Denial Gets you up a Crick

On a walk around the lake this morning, I saw a bald eagle perched on one of the dock pilings.  It's not the first time I've seen one at the lake, in fact last winter there were two hanging around at the same time.  It's becoming increasingly common to see them around here and pretty much all over the eastern United States.  But it wasn't always that way, when I was a kid, I grew up never seeing one our nation's most recognizable symbols in the wild.  Then I went to Alaska in 1991 and I saw bald eagles all over the place, and I came to the realization that they are not really the solitary residents of pristine wilderness that I had thought.
It turns out that human beings actually had a lot to do with the extirpation of bald eagles from large parts of the country, because of pesticides.  We didn't start out with the intention of making them disappear, we like them, unlike wolves, coyotes and bears (other extirpated species).  We wanted to still see the noble birds of prey, like bald eagles and osprey, soaring through our skies.  But we also don't like mosquitoes and various other crop pests that cost us a bunch of money, and we found this stuff dichlorodiphenaltrichloroethane or DDT for short (and man am I glad there's an abbreviation).
The DDT is demonstrably not toxic to higher order species in low doses, and even in some cases of acute exposure, it doesn't really seem too horrible, so A+, science has given us a miracle solution for bugs eating us and our crops!  Turns out, DDT is just gangbusters and getting rid of bugs, and it seems pretty safe otherwise, but it also has a rather persnickety quality: it bio-accumulates.  Which means the bugs die, but the DDT then enters the water supply and is absorbed by algae and other organisms on the bottom of the food chain, which are eaten by fish, which are eaten by, you guessed it: eagles.
The DDT doesn't kill the fish or the eagles, because it's largely non-digestible, it just sort of hangs around.  The fish are pretty fine, there doesn't seem to much of a down side for them living life with DDT coursing through their veins, and the birds that eat the fish seem okay too, except when it comes time to make new birds, the DDT affects the hardness of their eggshells.  Now, to be fair, we started using DDT as a pesticide in 1939, and environmentalism wasn't really much of a thing, outside of some rich white dudes who actually just wanted to make sure there would always be enough big game for them to shoot.  We weren't really paying that much attention to animals we couldn't eat.
Rachel Carson didn't write Silent Spring until 1962, and even then she was kind of just questioning whether some of the things we were up to were really that wise.  She didn't know about the egg thing, she just noticed that there seemed to be a lot fewer birds around than there used to be, and she had the audacity to think that we might have had something to do with that.
Ms. Carson woke some people up, and she also ticked some people off.  Which has been pretty much the dichotomous set of reactions that people have to bad environmental news.  It's either: "Wow, I didn't know we could cause this sort of a problem, how can we fix it?"  Or it's: "You're a big liar with all your science-y mumbo jumbo, the world is just too big for us to make that sort of a difference."
Look, my grandpa still had some jars of DDT in his garage when he died, because he was holding on to some of the "good stuff," in case he ever had some really pesky aphids or Japanese beetles.  I'm pretty sure he had heard the "story" of how it was killing the eagles, but he probably disbelieved it.  I loved my grandpa and he was entitled to his opinion, but his opinion was wrong, and if it had prevailed I still wouldn't be able to see a bald eagle just hanging around at the lake.
I really do believe that people are entitled to their opinion, up to a point.  The line is crossed when someone's opinion runs counter to facts, but not just any facts.  If your opinion is that Nickleback is a good band, you are entitled to that opinion, even though you are really, really wrong, you're not hurting anyone, unless I'm riding in your car and make me listen to Nickleback, but even then, your tone-deaf aesthetically bankrupt taste in music is not going to do irrevocable harm to the world that we're going to hand to our children and grandchildren, other than the fact that when people learn about the music of the 1990's they will think Nickelback was every bit as good as Pearl Jam.  It's misinformation, but it's not dangerous.
However, if your opinion is that DDT is fine, you're going to make it so my kids will only see bald eagles on money.  If your opinion is that our climate is not changing and that our rampant consumption of fossil fuels and attendant rise in atmospheric CO2 is not causing that change that isn't actually happening, then you are demonstrably wrong, by 99% of climate scientists.
It's hard to get 99% of any sort of scientist to agree on anything, that's the nature of science, they test hypotheses.  I'm pretty sure 99% never agreed about DDT, but we still banned it and now I see bald eagles at the lake.  Unfortunately, we are a little too addicted to fossil fuels and we're not going to be able to quit cold-turkey anytime soon.  But we have to start taking steps, or else we're going to cause our children and grandchildren a lot more trauma than never being able to see an eagle.
The good news is that we have learned a lot over the past 50 years, and we are starting to realize (at least some of us are) that we can, and should, try to fix the problems that our wanton ignorance has caused.  As of now there is no "cure" for climate change, but give us time, slow down, drive less, support sane legislative measures regarding the ecosystem, most of all stop pretending it's not happening.

The Crying on the Inside Kind

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

There's a Bill Murray movie called Quick Change, where he robs a bank dressed as a clown.  Someone asks him: "What kind of Clown are you?"  To which he replies, "The crying on the inside kind."
That actually may be the only kind of clown that actually exists.  Read about the pathology of funny here.
John Belushi, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, now Robin Williams, the list of funny people who have laughed themselves to death is long and tragic.
Williams suicide seems to have struck a chord, perhaps because he had time to evolve as an actor beyond comedy: Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, and even One Hour Photo, showed us that Williams had range beyond playing Mork from Ork and the manic wild man of his stand up comedy.  He let us see other facades that he had constructed as well as the funny man.  I suspect that very few people actually saw the real Robin Williams, and not being seen, especially when you are so famous, is a lonely thing.
Artists of various sorts have proven this true, from Vincent Van Gogh to Kurt Cobain, the ability to express your inner self through art is a gift and a curse.  The process by which you produce art, whether it is writing, painting, music, acting, or just making people laugh is way of reaching within yourself and showing what you have done with your pain.  It can be excruciating, and it can be beautiful, and sometimes the most painful things are also the most beautiful.
The fact that we have made many of our artists into celebrities, with all the benefits and curses thereof, further complicates matters.  In Kurt Cobain's suicide note, he lamented the fact that he couldn't feed off of the crowd like Freddy Mercury, but the truth is Freddy couldn't either, it cost him, it always costs us dearly to share ourselves with others, it makes us vulnerable and it makes us human.  The danger is in denying the cost, and not having enough "off stage" time and support.
So back to Williams, he was obviously a one of a kind sort of talent.  He was distinctive enough as a comedian that other comedians couldn't really even try to emulate his manic energy.  But that manic side has a shadow, as bipolar and manic-depressive people will tell you, and that shadow is dark indeed.  How many times have you heard someone say of a person who has committed suicide: "They seemed so...(insert favorite generic emotional statement of well-being here: happy, normal, content, funny, creative)."
Does it surprise anyone that he had substance abuse problems?  No, probably not, we sort of expect that sort of thing from our artistic types.
Yet it does surprise us that he was depressed.  Well, here's a news flash, the two things are intimately related.  Substance abuse is an attempt to self-medicate and numb the pain of existence; and when is existence painful?  When you're depressed.
Notice that good art speaks to our pain, even as it uplifts us.  Art that does not touch pain somehow is merely entertainment, and it will never change the world.  Art that lets us into the heart of the artist brings us together, whether it's the quizzical smile of the Mona Lisa or the words of Ernest Hemmingway (another suicide).  Art that doesn't cost anything, I'm talking to you pop music and formulaic movies, only numbs us in the most superficial and temporary manner.
Since the news of Williams suicide broke, social media has been filled with various expressions of the ways that Williams has touched people, and most of it was from his forays into drama.  Dead Poet's Society was one of those generation defining movies, right up there with The Breakfast Club for folks my age, it made us think for a moment that maybe Whitman was worthwhile.  Good Will Hunting, for better or worse, has brought us Afleck and Damon to stay.  In The Fisher King, Williams played a schizophrenic man in a way that was both humane and immensely entertaining.  In Good Morning, Vietnam, one of the first R-rated movies I was allowed to see, he played a funny man who has to get serious.  In What Dreams May Come, he plays a man who deals with grief and loss and finding hope.
It's profoundly sad, now that we know the end of the script, that a man who gave us so much of himself still felt so very alone and hopeless.  Looking back on it, his movies contained so much that can help us deal with life.
So long funny man, I hope you have found out now that God has a great sense of humor.
You don't have to play the clown any more.

An Inquiry into Values

I went to visit my cousin, who lives in D.C., just a little way up the road.  She is a lawyer, her husband is a political type who works for a Senator.  They're doing very well for themselves.  We showed up at the appointed hour at the upscale condo-complex where they live, right smack dab in the city, not far from Union Station.  Immediately we run into the conundrum of locked doors and gates.  I don't see my cousin that much and so I don't have a phone number or anything sensible like that, just an address and a time of arrival.  We go into a concierge sort of guy, and start asking questions.
Already, I'm beginning to feel decidedly like a country bumpkin, and I'm realizing that I'm really out of my societal comfort zone.  Nothing about the rest of the afternoon really changes that.  These condos where my cousin lives are really nice.  Even the hallways smell nice, which is impressive compared to the hallways of most of the apartment buildings I have ever lived or spent time in, where stale air and various other odors are fairly expected. They have a first floor unit with a nice little fenced in back yard, not my three acres by any stretch but enough space for a grill and a patio and a little fountain, which is really impressive in DC, where I can hear traffic on the street right on the other side of the fence.
Later, we go up to the roof of one of the tall towers in the complex. Above the 15th story of the tall buildings, it is not the tar paper and pigeon coop kind of city roof, it's club med.  There are nice little nooks with tables and chairs, a giant chess board and a pool, a freaking pool.  There are all these young, urban professionals, sunbathing by the pool, reading on ipads and phones, drinking beer, at the tables, carefully cultivating that "I'm in public, but I've got my own thing to do, but I hope some of my peeps show up soon to hang out" sort of attitude that you see so often in coffee houses and such.
I suddenly realize that I feel sort of uncomfortable.  Not because I'm on a roof, which was enough for a few of our group, but because I realized that I did not belong there as anything more than a visitor, there to see the sights.  It's a funny thing, even though I'm an introvert by nature, I spend so much time talking in front of people that I've become extremely un-selfconscious.  If I were to go on television or in front a large crowd, I would be able to act like I belong there and comport myself accordingly.  I have a Master's Degree, so I'm rarely intimidated by educated folk, I'm a spiritual/contemplative sort so mystics and empathic people don't throw me, I've spent a lot of time around medical stuff, so doctors don't shake me. But here on that roof, some rich kids threw me out of joint.
I started thinking about ways to get around that uncomfortable feeling.  I looked out at the city and I imagined that I could see all the invisible people that were living lives of quiet desperation somewhere down there.
Ah, there it was, the warm feeling of moral superiority.  I have chosen a job that will never, in any reasonable iteration, allow me to live in such luxury.  I have education, community respect and a leadership position, but I will most likely never make a six figure income, and I will never live someplace with a freaking pool on the freaking roof.  I am living sensibly and happily in my little house in the woods out in Maryland, and if I ever feel guilty about how much I have, all I really have to do is remember that roof and how there are many people who aren't any smarter or harder working, who get so much more.
And here's the weird part: I actually like that, because of the whole Jesus-following thing, the money really doesn't hook me too bad, at least not in the envy.  Maybe in the cultural conscience, but not in the "I want a pool on my roof" place.
What that sort of conspicuous consumption and the security measures it takes to maintain that little urban bubble remind me about is that fact that I have enough, and I likely have more than I need.  Which is a conviction that most of us need from time to time.
I know that if I give up some of my stuff, and if all those rich folks give up some of their stuff, it's not really going to solve the economic problems of our world.  We will still have a system where, despite having the raw affluence to make everyone a winner, we still insist that some people must be losers.  It's easy for me to look at the rooftop pool and feel bad for the homeless guy that lives in the alley over near the train station, or the kids who get their drinking and cooking water out of stagnant, polluted puddles, but eventually I need to turn the lens of my moral outrage onto my own house.
I have three acres of land that I don't use to grow food (at the moment).  I have more stuff than I really care to talk about and much of it just sits around in boxes or on shelves, waiting for a day when I "might" need it.  I have not gone hungry, other than in an attempt to lose weight, for a very long time.  I have as much water as I need, I have access to all sorts of recreation in order to spend my bountiful free time.
My wealth, compared to people in many parts of the world, is as ostentatious as the roof pool is to me.
I don't want to think about that, because it bums my trip right out.
I need to think about it, because the only way we're going to lift the people who really need it out of the mud, is if we focus on creating a world where your time and your effort earn you a living.
It occurs to me that most of our definitions of enough amount to: "just a little more than we have."
That in turn locks us into cycles of envy, stress and ultimately wastefulness.
And while we waste, others go hungry and thirsty.  While we are safe and secure others are homeless and vulnerable.  While we are free others are oppressed.  And none of that is okay.
The way to fix that is not to tear down the tall buildings with their roof pools, or split up my nice little backyard.  The solution is to work for more justice in the economic ans social systems of the world, to use our influence and prosperity to make "enough" a state of being for more than just us.

Absence of a Different Sort

But do know this: every time you choose to love, you have also just chosen to die.

-Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond

The kids have been with Michele's parents at the beach this week.  For the two of us, going about our daily routines and living life the way we must have lived it before they came along, it has been an interesting time.  We notice that there is something missing.  Michele has been a bit more emotional about it than me.  She misses her babies.  I don't so much miss them as I find their absence peculiar.
Part of the reason I don't get emotional about their absence is I trust that they're having fun, spending time with Grandparents and most importantly that they will be back tomorrow, and life will pretty much go back to normal.
That, of course, is not true for everyone who experiences the presence of an absence.  Let's call it the "second wave" of grief; that moment when it really sinks in that someone you love is not going to walk back in the door, or call you on the phone.
They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder.  That is certainly true in the case of my kids.  There have been times when I have had just about enough of them, and this week has been a refreshing break from the grind of parenthood (Michele and I went out and dropped a C-note on school supplies last night just to remind ourselves that we're parents).  Now though, I'm ready for the little nippers to come back, and I'm glad that they will.
The prospect of re-union is made more joyful because of the experience of knowing what it's like when we will not meet again upon the mortal coil. (I know, a lot of stuff comes back to that eventually, just be glad if you're among the fortunate ones who have not experienced a loss out of turn).
One of the things that has become clear to me in this brief separation, is how unusual it is to only have to think about just two.  At one point in my life, it was all I could do to manage my own stuff, then I began to learn to accommodate Michele, then a cat, then a dog, then Jack, then Cate, then another dog.  For a while there, life was getting awfully crowded.
And I almost forgot!  The whole Pastor thing!  Somewhere in that mix, I have learned to share my life with a whole bunch of people of all different sorts.
If you had told 19 year old me that I was going to do that, I would have told you that you were a crazy person.
I'm not going to go all Barbara Streisand on you here, but here's a surprise: 40 year old me, with all these connections and responsibilities and relationships, is a hell of a lot happier than 19 year old me.  I'm better because I have shared my life with people, even if I've had to say goodbye to some of the people I really liked and loved.
There are times when I think it would have been easier to stay closed off, and to think only of myself, and to protect my fragile emotions.  I know there are many in the world who live that way.
I mourn for them deeply.
I am glad that I have been shown the depth of beauty that comes out of even our most tragic losses.
Pauses are important to the meaning of the spoken word.
Punctuation is crucial to the written word.
Rests are as important to music as notes.
Negative space is crucial in drawing and painting.
Sculptures are created by removing bits and pieces from a meaningless block.
The void has it's work to do in every aspect of creation.
Peace.

Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge ;-)

I'm preaching this week on the story of Jesus walking on the water, from the Gospel according to Matthew.  This morning I met with a bunch of pastors to talk about the lectionary texts for this week.  We had a good discussion going, but because we're all intellectual sorts it is inevitable that at some point one of us is going to kind of blithely mention the possibility that in fact this might not have happened the way it says.  None of us are what you would call literalists, but we're all searching for an angle that seems interesting in this particular story.
One problem, as it appears to the modern mind, is that this doesn't make sense as a miracle.  Most of Jesus' other miracles were born out of compassion for people (even in one case, compassion for a wedding party that was going to be over a little too soon).  The walking on water thing just seems like Jesus is showing off.  There's no human purpose to it, other than to create this little scene with Peter and the other disciples.
But why is that not okay?
The struggle to understand Scripture for modern people is no longer about debunking myths.  Much damage has been done in the name of God, using flawed interpretations of Scripture and often doing so in an excessively literal or fundamentalist manner.  But in the world today, I think we need to hold on to more of our sacred stories, not hack away at the roots of our very humanity.  There is danger, of course, in understanding that Scripture, including the Gospels, is not a detailed historical record of everything that happened, and admitting that perhaps some stories were included for didactic purposes and perhaps were even driven by some agenda or were written in response to a situation that came up well after Jesus was actually walking around.  The danger is that we somehow negate the value of anything our rather limited modern historical perspective says is unlikely to be actually true.
Which is stupid, because we create meaning through fictional stories all of the time.  Outside of the Bible, Shakespeare's works have been incredibly formative to western civilization, and last I checked, he didn't write any non-fiction, even his histories of the English Kings are at best "based on the true story."  But does it matter if Henry V really gave the "band of brothers" monologue on the eve of Agincourt?  Is it any less inspiring?  Does the fact that Hamlet or Macbeth were fictional characters make their contribution to the world any less important?
I'm going to say that it matters not one whit.
But if I'm going to take that position, I need to be consistent.  If I'm going to say that I find sacred value in the story of Noah or Jonah, or some of the more suspect tales about Jesus, I need to actually embrace that sacred value, and not be a scoffer under my breath.
If I'm going to say that the truth of Scripture is greater than literalism allows it to be, then I need to allow it to be as well.  I should not narrow my perspective until I make the actual mistake that literalists always claim is down a slippery slope: if it's not all true than none of it is true, and if it's not completely true in our "objective" framework of understanding than it's not true at all, in any way.
This is a place where ancient people, who believed all sorts of things that we know to be false, actually have a leg up on us in understanding the mystery that truth doesn't have to be factual or rational to be truth.
Sure it helps when truth and the facts line up.  It's nice when you can back up your conclusions with nicely ordered proof and explanations, but I suspect that if that is the only criteria you accept, you are giving up on an awful lot of the beauty of being human (not all, just some really important parts).
Faith, hope and love are damnably subjective things, and yet they are the crowning glory of the human condition.  They are things we understand from stories and relationships and they absolutely refuse to be valid subjects of scientific investigation.
I'm going to believe that Jesus walked on water because it helps me learn something deep about faith and life.  Because I like the way things are better in a world where it's true.
There is, I believe, a historical reality to the life and teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
There are also places where the raw material of that reality has been formed in the hands of the Gospel writers, and places where translation and interpretive decisions have been made with regard to how they have been passed down.
I believe that perhaps the biggest miracle of Jesus is that he can still speak to so many, so that we can hear the truth through so much static.

By The Rivers of Babylon...

I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son; 

but I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees.

-The Prophet Amos (7:14)

If you have been following along with this little blog, you know that there are several things going on right now that greatly trouble my soul.  Most of them begin with war of some sort: war between Israel and Palestinians, the war on drugs, the war against terror, which has begotten a war in Afghanistan, and one in Iraq that we thought we won, until recently when ISIS stormed through various parts of the country and established an Islamic caliphate, which has proceeded to brutally persecute Christians and Islamic minorities in the name of Allah (way to go guys, be the monster everyone already suspected you were).

I'm getting pretty tired of war, and I'm not even personally involved in any of them, except as a human being, and it is as a human being that these things deeply trouble my soul.  I have been told that as an American Christian I really have no right to comment on things like the Israel/Gaza conflagration, because I don't understand what it's like for Israelis to live in a place where they are surrounded by people who openly wish they did not exist.  I'm not Jewish, indeed, so therefore I should just accept the bombing of civilians and the murder of children because: security is important.

The whole notion that I should just accept the atrocities of the world because it doesn't concern me is a theological and moral disaster.  You want to talk about decaying morality?  Leave the homosexuals and their cute little weddings out of it, let's talk dying children, let's talk people robbed of their homes and livelihoods, let's talk thousands of children fleeing the narco-state violence in their home country showing up on our doorstep, those are freaking moral crises!

I'll let the Jews speak for Israel, because at least a few of them are doing a good job:

Here

and 

Here.

I want to talk to American Christians, because I am one of them, and I think we are failing with a capital F to be Jesus followers.  In the article above by Rabbi Lerner, he compares the modern nation state of Israel to the Golden Calf, a form of idolatry.  We 'Mericans have the same problem, we have made our nation, because it really is a pretty remarkable human venture into liberty and justice, into an idol.  Remember, the Golden Calf seemed like a good idea, even to Aaron, Moses' own brother.  It seemed like a good idea because people need symbols and something in which to place their hope and trust.  God, the actual living God, didn't really seem like he had a good plan.  God was up there in the smoke on the mountain talking to Moses about the Law and the people were, quite frankly, terrified of that God.  The Golden Calf was a lot more of a sure thing... or at least a thing they could control.

When people want to control things, there are two things that we really love: Idols and Violence, not necessarily in that order.  You can control other people with violence for a while, but it usually gets out of control, Idols are more effective in the long term.  If you can create in people's hearts a strong affinity for anything that is not God, you can often subtly deprive them of their inherent connection to God.  This is not a desirable state of affairs, because God, our Creator, is what binds us together.  God is about bringing things together.

Roman Catholic Theologian Richard Rohr notes that the etymology of the word religion comes from the root ligio, to bind, and essentially means re-binding.  It should hold us together with one another and with God, and in so many cases it has the exact opposite effect.  It tells us that we are far from God; abject sinners and flawed creations.  It convinces us that we should hold ourselves superior to those who believe differently than we, because we have ascertained the essential truth of God's will.  That is, as Rohr points out, "diabolical," in Greek dia balein, means to throw apart.

The notion of empathy that I wrote about yesterday and then also ran across in Rabbi Jacob's article above, is exactly the sort of thing that holds us together as human beings.  It is, I suspect, a major component of what the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ seeks to demonstrate for us: God has empathy for creation.  Jesus is often sidetracked by his compassion (read empathy) for the afflicted.  His activity as a healer and a miracle worker, was both a blessing and a curse to his message.  Some people believed because he made the blind see, others remained spiritually blind despite his miracles.  In fact, it seemed to be the religious folk who were most offended by Jesus' empathy for people they had previously considered unclean and unworthy.

When people speak to me of God's elegant plans where everything works out for the best, I have to call shenanigans.  God's plans are messy, because God insistently works in and through human beings.  He pushes us in the direction of unity, like a parent who puts his toddler in a sandbox with other kids, hoping that little Billy will play nice.  God has made us for community, we are social at our very core, even introverts like me, (and I really HATE to admit this) need other people from time to time.  To deny our connections to one another makes us less than human, in extreme cases it makes for a sociopath.

Unfortunately, there are way too many sociopaths running loose in the world today.  There are way too many people who deny the living, relational God that I see pretty clearly in Scripture and in Jesus, in favor of some static idol.

The idols are legion: money, power, empire, lust, pleasure, leisure, individual rights, security, family, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.  Do you notice how that list migrates from "deadly sin" type stuff, to things we might actually think of as good and moral things?  That's what idols do, they are parasitic on our need for a living God, they offer us a way that is a little neater and a little more controllable than a God who might just show up in a whirlwind and cause all manner of messiness.

God does not have many names, aliases are more the devil's thing.  The basic prayer of Israel, Shema, goes as follows: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is ONE."  And the really remarkable thing is that you can actually sum God up in one word, and it is a word that you can find in all the religions and in all human cultures.  The word is Love, a relationship word, a together word, a word that defies violence and power and says, "Hey, maybe we should go a different path."  It is a word that Jesus uses a whole awful lot, and it is a word that speaks of a connection.

It is a word that holds empathy and compassion, mercy and justice, sacrifice and celebration, sex and friendship, art and beauty, all within those four letters.

It is the failure of love that is causing ALL of the problems of humanity.  We fail to love others, and we quickly name them enemies, they then threaten our security, we compete, endlessly for finite resources, and in the process our connection, our ligio, begins to wither and disintegrate.  We lose each other.  And if you think that we can lose each other this tragically and hold on to God, you have not been paying attention.

More on War

Mankind must put an end to war,

Before war puts an end to mankind.

- John F. Kennedy

There is a line where my convictions about non-violence begin to waver.  And it's not, as it is for some, about defending myself.  As a kid with a bit of a temper, I needed to learn at an early age to swallow my pride and walk away from a fight, or else I was going to probably go down a bad road.  I have this hope that, in a real pinch I would have the nerve to choose non-violence, even if it meant my own demise.  That is not the line.

The line is my children.  In one of my arguments/discussions with my parents last weekend we were talking about the situation in Israel.  I was moving along the lines that you find in recent blog entries about the futility and criminality of war in general, and trying to make the point that Israel is not the unquestionable good guy in this situation.  And my Dad, asked me this question that kind of knocked me off my high horse for a minute: "What if it was Caitlyn that got blown up by one of Hamas' RPGs?"  "What if it was her blood out there on your driveway?  How would you feel about war then?"

It was a low blow, because it crossed the line of my convictions.  It was where I realized I would be so angry that I would be perfectly willing to utterly destroy the villains who perpetrated that catastrophe.  I would feel utterly justified in bombing an entire city into rubble in order to destroy the person who fired the rocket that killed my daughter.

Over the course of a couple of days after this conversation I saw pictures, pictures of parents living through the exact nightmare that, even in a hypothetical case, threw me off the rails.  And it was compassion for those parents that has brought me back to the conviction that war must end.  I realized that the hatred and vengeance that must have been created in the hearts of those parents is going to be the seed of the next wave of violence.  Because, as I have come to believe, violence only begets more violence.  Peace by force is by nature an ephemeral creature.  Eventually hatred will win, eventually revenge will find a way.

The failure of human empathy gives the lie to any claim we might have to Christian ethics.  If we are willing to kill other people's children in defense of our own then we are still child killers.  I think we should have a pretty good idea how Jesus would feel about killing children, but even more directly we should hear his words about our enemies: "You have heard it 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, so that you may be children of your father in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

So my question is: Is he actually serious about that?

I think he is and I think he knows something that we really need to figure out as a species or we're going to go on slaughtering each other's children.  The only thing that will end the cycles of violence is for us to care enough about each other, to have enough empathy for one another that we realize that no goal is worth the death of a child.  Until we collectively say, "Never again!" to the holocaust of dead children, no matter who and where they are, we are not even getting a glimpse of the kingdom that Jesus was always going on about.

So here's where I am: I have no desire to see my daughter blown to pieces by a terrorist, and if that were to happen, I'm not sure I could restrain my hatred and my desire for vengeance.  And so I think that we ought not to expect any less from those parents in Gaza or Afghanistan or Iraq, who have had to dig their children's bodies out of the rubble of their own homes.  Our violence is not going to bring peace, unless those parents somehow don't feel the same thing for their children that I do.

And I know that's absolutely not true.

War is just going to cycle us through this whole mess, over and over again.

Somebody stop this merry-go-round, I want to get off.