Civil War with the firing on Fort Sumter lay in ruins at the end of the conflict. In the last year of the war, Confederate soldiers had turned the city's race track into a makeshift prison for Union soldiers. Where previously rich white planters had gathered in a conspicuous display of the wealth extracted from the labor of exploited slaves, there stood another symbol of the Confederacy. In the year of its operation, more than 250 northern soldiers died of illnesses related to exposure, malnutrition, and starvation. The Southern surrender at Appomattox in early April of 1865 left the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club empty except for a hastily constructed mass-grave dug by retreating Confederates.

Union Cemetery at Washington Race Course

After news of the surrender spread, some 28 black workmen, mostly former slaves living in Charleston, took it upon themselves to re-bury the Union dead. They built a proper cemetery. Lined it with a whitewashed picket fence. And on the archway over the entrance wrote the words "Martyrs of the Race Course." Then on May 1, 1865, black Charlestonians, along with white missionaries, soldiers, and aid workers held a memorial celebration on the grounds of the slaveholders' former race course.

Over 10,000 people marched that day. The parade was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren: boys and girls who had previously been kept by law from learning to read and write were the corporeal embodiment of the promise of a new south. They were followed by women bearing flowers, wreaths, and crosses to honor the dead. Black men, civilians marching en masse and in orderly martial cadence were next. Finally, federal troops, both black and white -- soldiers in the great war to end slavery -- marched onto the field. All of them understood the powerful symbolism of a celebration by former slaves to honor soldiers of the war to end bondage, held at a the very site of slave aristocracy's power, a southern pleasure ground-turned Confederate prison. To the participants that day, according to Blight, the ceremony was an the Independence Day celebration for the Second American Revolution.

In an ideal world, war would not exist. Nations could negotiate terms of co-existence. Religions would not see each other as deadly, satanic enemies, ripe for extermination. Races and states would not be captivated by myths of their personal superiority. The human mind would be impervious to paranoia and superstition.

But in the less-than-perfect world in which we live, war is inevitable. Belligerence and aggression remain prized virtues. Xenophobic fear is coded into our DNA. Kings thirst for land; bishops for souls; merchants for gold; soldiers for glory. The clan, race or country that does not accept this is soon swept from existence, leaving the world to the restless, ruthless and greedy.

But once in a while, a war is not fought for simple domination over others or appropriation of their lands and goods. Such wars are no less vicious or cruel, but they can bring forth a deeper peace, greater stability, a more perfect union.

Warriors do not choose their wars. They deserve honor and remembrance for having placed themselves in harm's way; for accepting the possibility that death and injury are the fruits of their dedication. Yet nations and peoples have a sacred duty to ensure that wars, when they do erupt, are fought for worthy reasons, so that the sacrifice of the men and women who answer the call to duty are not tarnished by unworthy aims. War whose aim is booty, or territory, or destruction of the unbeliever, or elevation of the self are unworthy of celebration. War that results in people unchained, madness ended and peace extended for all may almost be worth the horror, anguish and loss of life.

Kiss an Atheist-in-Christ!

I am still recovering from a wonderful, yet exhausting, family celebration, but couldn't resist posting about the Pope's latest comments, which I quote at length:

"(RNS) Pope Francis is warning Catholics not to demonize those who are not members of the church, and he specifically defended atheists, saying that building walls against non-Catholics leads to “killing in the name of God.”

“(T)his ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God,” Francis said Wednesday (May 22) in remarks at the informal morning Mass that he celebrates in the chapel at the Vatican guesthouse where he lives.

“And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”

"Francis explained that doing good is not a matter of faith: “It is a duty, it is an identity card that our Father has given to all of us, because he has made us in his image and likeness.”

"To both atheists and believers, he said that “if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good.”

"In a passage that may prompt a theological debate about the nature of salvation, the pontiff also declared that God “has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone!”

“Even the atheists,” he said to those who might question his assertion. “Everyone!”
-------------------------
I have already been challenged by a fundamentalist acquaintance who thinks Francis has now stopped being a Christian, citing John 3:17-19: "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. "

For many years, Catholics were guilty of interpreting scripture to exclude the possibility that salvation could come to non-Catholics. It turned out to be an ugly, divisive and lethal opinion that turned human beings against one another. In my opinion, it is how the Devil used Scripture to rend the Body of Christ by war and discord. Catholics have worked hard to move past that interpretation of Scripture, and to align themselves with the vision of God from the parable about the Prodigal Son -- the God who loves us and desires our return.

Fundamentalists are welcome to believe any exclusionary interpretation of Scripture that they please. But interpretations that cherry-pick verses, and fail to balance them against verses that provide different messages are suspect. And usually self-serving.

Welcome to my conspiracy

Celeste Corcoran and daughter Sydney, both nearly killed in the Boston Marathon bombing,give an interview

 

I spent last night watching videos. Specifically, videos made by conspiracy buffs interested in the recent Boston Marathon bombing. I was shocked (and disheartened) to learn that what to most people is an open and shut tragedy has become a twisted web of lies, corruption and conspiracies to a vocal few.

The self-appointed investigators homed in on what seemed like inconsistencies in the photographs taken at the event.

In one case, a bloody-faced woman, who was seen in many published photos crawling away from the blast site, is seen earlier. She is on her back seconds after the blast, and rolls over onto her knees before she can crawl away. While she rolls over, the narrator tells us that he can see her reach into pocket, pull out something (bloody makeup) wrapped in cloth, apply it and put it back into her pocket before she crawls off.

In another series of stills, we see Jeff Bauman, the gray-faced young man whose legs were shredded and blown off, just after he received his injuries. At first, his legs are positioned so that only his uninjured upper legs are seen. This leads the investigator to conclude that Baumann is a double-amputee, who is just pretending to be injured. We are told that at this moment, a gray-hooded man sitting on the ground just beyond Bauman quickly applies prosthetics to Jeff’s stumps to make it look like his legs had been injured. The joke is evidently on us: Jeff an actor in an elaborate plot to fool the public!

In another video, Bauman is seen in long shot from a grainy video being wheeled to an ambulance. An attendant approaches. To my eye, I thought he was covering Bauman's legs with a sterile wrap or a blanket. But no! The attendant is actually pushing the gruesome prostheses back onto Bauman stumps, since they were about to fall off and give away the charade!

There is something depressing and sad about the amount of brainpower devoted to “proving” a conspiracy in this case. For one thing, the logistics behind staging such a massive hoax are staggering. Everyone near the finish line would have to be in on it -- the cops, doctors, by-standers, media – anyone who could assist people whose injuries had been faked, or take the wrong picture. They would have had to conspire to keep any non-actor out of the death zone. ONE PERSON who walked onto the “set” could have blown the cover off the plot.

Think about Jeff Bauman as a case in point – one of many supposedly hurt and bleeding people whose roles (including applying prostheses, makeup and shredding their clothing) would have to be performed perfectly to fool the rest of us. And in the few seconds while smoke from the explosion cleared. For Bauman to be faking, he would need the work of many confederates – the civilians who rushed to help him, the ambulance attendants, the doctors who “treated” him; the nurses who changed the bandages on his non-existent injuries; the janitorial staff who cleaned his room; the family members and friends who knew that their amputee son/buddy had lost legs they already knew to be gone.

The sheer quantity of split-second timing, while the world watched, beggars the imagination. The massive cover-up needed to pull this off is unbelievable

It doesn’t seems as though these conspiracy buffs see the victims as human beings. They are just pawns in their know-it-all game of self-deception. The dead and injured are just paid performers, not needing, hurting, grieving victims whose entire lives have been altered forever, and who are deserving of our sympathy and support. Is it easier to shut off your conscience and your empathy than to live in a world where the inexplicable happens every day? Where real people die and are maimed by cruel, heartless attackers? I have read that belief in conspiracies helps some people to grapple with their own sense of powerlessness. They prefer “knowing” something monstrous to uncertainty.

Sadly, such paranoid thinking, while bringing us close to a tragedy, actually distances us from suffering. Remember the woman who was rolling over so she could crawl away, while self-applying bloody makeup? In the same frame was Celeste Corcoran, also on her back as her husband Kevin tried to pull her to her feet. Problem? Her feet were no longer fully attached to her body. A pool of blood quickly spread around her injured extremities. In pictures taken just seconds later, Celeste is on her back with her hand covering her eyes while Kevin is desperately pulling a belt around her leg to stop the gush of his wife’s lifeblood. While all of the conspiracy buff’s focus was on a woman who might have faked an injury (if you kept your eyes half-shut and assumed a person can apply convincing makeup in seconds while rolling on the ground) another woman who was literally bleeding out onto the streets of Boston was entirely invisible.

As invisible as the web of suppositions spun by people with too much time on their hands, too much technology and imagination at their disposal, but too little good judgment and heart for fellow human sufferers.

Pentecost Countdown Day 7: Wisdom

 

Wisdom: the capacity to love spiritual things more than material ones.

Here's where many in the developed world fall down. whatever we believe about religion, we (and I include myself here) enjoy homes stuffed full of electronics, expensive nights at the movies or restaurants and new (or nearly new) automobiles. Sometimes, the closest we come to a live of simplicity is to point to clothes in our closets that we not will not wear and to promise that someday, we'll donate them.

We are wise about the ways of the material world. We know where to shop to get the best deals, know how much a deal is worth to balance against the gas needed to get there. We know the tax loopholes and deductions, and know how to move our money around to get the best interest rates. When we scrimp, it might mean going out to eat once a weeks rather than two, or to quaff a glass of win at home rather than in a restaurant.

Wisdom about spiritual matters. Maybe not so much.

I would rather pray for a sick person than to visit. Is that just as good? I did a prison ministry once, but it creeped me out. Is that bad? I give of my time to write blog posts, but don't get beyond small talk with most people. Is that shallow?

I am not all bad. I listen to my family. I try to become kinder and less sharp-tongued. I try to be a lover, not just a critic. I talk to people who have been sick or away. I am a friend to gays and outcasts. I give (a little) to charities through paycheck withdrawal. I try to find truth and persuade others of it. I pray. I question. I wrestle with God.

Probably better than some, not than others.

Maybe the best wisdom come from a guy who was really in touch with the spirit of God, St. Paul.

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.

Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit a message of wisdom, to another a message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines.
 

I didn't see "blog writer" in the list, but I think I get the picture.

Lord, may I appreciate the gifts you have given me, and not spend too much time dwelling on those I lack. May I use these gifts for your glory, and to advance the cause of your kingdom. May my gifts touch hearts and make me worthy of a place in your kingdom. I ask this in the name of Jesus, the Lord.

Pentecost Countdown Day 6: Fear of the Lord

 

Fear of the Lord (wonder and awe): with the gift of fear of the Lord we are aware of the glory and majesty of God. A person with wonder and awe knows that God is the perfection of all we desire: perfect knowledge, perfect goodness, perfect power, and perfect love. This gift is described by Aquinas as a fear of separating oneself from God. He describes the gift as a "filial fear," like a child's fear of offending his father, rather than a "servile fear," that is, a fear of punishment. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Psalms 111:10 || Proverbs 1:7;9:10) because it puts our mindset in correct location with respect to God: we are the finite, dependent creatures, and He is the infinite, all-powerful Creator.

I ran across and article today, called "Ten Ridiculous Christian Right Prophecies." Aside from its subtle tone of snarky "faith-shaming," the piece was kind of fun to read. Among the prophecies were Pat Robertson's claim that Mitt Romney would win the 2012 presidential election and a rumor circulating among the religious right that on March 23 of this year, that "RFID microchips, the Mark of the Beast, will be implanted in all Americans". Well, Obama won, and I still don't set off security alarms when I walk through doors.

Fear of the Lord, to a certain subset of Christians is a hope rather than a worry. They hope that people will be scared enough to start acting right and maybe to support their particular political agenda.But FOTL seems a paltry thing if it is just used to scare us. It seems that a loving Father would be above the need to frighten people into "goodness." Is it really goodness if you are forced into it at the point of a pitchfork?

Christians in particular and all religious people in general ought to be worried about their certainties. This is hard work, but religioun means constant struggle -- constant working out of the relationship between self and God, and self and the scriptures and self and neighbor. Anyone who says that have it figured out -- especially when having that means thinking oneself completely in the right and others in the wrong -- ought to take a step back and examine their conscience. No person can be completely right; so when something thinks that have all the answers, they are, by definition, wrong, having equated their own standard of right and wrong with that of omniscient God.

There are two standards for right relationship with God and man -- and Jesus nailed it in Mark 12:

One of the scribes, when he came forward and heard them disputing and saw how well he had answered them, asked him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?”Jesus replied, “The first is this: ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

I would challenge those who think they know the mind of God, and that they are in his good graces, to bear these two commandments in mind. Putting oneself in the place of God -- doling out punishments and threats, are in violation of the first commandment. Those who deny their neighbors the justice due them are in violation of the second.

Pentecost countdown Day 5: Counsel

UNH's Cameron Lyle

Counsel (right judgment): with the gift of counsel/right judgment, we know the difference between right and wrong, and we choose to do what is right. A person with right judgment avoids sin and lives out the values taught by Jesus;

Lyle Camron is a track and field star at UNH -- the University of New Hampshire. Just before he had the chance to fill out his trophy shelf with more medals, another chance presented itself:

Growing up an athlete in Plaistow, N.H., Cameron Lyle heard all the cliches about the importance of sacrifice and giving your all. 

For most of his career as a track and field star in high school and college, the sacrifices were relatively easy. Work out harder. Sweat more. Put that shot just a bit farther. 

Recently though, Lyle upped the ante, officially ending his college athletic career a bit early so he could donate bone marrow to a 28-year-old man suffering from a form of blood cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukemia. 

Lyle’s decision to donate came just days before his final chances at gold medals in the Division 1 America East Conference championships and the legendary Penn Relays, the oldest and most celebrated collegiate track and field competition in the country. Lyle had medaled 11 times at the conference level.

Now, I admire a man who can run real fast and throw a metal ball real far. But I really admire a person who can put aside their personal goals when a higher call is heard. Most people know the difference between right and wrong. Some of them might even "choose to do what is right." But how many would make that choice when fame, glory or security is at stake?

I think we sell ourselves short when we think, "Not many." The Boston Marathon bombings happened just a month ago today. Just long enough ago to be put out of mind, at least once in a awhile. But that day was filled with heroes -- the ones with badges and reflective jackets, but also the ones with just a belt to cinch around a bleeding limb, or muscles to push a wheelchair down the street. True, there were also those who just ran away, and a few who helped themselves to official Marathon jackets at an untended table. But there were so many who stayed and helped. Even a cop who tried to save the life of one of the bombers after he'd been shot and run over.

You don't need to be a Christian to exhibit the gift of counsel. But anyone calling themselves Christian ought to measure themselves against counsel's lofty call.

Pentecost Countdown Day 4: Fortitude



A priest from nearby Honduras addresses the crowd in 2011

fortitude (courage): with the gift of fortitude/courage, we overcome our fear and are willing to take risks as a follower of Jesus Christ. A person with courage is willing to stand up for what is right in the sight of God, even if it means accepting rejection, verbal abuse, or physical harm. The gift of courage allows people the firmness of mind that is required both in doing good and in enduring evil;

On May 14, 1980, toward the beginning of the terrible El Salvadoran civil war, the same struggle that resulted in the death of Archbishop Oscar Romero, 600 campesinos were murdered near the Sumpul River by government forces. By the war's end in 1990, 75,000 people would be dead, and countless others "disappeared."

What is amazing is that ordinary people, including massacre survivors, their families and children, have been returning to the massacre site every year since the peace was signed in 1992.

Once a year the field is filled with music, theater performances, banners, pictures and spoken homages to the victims. The activity begins with testimony from victims and survivors and finishes with a mass given by priests who have been accompanying the communities of Chalatenango since the war. 

These ordinary people are reclaiming the land from its bloody past and their loved ones from being erased from memory and from existence, the fate desired for them by their oppressors. The people, with quiet strength, must dredge up painful memories in their quest to memorialize the dead, and not incidentally to send a strong message to those who choose extermination and terror as tactics, rather than dialog, negotiation and accommodation. The echos of the civil war, and the terrors it brought for half a generation, must still be loud in the hearts of those who lived through it. Yet they, the wounded and suffering body of Christ, in the people of El Salvador, having endured unspeakable evil, show the firmness of mind needed to do good. To bring peace out of war and life out of death.

May the oppressed dead live in our memories and stay alive in our hearts, a refutation of the Golgothas that continues to haunt our race down the millennia. Amen.

Pentecost countdown Day 3: Piety

Cardinal Seán O'Malley

Piety or reverence: with the gift of reverence, sometimes called piety, we have a deep sense of respect for God and the Church. A person with reverence recognizes our total reliance on God and comes before God with humility, trust, and love.

Cardinal Seán O'Malley, normally a pretty good guy (he dresses simply and mows his own lawn, for instance) is nevertheless a stickler for the letter of  Church law:

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, the archbishop of the Boston Archdiocese, said today he would not attend Boston College’s commencement because the scheduled speaker, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, supports controversial abortion-rights legislation in his country.

In a statement released this afternoon, O’Malley said the Catholic Bishops of the United States have urged Catholic institutions not to honor government officials whose views on the issue are inconsistent with the teachings of the Catholic church.

The Irish legislation would permit abortions if there is a real and substantial threat to the mother’s life, including from suicide. 

Relax. This is not another article taking the Church to task for its insistence on an absolute ban on abortion. I am more interested in the way the Cardinal has fallen down in his "deep sense of respect for God and the Church."

Aside from the horrifying insistence that placing a mother's life in peril is in keeping with a Consistent Ethic of Life, there's the issue of closing off conversations with those with contrary views. There's something disturbing, even sinister, about refusing to engage with a college of learned theologians and teachers, some of whom are willing to hear out a person whose views may not be entirely congruent with that of Church leaders. Refusing to engage will not make the issue go away, nor will it silence those with sincere beliefs that lead them to conclude differently. Leaders like O'Malley are just playing to the grandstand, to their legions of fans who applaud their every move as though from God himself. Their tactics only entrench the already substantial hostility to dialog of those in the Church who are convinced, without the inconvenience of mental struggle, that they have the Truth.

O'Malley is doing what any Catholic bishop of the early 21st century does. And that's not meant as a compliment. He is completely obedient to the magisterium, the Church's teaching authority. But can a man of the early 2000s be honest to the magisterium while staying true to his own intellect and to his conscience? Or must conscience and intellect kowtow to every Church teaching? Is it good for a man's soul that he twist mind and heart around doctines that are intellectually impoverished, illogical and lacking in compassion? A person who honestly supports abortion (or contraception or gay marriage or a non-celibate priesthood or any other opinion out of plumb with the Church) is at least being true to their own minds and hearts. For the cardinal to refuse to engage people of faith in their honest struggles with the hot topics of the day is to turn one's back not on heathens, fools and apostates, but possibly on the stirrings of the Holy Spirit herself.

Not an exercise in piety, if you ask me.

Pentecost Countdown Day 2: Knowledge

Onil and Perdo Castro, speaking to CNN about their kidnapper brother Ariel

Knowledge: with the gift of knowledge, we understand the meaning of God. The gift of knowledge is more than an accumulation of facts.
CCC

The brothers Castro were in the news this last week, with allegations of kidnapping, rape and torture of three young women. Ariel, Onil and Pedro were all arrested after the women  escaped the Cleveland home where they had been held captive for ten years. Soon, Onil and Pedro were released, as it became clear that only Ariel was involved. Speaking to CNN  this weekend, the two brothers disowned Ariel (in a reverse case of "He ain't heavy, he's my brother") and spoke about what they knew:

"I had nothing to do with this, and I don't know how my brother got away with it for so many years," Pedro Castro, 54, said.

They didn't know. But they are tortured with the thought that they should have known, or might have known. They didn't connect the dots. If they ever saw them.

Knowledge is usually seen in the rear view mirror, as the dots of our lives line up into recognizable patterns. But it is hard to know in the moment. When we say we know, we usually are accessing information from the past. I burned my hand on a hot stove once, so I know it'll hurt if I do it again.. I know Saturn's has rings and a bunch of moons because once, I learned it in school.  I know the Twin Towers were attacked, because I saw the replay on TV.

Meanwhile, knowledge about the present is pretty iffy. We don't even really know ourselves -- just the thin crust of egotistical personality we call "me." We don't understand where our emotions come from, whether they are twisted by experience or just twisted by a million years of primate evolution. Don't believe me? Watch how many people get passionate about a football team. And how many get passionate about global warming, or hunger in Africa. Or eating and smoking less.

The Spirit's gift of knowledge concerns knowledge of God. And not a list of factoids such as all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful and Eternal. Even if you believe these descriptions of God, you are hardly better off then no knowing. What does it really mean that God is all-good, for instance?That he is not capable of inflicting something we call evil, but that is good in his sight? Can you tell me (in terms that do not involve time) what eternity means?

The people who seems to know the existence called God don't rely on facts and figures - number of prayers answered or dangers averted. They speak in terms of a relationship. Which requires openness and trust. On long periods of silence punctuated by the sharp sting of presence. And they know what to look for. Not enormous miracles promised by too many religious leaders -- like healing a cancer or feeding a planet or raising a loved one from death. Unless you are a Moses or a Jesus (and maybe even then!) God's presence comes disguised in everyday occurrences -- a billboard with a message that seems tailor-made for a nagging problem; the fourth time in a week you hear a reference to an old book or movie; an unlikely encounter with an old acquaintance; a feeling that you should make time for a meal with a friend -- or an enemy. These can be God's invitation to reassess your priorities, to learn a new perspective, or to be his minister.

And here's the part you need to know from past experience -- that an invitation is of no value unless it is accepted. Saying yes to these divine experiences is critical. Or else, as we all know, the moment will pass with an opportunity lost. And a long time until another invitation.

Practice listening to your quiet mind, and consider its promptings. Don't talk yourself out of following an inconvenient urge. Sometimes, these are invitations to holiness.

Know what I mean?

Pentecost Countdown -- Day 1: Understanding

Protesters asking El Salvador's Supreme Court to save Beatriz's life

 

Someone from my community posted a suggestion about Ascension Thursday (yesterday): why not use the 9 days until Pentecost to meditate on the 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit --Fear of the Lord, Piety, Knowledge, Fortitude, Counsel, Understanding, and Wisdom?

Today, I ponder "understanding," or how "we comprehend how we need to live as followers of Christ. A person with understanding is not confused by the conflicting messages in our culture about the right way to live. The gift of understanding perfects a person's speculative reason in the apprehension of truth. It is the gift whereby self-evident principles are known, Aquinas writes." (source: Wikipedia)

And just in time for this reflection, I received an article from a friend about "Beatriz," a 22-year-old Salvadoran woman facing a grueling, life-and-death predicament:

Nearly one month has passed since lawyers representing Beatriz, a 22-year-old pregnant woman suffering from lupus and renal deficiency, filed a petition to El Salvador’s Supreme Court of Justice requesting an exception to the country’s total ban on abortion. A positive ruling would allow Beatriz (not her real name), who has a young child, access to the procedure she needs to save her life. The Supreme Court has yet to make a decision on the case, despite the fact that doctors at El Salvador’s national maternity hospital determined that Beatriz’s pre-existing medical conditions mean that the threat to her life increases as her pregnancy continues.

The article goes on to discuss how El Salvador's constitution severely restricts (to the point of a total ban) all access to abortion:

The Salvadoran constitution guarantees a secular state, yet the country’s policies on abortion reflect extremist religious views rather than best practices in public health. Not only is abortion prohibited by law in El Salvador, but women suspected of inducing an abortion (including those who miscarry naturally) may be tried for homicide and have been sentenced to as many as 30 years in prison. Doctors and other medical personnel suspected of assisting in an abortion procedure also face jail time if convicted.

You would have to live under a rock not to realize that the Catholic Church considers all abortion to be gravely illicit. In  theory, a person involved in abortion is unable to be absolved (formally pardoned)  from this sin by a parish priest. Only a bishop can do the job. If he chooses to.

But as cases like Beatriz's highlights, an absolute ban on abortion is tantamount, in some circumstances, to a death sentence for the mother. Abortion opponents would say that allowing Beatriz to terminate her pregnancy would put us on slippery slope -- I assume, a slope that leads inexorably to wanton murder, barbarity and cannibalism. Yet, the Beatriz case shows that refusing to place a toe on the slope can lead to dire consequences as well. Some abortion foes solve the problem (of maintaining a pro-life status while ignoring a mother's life) by denying that the mother has a right to her own life. They argue that the mother has had a chance at life, and the fetus must get one too. There are stories from Catholic hospitals of doctors saying that "we can't save all mothers" -- in other words, that adult females are expendable if one has to choose between the life of a mother and her baby.

You have to admit the grim irony in proving your pro-life bona fides by allowing women to die.

The gift of understanding asks us to take a long, hard look at our own motives and at the entirety of the effects of our decisions. In the case of abortion, it means taking the lives of the fetus, the mother, the family and the society into consideration. It means (for clerics especially) asking whether a total ban on abortion is good for one's soul, or just good for one's ecclesiastical career. It should also mean knowledge that the choice to end a life, whether a fetus's or a mother's, may be a weight you may have to carry for the rest of your life.

A life lived in the grace of the Holy Spirit is not guaranteed to be an easy one, free of hard choices. It often means accepting that hard choices are the only ones we have. That is the hard truth of living with the gift of understanding. Perhaps it is those who flee from understanding -- who reject the call to perfect their "speculative reason in the apprehension of truth" -- who are the ones most in need of this gift.

The challenge of mercy

Worcester funeral diretor Peter Stephan, whose efforts to bury a Boston Marathon bombing suspect have finally paid off.

The Boston bomber has finally found a resting place – though whether it is “final” remains to be seen.

“As a result of our public appeal for help a courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the assistance needed to properly bury the deceased,” Worcester police said in a statement this morning. “His body is no longer in the city of Worcester and is now entombed.” Stefan’s funeral home has been surrounded by media, protesters, and Worcester police, whose chief, Gary J. Gemme, on Wednesday publicly appealed for someone to step forward and end the controversy that cost his department some $30,000 in extra expenses. We are not barbarians; we bury the dead,” Gemme said on Thursday.

“Barbarians” – that kind of hits you in the face, doesn’t it?

 I was struck by the juxtaposition of the words “courageous” and “compassionate.” Given the sky-high passions for the perpetrators of the bombing, which resulted in the deaths of 4 people and the wounding of nearly 200, I should not have been surprised that these words needed to be placed together. But courage and compassion, one generally associated with masculinity and the other with feminity, do go together well.

One of the features of Christianity that accounts for its longevity is that it challenges us to look beyond our instincts, habits and cultural values. To be hateful, to hold grudges, and to seek to harm those how hurt is natural. Our instincts are fight and to defend. By necessity, these are very deep-seated needs, from the very beginning.  Kids hit, yell and fight. Adolescents scrap and bully. Adults, especially the drunker ones, get belligerent and go to war. Fighting is verbally, too. Humans have perfected the craft of insulting their opponents. Comics use it as the backbone of their routines. Even when we don’t have an immediate response to an insult, we spend hours dreaming up the perfect comeback, the thing we wished we had said. Those with some level of foresight even develop a litany of stock responses, ready to deploy when the need arises. “It takes one to know one!” ”You and what army?” “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” “ “Gee. And I thought we were getting along so well.” The list is very long. For some people, it seems that their entire verbal repertoire is made of such time-tested, “witty” comebacks.

But Christianity teaches another way, one that goes against the need for defeating or demeaning the adversary. It is a teaching that I struggle with. Not because I disagree with it, but because it is so hard to master.  

One of the signal teachings of Jesus was about mercy – to decline the invitation to retaliate, even verbally, even when it is deserved.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.’ Matthew 5:43

Even plain old anger and name-calling are issues.

“You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, ‘Raqa,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.” Matthew 5:21.

Rakah, by the way, means “blockhead.” Tough teaching, No-fun Jesus!

Yet mercy goes beyond refraining from doing evil in return for evil. It consists also of doing positive good, regardless of the worth of the person receiving it. The Beatitudes urge us to see the weak and marginalized – the sick, the poor, the naked, the hungry, the persecuted -- as blessed, not cursed. And the oft-quoted Matthew 25 imagines the judgment day, in which all humanity is asked whether it has lived up to the Beatitudes – treating the hungry, sick and persecuted as equal to their blessing. The Catholic works of mercy urge us to do the same – plus an admonition to bury the dead. And, as is true with books on etiquette, when someone goes to the trouble to tell you what is right, it is because most people are doing it wrong. Coming full circle to Jesus's teaching about retaliation, failing to burying the dead is a form of retaliation against them. It may be perfectly understandable reaction, but it is one that violates the code of absolute mercy that Jesus taught.

So hold your nose and bury the dead. Even the despicable dead.

It’s sad that the Worcester funeral director -- who worked so hard to find a burial spot for Tsarnaev – had to face angry demonstrators. His compassion, even if it is only in his job description, required courage and a willingness to face down implied threats. It will be a happy day, in this nominally Christian country, when the compassionate do not risk injury or ridicule for doing what they are obligated by their faith to do.

 

Nice words for nuns

A group of breast-baring feminist radicals politely listens to the Pope's address.

Pope Francis actually spoke to the nuns today -- and face to face! Amazingly, it seems that this is a bit of  rarity.

The meeting, a private audience held in the Vatican's Pope Paul VI Hall before Francis' weekly Wednesday audience in St. Peter's Square, was between the pope and approximately 800 members of the International Union of Superiors General (UISG), a membership organization of some 1,800 global leaders of congregations of women religious.

Nice words were spoken by the pontiff:

"What would the church be without you?"

Without you, the church "would be missing maternity, affection, tenderness"

At the end of the audience, "The pope concluded his talk with an apostolic blessing, telling the sister leaders he was extending it 'to you and to all in your institutes.'"

Nice words, and a blessing on their institutes!

Also, some strictness:

"It is an absurd dichotomy to think of living with Jesus but without the church, of following Jesus outside of the church, of loving Jesus without loving the church."

The pope exhorted the sisters to accept the three traditional vows of consecrated life -- obedience, poverty and chastity. He called them to look for poverty that "is learned with the humble, the poor, the sick and all those who are at the existential margins of life....Theoretical poverty doesn't do anything. Poverty is learned by touching the flesh of the poor Christ in the humble, the poor, the sick, and in children."

This is a little like lecturing moms that they should love, feed and clothe their kids. Technically correct, but it skirts being patronizing because sisters already do this work better than just about anyone around.

Still, I couldn't help but sense that this audience was a way to get the relationship between the Vatican and the sisters back on track. They said hat they had to say (we are not the hussies that we have been accused of being) and he said what he had to say (sisters shoud be faithful to Chuch teaching and to the poor).

Now that everyone is on the same side of the table again, let's get moving again!

Mercy for sisters?

 

The word is out that Pope Francis is meeting face to face with the Sisters today.

Women religious leaders have been meeting in Rome for the last few days for a conference of the International Union of Superiors General (UISG), a membership group for the leaders of the world's congregations of sisters and nuns. The UISG includes members of LCWR, the US group of women religious recently put under scrutiny by the Vatican.

After some early indications that Pope Francis backed the original assessment critical of the nuns, it seems that the Vatican is now back-pedaling. Brazilian Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, the new head of the Vatican’s department for religious life, has said that dialogue has been missing from the Vatican-ordered reform of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

On Sunday, Braz de Aviz claimed that he was never consulted him on the investigation of LCWR and said the lack of communication caused him "much pain."

Ah, the sounds of sausage being made.

While it is maddening that a group of committed, intelligent and holy women has to wait for a male champion to ride to their rescue, the realities of the Church today require it. And, sexist context or not, a dialog requires two parties. The Sisters have been calling for dialog for a long time. Perhaps now they will have a partner willing to engage them  - if not as equals, exactly, then as respected and maybe even loved.

Holy God, we have made you wait forever before recognizing the worth of your women servants. May our leaders continue to engage in honest, fruitful dialog, through which your Holy Spirit may be known. Amen.

With info derived from National Catholic Reporter and CNN .

Sympathy for the bomber

Alive, he was a wanted man. But as a corpse, no one wants him.

A funeral director in Worcester (bless his soul!) can't find a place to bury the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the Boston bombing suspects. The city of Cambridge, which one might argue (as his last place of residence)  has an obligation to bury him, wants him buried elsewhere. His mother wants him sent home, but Russia has not assented. The candidates for John Kerry's old Senate seat don't want him buried in Bay State soil. Meanwhile, over 100 offers for grave sites have poured in. But none has panned out -- whether due to hoaxers or to people offering graves that they don't control.

So, the search for a resting place goes on. And there's no question of why.

Places like Cambridge probably feel they are already associated too closely with Tsarnaev, thank you very much, being the city where he lived, as well as where Tsarenaev allegedly shot MIT police officer Sean Collier. Aside from sensitivity to Collier's family, city officials probably don't want to have to deal with the anger of Bostonians, who might vandalize the grave, or God help us, dig up the bomber to desecrate his corpse. Given the choice, few other towns would risk the violence and notoriety that would come with having such a criminal in their soil.

Other nationally-known criminals have had problematic burials. The body of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of president Abraham Lincoln, and shot dead on the Garret Farm in Virginia, "was shrouded in a blanket and tied to the side of an old farm wagon for the trip back to Belle Plain," Virginia. "The body was then buried in a storage room at the Old Penitentiary, [and] later moved to a warehouse at the Washington Arsenal."  Finally, four years after Booth's death, "the remains were once again identified before being released to the Booth family, where they were buried in the family plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore....No gravestone marks the precise location where Booth is buried in the family's gravesite."

Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK's killer, got a quiet, decent burial in Fort Worth, perhaps in deference to his wife Marina and two small children. Yet, the first tombstone was stolen, and the new marker, reading simply "Oswald," is a replacement. In 1981, Oswald's body was exhumed. A self-appointed researcher was convinced that "a Russian assassin had been substituted for the real Lee Harvey Oswald after his defection to the Soviet Union, a fact the United States government suppressed to avoid World War Three." The body was disinterred, examined, and proven conclusively to be Oswald's.

What are the options for Tsarnaev? Burial by some sympathetic city? An Osama-like burial at sea? Repatriation to Chechnya, where his grave might become an attraction for others of a terrorist bent? Permanent storage in some refrigerated government storehouse?

As a nation where Christianity is still a prominent faith, the words of Christ to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48) might have bearing here. As would the works of temporal mercy, which include a provision to bury the dead.

Don't think that I am naive. I know the hatred that animates the soul and the disgust with a man who has harmed and terrified so many.  Maybe my Pop's words are the advice we need: Time is a great healer. With time, tempers cool and outage subsides. We will eventually outdistance the impulse to seek revenge on the dead for the pain of the living. Until then, let us hope that true mercy animates the soul of someone in this poor, frightened nation, permitting Tamerlan Tsarnaev the rest that he denied to so many.

Kent State and polarized history

 

Like others of my generation, certain dates come freighted with meaning. November 22 -- the day JFK was killed. April 4 -- when MLK, Jr. died. June 6 -- the day Bobby was shot. But rounding out the grisly death parade is May 4. On that date in 1970, at the height of US involvement in Vietnam, a raucous, sometimes violent 4 days of anti-war protests came to a crashing end as National Guard troops fired on a gathering of students at Kent State University in Ohio. Four students, immortalized in Neil Young's angry ballad, "Ohio," were killed. 9 others were injured. The 67 rounds fired during that 13-second fusillade have echoed through the years.

It's hard to find a dispassionate view of the shootings, at least on the Internet. The victims are often portrayed as happy and innocent young college kids, cut down in the prime of their lives. The guardsmen, in green uniforms, battle helmets, lethal rifles and goggle-eyed gas masks are literally the faceless agents of a repressive government.

But the reality is more complex, as realities tend to be

3 days before the shootings, a drunken riot broke out in downtown Kent, as students and others lit fires and threw bottles at police. On May 2, someone, possibly students, set fire to the ROTC building on campus. Hundreds of students watched the building burn. Some slashed a fire hose. Others hurled rocks at the firefighters battling the flames. On May 3, student demonstration were broken up with tear gas and bayonets. By the time May 4 arrived, the atmosphere was incredibly tense and confrontational.

On that day, students gathered again for a noon demonstration, which the Guard considered canceled. They were bent on dispersing what they saw as an illegal demonstration and began to push the students away from the meeting point. They pushed them around a building and into a parking lot. As rocks and debris were hurled at them, the Guard paused on an athletic field, knelt, and leveled their guns at the students. They then arose and doubled back the way they had come, followed at some distance by students. As the Guard crested a hill, several guardsmen suddenly and inexplicably turned and started firing. Amid a rising chorus of screams of anger and cries for ambulances, they regrouped and marched back to their starting point.

There are many who claim to have heard an order to fire, and an orderly wheeling of soldiers into firing position, suggesting concerted action on the part of the guardsmen. There are those who believe that when the guardsmen had paused on the athletic field, they conspired to open fire on the students. But photos, video and common sense tell another story. Perhaps only a single guardsman, reacting viscerally to something, perhaps a thrown object, panicked, turned and fired. Those near him, perhaps spooked and hampered by limited vision through their masks, did likewise. Students near and far were cut down. Some were instigators, like the young man flying a black flag of anarchy, the young woman throwing rocks, and the young man lifting his middle finger to the Guard. Others were truly innocents, just cutting across a parking lot on their way to class, or watching the drama unfold from afar. No one truly seemed to expect a spasm of violence.

The Guardsmen had been introduced onto a volatile campus by Ohio's governor, dead set on putting down a mob of out-of-control college kids. The Guardsmen, young men the same age as the students, were weekend warriors trying to avoid the draft. Barely trained in the arts of war, they were out of their depth with the subtle tactics needed to control a crowd. Exhausted by several nights of strikebreaking, they were unnerved by 2 days of anarchical violence, insults and barrages of rocks. To them, the students may have seemed like class warfare, between privileged snobs, looking down through their hippy hairstyles and clean-cut sons of the working class. The guardsmen, whatever their mindset, had but three tools at their disposal: retreat, which was unthinkable; tear gas, which was ineffective in the windy May air; and their M1 rifles.

There is a great deal of good to say about America after Kent. For one thing, except for handful of violent episodes at colleges in May 1970, there have not been other similar tragedies since Kent. It seems that protesters, police, guardsmen and politicians took a long hard look at what happened, and took steps to prevent similar tragedies. Police now rarely act as agents of state policy. Guardsmen are better known for building levees, evacuating flood victims and serving their country overseas. Student protesters tend to be well-trained and practice non-violent techniques such as blocking access to buildings. The days of taking over the president's office and throwing rocks seem to be over.

The polarized atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s allowed for no middle ground between opposing viewpoints. You either had to be for the war or against it. For the students or for the guardsmen. But after 43 years, I would like to think that we would prefer a complex and ugly truth to a simplistic morality play in which good students were massacred by evil soldiers. Or in which America's citizen soldiers were provoked to shooting by godless, long-haired, foul-mouthed agents of a foreign power.

I do worry that our own time has become as polarized as that of the 1970s. A recent study shows that nearly half of a sampling of Republicans believes that armed revolution against the government might be needed to secure our liberties. Oh, the irony that the paranoia of the 1970s left has become that of the 2010s right! I can only hope that when push comes to shove, the lessons of May 4, 1970 will prevail. And that the next Kent State will not turn toward massacre, but be disarmed, disbanded and contained by forces that represent an honest attempt to cool tempers, soothe animosities, and calm the roiling waters of discord.

Hell and obsession

 

I dreamed last night about Hell -- about telling people what it was like. As if I knew!

In my dream, 20-30 people were having Mass in the living room of my childhood home.The people were utterly disconnected from each other -- and to the liturgy. There were 5 or 6 guitarists, me among them, all packed together. I could not find my music -- a typically dream scenario, right?The musicians were jostling each other, joking around and playing without regard to the music or to each other. The other people were talking very loudly. There was chaos and a cacaphonous din.

I brought order to the place (by using a not nice word) and talked about how Hell was where people ran to get the attention of others who were running away from them -- people desperate for attention running after people desperate to escape them.

After that, everyone calmed down and we all able to sing together. Even without the music!

When I woke, I immediately thought of a woman I know who considers herself to be a good and holy person. I know this because every story she tells is about herself -- about some very good or very holy thing that she herself has done. She needs to tell me, and I need to get away from her self-centeredness. Like in the dream!

It is Hell on earth to constantly need to seek the approval of others. There is no rest there, and no satifaction. It reminds of the damned in Dante's Inferno, always tracking around the same circle, living and reliving their sinful lives. As a punishment, they are trapped in their sins forever.

What an insight!
Lord, when we are trapped in our own perceptions and obsessive needs, help us to break out of these hellish circles to find freedom in you. Amen.

Mainely speaking: Tracing the roots of Salem’s witch crisis to the northern frontier

 

 

“In the Devil’s Snare” is a captivating new look at a phenomenon that has horrified and captivated generations of Americans: the 1692 Salem witch trials. Mary Beth Norton tries to set the record straight on much of the lore surrounding the case. The “Salem” witch crisis actually centered in Salem Village, now Danvers. Its tentacles reached into many Essex County towns in northeast Massachusetts: Topsfield, Haverhill, and Andover, where more accused witches lived than in Salem itself. By quoting extensively from extant trial records, Norton lays bare the methods used at the trial, which relied so extensively on “spectral” evidence – the reports, from the afflicted girls, that the unseen spirits of the accused were tormenting them. Norton showed the Salem Villagers to be fractious lot, quarrelling with each other over property lines and with their own ministers. And she deals a blow to the common understanding of the start of the crisis. There is no evidence that Tituba, slave of minister Samuel Parris, was responsible for telling Parris’s daughter and niece stories of dark magic. And to deny her modern readers any feeling of superiority over the Puritans, Norton tells us that the verdicts and deaths were repudiated by many of the participants just a few months or years after the end of the crisis.

 

But Norton’s main thesis, one which she trots out whenever the opportunity presents itself, is that the Salem crisis cannot be understood, and indeed can be explained nearly wholly, by setting in the context of the precarious situation that New England’s 17^th-century colonists held vis-a-vis the Indians. There is a great deal to be said about this perspective. The colonists were settled along the coast, in seaside villages up and down the New England seacoast. The Indians were literally in the backyards of the townspeople, whose small numbers and flimsy garrisons provided scant protection against raids. The godly Puritans, whose mission was to bring Christianity to the benighted savages and their demon-possessed land, could hardly be faulted for seeing Satan’s power lurking in the dark forests, along with his bronze-skinned minions. Add to this a world view that accepted every victory as grace from God and every defeat as a chastisement, and you have the perfect formula for a deep and abiding paranoia, bordering on madness. At the time of the crisis, the colonists were in the midst of a second great war with the Indians. Towns like Cocheco (Dover, NH) and Oyster River (Durham, NH) and the Maine towns of Wells, York and Falmouth were attacked by Indians and the French allies. Houses were burned, livestock stolen and residents killed, mutilated or enslaved. The refugees, among whom were future witchcraft accusers, ended up in places like Salem.

 

Norton is strongest when presenting us with information about the trials. She quotes extensively from the trial transcripts. She even identifies curiously missing entries in the transcripts and in the diaries of the Salem judges, suggesting their own embarrassment at their participation or that of their families. She traces the crisis of the English monarchy during the period, when fallout from the Glorious Revolution (in which monarchy had been restored after years of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan rule) rearranged the power structure of the colony, as well as the status of its charter. And she shows how the crisis’s days were numbered when the accusing girls started to accuse the wealthy and the high-ranking of being in league with Satan. It was one thing to accused some mumbling crone wandering the back roads of Salem. It was quite another to accuse the wife of the governor.

 

In spite of Norton’s confidence in her thesis that the roots of the crisis lay on the frontier, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was not getting the whole story. It was not until far into the book that Norton mentions, in passing, that some  of the accused were browbeaten into confessing by their captors. In fact, many of the confessed witches of Andover soon recanted, making it clear that they had been intimidated into admitting their guilt. Norton also withholds an important facet of 17^th century New England: that Puritan communities relied on consensus, with the entire community working toward a particular point of view, steamrolling the opinions of individuals. Both of these facts undermines Norton’s Indian War thesis. This suggests that, at most, Norton could claim a “perfect storm” of conditions, including paranoia about Indian raids, that precipitated the crisis. Nor does Norton explain the mechanism by which so many young women began their litany of accusations that ensnared neighbors and a former minister. Though Norton  poo-poos claims of other writers that the girls were victims of ergot poisoning, or were involved in a land-grab, her own claim--that the girls’ fits were induced by the trauma of seeing their families butchered—has few legs to stand on. Certainly, some of the girls had frontier connections. But others had none. What was their angle? Were they all caught up in the mania of being important, in a culture where children and women had little status? Were some of them insane? Could guilty consciences (over adolescent dabblings in the occult) have caused psychosis? Or was this all a sham perpetrated by the girls for their own reasons? Even, diabolically, just for fun?

 

The book left me with many unanswered questions. But it did spur my to seek out the sites of many of the scenes in the books – some of which, like house of Samuel Parris and the location of the Salem Meeting house – still exist far from the commercialized and folly of today’s Salem, built on the tourist fascination with witches and hanging trees. “In the Devil’s Snare” did not resolve the mysteries surrounding the Salem witch crisis. But Norton’s book, in spite of its claims of finding the missing link to the puzzle, has expanded the means by which investigators can approach the problem. The Indian Wars of the late 17^th century must now be seen as a critical link between the God-fearing intentions of our Puritan forebears, and the devilish madness they unleashed on themselves in 1692.