"The Whole Thing Is Simply Beyond Comprehension": Post-Paris Discussions and Lessons from History Not Learned and Unlearned

US Jul ’38: What’s your attitude towards allowing German, Austrian & other political refugees to come into the US? pic.twitter.com/7hMfLbXWFE

— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) November 16, 2015

Swords. And Dying by Them.

What follows is a series of excerpts from things I read/watched this morning, which all seem to me to have a common theme, one about taking swords and dying by them (Matthew 26:52). Violence is in the air we breathe, throughout the world. Our choice is not whether we shall or shall not breathe. It's whether we shall or shall not cooperate with the violence that is part and parcel of our daily existence.

Kali Holloway on 2014's Best Documentaries: From Colonialism to War to Ecology to Misogony, Homophobia, and Heterosexism

In this lull time between the various winter-solstice holidays and the celebration of a new year, when we have time on our hands, Kali Holloway's recent "Documentaries Extraordinaire" posting at Alternet is a real gift. I recommend it to you. 

10th Anniversary of Invasion of Iraq: A Poem

And, finally today, because yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the start of the unjust Iraq war, a poem I wrote when the Gulf War got underway: I'm tired of these wars . . . .

Tea Party Jesus on Bryan Fischer's Reading of Crucifixion as Justification for Aggressive War

Here's what the Tea Party Jesus site makes of the recent remarks of Bryan Fischer of American Family Association depicting Jesus's crucifixion as a religious justification for aggressive war with massive conflicts.

Bryan Fischer on God's Approval of Aggressive Wars: The Price of U.S. Catholic Bishops' Alliance with Religious Right

Dear God: it wasn't enough for Bryan Fischer to write recently that Jesus's death on the cross is an icon indicating God's approval of militaristic aggression, and as Andrew Sullivan aptly puts it, kicking ass on the cross.

Wars and Rumors: Reflections about War on Pearl Harbor Day

Wars and rumors of war. I’ve noted before on this blog that my father was a World War II veteran.

In fact, he was at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. Each Pearl Harbor day, I spend time thinking about the few pieces of information he was willing to share with my brothers and me about this horrific event. And about what war does to those of us who choose to pursue it.

My father seldom spoke about his war experiences. I know from various bits of evidence that he spent the entire war in the Pacific theater. I have pictures of him from Honolulu, lounging on the beach with other soldiers, sitting in nightclubs with a lei around his neck as hula dancers cavorted in the background. Whether those photos were taken in the months in which he was stationed at Pearl Harbor or at other points in the war—whether he went back and forth to Honolulu during the war—I don’t know. And no one is left who can tell me about this.

About the bombing of Pearl Harbor, I remember my father telling me the following: he and other soldiers were asleep when the attack occurred late at night or early in the morning of the 7th December. He awoke to hear bombs exploding, shouts of distress. He climbed to the deck of his ship, the USS Pennsylvania, and a bomb fell near him. He was wounded by a piece of shrapnel that lodged in his stomach area, without causing serious injury. He had the scar for the rest of his life.

I remember my father telling me that with the smoke, the noise, the confusion about what was taking place, it was very difficult to know who was bombing American ships and why they were under attack. For those in the thick of an unanticipated attack, it’s not immediately apparent that one is even being attacked. Experiences like this are surrealistic.

This was my father’s approach to the war in general: surrealistic. Nonsensical. A tragic, if necessary, waste of human life, of the lives of a generation of young men. Of his generation.

My father was not a pacifist. He stoutly defended the decision of the U.S. to enter World War II. He defended the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and became very angry when I asked questions about that decision.

At the same time, he did not talk about the war—not ever. He would, I think, have been wryly amused, if not downright irate, at those soldier wannabes of the next generation for whom World War II became the Grand War, the Good War, the supreme example of American altruism in the world.

In my father’s view, war was war. It was dirty business, and the less said about it, the better. In this respect, he was very much like all of my uncles who served in World War II. My father’s brother was an Air Force pilot who flew missions from England to the Netherlands, and who helped liberate the Netherlands, making good friends there whom he returned to visit several times before his death. My mother’s older brother (her half-brother, to be precise) was in the landing at Anzio and marched with his cavalry troop up through Italy into Russia, where he saw scenes of death and carnage that unhinged his mind, contributing to his suicide soon after the war had ended.

My mother’s younger brother was involved in the liberation of Germany. Like my father, he almost never spoke of what he saw and heard during the war. I know from stories his sisters told me that he “adopted” a young German boy who had somehow been made homeless during the war, and who followed him around, calling him Willie, eating the chocolate and food my uncle set aside for him. I know, as well, that he and his unit came on a horrific scene in a German village as the war ended: someone—they were not certain who—had locked a number of people into a barn and set it afire. They arrived just after the blaze had become fierce, and when they opened the barn door, they found the bodies of those locked inside piled at the door, where they had scrabbled to get out.

This uncle also captured an SS officer. The story goes that he happened on the officer shaving in a hut in the forest. When my uncle asked if he had a gun, the officer told him no. My uncle then turned over his mattress and found a Luger beneath it. The SS officer told him that, had he been in my uncle’s shoes, he would have shot him for lying. My uncle took him captive instead.

As I say, none of these relatives of mine who were soldiers during World War II ever told stories about their war experiences. It was not that they were ashamed. Their silence had to do, I believe, with their desire not to see the pain and burden of memory inflicted on the next generation. They came back from the war, most of these relatives, eager to take advantage of the opportunities for education that opened for them when the war ended, concerned to advance in their professions and make a better life for their children.

My father talked freely about the war on only one occasion that I can recall. On this particular day, he had taken too much to drink. I recall him sobbing as he said, “No one will ever know what that war did to the men of my generation.”

That’s the legacy that has stuck in my mind when I think about my father’s service during World War II. Not the legacy of the Grand War, the Good War, the war that the good, altruistic Americans fought to liberate European nations subjected to dictatorship. The legacy that remains with me is my father’s honest, pain-filled statement about what the war did to him and the men of his generation: “No one will ever know what that war did to the men of my generation.”

War is, I take it, nothing like the romantic imaginings of war urged on us by purveyors of macho military narratives and macho military images. War is bloody, mindless, tragic business. War is not to be admired, replicated, desired. War is to be opposed at all cost, whenever those with power offer war as a solution to a nation’s problems.

I am disheartened by Mr. Obama’s decision to continue the war in Afghanistan, as I have been disheartened by his (lack of) leadership in general, as president. In my view, the new president has been altogether too willing to serve the interests of powerful men at the top of our society—in Wall Street, in the political sector, in the military-industrial complex.

Mr. Obama’s failure of vision stems, I believe, from his eagerness to surround himself primarily with men—above all, with powerful men. The scope of his vision is determined by this choice, and we are all paying a price for the new president’s choice to continue the macho power games that have dominated our society for far too long now, and have contributed to its decline. And which will continue to contribute to our decline, so long as these games are permitted at the center of our society . . . .

Those who glorify war would be better served, it seems to me, to talk to people who have actually taken part in a war. The first-hand testimony of those who have waged war is seldom romantic and sentimental. Those who have gone to war know that war is an insane and unsavory business, not to be preferred by civilized human beings.

If the testimony of Vietnam veterans and veterans of the recent wars in the Middle East, and of the wives and mothers who bear the losses of war, could be heard—really heard, heard in a powerful and effective way that makes the words count—in our halls of power, we might hesitate to solve our current problems by continuing war. We might, instead, think of creating more jobs to build our country and permit people out of work to lead decent and fulfilling lives. Something war cannot accomplish.

In Midwinter: An Advent Meditation

Winter sky.

Bare branches

Backs arched up, out.

A cat licking its paws

In the yard next door.

The pink of slave-quarter walls

Made nacreous by failing day.


And I.


What voice sings within me

And in the glory of shifting light

Atop the oak, amidst its limbs?


Why does the common grace

Of closing year

Return me to myself and hope

Amidst the ruins?


Out of the East war threatens.

Westward ride the Horsemen.


And I sit

Wait

Wonder.

It's possible I've posted this poem previously on this blog, though a search using Blogspot's search engine for terms included in it isn't turning up any hits. If I have posted the poem before, my apologies for recycling it again. It's in my mind the past few days, following Mr. Obama's war speech. I wrote it in New Orleans as Mr. Bush Ist began the wars in the Middle East.

A Reader Writes: Can the Milgram Experiment Be Applied to Cyberbullying?

Since I blogged earlier today about my need to look for those shining threads that pull my mind and heart forward by providing me with new moral insight, and since I have stinted readers of this blog throughout the week by not posting here, I'd like to upload an email discussion I've just had with someone who read one of my previous postings and recently contacted me about it. The posting in question is my posting on connections between the Milgram experiment and school bullying.

The person who emailed me about that posting is beginning a doctoral dissertation that will focus on cyberbullying. She wonders if it's possible to make connections between the Milgram experiment and cyberbullying. In the view of this correspondent, it's possible that the Milgram experiment demonstrates a human tendency not only to practice cruelty simply because an authority figure commands us to do so, but a tendency as well to ramp up our cruelty when we feel at a remove from the object of our cruelty.

And so my correspondent wants to investigate whether students who engage in online bullying feel a sense of removal from their victim that enables them to ignore their responsibility for the pain they inflict. It's possible, this researcher thinks, that online technology invites cruelty in some young people who would otherwise not bully, by providing those young people a sense of distancing from the person they are bullying online.

And here's what I wrote in response:

I can't claim to have done much research on cyberbullying, but what you say makes intuitive sense to me. When people feel that their identities are shielded, and that they can function at a remove from those they intimidate, it strikes me that they may well be inclined to enhance their tactics of intimidation.

I know the impulse myself. When I post on a blog under a username, there is always a temptation to say things I probably would not say in my own persona, under my own name. I try not to succumb to that temptation. But I still know it's there, tugging at me.

And I wonder if that tug accounts for the raucous nature of many blog discussions. I recently read a blog discussion that became downright ugly, and very quickly. One of the posters who uses the blog name Mean Girl was gratuitously insulting--well, mean, actually--to other posters. The whole discussion quickly got out of hand, with insults flying in all directions.

I'm not sure that would have happened, had all those bloggers been talking face to face. I imagine they would still have had their strong opinions and animosities. But I also suspect that they would probably have been inclined to express them more judiciously and with more civility than they did when their identities were shielded by usernames.

There is something about being at a remove from the object of our cruelty (whether that cruelty is intentional or not) that does permit us to be more cruel, I think. The German theologian Dorothee Sölle wrote about this following the Vietnam War, in her book Of War and Love (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1983). She argues (convincingly, I think) that technologies for warfare invented in the 20th century (e.g., the atomic bomb, napalm in the Vietnam War, etc.) brings warfare to an even more dehumanizing level than any we've seen in the past.

As she notes, prior to the development of such modern technologies for waging war, people at least saw the human faces of those they killed with swords, bows and arrows, and even cannons and rifles. Now we can fly over a place, drop bombs or canisters of gel designed to set people afire, and never seen any human faces at all, though millions may die.

Cruelty is perhaps always easier to practice when we do not have to face the object of our cruelty, and when we can, in various ways, convince ourselves that it is not another human being like ourselves we are tormenting, but someone whose humanity is distant from our own, and not at the same level as ours.

Thought for the Day: Ivor Gurney on Cruelty of Man to Man

Not half can be written of cruelty of man, on man,

Not often such evil guessed as between man and man.

Ivor Gurney, “To God,” in Selected Poems, ed. E.J. Kavanaugh (Oxford: OUP, 1990) (p. 96).

Mr. Bush the First Goes to War

The following journal entry is from January 1991:

Bush has gone to war. Always obscene, but what is particularly obscene this time is the immediate media transformation of this tragedy into spectacle. No new observation, this. Yet the process this time is further down the road than in Vietnam. This time, big t.v. studs—Rather, Brokaw—jaw with big army studs while all the world is supposed to look on breathless. It’s no more and no less than a football game, the telecaster conferring with the coach.

And what coaches. The living dead, swaggering and fit for the finest board rooms, these generals stand before the camera and deliver grave messages. They love it, love their attention. It’s as if the real scene behind the scenes is finally before us—these men who run it all behind the scenes finally on camera to tell us who and what and why. I don’t recall any war in which this has occurred so prominently as in this “war.”

Why so? Two terms of Reagan have made the always passive, always hypnotized American public even more susceptible to media manipulation. Comments in the newspaper today about the job our boys are doing—awesome to see the planes take off, just have to deliver those bombs, business to do. The sense of suppressed excitement that something is finally happening. Stay tuned, folks—the next installment of WWIII airs shortly. Popcorn in the bomb shelters.

+ + + + +

Always the same mideast city as a backdrop,
Muddy against the screen behind the t v man
Asking us to humanize the bombs
In the comfort of our living room.
Play by play the war unfolds,
Red starburst streams on maps
Fondled o so lovingly by Mr. General
So and so.
His pointer trembles with suppressed delight
That at last now today Jan. 17 1991
We're finally doing something
Kicking some oilgreasy Eyeraqui ass
To shout it to the world, America is BACK!

And how.
Rambo couldn't say it better--
Kaboom! Kachuga! Pow, pop, pow!
The movies pale beside this theater
Of George's little war.

While mamas pray
And widows weep
And justice cries to heaven for one day.

Bush and Torture: What Does It Mean to Be Methodist Today?

I have been fighting with myself about this posting. Because, God help me, I cannot read the sickening memos about our recent legacy of torture that the government released yesterday (here), without reminding myself that George W. Bush is a Christian. And, to be specific, a United Methodist.

As I’ve noted previously on this blog, both of my grandfathers were Methodists, so I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Methodists. I cherish the Wesleyan traditions that call social structures to conversion, to the practice of justice and peace. When I read documents from my own family’s history, I am struck by the passion with which some members of my family engaged the slave system in which they were enmeshed, as plantation owners and slaveholders who also happened to be Methodists. I am struck by their struggles, that they cared enough about their church’s teaching to struggle—and often struggle hard—with the disparity between what their church proclaimed and what they did in their personal and economic lives.

In some cases, their Methodist convictions led them to manumit their slaves. In other cases, it urged them to assist freed slaves as they migrated to Liberia. In one case, it led a Methodist minister who was also a state representative in Alabama to buy slaves that were mistreated whenever he could do so and to set them free. In another case, it led a white planter-minister to challenge the laws against miscegenation and to form a marital union with a free woman of color, acknowledging her as his wife and his children by her as his lawful family, even when laws forbade such acknowledgment.

So when I read the memos about torture under the Bush administration, I take these personally. I ask how a United Methodist, with the historic legacy of commitments I have just sketched, could possibly countenance brutal torture of other human beings. And could work to set up a system for such torture sponsored by my own government.

I’m sickened by these memos. As I read them, I wonder what being a Christian—a Christian walking in the footsteps of John Wesley—means in the world today. What difference does it make, I have to ask myself, for the United Methodist church to issue noble proclamations deploring injustice, war, mistreatment of workers, homophobia and heterosexism, if those proclamations mean nothing, nothing at all, in the real world? In the lives of Methodists. In the behavior of Methodist institutions.

As I say, I have fought with myself about saying these things on this blog. I am an outsider to the United Methodist church, after all, albeit one with deep family roots in Methodism. It is always a touchy matter to criticize other families and their behavior. One can confidently skewer the pretensions and hypocrisies of one’s own family, but doing so with other families is tacky, and courts angry responses from the family under fire.

And still. Bush was president. He was my president, though I surely did not vote for him. I have a right to wonder about the disparity between what his church claims to cherish, and what Mr. Bush did as president.

I have also worked in United Methodist institutions and have seen at close range what goes on in those institutions, vis-à-vis the Social Principles. I have seen how the Social Principles of the church can be honored by effusive lip-service, but totally ignored in the labor practices of United Methodist institutions.

I have watched the United Methodist church pass resolutions condemning homophobia and heterosexism (here), while the United Methodist institution in which I worked did absolutely nothing to combat those sins within its own structures, and when it savagely punished anyone who called for dialogue about this. I’ve worked in a United Methodist institution that, even after the last General Conference passed a resolution decrying homophobia, not only does not have any policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, but actively oppresses gay employees.

I feel I have to speak out. In this nation with the soul of a church, religion is more than a private matter, after all. Religions have a public face. The United Methodist church has a significant and powerful public presence in American life. I live in a city whose culture—whose civic and not just religious culture—is imbued with a Methodist ethos.

It matters to me when my Methodist brothers and sisters do not call their own brothers and sisters to accountability for making a mockery of core Wesleyan values and principles. It matters to me when I look at who is leading the fight to re-outlaw gay marriage in Iowa, and discover that the senator spearheading that movement, Christopher Rants, is a United Methodist (here).

I have been made sensitive to United Methodist dialogues and the powerful influence of the United Methodist church in American culture by my own horrendous experience of injustice in a United Methodist institution. It appalls and will continue to appall me that, when my partner and I were treated with gross indignity by a United Methodist institution, not a single minister on that institution’s governing board raised her or his voice in protest. It appalls me that it was a United Methodist minister who advised the leader of that institution when Steve and I were assaulted as human beings by that Methodist institution, had our livelihood removed from us without cause, and were placed in a precarious economic position that still burdens our lives.

I am sensitive to United Methodist issues as I read the torture memos, too, because I have been receiving reminders recently of the upcoming annual meeting of Reconciling Ministries Network, a group of courageous United Methodists working to call their brothers and sisters to accountability for their injustice towards gay persons. In its treatment of gay and lesbian human beings, the United Methodist church displays the same shocking insensitivity to its own best teaching that the Methodist president George W. Bush displayed towards Wesleyan principles in crafting techniques of torture.

And the two issues are connected. You can't undermine the witness of a church by ignoring its call to just treatment of gay human beings, without also undermining the witness of a church when it calls for an end to war and the social injustices that lead to war. The same United Methodists who work tooth and nail to keep gay human beings out of the Methodist church combat the church's teachings about just labor practices and about issues of war and peace. Homophobia is connected to militarism and exploitation of workers.

As Mel White notes in an interview with Brent Hartinger at today’s AfterElton website (here),

You know, religion isn’t changing that much. Here’s the most liberal church of all, the Episcopal Church, being divided down the center by it. And here’s the United Methodist Church pastors holding at the national assembly this last summer to allow pastors to deny membership to lesbian and gay people. Allowing them to deny membership, not ordination or marriage – membership.

And the United Methodists have this great tradition of progressive kind of stance with John and Charles Wesley and the Native Americans and all that kind of stuff – they’ve always been liberal – now they’re being taken over by these right-wing organizations within their church. And the Catholic Church, I mean when the Pope just a few weeks ago says it’s as important to save the world from homosexuality as it is to save the rain forests, I think we haven’t gotten very far with him either.

When I read this, when I read the torture memos and remember that George W. Bush is a United Methodist, when I read the noble UMC General Conference resolution against homophobia and heterosexism but look at how some Methodist institutions actually behave, I have to speak out. I have to ask my United Methodist brothers and sisters please to address the disparity between the words and the deeds within their institutions—to call their Wesleyan brothers and sisters to accountability.

And I certainly promise that I will continue to hold my Catholic brothers and sisters accountable for actions that betray what we claim to cherish—because God knows, there’s a lot of work to do on my side of the fence, too.

We Are in Trouble: Comments on theTheocracy Slouching to the Polls to Be Born

I remember reading years ago something German theologian Dorothee Sölle wrote about the Vietnam War. To be specific: what she wrote about is how those who manipulate the public’s consciousness to make war thinkable must inevitably assault the linguistic structures that enable us to see, touch, witness what is going on when we kill fellow human beings in war. They must break the link between what we know to be true with our own eyes, and what they inform us is true.

As well as I remember, Sölle points out that one of the “advances” of modern warfare is its ability to remove the killer from the killed. We now have the ability to kill millions of people in an instant, merely by touching a button. We do not have to see the faces of those we annihilate. We do not have to hear their screams. We do not have to smell the burned skin and witness the mangled bodies. We can fly over, drop the bomb, and go about our other daily business after we've taken care of that bit of business.

War as business, war as transaction, war as techne: it’s only a matter of building the killing machine, deploying it, telling someone to do his duty, and then doing that duty, if we’re the one so ordered. All in a day’s work. I can be flying one hour over the village I napalm, and the next, sitting in a beer hall joking with friends—never having seen a single face of the human beings I have just murdered.

Sölle notes that this capability not only removes the human cost—the human reality, the evil—of war from the table of public life (except, of course, for those who are killed, and for their friends and relatives). It also requires linguistic structures to get the rest of us, who might have qualms about what we understand to be done in our name and with our tax contributions, to buy into the murder.

The new “advances” of modern warfare require words that shield us from the sordid reality of those advances. So we now speak of “neutralizing” the enemy, rather than killing her, of “sanitizing” an area rather than murdering its occupants. And, when the same folks who control the manufacturing of the war materiel and who profit from this manufacture also attain the ability to spin our language outside reality-based boundaries, well, what’s left to do? What’s left to assure their total control over everything?

A next step is to chain the watchdog media insofar as they keep wanting to natter tirelessly on about reality-based inconveniences. It’s important not only that murder of innocent civilians be spoonfed to the public as a winning surge: it’s also crucially important that we never get to see the evidence of our winning surges. That is, it’s imperative that we don’t see the real-life, real-dead human bodies, mangled, splayed, leaking blood and guts, on our t.v. or internet screens. A huge mistake of the Vietnam War was the willingness of the media to flash news to the American public in which we actually saw the little Vietnamese girl running down the road naked, fire streaming from her back. From a bomb we had dropped. From a bomb we in the heartland, munching our suppers at the family dinner table, had paid for.

Seeing, touching, witnessing atrocity has the potential to lead to backlash against atrocity—and our complicity in atrocity. For those trying to sanitize our consciences when it comes to our willingness to accept our complicity in murder, it's important not to allow us to see the bodies returning home, either, the bodies of our own soldiers. These remind us that, as bombs are deployed and enemies neutralized and problem places sanitized, human beings are the ultimate price. Both them and us. Both human.

I bring all of this up today as part of a larger reflection. As the current presidential election slouches towards its final end, I’m asking myself—more than ever before, more than with any previous election I’ve tracked since I began to vote in the late 1960s—what it would take to end democracy in our nation.

That is, assuming that someone, somewhere, would like to see our democratic experiment finally ended. As I think about it, I’m more and more convinced that the final act leading to nightfall is to remove the stinger of plain truth from plain language, so that people no longer have the ability to tell a lie from truth. Or even care to distinguish lies from truth.

Assuming that someone might want to move our faltering democracy in an overtly fascist direction, what would that someone have to do to move us definitively past the tipping point? Well, after years of “sanitizing” and “neutralizing” our language so that red has come to suggest green and pro-life comprises war and the death penalty, after deploying the term “elitist” as a weapon so that anyone asking simple reality-based questions about the growing gap between truth and lies in official rhetoric is, voilà, an elitist, we simply have to sin more boldly. And as we do so, defy anyone to tell us that we are sinning.

We have to start sinning boldly by telling lies that anyone can see to be lies, and declaring them to be true. Because I said so. And God is on my side. And God is not on your side. And if any watchdog group challenges the lie, that group is elitist and I won’t even talk to them until they are chastened and willing to swallow the next lie I intend to tell as I sin boldly.

I used to claim to be great. I now declare myself to be GREAT. Who are you to question that declaration, to ask piddling questions about evidence and facts, when it is I—the GREAT ONE—who have made the declaration, I who have twisted the arms of those I terrorize to make the declaration?

A society that has moved light years beyond doublethink and newspeak to the lie boldly told by one declaring herself or himself GREAT and an emissary of God is a society in trouble.

We are in trouble.

If we let ourselves be duped and bullied in this way, if we do not fight back, we must be prepared to accept the inevitable: the definitive falling of the curtain, the demise of our democratic society. We must be prepared to see people of good will hounded from our midst, people of integrity gloriously smeared in every way possible by people of the lie, and then booted out as troublemakers.

We must be ready to endure the muzzling of poets and artists, the hemlock administered to the philosophers and theologians we have not yet succeeded in making obsolescent, those who will not conform.

We must be ready to stand and cheer as some new group of Brown Shirts burn books and order us to cheer. In the name of God, you understand. We must be prepared to watch with sneers on our faces as rabbis, imams, and pastors who have refused to bow to the new theocratic GREAT ones are publicly humiliated, forced to tape-record canned sermons in praise of the GREAT ones of the land.

I imagine the new Brown Shirts—God help me, but I do!—displaying huge pro-life banners as they do their dirty business in the name of the GREAT ones whom GOD has sent.

Not ready for this? It's coming with a vengeance, if we don't wake up. And the narcotic—of cultivated stupidity, of systemic lying, of god dispensed as right-wing commodity to those who crave a dispensable god that answers to them alone—has been administered for so long now, there is not much hope to postpone the inevitable. Or to make a difference.

Unless we awake from our slumber very soon. And do something.

4,000 Dead and the Office of Motherhood in All Things

Our high God, the sovereign wisdom of all, arrayed himself in this low place and made himself entirely ready in our poor flesh to do the service and the office of motherhood himself in all things.

As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother.

A mother can give her child milk to suck, but our precious mother, Jesus, can feed us with himself.

The mother may suffer the child to fall sometimes, and to be hurt in diverse manners for its own profit, but she may never suffer that any manner of peril come to the child, for love. And though our earthly mother may suffer her child to perish, our heavenly Mother, Jesus, may not suffer us that are His children to perish: for He is All-mighty, All-wisdom, and All-love; and so is none but He,—blessed may He be!

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I have been thinking of Julian of Norwich and of her profoundly moving insights into the maternal nature of God, as the news arrives that we have reached a new watermark with the war in Iraq: 4000 American soldiers dead.

And that is not even to count—or recognize—the many Iraqi men, women, and children who have also died in this war.

4000 mothers’ children now dead.

War demands reflection about what it means to be a mother. The loss of any life demands reflection about all that goes into the making of a human life. A mother, some mother somewhere, spends a good part of a year gestating, carrying a new life, bringing that life into the world with pain. Creation is work. Creation demands care. It takes far more energy to make than to destroy. A building constructed by years of painstaking labor can be hauled down in a single day.

Every human life ever created presupposes painstaking labor—on the part of a mother, on the part of Mother God, who grieves along with human mothers when the irreplaceable son or daughter created through such labor is suddenly gone. War is a horrendous, wasteful, absurd challenge to everything that motherhood—or creation, in the Judaeo-Christian theological framework—means.

Mothers are implicated. Mothers suffer perhaps more than anyone else, in war.

This is something German artist Käthe Kollwitz recognized, which she made the central theme of her art in the period between the two world wars. Like Cassandra, Kollwitz could see clearly what was coming, but could not avert it. She saw the horrendous waste of human life in the first war, and she knew that this war would repeat itself down the road in another act of ultimate absurdity, another world war.

Her drawings repeat, over and over, with the obsessive concern of someone who must be heard but will not be heard, the theme of mothers clutching their children to themselves, trying futilely to keep the seed that must be sown for future harvests safe from destruction. Kollwitz’s work is replete with mothers, with mothers’ arms, with the circling of mothers’ arms around children. Again and again, her work echoes the theme of mothers clutching their children to themselves, seeking desperately to guard their children, mourning over lost children. Mothers clinging to each other to create circles of protection in the world; mothers clinging to children whose birth has cost a mother so much, and whose tragic destruction is so simple to accomplish . . . .

Kollwitz’s art is a perfect counterpoint to Julian’s meditation on the nature of God. War is an act of ultimate atheism. No Jewish or Christian believer who believes what the creation narratives say about God—that God wombs the world into existence as a mother bird broods over its nest—can believe in, endorse, want, accept war.

What is brought into being at such tremendous cost should not be destroyed in a single act of insane, meaningless destruction. There are other ways, better ways, to resolve human conflict.

The news about the toll the war in Iraq has taken on our own nation, in the number of soldiers now lost, arrived on the eve of the liturgical feast day of the Annunciation, a day commemorated in many Christian traditions as the day on which Mary accepted the divine request to bear a child. The infancy narratives in the Christian gospels link the story of Jesus’s birth to that of his death: in accepting the divine offer of maternity, Mary also committed herself to give up her son, in the end of his life.

The pain of motherhood, the sorrow of mothers who bear children with such care and hope, but who give their children up to horrendous acts of violence, runs through the foundational stories of Christianity. These narratives are narratives about the Motherhood of God, about God’s totally involved love for human beings, about the pain God bears in bearing the world into being, and the pain God undergoes in seeing the world created at such cost senselessly destroyed.

Anyone who listens to these stories is called to create inside himself the capacity for motherhood: the capacity to listen, ponder, create, nurture, and enter into the suffering of those to whom one is linked. These are themes explored again and again by great artists, whose voices we need to hear, if we wish to become more humane.

I have just finished, and highly recommend, Pat Barker’s latest novel, Life Class. Critics who have noted that Barker shines when she returns to the theme of her novels about the first world war—the Regeneration trilogy—are right. The war to end all wars, and its cultural effects on England, are Barker’s métier.

Barker is acutely observant, in noting how war de-centers gender presuppositions. Men sent as mere boys into battle often discover the capacity to love each other fiercely. If they survive and return home, the questions this capacity to love provokes in them must be addressed in the cultural context of back home.

Women also confront gender shifts in wartime. War can open unexpected new avenues for women’s work to count, for the first time, to be seen for what it is—ceaseless labor to keep the machinery of society alive. Women can shake off constricting old social expectations in wartime, traveling unchaperoned to the front to nurse the wounded, living alone in apartments in large cities where their labor is now needed to keep things going.

Women also pick up the pieces in war, and Barker excels in describing this dynamic. It is women who flock to the front to pick up the pieces—quite literally—of wounded men who have to be patched back together in order to be sent again into battle. It is women who cope with the loss when their men cannot be healed. It is women who often bear the brunt when the man returned home is a mere shell of a human being, physically there, mentally gone.

Kollwitz has it right, as does Pat Barker: the seed for sowing must not be milled. We must war against war (krieg dem Kriege). Only in this way can those of us who seek to believe continue the office of God’s motherhood in all things, in the societies in which we live.