Fallen From the Desk of Pastor Wayne
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For Warmth
I hold my face in my two hands. No, I am not crying. I hold my face in my two hands to keep the loneliness warm— two hands protecting, two hands nourishing, two hands preventing my soul from leaving me in anger. --Thich Nhat Hanh
Reprinted: Call Me By My True Names, 1999 |
This poem was written after its’ author heard about the bombings of Ben Tre, Viet Nam and the comment made by an American military man, “We had to destroy the town in order to save it.”
As a student of histories I’ve been taught that ‘Those who do not know their history are destined to repeat it.’ Yet it seems humanity is intent to repeat the same pattern, only now with bigger and better weapons and even more convoluted thinking. The current ironies and double standards are almost comic, were they not so tragic.
I recently watched a TV report on the new and improved ‘Bunker-busters’, MOAB and JDAM bombs to be used against |
a significantly disarmed Iraq which closed with a Christian worship service where our American soldiers in Kuwait were singing, “ Ain’t Gonna Study War No More”.
My nation creates and possesses more Weapons of Mass Destruction than any other country, yet we stand in judgment of others. We are the only country to date to have actually used these weapons, and tragically after it was already determined that the war in the Pacific was over. Historians maintain those bombs were used in fact, to send a message to Russia. In a similar irony, while our new MOAB bomb incinerates everything within a mile, it’s unique ‘selling-point’ is its’ “nuclear-cloud effect” intended to scare the combatants. What am I missing?
I’m distressed by the tragic irony that Manuel Noriega, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein all received military support and training from our government. In 1980, the Russians were wrong to go pre-emptively into Afghanistan, so the US provided military support to bin Laden and the Taliban only to have to go into Afghanistan ourselves twenty years later in search of the same bin Laden and Taliban. We supported Hussein against Iran. You are not alone if you see an unhealthy pattern here!
How can we hold to the Geneva Convention while at the same time allowing the current situation in
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We declare a “War on Terror”, yet those captured on the battlefield are not “legally” considered ‘prisoners of war’ and therefore exempted from basic human rights. Somehow allowing us to keep these terrorists off the continent allows us to subvert American laws; offshore banking meets offshore torture. I fear we are writing another sad chapter into our history.
In its noble 56 year history, the United Nations has averted many wars, vaccinated millions of children, provided clean water for developing nations, and provided for free, democratic elections as it did in South Africa following the end of apartheid. Kofi Annan has done a valiant job at an extremely difficult task and no doubt the UN will be needed to provide the humanitarian aid after the warriors have gone home. How can the United Nations be useful when it suits our needs, but “irrelevant” when it opposes us? Can we see the UN as a vehicle of democracy and then ignore its’ democratic votes?
We recently studied how the early pacifist Christian church was first viewed as an illegal enemy of the Roman Empire, Then the Roman Empire made it not only legal to be Christian, but illegal not to be. Eventually the fall of the Roman Empire led to the rise of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, giving way to “just war” criteria and the Crusades, the violence of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and the Inquistion. What will the role of the Christian Church be in today’s American Empire? How will the ethics of pre-emptive violence resonate in today’s Christian context? Do the non-violent teachings of the pacifist Jesus speak truth to our current generation or does Might make Right?