"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

sacred questions before this 21st century cross

interrogate everything
– ikon, lessons in evanDelism, ’08

i’ve been listening to david’s talk at ffm 09. which is about as frustrating a thing as a person can do for pleasure of a rainy sunday. my brother said he enjoyed it because it’s like having david in the room. a comfort in a familiar voice. and that’s why it’s frustrating. david peppers all his talks with, does anyone have anything they want to throw in on that?

and david means it. which is one of the reasons i like him so much, why he’s one of my favourite people to be in conversation with. he’s got, what seems to me, something like an instinctual Ricoeur thing going on. it’s all about the space inbetween, in the exchange, in the Q&A, the back and forth of that inbetween where things get electric. that to me is the space of divine happening.
so i’m speaking to the laptop. saying, yes, i do… i wanna talk about this. wonder around this. i want to see the space spark and breathe. i want how i envisage it to be expanded. see its edges perforated, where my limitations only now see solid boundaries. i want cracks to appear so that more light comes in… but all i have is the laptop and me responding to an audio recording…

perhaps when we have a space in between that’s closed, small… claustrophobic, only reaffirming of what we already think or finding ways to reaffirm what we desire to achieve, then the possibility of divine happening is being squeezed out. it’s the kind of space in which politicians sit with lawyers and find doublespeak loopholes that will make, pervert, justice to be synonymous with brutality. that’s a space that’s not opening up room for revelation, for truth. in those spaces, people become bodies. and we become God, rather than G-D being revealed… and i don’t know what to do with that… not a fucking clue other than to pray… and praying to G-D i pray is outside of my head… the G-D that suffers here:

david quotes Marx,

religious suffering is at one at the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature the heart of a heartless world and the soul of souless conditions.

the man who also said, “religion is the opiate of the masses”… and david poses a question about how we define religion. global consumerism as religion perhaps…?

and so i’m there speaking back to the laptop and asking, what happens if we say it’s democracy that’s the opiate of the masses? or maybe, the drug’s a two party system played out in the media as a false dichotomy of left v. right, that reduces what should be moral action to mere party political?

what is it that’s keeping us asleep?

because religion, when it’s weak, when our G-D is weak, by which we might mean self sacrificing, might help us speak to power… i’m trying to make sense of how interrogate everything without adding to the brutality… faced with this cross, what do we stand for…? what will i stand for?

i was reminded of this:

If anyone asks: "How did Jesus raise the dead?" kiss me on the lips, say:
like this!

- Rumi, Like This, translation from Rumi's Divan by Fatemeh Keshavarz

when i heard this:

justice is what love looks like in public
– cornel west, ffm09

that’s about as religious statement as i’ve ever heard. we need this space for the apocalyptic, for the conversations from the war room to the campus to the check out aisle to the hospital room waiting room to the prison to keep being broken open with our questions, out interrogations. i know i need it, ’cause i don’t know what to do with all of this.

and so by way of cornel west and solomon burke and all the other poets, i find those edges of the conversation that david and others keep bringing to the table, that i talk to as i stand at the kitchen counter with coffee and scrambled eggs… those edges are pushed out wider for me… this, i say, i believe:

it’s not the religion of Jesus that keeps me numb… that’s what keeps me hoping there’s something impossible around the corner… that justice, which is beyond any impeachment, but looks like heart rending change in the name of full force goodness… it keeps me questioning everything, even when i’d rather sleep easy and not have to look this cross in the face.

::

this i used to believe. 4 very different stories on this american life. all worth hearing.

edited to add: as is this sobering conversation between bill moyers and co-creator of the wire, david simon on the truth about what he calls the war on the underclass.

“If you don’t need ’em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you’re doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There’s no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them.”

::

thy kingdom come
thy will be done

LB

(photo from this in the daily dish.)

are we in a post-moral era?

so Dick Cheney has joined in the US torture debate.

surely using the, “But the torture worked” defence is like a guy defending a charge of rape by saying, “Well it got me an orgasm, didn’t it?”

just because it got you what you wanted, doesn’t make it right.
torture as a means to an end is no better than torture being an end in itself.

we’re in deeply disturbing moral territory when the publicising of, and efficacy of, torture are the issues at hand,

you will be known by how well you treat your enemy…

LB