Imagine life without them. Their petal hearts bursting forth, impossibly delicate tiny golden barbells of stamen, purple filament fine as baby hair. The tri-petaled joy of spiderwort, the nectar of an apricot rose, the brassy trumpet of the stargazer lily, the stout trajectory of the amaryllis, the fragrant bell of the lily of the valley calling the passerby to prayer. A palette of colors heretofore unknown. According to one source, flowering plants and honeybees co-evolved sixty-five million years ago though fossils show flower-like structures as far back as 130 million years.
Flowers, perhaps more than anything else, speak of beauty and mortality in the same breath.
Last fall I planted twelve bearded iris along with other smaller varieties. Toward May’s end one white and periwinkle blossom appeared, so breathtaking I cut it and brought it inside. Within two days, the petals wilted. The next week, a bronzely purple bloom arose as if it alone could save the earth. It too melted in all its glory, weeping great purple tears onto the coffee table as if the Buddha himself had sent iris to remind us of life’s impermanence.
Ah, but the iris will bloom next year. Perennials, the great emissaries of hope that teach us not to fear the fertile dark but to praise it.
We grow flowers to imitate the earth which thought of it already, decorating hillsides and meadows with bluebonnets and cosmos, lupines and larkspur, foxglove and morning glory. We give flowers to whisper life into deadened spaces, to celebrate accomplishment as if the splendor of our achievements might compare to the splendor of theirs. We paint and photograph, sculpt and weave flowers into the fabric of our daily being though already they insinuate themselves there. Flowers always bloom in the garden of our lives, becoming part of our stories.
Sometimes it is not the flowers themselves that appear, but we appear as flowers. When I think of the weeping iris, resplendent still in its beauty as diminishment sets in, I go back ten summers ago, as a hospital chaplain as part of my ministerial training. I meet man in his eighties I’ll call Mr. Goldberg on the renal unit, lying vertically across the horizontal length of his bed, in a johnny and diapers. He lets me feed him canned peaches that slide from the spoon.
He finishes the slippery peaches.
“What matters?” I ask as the TV overhead flickers a blue-green backdrop from the fishing channel.
“I’m waiting for you to get naked and see how the other half lives,” he replies.
“That may be the best offer I get,” I tell him, “but my supervisor would probably get upset if I take off my clothes.”
“What, is he a chaplain?” Mr. Goldberg asks. I nod that he is.
I offer to pray with him and apologize for not knowing Hebrew. He shrugs and lets me hold his hand. Softly, I form the words close to his ear, my eyes shut. A short caravan of syllables later, he interrupts to compliment my navy blue blazer.
Mary Oliver writes:
Never in my life
had I felt myself so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and stems and the flowers
began. 1
He sputters like a candle swallowing its wick, like an iris melting into indigo tears.
“You, with broad shoulders,” he says. “Me, with nothing.” I don’t let go of his hand.
Perhaps more than other question I wonder if we were to come back as a flower what flower would you, would I be? What flower speaks of your life in this moment? Are you growing wild beside a noisy road or deep in the forest amid the tender moss that swaddles trees? Are you part of a riotous bouquet of color or do you stand muted and solitary? Take a moment to consider your flower self now and how you would choose to return. Might you come back as an eager daffodil announcing yourself yellowingly bold? Would you choose the dignified crimson dahlia or the impetuous peony? Share if you will with someone seated near you, your current flower self and what flower you would choose to inhabit? And what flower do you see the person next to you?
In her poem, “Daisies,” Mary Oliver writes:
It is possible, I suppose that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what it means. …
At my feet the white-petalled daisies display
the small suns of their center piece, their—if you don't
mind my saying so—their hearts. Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example—I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch—
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field. 2
It is useful to ponder suitability especially those times in life when either the field feels unsuitable for growth or we feel mismatched to the field.
The same summer I spoke of ten years ago I encountered a boy not unlike the “white-petalled daisies,” his heart a small yellow silent sun. John had no words at least that he could speak. His chart made no explanation beside the notation “nonverbal.” Each day for a month I would visit him, alone in the hospital at seven, his father working and living four hours away rarely able to come. Mother out of the picture. John with his renal pump stitched inside his belly, glanced at but rarely seen like daisies in a field that appear prosaic, endless iterations of themselves.
One day I find John in the playroom, seated at the computer staring at the screen. “John” I say, “would you be willing to come color with me?” I shall always cherish the moment he draws his small finger with its dirty nail to the power button and turns the computer off. His silent gesture of generosity the most glorious bloom.
Who is to say whether the field that holds John suits him now, but his quiet flowering in a single moment resides with me still.
Again, from Mary Oliver:
Night after night
darkness
enters the face
of the lily
which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse
of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content
to stand there
in the garden,
not quite sleeping,
and, maybe,
saying in lily language
some small words
we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,
its lips
are so secret,
its tongue
is so hidden –
or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience
of vegetables
and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon
becomes the golden sun –
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?
Vigen Guroian a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia writes:
I’m walking in my garden and all of a sudden, overnight, something has bloomed, maybe the honeysuckle, maybe the rugosa roses… And I don’t even see it, but I know it’s present. I feel its presence. No, I smell its presence. I’m aware of it. For many of us, that’s an experience like that of experiencing God in prayer.
Pithily he says, “Gardening grows from our deep longing for salvation, so that beauty fills our lives.”3
I recall the women I met in Cuernavaca, Mexico, struggling in abject poverty to survive, who grow flowers in discarded coffee cans so that their lives too, will have beauty, who give their North American visitors roses from the bunches they sell to make enough money to eat for a day.
Flowers give us beauty but more, they give us the gift of sharing that beauty, of giving it again. In that spirit of generosity we partake in the flower service created in 1923 by Norbert Capek, founder of the modern Unitarian movement in Czechoslovakia. Dr. Capek sought to bring people into communion with life’s beauty, with the earth’s grandeur, with the flower nature within ourselves. So as Molly and I come to you with flowers, I ask that you each take one and notice its uniqueness, the beauty it offers at whatever stage of life it’s in. Notice too how it speaks to you and of you— once everyone has a flower while Robin plays, I ask you to give the flower to someone else, reverently, gladly: with words or in silence, allow yourself to be part of the gift the earth gives us in what flowers.
Closing words: In the voice of an old man, in the singular movement of a silent child, in the trumpeting bloom and the weeping surrender of petals may we inhabit life’s momentary beauty. I leave you with Mary Oliver’s poem, “Poppies.”
The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation
of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn't a place
in this world that doesn't
sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage
shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,
black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.
But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,
touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—
and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night? 4
---
1 From the poem “White Flowers,” New and Selected Poems, Mary Oliver, Beacon Press
2 from “Daisies,” published in Why I Wake Early , Mary Oliver, Beacon Press
3 http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/restoringthesenses/transcript.shtml
4 Published in New and Selected Poems and in Blue Iris, Beacon Press
Copyright Rev. Leaf Seligman, First Parish Fitchburg UU, June 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
War is Not Inevitable: Memorial Day 2010
Tomorrow the bells will toll for fallen soldiers. Cities and towns will have parades. Members of the American Legion and VFW posts will place flags on graves of servicemen and –women. Politicians will make speeches. Veterans will offer remembrances of fallen comrades. At Arlington National Cemetery taps will be played, wreaths will be laid, and the tomb of the unknown soldier guarded in solemn ritual. And all the while war will rage on.
The fallen soldiers, airmen and -women, sailors, marines, guardsmen and –women barely whisper from their graves. Quieter still are the fallen civilians.
There is little more sobering than poring over the faces of war dead. Inch-square portraits, row upon row filling pages of The Washington Post, The Globe or The Times. Such earnest visages rendered in miniature as if their lives, their call to service and their wrenching deaths could be contained in an image the size of a thumbprint. While the photos momentarily arrest us, like a lock of hair falling forward we brush from our eyes, the battalions of images have yet to indelibly inscribe the futility of war.
Of course there have always been pacifists among us. One of my favorites within our tradition is John Haynes Holmes, born in 1879 in Philadelphia and raised Unitarian. John Haynes Holmes helped found the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice and what became the American Civil Liberties Union. But for most Unitarians of his day, Holmes’ absolute pacifism went too far, and he disassociated himself with Unitarianism during World War I. In 1925, John Haynes Holmes authored his tenth book, Patriotism Is Not Enough, published by my grandfather. In it Haynes wrote, “The result of all this sacrificial heroism was—what? Death, destruction, despair—the bankruptcy of nations, and the wrecking of civilization…little was won; well-nigh everything, material, ethical, spiritual was lost.”
It’s fair to say Holmes, like the other absolute pacifists among us fall out of favor with the majority, who may dislike war, but nonetheless believe in its efficacy. Of course the profiteers of war, the military industrial complex identified by President Eisenhower, may not dislike it, but most of us on a gut level understand the profits war generates come at tremendous social cost.
Yet beyond the circle of Gold Star families and veterans who know first hand the “death, destruction and despair,” beyond the hundreds of millions of non-combatants worldwide who have suffered the physical, political, economic and environmental devastations of war, the rest of us may register such ravages intellectually yet we assent with our silent acceptance, our complacency and complicity.
I am not suggesting we like war or approve of it, even though we may have the utmost appreciation and respect for the valor of fighting forces. Some may harbor frustration that killing even in the name of national defense gets valorized because killing on foreign soil or sand begs the question: what risk to our life or limb are we defending? And what spiritual and ethical principles do we sacrifice in the process of increasingly roboticized warfare where the faceless enemy becomes even more abstract?
We all know the stories of a Christmas ceasefire where young troops in Europe paused in their trenches, smoking cigarettes, singing “Silent Night” together across enemy lines in English and German. Probably far less chance wary young Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan will pause to set down arms and sing Qu’ranic verses with local combatants whether they long for safety and self-determination, too. Surely no songs fill the air beneath predator drones.
As staggering as war is for combatants, it victimizes women and children beyond compare. The rapacious hunger for oil, minerals and other resources has turned their torsos into battlefields.
In her eloquent and moving keynote address to the 2010 Women’s Nobel Initiative International Gender Justice Dialogue, social psychologist, writer, and Benedictine sister Joan Chittister said at the turn of the last century, civilian casualties were 5% of the war dead. In World War One, 15%. World War Two, 65%. By the mid 1990s, 75%. Today, civilian deaths comprise over 90% of war deaths. “If you want to be safe,” she suggests not as sardonically as it sounds, “join the military.” Major-General Patrick Cammaert, former commander of UN peacekeeping forces in the eastern Congo concurs when he states, “It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict.”
I will spare you the grim list Joan Chittister provides but in summary, she calls the sixty million civilian deaths in the twentieth century “an orgy of war and civilian slaughter.”
It is not that the deaths of our military should go unnoticed, unheralded, it is that for each tiny portrait published in the newspaper, another dozen faces or more, belong in those pages. For while we may distinguish between the patriotism, or economic need of men and women who enlist, who join officer training programs or the National Guard—over and against those who simply die in the line of fire—the breath of life than animates each of us, the cosmos that bears us, the creative wellspring that brings us into being weeps no less for the lone boy ambling across the road, the elderly couple hiding in their home, or the hundreds of thousands of women and girls broken by systematic rape meant to brutalize them and shatter their communities with the blunt force of shame.
It is not simply that war happens, Joan Chittister tells us, it is that entire societies are organized around war. “Our generation, yours and mine, has made the whole world into prey but only some are armed.” Where, she asks, in the monuments we erect to the war dead, are the monuments to those whose lives have been denied not just from stray bullets and bombs, from predator drones and landmines, but from soil erosion, deforestation, diversion of water and food and natural resources used to fuel combat? Consider the children who go uneducated, the women who remain illiterate, the houses that go unfinished, the roads that go unmade, the minds and hearts and bodies untended because there is war—not in our yard but in our name. And not just ours, for there are many nations with denizens so depleted it takes nothing to grind them into fodder of war. Yet so often the line of connection ensnares us.
Sixty Minutes recently reported on “conflict minerals” in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to the broadcast, there are over a million displaced people, over 200,000 women raped, and five million deaths in eastern Congo from a civil war “being fueled by a multi-million dollar trade in minerals that go into our electronic products.”
Cell phones, computers, even jewelry bears the bloodstains and misery of a nation despoiled. Sixty Minutes interviewed a woman in a refugee camp who told of her village destroyed in 2007, where 280 people including her parents and husband were burned alive. Later three of her children were shot dead and she suffered rape by uniformed men armed with machine guns. Her story, horrifically, is common in Eastern Congo where there are no monuments to war dead, only mineral exports that supply our demand for instance access and communication.
It will not be parades or statues, wreaths or speeches that absolve us or honor the dead. In the words of Joan Chittister, “It’s not what the mind knows; it’s what the heart knows that changes the world.”
In 2009, a Democratic representative from Washington State, Jim McDermott introduced legislation to “put in place a system of audits and regulations that would help stop companies from importing conflict minerals into the United States,” though the bill has not gained passage. As important as that piece of legislation may be, what lies before us is the willingness to re-see war, from the heart not the mind. Our analytical, ever-reasoning brains accept the inevitability or war. Some of us see it as a sad signature of being human. Other species may be predatory but aside from wily ants, we don’t see much that looks like war.
It is excruciating to see in the cell phone we use to call home in an emergency, in the laptop I use to write this sermon, the inconceivable costs of war from the pillaged earth and polluted air to rape and child labor, burning flesh to immolated villages, to displaced millions in despair. It is hard enough to watch The Hurt Locker and imagine negotiating a landscape pocked with IEDs.
But as Joan Chittister and John Haynes Holmes dare to assert, war is not the inevitable consequence of evolution. It comes from a willingness, in some cases couched as patriotic fervor, and sometimes in complicit assent. If it is “only with the heart that one can see rightly,” if “what is essential is invisible to the eye,” (Antoine de Saint Exupery) we will have to look beyond the convenience to its costs. We will have to listen more closely to what the soul knows and the mind denies. Too often we have conflated entitlement with God’s grace, ingenuity with providence, war with religion.
Joan Chittister says, “Violence defines religion consumed more by the national than the universal.” John Haynes Holmes sharpens the image:
Patriotism has its holy days, its saints and martyrs, its sacred books and documents. In its national anthems it has hymnology, in its ceremonials of the flag, a ritual as august as the mass.…And it is this religion of patriotism which denies and defeats the ideal of brotherhood, the love of all mankind.
In 1986, an international group of scientists in fields ranging from neurophysiology to behavioral genetics, ethology to psychology addressed the question of whether scientific theories and data can legitimately justify the claim that war is hard-wired into us. These scholars concluded it is not. In a statement on violence adopted by UNESCO, they arrived at five propositions:
1.It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors.… The fact that warfare has changed so radically overtime indicates that it is a product of culture.… War is biologically possible, but it is not inevitable, as evidenced by its variation in occurrence and nature over time and space. There are cultures which have not engaged in war for centuries, and there are cultures which have engaged in war frequently at some times and not at others.
2. It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature. While genes are involved at all levels of nervous system function, they provide a developmental potential that can be actualized only in conjunction with the ecological and social environment.
3. It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior.… Violence is neither in our evolutionary legacy nor in our genes.
4. It is scientifically incorrect to say that humans have a “violent brain.” While we do have the neural apparatus to act violently, it is not automatically activated by internal or external stimuli. Like higher primates and unlike other animals, our higher neural processes filter such stimuli before they can be acted upon. How we act is shaped by how we have been conditioned and socialized. There is nothing in our neurophysiology that compels us to react violently.
5. It is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by “instinct” or any single motivation. The emergence of modern warfare has been a journey from the primacy of emotional and motivational factors, sometimes called “instincts,” to the primacy of cognitive factors. Modern war involves institutional use of personal characteristics such as obedience, suggestibility, and idealism, social skills such as language, and rational considerations such as cost-calculation, planning, and information processing. The technology of modern war has exaggerated traits associated with violence both in the training of actual combatants and in the preparation of support for war in the general population. As a result of this exaggeration, such traits are often mistaken to be the causes rather than the consequences of the process.
The signatories of this research statement conclude:
that biology does not condemn humanity to war, and that humanity can be freed from the bondage of biological pessimism and empowered with confidence to undertake the transformative tasks needed…Although these tasks are mainly institutional and collective, they also rest upon the consciousness of individual participants for whom pessimism and optimism are crucial factors. Just as “wars begin in the minds of men,” peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.
This Memorial Day we can do something far more meaningful, far more consequential than marching or attending a parade, more lasting than placing a wreath, flag or flower on a grave. We can begin the task of changing our own consciousness, of undoing a lifetime of cultural imprinting that has stamped the inevitability of war on our brains. Joan Chittister reminds us: “War is not inevitable. It is chosen; it is planned.”
The great Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry asks:
Who has invented our enmity?
Who has prescribed us hatred of each other?
Who has armed us against each other with the death of the world?
Who has appointed me such anger that I should desire the burning of your house or the destruction of your children?
Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to destroy you, or that I would improve myself by destroying you?
Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you, or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with you?
The silenced soldiers in their graves, the civilian dead, the scarred earth. and the living “whose souls have been disfigured” by war beseech us to answer. Amen.
Closing words:
“There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool.
There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.” (Wendell Berry)
The fallen soldiers, airmen and -women, sailors, marines, guardsmen and –women barely whisper from their graves. Quieter still are the fallen civilians.
There is little more sobering than poring over the faces of war dead. Inch-square portraits, row upon row filling pages of The Washington Post, The Globe or The Times. Such earnest visages rendered in miniature as if their lives, their call to service and their wrenching deaths could be contained in an image the size of a thumbprint. While the photos momentarily arrest us, like a lock of hair falling forward we brush from our eyes, the battalions of images have yet to indelibly inscribe the futility of war.
Of course there have always been pacifists among us. One of my favorites within our tradition is John Haynes Holmes, born in 1879 in Philadelphia and raised Unitarian. John Haynes Holmes helped found the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice and what became the American Civil Liberties Union. But for most Unitarians of his day, Holmes’ absolute pacifism went too far, and he disassociated himself with Unitarianism during World War I. In 1925, John Haynes Holmes authored his tenth book, Patriotism Is Not Enough, published by my grandfather. In it Haynes wrote, “The result of all this sacrificial heroism was—what? Death, destruction, despair—the bankruptcy of nations, and the wrecking of civilization…little was won; well-nigh everything, material, ethical, spiritual was lost.”
It’s fair to say Holmes, like the other absolute pacifists among us fall out of favor with the majority, who may dislike war, but nonetheless believe in its efficacy. Of course the profiteers of war, the military industrial complex identified by President Eisenhower, may not dislike it, but most of us on a gut level understand the profits war generates come at tremendous social cost.
Yet beyond the circle of Gold Star families and veterans who know first hand the “death, destruction and despair,” beyond the hundreds of millions of non-combatants worldwide who have suffered the physical, political, economic and environmental devastations of war, the rest of us may register such ravages intellectually yet we assent with our silent acceptance, our complacency and complicity.
I am not suggesting we like war or approve of it, even though we may have the utmost appreciation and respect for the valor of fighting forces. Some may harbor frustration that killing even in the name of national defense gets valorized because killing on foreign soil or sand begs the question: what risk to our life or limb are we defending? And what spiritual and ethical principles do we sacrifice in the process of increasingly roboticized warfare where the faceless enemy becomes even more abstract?
We all know the stories of a Christmas ceasefire where young troops in Europe paused in their trenches, smoking cigarettes, singing “Silent Night” together across enemy lines in English and German. Probably far less chance wary young Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan will pause to set down arms and sing Qu’ranic verses with local combatants whether they long for safety and self-determination, too. Surely no songs fill the air beneath predator drones.
As staggering as war is for combatants, it victimizes women and children beyond compare. The rapacious hunger for oil, minerals and other resources has turned their torsos into battlefields.
In her eloquent and moving keynote address to the 2010 Women’s Nobel Initiative International Gender Justice Dialogue, social psychologist, writer, and Benedictine sister Joan Chittister said at the turn of the last century, civilian casualties were 5% of the war dead. In World War One, 15%. World War Two, 65%. By the mid 1990s, 75%. Today, civilian deaths comprise over 90% of war deaths. “If you want to be safe,” she suggests not as sardonically as it sounds, “join the military.” Major-General Patrick Cammaert, former commander of UN peacekeeping forces in the eastern Congo concurs when he states, “It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict.”
I will spare you the grim list Joan Chittister provides but in summary, she calls the sixty million civilian deaths in the twentieth century “an orgy of war and civilian slaughter.”
It is not that the deaths of our military should go unnoticed, unheralded, it is that for each tiny portrait published in the newspaper, another dozen faces or more, belong in those pages. For while we may distinguish between the patriotism, or economic need of men and women who enlist, who join officer training programs or the National Guard—over and against those who simply die in the line of fire—the breath of life than animates each of us, the cosmos that bears us, the creative wellspring that brings us into being weeps no less for the lone boy ambling across the road, the elderly couple hiding in their home, or the hundreds of thousands of women and girls broken by systematic rape meant to brutalize them and shatter their communities with the blunt force of shame.
It is not simply that war happens, Joan Chittister tells us, it is that entire societies are organized around war. “Our generation, yours and mine, has made the whole world into prey but only some are armed.” Where, she asks, in the monuments we erect to the war dead, are the monuments to those whose lives have been denied not just from stray bullets and bombs, from predator drones and landmines, but from soil erosion, deforestation, diversion of water and food and natural resources used to fuel combat? Consider the children who go uneducated, the women who remain illiterate, the houses that go unfinished, the roads that go unmade, the minds and hearts and bodies untended because there is war—not in our yard but in our name. And not just ours, for there are many nations with denizens so depleted it takes nothing to grind them into fodder of war. Yet so often the line of connection ensnares us.
Sixty Minutes recently reported on “conflict minerals” in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to the broadcast, there are over a million displaced people, over 200,000 women raped, and five million deaths in eastern Congo from a civil war “being fueled by a multi-million dollar trade in minerals that go into our electronic products.”
Cell phones, computers, even jewelry bears the bloodstains and misery of a nation despoiled. Sixty Minutes interviewed a woman in a refugee camp who told of her village destroyed in 2007, where 280 people including her parents and husband were burned alive. Later three of her children were shot dead and she suffered rape by uniformed men armed with machine guns. Her story, horrifically, is common in Eastern Congo where there are no monuments to war dead, only mineral exports that supply our demand for instance access and communication.
It will not be parades or statues, wreaths or speeches that absolve us or honor the dead. In the words of Joan Chittister, “It’s not what the mind knows; it’s what the heart knows that changes the world.”
In 2009, a Democratic representative from Washington State, Jim McDermott introduced legislation to “put in place a system of audits and regulations that would help stop companies from importing conflict minerals into the United States,” though the bill has not gained passage. As important as that piece of legislation may be, what lies before us is the willingness to re-see war, from the heart not the mind. Our analytical, ever-reasoning brains accept the inevitability or war. Some of us see it as a sad signature of being human. Other species may be predatory but aside from wily ants, we don’t see much that looks like war.
It is excruciating to see in the cell phone we use to call home in an emergency, in the laptop I use to write this sermon, the inconceivable costs of war from the pillaged earth and polluted air to rape and child labor, burning flesh to immolated villages, to displaced millions in despair. It is hard enough to watch The Hurt Locker and imagine negotiating a landscape pocked with IEDs.
But as Joan Chittister and John Haynes Holmes dare to assert, war is not the inevitable consequence of evolution. It comes from a willingness, in some cases couched as patriotic fervor, and sometimes in complicit assent. If it is “only with the heart that one can see rightly,” if “what is essential is invisible to the eye,” (Antoine de Saint Exupery) we will have to look beyond the convenience to its costs. We will have to listen more closely to what the soul knows and the mind denies. Too often we have conflated entitlement with God’s grace, ingenuity with providence, war with religion.
Joan Chittister says, “Violence defines religion consumed more by the national than the universal.” John Haynes Holmes sharpens the image:
Patriotism has its holy days, its saints and martyrs, its sacred books and documents. In its national anthems it has hymnology, in its ceremonials of the flag, a ritual as august as the mass.…And it is this religion of patriotism which denies and defeats the ideal of brotherhood, the love of all mankind.
In 1986, an international group of scientists in fields ranging from neurophysiology to behavioral genetics, ethology to psychology addressed the question of whether scientific theories and data can legitimately justify the claim that war is hard-wired into us. These scholars concluded it is not. In a statement on violence adopted by UNESCO, they arrived at five propositions:
1.It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors.… The fact that warfare has changed so radically overtime indicates that it is a product of culture.… War is biologically possible, but it is not inevitable, as evidenced by its variation in occurrence and nature over time and space. There are cultures which have not engaged in war for centuries, and there are cultures which have engaged in war frequently at some times and not at others.
2. It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature. While genes are involved at all levels of nervous system function, they provide a developmental potential that can be actualized only in conjunction with the ecological and social environment.
3. It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior.… Violence is neither in our evolutionary legacy nor in our genes.
4. It is scientifically incorrect to say that humans have a “violent brain.” While we do have the neural apparatus to act violently, it is not automatically activated by internal or external stimuli. Like higher primates and unlike other animals, our higher neural processes filter such stimuli before they can be acted upon. How we act is shaped by how we have been conditioned and socialized. There is nothing in our neurophysiology that compels us to react violently.
5. It is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by “instinct” or any single motivation. The emergence of modern warfare has been a journey from the primacy of emotional and motivational factors, sometimes called “instincts,” to the primacy of cognitive factors. Modern war involves institutional use of personal characteristics such as obedience, suggestibility, and idealism, social skills such as language, and rational considerations such as cost-calculation, planning, and information processing. The technology of modern war has exaggerated traits associated with violence both in the training of actual combatants and in the preparation of support for war in the general population. As a result of this exaggeration, such traits are often mistaken to be the causes rather than the consequences of the process.
The signatories of this research statement conclude:
that biology does not condemn humanity to war, and that humanity can be freed from the bondage of biological pessimism and empowered with confidence to undertake the transformative tasks needed…Although these tasks are mainly institutional and collective, they also rest upon the consciousness of individual participants for whom pessimism and optimism are crucial factors. Just as “wars begin in the minds of men,” peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.
This Memorial Day we can do something far more meaningful, far more consequential than marching or attending a parade, more lasting than placing a wreath, flag or flower on a grave. We can begin the task of changing our own consciousness, of undoing a lifetime of cultural imprinting that has stamped the inevitability of war on our brains. Joan Chittister reminds us: “War is not inevitable. It is chosen; it is planned.”
The great Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry asks:
Who has invented our enmity?
Who has prescribed us hatred of each other?
Who has armed us against each other with the death of the world?
Who has appointed me such anger that I should desire the burning of your house or the destruction of your children?
Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to destroy you, or that I would improve myself by destroying you?
Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you, or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with you?
The silenced soldiers in their graves, the civilian dead, the scarred earth. and the living “whose souls have been disfigured” by war beseech us to answer. Amen.
Closing words:
“There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool.
There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.” (Wendell Berry)
Monday, May 10, 2010
Emporer Penguins, Precious, and Parenthood
I can think of no more poignant depiction of parenting than The March of the Penguins. The breathtaking documentary film and companion volume tell of emperor penguins “dwarfed by the blue-white world of Antarctic ice as they trek for miles from the sea to breeding grounds” culminating in a “monogamous pairing…a meticulous life or death exchange of the egg.” After much practice the penguin pair collaboratively transfer the egg. The male tenderly rolls the egg onto his feet, to be warmed by his incubating pouch while the female, utterly depleted by hatching the egg, can return to the sea to feed. While the females make their perilous journey, the males huddle together in formation “making a ramparts of their bodies against the blizzards and extreme cold.” Singularly focused on protecting the eggs that will hatch while the females are gone, the fathers themselves though starving, “regurgitate a milky substance stored especially for the chick” to sustain the offspring for a few more days.
Both parents press themselves against the most dire and demanding of circumstance to preserve the fragile new life they have created.
Those of you who are parents know something about this, though hopefully your experience contains conditions far less punishing and perilous than the brutal ice and cold of the Antarctic.
But parenthood is not always heroic, or even noble, sadly. The recent and much acclaimed movie, Precious and the novel upon which it is based, entitled Push show another side of parenting far more distressing in that the brutality of climate is replaced with the brutality of parents themselves endowed it seems only with ignorance and self-gratification. Anti-penguins as it were. While March of the Penguins illustrates the unmatchable precision and wisdom of instinct and nature attuned to environment, Push and Precious, though fictional accounts portray a realistic glimpse into need gone terribly awry. Instead of the dedicated protection by parents the emperor penguins model, the parents of Precious perpetuate a relentless and predatory cycle of abuse. Her father impregnates her twice, at twelve and sixteen, and her mother, threatened by his wavering attention, preys on Precious as well.
As easy as it is to demonize such depictions as monstrous and unfair, they serve as a chilling reminder that the capacity to conceive and bear young—in our species—is not always accompanied by the instructive instinct to nurture. While the body may still contain triggered responses: breast milk that lets down at the sound of an infant’s cry, there are women and men, and sadly, girls and boys unequipped to parent despite their capacity to fertilize and gestate.
If the emperor penguins teach us about parental sacrifice and tenderness for the sake of the children despite harrowing odds, the brave and horrifying fictional world of Precious teaches us too, that seemingly insurmountable odds can yield to purpose and creativity.
The title of Sapphire’s book upon which the film is based, comes from Precious’ experience of labor as an EMT tells her to push, and push she does, into a world that neither welcomes or wants her or her incestuously produced young. Precious eventually pushes against her own ignorance, the crushing ignorance of her parents and the ignorance of the world that ignores at best and crushes at worst poor fat black illiterate teenage girls before and after they become HIV positive. At the end of the novel, in a section entitled “Life Stories: Our Class Book,” Precious writes:
"first I don’t unnerstan it
but now I do
CONCREET JUNGLE
it’s a prison days
we live in
at least me
I’m not really free
baby, Mama, HIV
where I wanna be? Where I wanna be?
Not where I AM
on the 102
down lex avenue
I do have
lungs take in air
I can see I
can read
nobody can see now but I might be a poet, rapper, I got my
water colors
my child is smart
my CHILDREN is alive
some girls in
forin countries
babies dead.
Look up sometimes
and the birds is like dancers
or like programmed
by computer
how they fly
tear up
your heart
bus moving
PLAY THE HAND YOU GOT
housemother say.
HOLD FAST TO DREAMS
Langston say.
GET UP OFF YOUR KNEES
Farrakhan say.
CHANGE
Alice Walker
Say.
Rain fall down
wheels turn round
DON’T ALWAYS RHYME
Ms. Rain say
walk on go into the poem
the heart of it
beating
like
a clock
a virus
tick
tock."
Amidst conditions as perilous as the penguins face, Precious endures, at least for the moment, marching into the heart of the poem, her own life beating for its sake, for the sake of the children.
Parenthood be it of actual offspring, be it of chosen children, be it of oneself; be it of a calling, a vocation meant in some way to mother the world, to father the egg incubating in a pouch—parenthood as I understand it, is that state of being that transforms us into givers and protectors of life; channels of creativity, worshippers of possibility.
Parenthood for emperor penguins entails the “absolute unmixed attention” French philosopher Simone Weil called a form of prayer. For Precious, parenthood conjures both the serrated edge of brokenness from which she emerges and the stark and surprising existence in which she labors. For one of you, it means:
• Being in the center of a relationship triangle, with your children, your
mother, and your partner's mother making up the corners.
• Always trying to live up to someone's expectations, including your own, and
frequently hearing that you're doing it all wrong.
• Playing many different roles over and over: teacher, comforter, entertainer,
doctor, judge, chauffeur, detective, psychiatrist, coach, good cop, bad
cop. Sometimes you get a standing ovation. Sometimes you get boo’ed.
• Being able to make macaroni and cheese in your sleep. (If you get to sleep.)
• Being awakened at 2am with words such as “I had a bad dream.” “I threw
up.” “I'm hungry.” “I wet my bed.” or the ominous “Mom, I need to talk to you.”
• Being challenges and rewarded, but not always in equal measure and never in
the ways you expected.
This morning I invite you to ponder your relationship to parenthood whether you have children or not. If you, like me, know of parenthood via having parents or parenting a life of purpose, you might reflect on what about literal parenthood inspires, baffles, awes you. In the brief time I wholeheartedly tried to step-parent I heard my mother’s admonishment that try though I might, I would never really be the parent of the children I sought to help raise. I understood what my mother meant especially after the relationship with the children’s mother ended and contact ceased from their end as well. But I recall as clearly the two children proudly proclaiming that everything I knew about kids they taught me. Mostly that is true. Those two children and those two years of my life instructed me vastly and deeply not just about children, but about myself and especially my father who I came to understand in a much fuller way. I referred to my role as “daddy penguin.” I came to appreciate far more deeply the complex and unending commitment required by anyone choosing parenthood. As my own experience and the penguins and Precious reveal, what makes parenthood real is walking into the poem of parenthood, into the heart and ice of it, feeling the beating like a virus, like a clock.
What in your life do you travel to the center of and stay? What awakens you at two a.m.? What jostles you from the sleep of your days? The whimsical artist Brian Andreas tells us “there are angels whose only job is to make sure we don’t get too comfortable and fall asleep and miss our lives.” Sometimes those angels are our children. Sometimes our dogs, or cats or partners or other passions. Sometimes, the icebergs breathtakingly blue reminding us beauty and obstacle co-exist.
What places you in the center of expectations you cannot fully meet? What instructs you in the necessity of self-care as a precondition of caring for someone or something else?
What provides the repetitive opportunity to master a skill? To stretch your patience like taffy to amazing lengths?
What draws you into multiple roles with its multiple demands?
What develops your capacity to endure the web of relationships we all encounter?
The answer to the queries may be for some, a form of parenthood outside the realm of children: a figurative nurturing, a relationship predicated on care and sustained by love. I suspect though it is merely conjecture, that duty alone does not a parent make. The poet H.D. wrote of being drawn to what she loved “with no thought of duty or pity.” I think of what compels us to nurture, not simply to tend, but to nourish from the wellsprings of our own being—and it almost certainly involves love.
The creators of March of the Penguins write of the epic journey as a story about love. To the human observer, especially the film crew who endured such punishing conditions to document the story, it is impossible to witness such painful determination, such existential sacrifice, such abiding parenthood without attributing it in part to love.
Thus parenthood cannot simply be sacrifice; it must involve choice. The penguins do not give up. They muster on.
For Precious, whose mother and father choose nothing of parenthood perhaps because they know nothing of it, parenting her own children and her own child-self demands choosing to push, again and again.
For those among us this Mother’s Day who parent children young or grown, the parenting never stops. The challenges and rewards come not in equal measure and not as expected.
For those of us who parent in metaphorical ways, we too choose to keep marching, to keep pushing, to keep placing ourselves in the environs of vulnerability that dependably offer challenge and reward.
I grew up hearing my mother say, “Choice is not sacrifice.” I am coming to understand what that means. I still hold possible the ways choice can feel sacrificial; in fact, the penguins and many parents choose what amounts to sacrifice. If in the choosing there is love—there can be satisfaction.
In the incubating pouch of male and female emperor penguins, in the beating heart of a poem, in the interrupted stillness of the night, parenthood emerges as a choice to affirm and protect, nurture and relish the immense burden and preciousness of life. Amen.
Both parents press themselves against the most dire and demanding of circumstance to preserve the fragile new life they have created.
Those of you who are parents know something about this, though hopefully your experience contains conditions far less punishing and perilous than the brutal ice and cold of the Antarctic.
But parenthood is not always heroic, or even noble, sadly. The recent and much acclaimed movie, Precious and the novel upon which it is based, entitled Push show another side of parenting far more distressing in that the brutality of climate is replaced with the brutality of parents themselves endowed it seems only with ignorance and self-gratification. Anti-penguins as it were. While March of the Penguins illustrates the unmatchable precision and wisdom of instinct and nature attuned to environment, Push and Precious, though fictional accounts portray a realistic glimpse into need gone terribly awry. Instead of the dedicated protection by parents the emperor penguins model, the parents of Precious perpetuate a relentless and predatory cycle of abuse. Her father impregnates her twice, at twelve and sixteen, and her mother, threatened by his wavering attention, preys on Precious as well.
As easy as it is to demonize such depictions as monstrous and unfair, they serve as a chilling reminder that the capacity to conceive and bear young—in our species—is not always accompanied by the instructive instinct to nurture. While the body may still contain triggered responses: breast milk that lets down at the sound of an infant’s cry, there are women and men, and sadly, girls and boys unequipped to parent despite their capacity to fertilize and gestate.
If the emperor penguins teach us about parental sacrifice and tenderness for the sake of the children despite harrowing odds, the brave and horrifying fictional world of Precious teaches us too, that seemingly insurmountable odds can yield to purpose and creativity.
The title of Sapphire’s book upon which the film is based, comes from Precious’ experience of labor as an EMT tells her to push, and push she does, into a world that neither welcomes or wants her or her incestuously produced young. Precious eventually pushes against her own ignorance, the crushing ignorance of her parents and the ignorance of the world that ignores at best and crushes at worst poor fat black illiterate teenage girls before and after they become HIV positive. At the end of the novel, in a section entitled “Life Stories: Our Class Book,” Precious writes:
"first I don’t unnerstan it
but now I do
CONCREET JUNGLE
it’s a prison days
we live in
at least me
I’m not really free
baby, Mama, HIV
where I wanna be? Where I wanna be?
Not where I AM
on the 102
down lex avenue
I do have
lungs take in air
I can see I
can read
nobody can see now but I might be a poet, rapper, I got my
water colors
my child is smart
my CHILDREN is alive
some girls in
forin countries
babies dead.
Look up sometimes
and the birds is like dancers
or like programmed
by computer
how they fly
tear up
your heart
bus moving
PLAY THE HAND YOU GOT
housemother say.
HOLD FAST TO DREAMS
Langston say.
GET UP OFF YOUR KNEES
Farrakhan say.
CHANGE
Alice Walker
Say.
Rain fall down
wheels turn round
DON’T ALWAYS RHYME
Ms. Rain say
walk on go into the poem
the heart of it
beating
like
a clock
a virus
tick
tock."
Amidst conditions as perilous as the penguins face, Precious endures, at least for the moment, marching into the heart of the poem, her own life beating for its sake, for the sake of the children.
Parenthood be it of actual offspring, be it of chosen children, be it of oneself; be it of a calling, a vocation meant in some way to mother the world, to father the egg incubating in a pouch—parenthood as I understand it, is that state of being that transforms us into givers and protectors of life; channels of creativity, worshippers of possibility.
Parenthood for emperor penguins entails the “absolute unmixed attention” French philosopher Simone Weil called a form of prayer. For Precious, parenthood conjures both the serrated edge of brokenness from which she emerges and the stark and surprising existence in which she labors. For one of you, it means:
• Being in the center of a relationship triangle, with your children, your
mother, and your partner's mother making up the corners.
• Always trying to live up to someone's expectations, including your own, and
frequently hearing that you're doing it all wrong.
• Playing many different roles over and over: teacher, comforter, entertainer,
doctor, judge, chauffeur, detective, psychiatrist, coach, good cop, bad
cop. Sometimes you get a standing ovation. Sometimes you get boo’ed.
• Being able to make macaroni and cheese in your sleep. (If you get to sleep.)
• Being awakened at 2am with words such as “I had a bad dream.” “I threw
up.” “I'm hungry.” “I wet my bed.” or the ominous “Mom, I need to talk to you.”
• Being challenges and rewarded, but not always in equal measure and never in
the ways you expected.
This morning I invite you to ponder your relationship to parenthood whether you have children or not. If you, like me, know of parenthood via having parents or parenting a life of purpose, you might reflect on what about literal parenthood inspires, baffles, awes you. In the brief time I wholeheartedly tried to step-parent I heard my mother’s admonishment that try though I might, I would never really be the parent of the children I sought to help raise. I understood what my mother meant especially after the relationship with the children’s mother ended and contact ceased from their end as well. But I recall as clearly the two children proudly proclaiming that everything I knew about kids they taught me. Mostly that is true. Those two children and those two years of my life instructed me vastly and deeply not just about children, but about myself and especially my father who I came to understand in a much fuller way. I referred to my role as “daddy penguin.” I came to appreciate far more deeply the complex and unending commitment required by anyone choosing parenthood. As my own experience and the penguins and Precious reveal, what makes parenthood real is walking into the poem of parenthood, into the heart and ice of it, feeling the beating like a virus, like a clock.
What in your life do you travel to the center of and stay? What awakens you at two a.m.? What jostles you from the sleep of your days? The whimsical artist Brian Andreas tells us “there are angels whose only job is to make sure we don’t get too comfortable and fall asleep and miss our lives.” Sometimes those angels are our children. Sometimes our dogs, or cats or partners or other passions. Sometimes, the icebergs breathtakingly blue reminding us beauty and obstacle co-exist.
What places you in the center of expectations you cannot fully meet? What instructs you in the necessity of self-care as a precondition of caring for someone or something else?
What provides the repetitive opportunity to master a skill? To stretch your patience like taffy to amazing lengths?
What draws you into multiple roles with its multiple demands?
What develops your capacity to endure the web of relationships we all encounter?
The answer to the queries may be for some, a form of parenthood outside the realm of children: a figurative nurturing, a relationship predicated on care and sustained by love. I suspect though it is merely conjecture, that duty alone does not a parent make. The poet H.D. wrote of being drawn to what she loved “with no thought of duty or pity.” I think of what compels us to nurture, not simply to tend, but to nourish from the wellsprings of our own being—and it almost certainly involves love.
The creators of March of the Penguins write of the epic journey as a story about love. To the human observer, especially the film crew who endured such punishing conditions to document the story, it is impossible to witness such painful determination, such existential sacrifice, such abiding parenthood without attributing it in part to love.
Thus parenthood cannot simply be sacrifice; it must involve choice. The penguins do not give up. They muster on.
For Precious, whose mother and father choose nothing of parenthood perhaps because they know nothing of it, parenting her own children and her own child-self demands choosing to push, again and again.
For those among us this Mother’s Day who parent children young or grown, the parenting never stops. The challenges and rewards come not in equal measure and not as expected.
For those of us who parent in metaphorical ways, we too choose to keep marching, to keep pushing, to keep placing ourselves in the environs of vulnerability that dependably offer challenge and reward.
I grew up hearing my mother say, “Choice is not sacrifice.” I am coming to understand what that means. I still hold possible the ways choice can feel sacrificial; in fact, the penguins and many parents choose what amounts to sacrifice. If in the choosing there is love—there can be satisfaction.
In the incubating pouch of male and female emperor penguins, in the beating heart of a poem, in the interrupted stillness of the night, parenthood emerges as a choice to affirm and protect, nurture and relish the immense burden and preciousness of life. Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)