1.
Costa’s a film producer
A Spanish gantser macher
He can feel good about himself
By helping the idealistic director Sebastian
To realize his dream of making a revisionist movie
About those dissident, trouble-making priests
Las Casas and Montesinos
Who challenge Columbus’ mission in the “New World”
“This film’s gonna be great”
“Fucking epic, man”

Costa’s preoccupation
Is how to save money at every turn
When the director’s assistant Maria
Sees that the Cochabamba people
Are rising up against the privatization of their water
She asks Costa if she can make a documentary about it
He refuses
Says “I’m not a fucking NGO”
“It has nothing to do with me”
And Maria retorts
“But you’re right in the middle of it” Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Berrigan once said to us
About trying to lead a nonviolent life:

“We do it because it’s the right thing to do
Not because it’s going to get us anywhere”

How deeply this cuts us!
Is the Jesuit priest crazy?

Because in these United States of Amnesia
We so want to get somewhere

We want success!
We want to know that we made a difference!

We want others to know we made a difference
(Is anyone keeping track of all our service hours?)

We wouldn’t mind beefing up
Our individual and collective CVs

We want to stop the war!
Bring the troops home now!

(Some in the peace movement
Claim their efficacy

In ending the war in Vietnam
But don’t mention the Vietnamese resistance of thirty years)

We used to crave media attention
Now we get validation via social media

We don’t want to be losers
We want to be a force to be reckoned with

Berrigan (like Gandhi)
In and out of jail

Visiting the poor who have cancer
Befriending the people with AIDS

Comforting the afflicted
Afflicting the comfortable

Renouncing the fruits of action
Giving everything to the work at hand

Why had I never noticed the number of sick people who appear in the Gospels? Who or what made them sick?

It was not theologians who invented the cross, rather, the Roman Empire thought up this method of deterring people who heard the cry for liberation by slowly and publicly torturing to death those who cried out. Anyone who has ever read reports of torture, for example, from Guatemala, anyone who has seen a film like Two Worlds about South Africa knows that it is not a matter of something exotic but of the normality of imperial suppression which now presents a slow method of torture as “low intensity conflict” for whole regions.

–––

Our pattern was to provide political information integrated with biblical texts, a brief address, calls for action, and finally, discussion with the gathered congregation. The basic elements of all subsequent Evensongs were information, meditations, and action.

I use the gospel, or other religious traditions, to say something that is vital to me.

–––

Writing means for me that I continue the writing of the Bible, going on with the writing of the Book.

When I have spent time with someone and have been touched by particular points in our conversation, I often feel the need to write it down and to reconstruct or clarify it for myself.

–––

When you spread your life around rather than hoarding it, then the great light becomes visible within you. To be sure, you enter into loneliness, often you lose friends, a standard of living, a job, or a secure career, but at the same time you are changed. And the cross, this sign of isolation, of shame, of abandonment becomes, in this process, the tree of life, which you no longer like to be without at all.

Those who do not fight back do not believe in love or hope. In my opinion, a group of Christians who call themselves a church are a church only if they fight back. To live in resistance is what is meant by hope against hope.

–––

The correct theological question is thus not whether someone lives with or without a god, but rather which god is worshipped and adored in a particular society.

Our relationship to the world is expressed in having, consuming, and dominating.

–––

I really believed –and still do—that Christ cannot be understood and loved without seeing the ongoing crucifixion done to his sisters and brothers.

To pray means to hold before ourselves again and again the black children of South Africa who today are in prison, humiliated, and tortured.

–––

There are among us people who allow themselves the truth. They step in for the victims of violence; they create unrest while the authorities are trying to keep everything nicely under control.

Quakers speak of three qualities open to everyone: boundless happiness, absolute fearlessness and constant difficulty.

–Dorothee Sölle (1929-2003) was a German feminist theologian, poet and activist. These passages come from her Essential Writings.

A library I once spent time in
Is named in honor of Pope Pius XII

He was nothing if not prudent
And prudence is a virtue much of the time

In 1948
When talking with members of the Dominican order

Albert Camus admitted that the anti-Fascist resistance
Had waited for a clear voice to speak out of Rome Read the rest of this entry »

Mechaiaeh … Pronounced m’KHY-eh, to rhyme with “messiah.” The kh sound is, of course, the way a MacTavish would roll it out. From Hebrew. Pleasure, great enjoyment, a real joy. … Mechaieh comes from the Hebrew chay, meaning “life.” Technically, a mechaieh is one who gives life. (Mechaieh also meant God). –Leo Rosten’s The Joy of Yiddish

I like the technical meaning. I like to remember Mev as a real mechaieh, a woman vibrating with the buzz of savor, brimming with the indignation of resistance, verving through the day with alert and calm appreciation of the miracle of being awake.

Was Jesus the messiah? So, normative Christianity asserts, but what does it practically mean?

Was Jesus a mechaieh? Of course.

Was Mev a mechaieh? I can so testify. Read the rest of this entry »

No one would really confuse a Catholic Worker type with a real ghetto person, and no one would really confuse you with a real impoverished hillbilly. You may identify with them, but they do not identify with you.
–Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether to monk Thomas Merton, mid -1960s

We may identify with Palestinians in the refugee camps
Or in Israel
Or in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem

Or the Iraqis
The Afghans
The Pakistanis

And maybe some of them would identify with us
If they learned that we
(Like them)

Had done something that really touched the nerve
Of the powers and principalities here
And that led us to experience Read the rest of this entry »

Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Riverside Church, NYC, April 1967; Route 50 in Nevada; Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; Duke Ellington, “Take the ‘A’ Train”;  Joey Neilsen, resister of Catholic high school homophobia; massive protests in Washington, D.C. during Democrat administration in power; Kathy Kelly’s prophetic, peripatetic interventions on behalf of America’s “unworthy victims,” e.g., Iraqis, Nicaraguans, Palestinians; Read the rest of this entry »

Thesis 11, Still

One reader of Dear Layla/Welcome to Palestine wrote me
With characteristic candor:

“Damn you! It fucking hurt to read this book
And thank you! It was the final push I needed to get off my ass”

It’s one thing to put together, compose
127 chapters

To create characters
To quote real people who say

“There are more things Habermas in occupied Palestine
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” Read the rest of this entry »

For years I read him to get a bearing
On the atrocities the U.S. enabled in Central America

I wrote my Master’s thesis on him
On Israel/Palestine and liberation theology

When I met him at his office
He patiently answered all my questions

In Berkeley he spoke at the theological consortium
And had dinner with the Catholic Workers

He sent his condolences
After he heard Mev had died Read the rest of this entry »

I recently came across this  excerpt from an interview, which first appeared in 1999.  I am reminded of the 17 people who showed up on Sunday at Sophia House to hear Sara and Emily speak about another prophetic bishop of the people, Oscar Romero.

David Barsamian: The Brazilian archbishop Dom Hélder Camara once said, “When I fed the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why are they poor, they called me a communist.” Did you know him?

Noam Chomsky:  I didn’t know him, but about two years ago I happened to be in Recife, which was his base.  He was one of the leading figures in liberation theology. He made a real difference in Brazil and in the world, and in particular in Recife. The church traditionally had been the church of the rich. He turned it into a church of the poor. He got his priests and nuns to work in the poor areas. Church buildings were given over to educational and health institutions. It made a big change. Recife was one of the leading centers of liberation theology. It was devastated, mainly by violence, but also by the Vatican.

The Vatican was strongly opposed to Dom Hélder Camara. The Vatican doesn’t have guns, but it had its own force. The Pope was able to undermine liberation theology, get rid of the progressive bishops, and put in very reactionary ones. The effect is that there is nothing left in Recife. Except for people roughly my age, people don’t even know about this history anymore. Liberation theology was dismantled. Read the rest of this entry »

We knew it was coming
6 to 10 inches

Dread: The roads will be terrible!
Exhilaration: No school!

That morning he left his house
Shovel in hand

He approached one older neighbor
With his usual smile

“How about I make a start
In this driveway of yours?” Read the rest of this entry »

Now that you’ve been accepted
To the Kennedy School of Government
Where you’ll have access
To current and future movers and shakers

Where there’ll be balanced discussions
About “America’s humanitarian role in the world”
Where professors are civil, assured
Savvy, and so very smart

Once a month (or, if need be, once a day)
Return to some touchstones
Like one of Mev’s photos from Haiti
Or one of your photos from Gaza Read the rest of this entry »

“If God accepts the sacrifice of my life, may my blood be a seed of freedom and a sign that hope will soon become a reality. A bishop will die, but the Church of God, which is the people, will never perish. I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the people of El Salvador.” -Oscar Romero

March 24 marks the 33rd anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a bishop transformed by the suffering of his people from poverty and war. He was a witness to many human rights violations, and despite his history of being a conservative bishop, he became a symbol of social justice and faith for the Salvadoran people. His sermons on living in love, his commitment to liberation theology, and his nonviolent stance ultimately cost him his life. Join Emily Howard and Sara Hanel in commemorating and reflecting on Romero’s humble example, transformed conscience, death, and spirit that permeates the hearts of Salvadorans and the marginalized all over the world over 30 years later.

Sunday 24 March
Potluck begins at 6:00 p.m.
Sharing begins at 6:45
Sophia House
4547 Gibson Avenue
Forest Park Southeast
63110

Ten thousand and two texts
A thousand and three tweets
644 Facebook status updates
87 cell phone messages save or delete

Enough already!
Take a deep breath
Leave behind the technology
And go out

To receive the wind’s news from Bo Juyi
To find the message from Wang Wei on the river bank
To sip Li Po’s wine with a smile
To join Tu Fu in the battle against inhumanity

Have so loved The Book of Mev — even though my heart was breaking at times and tears were streaming down my face. Of course I knew the end, but I had no idea what the journey would be like. I so enjoyed reading about Mev’s and your budding relationship; was touched by many of the readings from other places that you included; especially loved reading about Mev when the pope went to Denver. That was impressive! But I was ill-prepared, even though you hinted at what would come, for Mev’s final journey and what havoc the brain tumor would cause in her body. Unbelievable. I had not heard the term, “the Arco Angels,” even though I knew the area had a closely knit community. How vulnerable you allowed yourself to be and how supportive they were! What a community!

Right now my next door neighbor is dying from stage 4 melanoma. He is in hospice near Mercy Hospital so Helena and I went out to see him yesterday. He is weak but alert and can whisper. Family and friends were visiting and of course there was great interest in some sports game on TV. Later Helena commented that people don’t talk to the dying person about the fact that he is dying, thank him for his life and all he shared, etc. She definitely has a point, but I was trying to imagine myself in my neighbor’s position and wondered how I would react if everyone who came in felt they had to talk to me about dying. Think it would get old quickly. But then again, maybe not. So I thought about you and the Arco Angels and wondered how people dealt with that over the 7 or 8 mo. of Mev’s illness. Anyway, wondered if this might sometime be an appropriate theme for one of the Sunday gatherings.

–Jean Durel

1.

Years ago a student offered her honest assessment of a Social Justice class I taught: “You know, the work load in your class is overwhelming…and I tell all my friends that they have to take it.”

Likewise, reading Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is overwhelming… and you really have to take the time to read it.

For people of a certain age, the linkage of the words “atrocity” and “Vietnam War” means the My Lai massacre of March 1968. In that hamlet, U.S. troops murdered over 500 women, older men, and children. The massacre has been seen by many as an aberration, an oddity, albeit an obscene one.

Turse will have none of this. From interviews with many U.S. veterans as well as Vietnamese survivors, from his poring over the archives of the Army’s own investigations, Turse comes to this conclusion: “the War Crimes Working Group files alone demonstrated that atrocities were committed by members of every infantry, cavalry, and airborne division, and every separate brigade that deployed without the rest of its division—that is, every major army unit in Vietnam.”

Turse doesn’t excuse what the ground forces did, but he does stress that they were acting in response to policy made at the highest levels of the military. The short-hand for the policy was “body-count,” that is, the U.S. could determine its progress by how many Vietnamese enemy corpses it generated. The result: “From the start of the American War to its final years, from the countryside to the cities, Americans relentlessly pounded South Vietnam with nearly every lethal technology in their arsenal short of nuclear weapons, indiscriminately spreading death across vast swaths of territory…. the logic of overkill exacted an immense, almost unimaginable toll on Vietnamese civilians. U.S. commanders wasted ammunition like millionaires, hoarded American lives like misers—and often treated Vietnamese lives as if they were worth nothing at all.”

2.

One veteran said, “We was going to kill anything that we see and anything that moved.”

Another said, “The search-and-destroy mission is just another way to shoot anything that moves.”

One officer said, “So a few women and children get killed… teach ‘em a damned good lesson. They’re all VC or at least helping them… You can’t convert them, only kill them.”

In response to using grenades against children, one soldier said, “Tough shit, they grow up to be VC.”

A general said, “You’ve got to dry up the sea the guerrillas swim in—that’s the peasants—and the best way to do that is to blast the hell out of their villages so they’ll come into our refugee camps.”

One correspondent said, “There were hundreds of these albums in Vietnam, thousands, and they all seemed to contain the same pictures… the severed head shot, the head often resting on the chest of the dead man or being held up by a smiling Marine, or a lot of heads arranged in a row, with a burning cigarette in each of the mouths, the eyes open …the VC suspect being dragged over the dust by a half-track or being hung by his heels in some jungle clearing; the very young dead…a picture of a Marine holding an ear or maybe two ears or, in the case of a guy I knew near Pleiku, a whole necklace made of ears… the dead Viet Cong girl with her pajamas stripped off and her legs raised stiffly in the air…. Half the combat troops in Vietnam had these things in their packs, snapshots were the least of what they took after a fight, at least the pictures didn’t rot.”

3.

William Calley was under house arrest for a few years for his role in the My Lai massacre.

But the architects of the policy that produced a system of misery and mass death got away with it.

Just as the architects of the policy that committed aggression in Iraq and produced a smaller-scale system of misery and mass death have gotten away with it.

It’s unrealistic to think that any U.S. official will ever have to go on trial for his (or her) role in war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity.

But in Guatemala the former dictator Efrain Rios Montt is going on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity that occurred in the early 1980s. U.S. President Ronald Reagan was a strong ally of Montt.

How many hours of difficult, dangerous work did how many Guatemalans have to do over how many years to bring Montt to trial?

We still have so much to learn from the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, and the Guatemalans.

1.

In our Intercultural Studies class today
Mariah, Ta’mare, and Rachel read the following stanzas
Of “Our True Heritage” by Thích Nhất Hạnh:

The cosmos is filled with precious gems.
I want to offer a handful of them to you this morning.
Each moment you are alive is a gem,
shining through and containing earth and sky,
water and clouds.

It needs you to breathe gently
for the miracles to be displayed.
Suddenly you hear the birds singing,
the pines chanting,
see the flowers blooming,
the blue sky,
the white clouds,
the smile and the marvelous look
of your beloved.

You, the richest person on Earth,
who have been going around begging for a living,
stop being the destitute child.
Come back and claim your heritage.
We should enjoy our happiness
and offer it to everyone.
Cherish this very moment.
Let go of the stream of distress
and embrace life fully in your arms.

2.

I then asked the students to discuss these questions:
Do you feel like “the richest person on Earth”?
What would make you happy, right now?
To whom do you typically offer your happiness?

3.

After several minutes
I asked if anyone would like to share
Anlin (who came to the United States
From China last August)
Said with deep conviction
“I am the richest person on Earth
My parents love me
My friends love me
Yes, I am the richest person on Earth”

He was an extremely smart and humble guy
In the same class as my older brother and cousins

He went to the University of Chicago
Dropped out after a semester

He then made his way to the East Coast
Joined a radical community there

The focus of the community
Was to help the homeless

Offering hospitality
Protesting city policy

Engaging in civil disobedience
Serving up soup

The work never stopped
You just kept going

As the weeks went by
He became more and more despondent

Shutting down
Barely coming out of his room

No one even noticed his absence
No one checked in on him

In the dead of winter
He realized this wasn’t the place for him

He managed to get out of the room
Find the charismatic leader of the community

Told him that it wasn’t working out
And he’d be leaving soon

The leader stared at him
“Fine, go ahead and leave

But tonight when someone freezes to death on the street
It will be on your conscience, not mine”

The leader walked away
The young man walked away

Years later the young man became a doctor
Years later the charismatic leader killed himself

Someone had an idea
Someone mentioned it to a colleague
Someone sent a memo to the higher-ups
Someone gathered a group of movers and shakers
Someone got the engineers on board
Someone set production goals
Someone managed shipping and receiving
Someone worked 16-hour days
Someone believed in the mission
Everyone did his part on the assembly line
Someone headed up the legal department
Someone smiled on all the interdepartmental cooperation
Someone set production goals
Someone rubbed his hands a little greedily
Someone put all the pieces together
Someone headed up quality control
Someone reviewed the profit sheet
Someone was on the phone to Poland
Someone inspected the finished product
Someone tested the finished product
Someone gave his seal of approval
Someone hosted a party for the principal players
Someone sent word up the chain of command
Someone loaded the trucks
Someone installed the product
Someone wrote up a manual of precise instructions
Someone shouted, “It’s ready”
Someone said, “Let’s do it”
Someone felt anxious about results
Someone couldn’t tell his wife about it
Someone slept easily
Someone had technicians on hand in case there was a malfunction
Someone saw the big picture
Someone articulated the rationale and benefits
Someone turned it on
Someone marveled at well it worked
Someone cleaned up afterward
Someone played his role in keeping in everything going
Someone solved some problems they hadn’t anticipated
Someone envisioned that one day it could work nonstop
Someone wrote up a patent for a new and improved version
Someone said it was necessary
Someone didn’t second-guess his superiors
Someone didn’t ask questions
Someone just looked at the numbers
Someone claimed credit that wasn’t his
Someone trusted the leadership
Someone got a bonus
Someone asked for a raise
Someone wondered how long this could be profitable
Someone repeated over and over “Business is business”
Someone expressed pride in these crematory ovens that served the Fatherland