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by Ken Sehested

Veterans Day doesn’t lend itself to commercial attention like its twin, Memorial Day, probably because it’s squeezed between two other cash-registering holidays, Halloween and Thanksgiving, and it does not coincide with a car-cultural observance like the Indy 500 auto race.

But it is a federal holiday, what was originally called Armistice (or Remembrance) Day, marking the cessation of World War I hostilities on the 11th month of the 11th day at the 11th hour in 1918.

The “remembrance” is stirred by the poem, “In Flanders Field,” written by Canadian John McCrae, a Lieutenant Colonel during the war, from the point of view of the dead, early in that conflict before the war’s romanticism turned to disillusionment.

§  §  §

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place. . . .

§  §  §

Here are four things people of faith should reflect on in this season.

1. The law of unintended consequences is never more apparent than in violent conflict.

World War I, begun in July 1914 between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, quickly spread to numerous other countries due to an interlocking series of alliances. The howls of purported dishonored national glory were provoked by precisely the kind of nationalist assertions favored by the current occupant of the White House’s West Wing.

It was all supposed to be over by Christmas. Instead, it escalated quickly. Given the imperial reach and extractive interests of numerous belligerent nations, soldiers from 28 different countries participated. Nations as far away from Europe as South Africa and Japan participated. And all of this started when a fervent Serbian nationalist assassinated the presumptive heir (and his wife) to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

It was unprecedented carnage. The first day alone of the Battle of the Somme resulted in over 70,000 casualties. By war's end on 11 November 1918, the final tally of vengeance for one assassination had claimed the lives of nearly 40 million combatants and civilians, many times over wounded. Add to that, eight million horses, mules, and donkeys were killed.

Furthermore, the war precipitated the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian genocide, which took the lives of another 1.5 million; and it was a significant factor in “the greatest medical holocaust in history,” the 1918 influenza outbreak, which took the lives of somewhere between 50-100 million people worldwide.

§  §  §

. . . .and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

§  §  §

2. The Great War was the globe’s first industrialized war. The exuberance of humankind’s burst of scientific discovery in the late 19th century dramatically increased the capacity for mechanized killing. Machine guns, submarines, airplanes, and tanks were “force multipliers” (to use current military jargon).

To say nothing of the development chemical weapons—which, though not the most reliable killing apparatus, was far and away the most terrifying. Each of the major powers—France, Britain and Germany—used chemical weapons, though Germany’s use was the most significant. The US developed an even more effective chemical weapon, and sent a specialized chemical warfare unit to Europe; but the war’s end precluded their deployment.

3. In 1954, in the heat of the Cold War’s hysteria, when “God” became the mascot of the “free” world over against the “godless” communists, Armistice (or “Remembrance”) Day was repurposed as “Veterans Day.” In so doing, the work of mourning and incantations resolving never-again were displaced by the celebration of martial prowess.

“Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not,” declared novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a World War II veteran and prisoner of war. “So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.”

§  §  §

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

§  §  §

4. Writers as far back as the Napoleonic Wars noted the sudden appearance of the red poppy on battlefields, but it was McCrae’s grief-inspired poem that highlighted the association.

That bit of verse led to the tradition, especially in the United Kingdom and several of its commonwealth allies, but also in the U.S., of wearing artificial flowers resembling red poppies as a symbol of mournful remembrance of the war’s incalculable suffering, along with the resolve to never again commit such atrocities. (The Allies advertised the fight as “The war to end all wars.”)

What we now know is that in soils like that of Flanders, a thin crust of alkaline is released when the ground is disturbed, as happens with bombardment and grave digging. The soil becomes acidic, choking most growth. But poppies thrive in such war-spoiled botanical conditions.

The red poppy is not a floral triumph. Rather, it is the ground’s tear, resulting from the soil’s hemorrhage. It is a judgment lodged against the despoiling of earth’s fertility—and against all mortal “faith” requiring the blood of sacralizing violence as the price of “redemption.”

§  §  §

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
  If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

§  §  §

We are left to wonder if McCrae, when urging those who came after to “Take up our quarrel with the foe,” had any inkling of how rapidly foes would multiply.

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©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested
10 October 2019

“The Amazon is not burning—it is being burned.”

§  §  §

        Years ago, on a speaking assignment in Brazil, I flew to Rio de Janeiro, where I was met by several new acquaintances. After introductions and handshakes, we drove into the city to where I would be staying for the week.

        On our way, we drove along a highway below Corcovado Mountain, on whose perch sits the famous “Christ the Redeemer” statue, for many years the tallest in the world.

        I craned my neck to get a view; and then quietly mumbled, “Don’t jump! Don’t jump!” It was just loud enough to be overheard. At which point the car erupted in laughter.

        I knew then that my new friends shared my streak of irreverence, particularly over frivolous escapades of public piety, with which the powerful almost always disguise their intrigues.

        Brazil (spelled Brasil by its citizens) is getting more attention in recent months, primarily because of the massive fires raging in the Amazon rainforest, most of which is within Brazil’s boundary, but also stretches into eight neighboring countries. This year nearly over 72,00 fires have broken out, an increase of 80% over the same period in 2018.

        Sometimes referred to as the earth’s lungs, the forest supplies some 20% of the world’s oxygen and sequesters a quarter of the carbon dioxide absorbed by the world’s forests. But the forest is also home to an estimated 300,000 indigenous people belonging to hundreds of distinct tribes. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution explicitly stipulates that population’s claim to the land.

        Here in North America we’ve come to learn that wildfires are part of our forests’ ecosystem. But not so with rainforests. The Amazon, as has been said, is not burning—it is being burned. And this is bad news, not just for those living in the region, but for the entire planet.

        The reasons for the forest’s scorching, along with the displacement of its indigenous residents, are as old as its geologic formation: the seemingly inexhaustible demands for “development.” Meaning, more stuff. Growth as a measure of girth. The extractive impulse, where calculations of progress are left in the hands of corporations and financiers and those doing their bidding.

        Cattle farmers and plantations want to squeeze more “productivity” from the land. Loggers want its timber. Miners want its metals, minerals, and gemstones. The quickest way to gain access is to torch it.

        Adding to these damages are droughts compounded by climate change. Normally “fire-proof” rainforests are more susceptible to burning.

        Environmental activists and advocates for the health of local communities face growing peril. In 2018, in Brazil alone, 70 were murdered. Few assailants are brought to justice.

        Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro—referred to as the “Trump of the Tropics” for his right-wing proclivities—made accelerated economic development of the rainforest a key pledge in his 2018 presidential campaign, and existing environmental laws are routinely ignored.

§  §  §

Life in Amazonia has perhaps never before been so threatened “by environmental destruction and
exploitation and by the systematic violation of the basic human rights of the Amazon population. . . .”
—Brazilian Roman Catholic Cardinal Claudio Hummes, in his opening remarks to the
“Synod of Bishops on the Amazon,” currently (6-27 October 2019) meeting in Rome

§  §  §

        Prior to the Western media’s coverage of the Amazon fires, North Americans knew little of Brazil. Some recall coverage of the 2016 Olympic games there. Some know about the extravagant Carnival parades, overshadowing the Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans just prior to Lent; or the famed soccer player Pelé; or the country’s renowned Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. I didn’t know prior to my trip that more African slaves disembarked in Brazil than in any other country during the 16th-18th century Atlantic slave trade.

Right: Tanks on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 31 May 1964, start of the US-backed military coup

        I would venture that even fewer of my fellow citizens know that the US encouraged, organized, and supplied a 1964 coup d’état creating a military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for 21 years.

        Declassified documents released in 1974 revealed that the US government actively plotted to overthrow the democratically elected government of President João Goulart, including orchestration with key Brazilian military leaders and the resources of a US naval carrier group, which transported ammunition, oil, gasoline and other war materiel.

        “I think one of our important jobs is to strengthen the spine of the [Brazilian] military," US Ambassador Lincoln Gordon told the President [Kennedy] and his advisor, Richard Goodwin, according to a secretly taped meeting in the Oval Office with Kennedy on 30 July 1962. Kennedy would be assassinated before the coup commenced on 31 March 1964; President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the actual go-ahead.

        Paramount among US fears of the Goulart government was its relative independence, a risky stance in the geopolitics of the Cold War; Goulart’s promise to remove Western companies’ control of Brazilian oil production, along with other social and economic reforms; and the ever-present US fear of communism.

        Latin America “has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power,” said Under-Secretary of State Robert Olds in 1927 testimony to Congress, “while those we do not recognize and support fail.”

§  §  §

“When I give people food, they call me a saint. When I ask why there is no food, they call me a communist.”
—Brazilian Archbishop (1964-1985) Hélder Câmara

§  §  §

        Of special note is the way religious piety is manipulated during this history. In the months leading up to the coup, a coalition of right-wing sectors in Brazil organized a march to protest Goulart’s rule, under the banner of “Marches of the Family with God for Freedom.” Then, during Bolsonaro’s campaign, his party’s popular motto was “Brasil above everything, God above everyone” (eerily parallel to Trump’s “America First” slogan).

        During a 2016 trip to Israel, Bolsonaro, a professed Catholic, asked prominent Pentecostal pastor (and head of Brazil’s Christian Social Party) Everaldo Pereira to baptize him in the Jordan River in a flagrant attempt to cement his political ties to Brazil’s sizeable, deeply conservative evangelical Christian community.

        In his book, “The Future Church,” journalist John L. Allen Jr. noted that in 1969, then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller predicted that “The Catholic Church has stopped being a trusted ally of the US, and on the contrary is transforming itself into a danger because it raises the consciousness of the people.” The governor went on to recommend that the US support fundamentalist Protestant groups in Latin America.

        A few years later, in 1982, a group of President Ronald Reagan’s advisors, meeting in Santa Fe shortly before Reagan’s trip to Rome for a meeting with the Pope, openly discussed how to deal with theological trends in Latin America. In their “Santa Fe Document” they wrote that “American foreign policy must begin to counterattack liberation theology.” It accused liberation theologians of using the church “as a political weapons against private property and productive capitalism by infiltrating the religious community with ideas that are less Christian than Communist.”

        Clearly, the mantle of authority granted to “Christ the Redeemer” is contested by conflicting loyalties and incompatible claims. The stakes are high, and the spirits must be tested (cf. 1 John 4:1).

        The desolation caused by the fires could be a mirror into which not just Brazilians but all of us, particularly those of us in the US, can peer to get a more accurate picture of who we have become. And, maybe, of whom, for whom, and by Whom we wish to be.

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©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested
12 September 2018

“For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation
and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death.”
—2 Corinthians 7:10

        We are in a maelstrom of historical markers and liturgical import. For people of faith, it points to a significant fork in the road.

        On the one hand, we may choose an escalation of conceited policies, gluttonous consumption, and imperial threats, on and on—not world without end, for it will surely end if, by no other cause, choking to death on our own excretion.

        On the other hand, we might acknowledge our rancorous ways, reweave the tears in our social fabric, choose the public good over private gain, harness our public polity and economic productivity to the governance of sustainable development, shared bounty, and international cooperation.

        I’m not optimistic that we have learned that indignity and violence beget more of the same; that, as Admiral Michael Mullen, former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We cannot kill our way to victory.” But let’s assess where we are.

§  §  §

“When Solomon depicts the love G‑d harbors for His nation,
he writes (Song of Songs 8:5): “Beneath the apple tree I
aroused you[r love].” Eating an apple on Rosh Hashanah
is an attempt to remind G‑d of our age-old love.
—Rabbi Baruch S. Davidson[1]

§  §  §

        We stand in the middle of the “Days of Awe,” the 10-day period linking Judaism’s two High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; between “happy new year” (by Jewish reckoning, year 5779), where the haunting of old failures gives way to new possibilities, to the confirmation of the Day of Atonement’s embrace accompanied by earth’s renewal. The journey entails the resolve of acknowledging the ways we ourselves, and our body politic, have fallen short and jumped the tracks. This is the aim of penitential living.

        By what capacity might this happen? It is the prospect of mercy abetting wrath, the removal of shame, the possibility of a new beginning that enables our turning around, embracing the strenuous labor of repairing broken relations and enacting just policies.

        Reflected in Rosh Hashanah’s wake, in the delight of the world begun anew, our lives are thereby inscribed in the Book of Life, then sealed on Yom Kippur. Jews greet each other on Rosh Hashanah with the Hebrew phrase L’shana tovah, the abbreviated rendition of L’shanah tovah tikatev v’taihatem (“May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year”).

        At-one-ment. On earth, as in heaven. Able again to go out in joy, be led back in peace, the hills bursting in song, the trees in applause (Isaiah 55:12).

§  §  §

“The Messenger of God (peace and blessings be upon him) said: When God created
the creation, he inscribed upon the Throne, “My Mercy overpowers My wrath.”[2]

§  §  §

        Today is also first day of Muharram, the first month in the Islamic Hijri calendar, marking Muhammad’s forced migration from Mecca to Medina, this now being year 1440 for Muslims. The Hebrew Rosh HaShanah is etymologically related to the Arabic Ras as-Sanah, the name Muslims give for the Islamic New Year. [Note: Jewish, Islamic, and Christian calendars are calibrated differently—special observances do not always overlap across traditions.]

        As it happens[3], we are also marking the anniversary of 9/11, the date in 2001 when foreign terrorists, using rudimentary weapons, employed our own technology to strike both World Trade Center towers in New York City, the twin symbols of global financial dominance, and the Pentagon, symbol of global military might. A fourth plane, crashed in Pennsylvania, may have been headed for the White House.

        As it also happens, we are near the 15 September anniversary of the 1963 bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls and traumatizing a city—Birmingham—nicknamed “Bombingham” for the sheer number of terrorist bombings it endured. The strike on 16th Street came less than three weeks after the soaring inspiration of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 28 August March on Washington, where a quarter of a million people were ecstatically immersed in the vision and promise of the Dream for which that occasion is remembered.

Right: The bomb blast of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham blew Jesus' head out of a stained glass window.

        The 16th Street conquest, carried out by home grown terrorists that our nation has long sheltered, knocked the Dream out of its orbit, where it wobbles, still, today. And our electorate has installed as president a man who dares say aloud what most, if not all, others have silently affirmed:

        “Real power is (I hate to use the word) fear.”[4]

        Add to this the US military doctrine known as “Shock and Awe,” first used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which calls for using massive military force to degrade a population’s infrastructure (water, sanitation, power, etc., all of which violates international law) sufficient to provoke trembling terror, collapsing the will to carry on.[5] This kind of awe is the polar opposite of that coming from the promised new city, whose residents “will be in awe and will tremble at the abundant prosperity and peace I provide for it” (Jeremiah 33:9).

§  §  §

“I will speak against those who cheat employees of their wages,
who oppress widows and orphans, or who deprive the foreigners living
among you of justice, for these people do not fear me, says the Lord Almighty.”
—Malachi 3:5

§  §  §

        Those conversant with the language of Scripture will say, well, of course. Everywhere you turn in the Bible it’s fear of the Lord, fear of the Lord. What’s not to like in our president’s conclusion (and near-global consensus)?

        Does not this recognition alone undermine all religious appeal to confession and forgiveness, penitence and reparation, a promised atonement through which “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6)? Isn’t it all just a big mob-conspired protection racket? A pyramid of escalating overlords, beginning in the intimate relations of home and stretching to cosmic proportion?

        People of faith—and here I speak specifically to my own Christian community—have a helluva lot of work to do to even get a public hearing, not to mention bringing a coherent, convincing case. To put it precisely, what is to be said about the option of penitential living constituting the rule of faith, that distinguishes its pursuit as a trustworthy alternative to what, from all appearance, is the inevitable reign of fear and its trembling wake? Mining the depths of the Jewish tradition’s understanding of Rosh Hashanah (the prospect of beginning anew) and Yom Kippur (penitence as the key to bounty and freedom) is an urgent undertaking.

§  §  §

“Prayers of confession are usually short or long, depending on where
clergy want to focus the congregation’s attention. Usually, such
prayers are throw-aways, diversions. Everyone knows that the
congregation is going to go on as if the prayer had never been
offered. Especially for the affluent and empowered, prayers
of confession are prayed quite easily. Lunch is right
around the corner. Gated homes await them.”
—Marc Ellis, “Communal confession on Yom Kippur”[6]

§  §  §

        Our problem begins with this rather obvious fact: Our principal association with penitence and confession is self-abasement. The primary dictionary definition of penance is “voluntary self-punishment inflicted as an outward expression of repentance for having done wrong.” Do a web search for images of “penance” and much of what you will get are pictures of people literally whipping themselves.

        Karl Marx was not the first, nor the last, to conclude that religion is more or less a form of crowd control, with God as the ultimate godfather with, by extension, stately powers of all sorts serving as underbosses. That the latter are often in violent conflict with each other confirms, rather than questions, this conclusion.

        Conflict mediation specialist Byron Bland writes that two truths make healthy community difficult: that the past cannot be undone, and that the future cannot be controlled. However, two counterforces are available to address these: the practice of forgiveness, which has the power to change the logic of the past; and covenant-making, which creates islands of stability and reliability in a faithless, sometimes ruthless world.[7]

§  §  §

“Repentance is the response to grace that overcomes the past and
opens onto a new future. Repentance distinguishes Christian
life as one of struggle and conversion and pervades it, not
with remorse, but with hope. The message of Jesus is not
‘Repent’ but ‘Repent for the Kingdom of God is near.’”
—John Shea[8]

§  §  §

        Yom Kippur does not mean self-abasement. It is not a day for self-reviling and personal shame; it is not a day for groveling in the presence of the divine, as if God takes pleasure in punishing and condemning us—much less watching us punish and condemn ourselves or each other.

        God is not a sadist. And the call to confession and repentance is not a form of masochism.

        In Judaism, the focus of Yom Kippur’s call to repentance is not resignation and despair over our weakness and sin (great as they are), but renewal and hope, the chance to start again.

        The purpose of repentance is not retaliation but restoration; the focus is not on exacting revenge but on enacting repair.

        The function of repentance is summed up in the Hebrew phrase with origins in the second century CE Mishnah: “Tikkun olam,” repair of the world.

        Tikkun olam: This is the driving force behind all of Scripture.

        Tikkun olam: This is the purpose of God.

        Tikkun olam: This was the mission of Jesus.

        Tikkun olam: This is the animating power of the Holy Spirit.

        The practice of tikkun olam, played out in the Newer Testament’s terms, is the basis of Jesus’ command to love enemies.

        Tikkun olam: In the words of the Apostle Paul, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21).

        Tikkun olam: By its posture and practice all lording behavior is unveiled, stands under judgment, and is destined for perdition.

§  §  §

“‘Fear of God’ is not cowering, frightened intimidation. Those who fear God
are not wimps and are not preoccupied with excessive need to please God.
They are rather those who have arrived at a fundamental vision of reality
about life with God, who have enormous power, freedom, and energy
to live out that vision. ‘Fear of God’ is liberating and not restrictive,
because it gives confidence about the true shape of the world.
—Walter Brueggemann[9]

§  §  §

        The wreckage wrought by human behavior is real; but the future is not thereby fated. Mercy opens a portal to repentance, a repentance signified not so much as creedal precision, or ritual purity, or counting spiritual calories, as by the hard work of repairing the damage done by our disordered desires.

        Repentance is not about you or me. It is about a world created in delight, maintained by the prerogative of divine mercy, and destined for deliverance from its agony—though not by dread’s might, nor by fear’s fright, but by my spirit says the Blessed One (cf. Zechariah 4:6).

        The longing for vengeance, which we all feel when violated in ways large and small, is rooted in the demands of justice. But retaliation almost always escalates the cycle of violence, until it becomes self-perpetuating: an eye not just for an eye, but for a piece of scalp, too, and on and on until the whole world is not simply blinded but obliterated.

        Workers of mercy are not sheepish well-wishers but daredevils: Guided by beatific vision, steeled by fear-conquering faith, and informed by strategic calculation, intent on interrupting the cycle of enmity, sowing a culture of peace to yield a harvest of justice (cf. Hosea 10:12 and James 3:18).

        If—as people of faith are fond of saying—God is not done with us, then neither can we be done with each other. The failure to love enemies is a hedge on Jesus. The only toll on the road to Heaven is a broken neighbor as a companion.

§  §  §

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear;
for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever
fears has not reached perfection in love.”
—1 John 4:18

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©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

[1]Chabad.org

[2] Imam Bukhari and Muslim b. al-Hajjaj ahadith (official collections of oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad).

[3] Both Jewish and Islamic calendars are lunar and do not sync with the modern Gregorian solar calendar. Thus, dates for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and other special Jewish holidays occur at different times of the commonplace year. For more see “A Gentile’s Guide to the Jewish Holidays,” Judaism 101.

[4] Presidential candidate Donald Trump in a 31 March 2016 interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Washington Post

[5] For more see Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock And Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (National Defense University, 1996), XXIV

[6] Mondoweiss, quoting Rabbi Brant Rosen’s confession to be read during his congregation’s Yom Kippur service

[7] Stanford Report https://news.stanford.edu/news/2001/february14/byron-214.html

[8] The Challenge of Jesus, p. 4.

[9] Remember You Are Dust, p. 17