news from syracuse
reading the syracuse post-standard on my porch in skaneateles with a cup of coffee, a muffin, and an unexpected morning off:
state trooper shootings shake up the community, suspect found dead “in the wreckage of a house destroyed by a towering fire after a police raided it [sic] Wednesday evening.” Cause of fire unknown. “I cannot tell you whether he was dead or alive when the fire started.” … an art student who makes mock meth labs and pipe bombs and then displays them on end tables or inside teddy bears to provoke thought on the everyday nature of their components runs into trouble with his university public safety division … Stephen Hawking gets a complimentary ride today on a commercial “zero-gravity” flight, expects weightlessness to be “bliss” … a drunk German man is found sleeping in the foyer of his bank at 4:15 am with his horse standing nearby – “Aside from an undesirable deposit made by the horse inside the building, the man – who has an account at the bank – had not breached any bank rules.” … a man in a Captain America costume was arrested for disorderly conduct after groping a woman during a costumed bar crawl – “Several patrons who had also dressed as Captain America were asked to step outside so the woman could identify the suspect.” … the veracity of the civilian death toll in Iraq, as reported by Iraqi officials, is questioned … the House passes an Oct. 1 pullout start date by 10 votes but a veto is expected if it passes the Senate … the Dow breaks records … the country grapples with the VT shootings … the death penalty is proposed in NY state for killing law enforcement officers … a one paragraph nod to a Harvard professor with a new book on terrorism that includes the advice: “Addressing the demands of terrorists should not always be dismissed as appeasement.” …
I stare at the lake and marvel at how we take so much comfort in our ability to scoff and tell people to grow up as we hurry past the headlines and flip to the sudoku.
I think we don’t want to admit that our lives are becoming a daily devotional to a series of gimmicks that we hope will keep the pane of glass between us and the enemy opaque enough that we can pretend we never even knew it was there.
We don’t want to think about what causes other people’s glass to break because we’re afraid that if we make eye contact it will sweep across the room, kiss us on both cheeks, and greet us by our first name while asking about the kids and the dog.
The enemy is not terrorism. It is desperation. And we all know its face.
April 26th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Tears in my eyes.
Cindy Sheehan is asking mothers to converge on D.C. the day after Mother’s Day and remain there until the war is ended or we are arrested. My friend asks whether going would be an act of hope or an act of desperation.
In order to graduate from seminary, I had to write about whether I knew my way back from despair. I told the truth. I said no. I don’t think there is a way back. There is only a way through. A way forward. A way beyond.
Rebecca Parker is president of my seminary. She wrote an essay called “After the Apocalypse” in which she talks about how our culture is influenced by the expectation that disaster is looming and about to descend. She suggests we can quit dreading the apocalypse because it has already happened. Violent upheaval, terrible travail, rivers of blood – all this has already happened and is happening even now. The question is, how shall we live in the face of it?
Her answer is that living after the apocalypse requires three things. First, is remembering. If we fail to remember we let history be written by those who want to pretend that everything is okay. And the opaque windows become brick walls. [The ancient wisdom is true that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.] Second, we must speak our own truth. Our doubts and fears, even our despair, is precious truth. This, of course, is related to remembering. Finally, we salvage what we can from among the ruins and use it to build communities of caring.
When the glass breaks and I survey the ruins before me, one of the first things I notice is that the air has new texture and richness. It is moving across my face. There is grace in the vastness of the world.
Rumi says, “When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools. Dig a way out through the bottom, to the ocean. There lies a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope. If the hopers knew, they’d feel slighted.”
And he ends by saying, “Look as long as you can at the one you love whether that one is moving away from you or coming back toward you again.”
I want my eyes to look only for love. To survey the wreckage for signs of anything that might be used on love’s behalf to make a difference right now. I want to be glad when the window breaks.
April 26th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
i’m not sure that the window has to break. i’m not sure that we have to view what is on the other side as despair. i think we might be able to clean the glass and open some doors we never noticed before. i think part of the problem might be seeing hope and despair as the only options, and labeling one as success and the other as failure. i think the reason we fog up the windows is that we don’t think there’s supposed to be anything on that side of the wall. but there is. and i think if we could embrace that we’d have a lot more energy for creative problem solving. i think that hope and despair are two sides of the same wall and clinging to either keeps us from figuring out how to walk into the next room.
or something like that.
cuz that all sounds a bit uppity, now don’t it?!
;)
i agree that there is no way back, only forward, and that figuring out how to live now is the question before us. i don’t want to look only for love, though. i think fear shows me where love needs to go.
hopefully that doesn’t sound dismissive. just trying to figure out that whole speak my own truth thing.
luckily, i have good teachers. <3