sunday morning

with forecasts of heavy rain to come i’m sitting in jayne’s backyard in glorious sun. jayne and willow are doing yoga inside and i’ve foregone same so i can catch up on the last 24 hours in iran over coffee, and enjoy the solitary stillness with the birds before a day of chat and art making takes over.

i liked this, from today’s writer’s almanac…

It’s the birthday of American writer John Edgar Wideman…

He said,

“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up. But the writing is a way of not allowing those things to destroy you.”

and ireland’s faith gets an intriguing mention in a recent SoF Observed, Yeats Reminds Me

“We are a nation of believers. We produce anti-clerics, but atheists, never.”
– William Butler Yeats

i’ve not a drop of Irish blood in me and have not (yet, anyway) taken citizenship, but i’ve lived on this island for not far short of 22 years, and inescapably shaped by this place. this line from Yeats is a provocation. my initial response was, “But there are atheists on this island”. a beat later i heard myself thinking, “But was it Ireland that “produced” their atheism, or influence from someplace else?”

raindrops are falling on my head. time to move…

LB

the long shadow

in the last couple of months i’ve written several times about torture, or at least, my own feelings as i try to find a sense of faith (beyond despair) in human goodness or perhaps of what the place for G-D is in all of this mess there is… knowing that being a decent human being is something i fall far short of all too often and that being human, i am not beyond the capacity for violence, as much as i desire to live in peace…

i think this will be helpful… Speaking of Faith: the long shadow of torture

Rejali’s immersion in 40 years of social scientific research also yields the plain, unsettling message that these men and women who have perpetrated torture were probably not sadists, not just a “few bad apples” who defied the norm. The demonstrated if shocking norm of human behavior is that at least half of us are capable of inflicting harm on another human being under orders, in the right circumstances, with the right kind of authority behind the orders. […]

Whether you call it “enhanced interrogation” or “torture,” it profoundly traumatizes the lives and societies of those who experienced it and those who perpetrated it. Coming to terms with these human consequences will be the work not of days but of years and generations. For we know that in our lives, both individual and collective, traumas that we do not face will continue not merely to haunt but to define us. – from krista’s journal: Facing the Malleability of Human Nature (italics my own)

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all man is that being who invented the gas chambers at Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered the gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

– Victor E. Frankl; Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)

LB

"terror is easier to face than confusion", he said

i’ve been reading the analysis of dick cheney’s speech to the AEI last week. wondering at the horror of the torture committed in afghanistan, abu ghraib and guantanamo. at the attempts to justify it, deny it.

and feeling powerless despair. we call it inhumane. but it was humans who did it. authourised it. legal-eased it. and there seems nothing but silence with which to respond. wordless in the face of images indicting us with just how far we humans will go to prove our might, our power, our authority, our triumph over the will of another. and as we rob the other of their dignity, strip it, beat it, break it, we lose our own…

i think of my infant nephew and feel the conflict of welcoming him into this world. for there is goodness and beauty but there is so much else besides. so many whose lives are marked by sadness, pain, suffering, horror. for whom this place is hell. i see the images of naked men, hooded, taunted by dogs, leashed, bound, and i think of this tiny boy starting out on his journey and wonder at what he will make of this world. wondering at what his life will be for… and if we can only tell him and his sister that we are present to a kingdom of beauty if we look the other way….

i think of the persisting scandal in the british parliament threatening to topple a government and i think of the abuse of so many at the hands of the irish church, of mass rape and mutilation of girls in Africa, which ilke enhanced interrogation appears to threaten no one. i can’t help but wonder that the expenses scandal is but distraction. and matters more to people because it came out of their pocket but does not affect their conscience. it’s perhaps not ethic that drives us but (love of) money. ethic should not be found on a sliding scale but this seems disproportionately scandalous… perhaps we choose our outrage by what we are willing to face. by what we are willing to pay attention to.

and in truth i fear all this is little more than a distraction from other things more personal that are pressing in unexpectedly and rubbing at wounds i thought i’d moved past. i feel the all too familiar claustrophobia setting in and i’ve been struggling not to resort to counting the hours ’til i can run. retreat to safer soil and be away from the triggers currently setting off tiny explosions of grief. it’s not funny how the total degradation of strangers never cuts quite as sharp as the mere slights of others against us. even the words and actions we choose to see as slights, whether intended as such or not. and usually not.

but it feels upsetting to feel oneself regressing and in need of retreat. especially when surrounded by lovely, beautiful people. and then grace comes in and i don’t know what to do with it either. feeling close to the brink, with it all caught up in my chest, trying to mask the twist of feelings keeping me from breathing easy…

i got to be at tuesday group last night. the unexpected chance to see mo and lynn’s soft smiles was balm. we sat and read tobit chapters 3 and 4. tobit and sarah both pray to YHWH to have their lives taken from them, believing it better to be dead than bear the insults of others. both pushed to the brink by scorn and shame. and like them, i pray. in tears. because sometimes tears are the best prayers we have next to silence. i pray perhaps not for death, but for release from shame and anger and hurt.

when i touch the tiny wooden cross at my throat, i think, this is what we do… and i am no different than the rest…

LB