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What Are the Wounds of War?

2008-05-15T16:17:00.001-04:00

Military Debates Purple Heart Awards For Mental Stress

By YOCHI J. DREAZENMay 13, 2008; Page A11
WASHINGTON -- Centuries before Iraq and Afghanistan, George Washington created the Purple Heart to honor troops wounded in combat.
Matthew Leake
But with an increasing number of troops being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, the modern military is debating an idea Gen. Washington never considered -- awarding one of the nation's top military citations to veterans with psychological wounds, not just physical ones.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered cautious support for such a change on a trip to a military base in Texas this month.
"It's an interesting idea," Mr. Gates said in response to a question. "I think it is clearly something that needs to be looked at."
The Pentagon says it isn't formally considering a change in policy at this point, but Mr. Gates's comments sparked a heated debate on military blogs, message boards and email lists. The dispute reflects a broader question roiling the military: Can psychological traumas, no matter how debilitating, be considered equivalent to dismembering physical wounds?
Supporters of awarding the Purple Heart to veterans with PTSD believe the move would reduce the stigma that surrounds the disorder and spur more soldiers and Marines to seek help without fear of limiting their careers.
The High Price Paid
"These guys have paid at least as high a price, some of them, as anybody with a traumatic brain injury, as anybody with a shrapnel wound," John Fortunato, who runs a military PTSD treatment facility in Texas, told reporters recently. Absent a policy change, Dr. Fortunato told reporters, troops will mistakenly believe that PTSD is a "wound that isn't worthy."
Opponents argue that the Purple Heart should be reserved for physical injuries, as has been the case since the medal was reinstituted by Congress in 1932. Military regulations say the award should go to troops with injuries "received in action with an enemy." Some opponents also note that PTSD can be faked, which can't easily be done with a physical wound.
"The Purple Heart was meant to be a badge of honor to show you were wounded in battle," says Bob Mackey, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who fought in the first and second Iraq wars. "I've been in combat three times. There's stuff I've had to deal with. But it's substantially different from being physically hurt."
The biggest difference, he says, is that some veterans may be diagnosed with PTSD even if they never saw combat or fought an enemy -- requirements, historically, for receiving a Purple Heart.
Lasting Torment
Military historians believe that the syndrome now known as PTSD -- usually characterized by nightmares, sleeplessness and anxiety -- has been around for as long as humans have gone to war.
The American Psychological Association formally recognized PTSD in 1980, and the term quickly entered the popular imagination as a way of describing the suffering of veterans emotionally traumatized by what they had seen or done in Vietnam.
Today, PTSD is emerging as one of the signature maladies of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which lack clear front lines and pit U.S. forces against enemies who operate out of densely packed civilian areas.
A recent California-based research institution Rand Corp. study concluded that 300,000 of the military personnel who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan have symptoms of the disorder, which can sometimes lead to suicide. The report found tragedies closely linked to the development of PTSD: Half of the 1.6 million troops who spent time in the two war zones had friends who were seriously wounded or killed, while about 45% saw dead or wounded civilians.
The young soldiers and Marines serving in Iraq and Afghanistan came of age in a culture obsessed with therapy and mental disease, but the Rand study suggests that today's troops are no more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than those who fought in Vietnam. A 2006 study in the journal Science estimated that 18.7% of Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD, a figure virtually identical to Rand's estimate for veterans of the current wars.
Military officers and psychologists fear that veterans of the two wars will suffer mental-health problems for decades to come, a largely hidden cost of the current conflicts.
"There's a financial cost to this, but more importantly there'll be a cost in lives if we don't get a handle on this problem now," Sen. Christopher Bond (R., Mo.) said in a recent interview. He is crafting a new bill designed to improve veterans' mental-health care.
Sen. Bond's bill would allow active-duty soldiers suffering from mental-health problems to use the much-larger network of Veterans Administration facilities and treatment centers. It would also train veterans to offer psychological assistance to other returning service personnel.
The Stigma
Many military personnel are reluctant to seek counseling for PTSD because they are afraid that seeking help would harm their careers. A recent survey by the American Psychiatric Association found that 75% of military personnel felt that asking for assistance would reduce their chances for promotion.
"There's a real fear that admitting to mental illness will mean being stigmatized," said Carolyn Robinowitz, the organization's president.
The Pentagon's Mr. Gates has worked hard to dispel that stigma, recently pushing through a rule change allowing military personnel to get counseling for PTSD without having it negatively affect their security clearances.
The question of whether veterans suffering from PTSD should be eligible for the Purple Heart is a deeply emotional issue for military personnel and their families.
Carol Schultz Vento's father, Arthur, was a World War II veteran who took part in the D-Day invasion and won a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts during his service in Europe.
"From my perspective, the PTSD impaired his functioning more than the physical injuries," she says.
Ms. Vento is working on a book about the emotional traumas World War II veterans like her father suffered, and believes PTSD victims should be eligible for the Purple Heart.
"But for their war experiences, those veterans would not have been traumatized and struggle to adapt to postwar life -- and some don't make it," she says.
Robert Certain is a retired Air Force colonel who was shot down over Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1972 and held as a prisoner of war. He received a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts and later became an Air Force chaplain and Episcopal priest.
'Obvious to the Warrior'
Mr. Certain suffered severe depression in the 1980s and was formally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2000.
Mr. Certain says that he is conflicted about whether veterans with PTSD should be eligible for the Purple Heart. In his own case, the disorder wasn't diagnosed until decades after the Vietnam War ended but he believes that making troops suffering from the disorder eligible for the award might persuade more of them to seek help.
In an email, he wrote: "The scars resulting from PTSD are almost all invisible to the observer, but always obvious to the warrior who has them."

MOURNERS' KADDISH IN TIME OF WAR AND VIOLENCE

2008-05-05T12:31:00.000-04:00

[The Jewish prayer that is used to mourn the dead is the Kaddish, though it has in it only one word -- "nechamata, consolations" - which hints at mourning. In this version, changes in the last line of the Hebrew and English texts specifically include praying for shalom, peace, not only for the people Israel (as in the traditional version) but also for the children of Abraham and Hagar through Ishmael (Arabs and Muslims) and for all who dwell on this planet. [The interpretive English addresses the meaning of "shmei rabbah," the "Great Name," which is interpreted as that name which includes all the names of all beings in the universe and which is also present within all beings. [The interpretive English suggests why in the midst of saying we cannot praise or sing to God enough to fully celebrate the Awesome Reality, we also say we cannot CONSOLE (nechamata) God enough. In our view, while many forms of death are part of the great spiral of all life, one kind of death -- the killing of one human, bearing the Image of God, by another -- leaves God inconsolable. [in the next-to-last verse this version focuses on preserving life for those of our own "family," the Godwrestlers, and then in the last verse it prays for shalom for us [those immediately present], for all the Godwrestling folk (Israel), for all the children of Ishmael, and for all peoples. [This Kaddish was developed by The Shalom Center and Rabbi Arthur Waskow.] Yitgadal V'yit'kadash Shmei Rabah May the Great Name, through our expanding awareness and our fuller action, lift Itself to become still higher and more holy; May our names, along with all the names of all the beings in the universe, live within the Great Name; May the names of all whom we can no longer touch but who have touched our hearts and lives, remain alight within our memories and in the Great Name; May the names of all who have died in violence and war be kept alight in our sight and in the Great Name, with sorrow that we were not yet able to shape a world in which they would have lived. May the Great Name, bearing ALL these names, live within each one of us; (Cong: Amein) B'alma di vra chi'rooteh v'yamlich malchuteh b'chayeichun, u'v'yomeichun, u'v'chayei d'chol beit yisrael, b'agalah u'vzman kariv, v'imru: Amein: -- May Your Great Name lift Itself still higher and more holy throughout the world that You have offered us, a world of majestic peaceful order that gives life to the Godwrestling folk through time and through eternity ---- And let's say, Amein (Cong: Amein) Y'hei sh'mei rabbah me'vorach l'olam almei almaya. So therefore may the Great Name be blessed, through every Mystery and Mastery of every universe. Yitbarach, v'yishtabach, v'yitpa'ar, v'yitromam, v'yitnasei, v'yithadar, v'yit'aleh, v'yithalal -- Shmei di'kudshah, -- Brich hu, (Cong: Brich Hu) May the Great Name be blessed and celebrated, Its beauty honored and raised high; may It be lifted and carried, may Its radiance be praised in all Its Holiness --- Blessed be! L'eylah min kol bir'chatah v'shir'atah tush'be'chatah v'nechematah, de'amiran be'alma, v'imru: Amein (Cong: Amein) Even though we cannot give You enough blessing, enough song, enough praise, enough consolation to match what we wish to lay before You - And though we know that today there is no way to console You when among us some who bear Your Image in our being are slaughtering others who bear Your Image in our being. Yehei Shlama Rabah min Shemaya v'chayyim aleinu v'al kol Yisrael, v'imru Amein. Still we beseech that from the unity of Your Great Name flow great harmony and joyful life for the Godwrestling folk; (Cong: Amein) Oseh Shalom bi'm'romav, hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu v'al kol yisrael v'al kol yishmael v'al kol yoshvei tevel -- v'imru: Amein. You who make harmony in the ultimate reaches of the universe, teach us to make harmony within ourselves, among ourselves -- and peace for the Godwrestling folk, the people Israel; for our cousins the children of Ishmael; and for all who dwell upon this planet.(Cong: Amein) Oseh Shalom bi'm'romav, hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu v'al kol yisrael v'al kol yishmael v'al kol yoshvei tevel -- v'imru: Amein. =====================================================

Passover Becomes a Rallying Cry for Progressives

2008-04-22T14:13:00.000-04:00

By Anthony WeissThu. Apr 17, 2008

Activists are hoping that as Jews sit down at their Seder tables this year, they will turn their thoughts not just to ancient Egypt but to Sudan, Tibet and even the polar ice caps.
Jewish groups have sponsored a spate of new Haggadahs, additional readings, and supplemental rituals and symbols in an attempt to put social justice on the Passover table.
Though many Jews associate Passover with home and family, it has in recent times become the most political holiday in the Jewish calendar. Each year, Jewish activists and organizations publish new Haggadahs and offer new rituals to introduce contemporary political issues into the celebration of Passover. Interracial and interfaith Seders have become staples of Jewish outreach. Now, Jewish activists are seeing a new upsurge in attempts to connect Passover’s themes to hot-button social issues.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who helped usher in the contemporary era of Jewish activism with his “Freedom Seder,” says that the activist message of Passover has resonated with today’s political climate.
Passover “is about change,” he told the Forward. “It’s about social change, it’s about overthrowing a pharaoh. It’s about the earth itself rising up. All the reasons I did the Freedom Seder [almost] 40 years ago are exactly on point.”
Waskow wrote and organized his Freedom Seder in 1969, drawing on both traditional liturgy and texts by non-Jews such as Mahatma Gandhi to speak about the injustice of racial inequality. That spawned a host of followers; over the next few decades, the Freedom Seder was joined by feminist Seders, gay rights Seders, labor Seders, Soviet Jewry Seders and environmental Seders.
“Modern liberation Haggadahs have some long legs, historically,” said Rabbi Burt Visotzky, a professor of Jewish texts at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. “Jews did have a tendency to read themselves into text, and their political situation, throughout history.”
Many of the modern alterations have broken with Jewish tradition in focusing not on particularly Jewish issues but on more universal concerns. One such example this year is the project called An Unlit Candle, which urges Jews to place an unlit candle on their Seder table in protest of the recent Chinese government crackdown in Tibet. Jay Michaelson, one of the organizers (and a regular contributor to the Forward), said that he was encouraged by both the symbolism of candles and light in Jewish ceremony and by seeing the Olympic torch extinguished during the recent protests in Paris.
“In Jewish tradition, candles are symbols of light and freedom,” he said. “The idea is that the Tibetans’ light has not been lit. We’re celebrating what they don’t have.”
The Chinese government has become an ever-more frequent target for Jewish activism in recent weeks. American Jewish World Service, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the Religious Action Center — the political arm of the Union for Reform Judaism — have all called on the United States to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics as a rebuke for Beijing’s human rights abuses. At the same time, Orthodox rabbis Yitz Greenberg and Haskell Lookstein have circulated a petition among fellow Jewish leaders, urging Jewish tourists to boycott the Beijing Olympics.
For Passover, the JCPA and AJWS have also teamed up with two non-Jewish organizations, the Save Darfur Coalition and Tents of Hope, to create a Darfur-themed Seder. The Darfur Seder includes a pause for participants to phone their elected officials, as well as a petition that can be sent to China’s special envoy to Darfur. The Seder concludes with the words “Next year without genocide.”
The Seder themes of oppression and redemption have also become rhetorical symbols in non-Jewish settings. On April 17, UNITE HERE, a union of textile workers and hospitality workers, organized a rally outside the offices of Goldman Sachs in downtown Manhattan to advocate higher wages for the company’s cafeteria workers. Though few of the cafeteria workers are Jewish, the rally will feature a mock Seder along with Passover songs.
Oppression is a common political theme, but some organizations have chosen to focus on Passover’s roots as a springtime holiday and to turn the focus to the earth itself. Waskow is the director of The Shalom Center, a social activism organization that has issued a Seder supplement focusing on environmental issues, particularly global warming.
“Maybe in our generation for the first time, when we look at the plagues, we can look at them and say, Oh, I recognize that — those are ecological disasters. That’s a climate disaster,” he told the Forward. “Suddenly, through eyes of where we live now, that exodus is also about the earth.”

Once We Were Strangers Editorial

2008-04-22T12:28:00.001-04:00

Thu. Apr 10, 2008
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Every year at the first full moon of spring, on the 14th day of the biblical month of Nisan, Jews all around the world gather with their families to re-enact their ancestors’ flight from Egyptian slavery. Passover is the most familiar ritual on the Jewish calendar, bringing together Jews of every stripe, the devout and the distant, to share a meal and tell our people’s story. More than any other day, Passover touches us and draws us close because it bears a message that is so instantly recognizable, at once universal and uniquely Jewish: liberation from bondage and oppression.
It is universal because it gives voice to a yearning shared by people everywhere — to be free, to walk in dignity, to enjoy the fruits of our own labor. The legacy of Israel’s exodus from Egypt has been taken up worldwide by those who struggle against their taskmasters, whether European peasants or African slaves. And yet, it is uniquely Jewish because it is indeed our own legacy, the tale of our origin. We remember our humble roots with pride, knowing that our particular story has become the human story.
We remember, and yet we forget. Once, the memory of our oppression made us reach out to others. Now it makes us draw into ourselves. Ritual tells us to remember the stranger as we were strangers in Egypt, to invite all who are hungry to come eat.
But now we shrink from the stranger. We close our doors in fear. In this incomprehensible, upside-down world in which we live today, it seems that the oppressed, the hungry peoples of the Third World, the children of the new ghettoes, have somehow come to see us — us, the children of slaves! — as the oppressor. We see them coming to us with one hand extended in supplication and the other curled into a fist, and in the end we see only the fist.
Of late, we have taught ourselves to reinterpret the Passover holiday so as to reflect our new understanding of oppression. We are no longer hungry or enslaved, most of us, but we are lost in the desert of our freedom. How do we liberate ourselves from this? Teachers come and go and tell us to find the oppressor within ourselves. They urge us to liberate ourselves from our ego, or to flee the narrow spaces within our hearts, or to free ourselves from our new-found freedom and return to tradition. And so Passover becomes Yom Kippur, a time of inner search, or Shavuot, a celebration of the Law, or Tisha B’Av, a remembrance of every past injury.
All these messages have meaning. They add layers of richness to our Seder table. But they are the dessert, not the meal. Passover is a time, first of all, to speak of real liberation from all-too-real bondage. This Passover is a time to speak of Zimbabwe and Tibet — and perhaps even Gaza. It is a time to remember that we were strangers in Egypt, and to call on all who are hungry to come and eat.

THE MUCH TOO PROMISED LAND

2008-04-22T12:22:00.001-04:00

April 16, 2008
Books of The Times
Advice After Two Decades of Arab-Israeli Diplomacy

By ETHAN BRONNER

America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace
By Aaron David Miller
407 pages. Bantam. $26.
In 1990, after the administration of George H. W. Bush had begun talking with the long-shunned Palestine Liberation Organization in the hope of brokering Middle East peace, one of its groups launched an unsuccessful terrorist attack on a Tel Aviv beach. The P.L.O. leader Yasir Arafat refused to expel those involved or distance himself from the operation. The secretary of state, James A. Baker III, new to Mideast diplomacy and already frustrated by its endless ups and downs, said to an aide, Aaron David Miller, that “if I had another life, I’d want to be a Middle East specialist just like you, because it would mean guaranteed permanent employment.”
In the next 18 years Mr. Baker became something of a Mideast specialist himself, and like Mr. Miller, has not wanted for gainful employment. And in this final year of the George W. Bush administration, Mideast specialists are lining up once again to try to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians, with proposals that look awfully similar to previous ones that failed.
As Mr. Miller, who spent most of the past two decades as a central participant in those efforts, notes in this revealing and well-written memoir, “Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is continuing to try the same approach to solve a problem but expecting different results.”
Mr. Miller, who left government in 2003 and is now a researcher, has a few ideas about how to move forward, but mostly he has sobering tales from the front. He does not spare himself. He recounts, for example, that in 1998, despite many setbacks, he publicly stated that the peace process begun in Oslo in 1993 had reached a point of no return.
“It was as bold (and naïve) an argument as I had ever made,” he writes. He says that even as he felt doubt creeping in, he suppressed it, because the excitement of being part of history outweighed rational analysis.
While Mr. Miller does not prescribe a revolutionary remaking of the peace process, he does devote much of this volume to puncturing what he considers American illusions in the hope that the next round of diplomacy will be more successful. Like his colleagues (including his friend and onetime boss Dennis Ross, who wrote his own account four years ago, “A Missing Peace”), Mr. Miller came to realize that Arafat was highly problematic. But unlike Mr. Ross or Bill Clinton (whose memoir addressed the topic), he argues that the United States has given Israel too much leeway and failed to push it to live up to commitments and make painful choices.
He says Mr. Clinton was far too impressed with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, even suggesting that Mr. Clinton viewed that Israeli soldier-statesman with a filial reverence. He adds, “So we never had a tough or honest conversation with the Israelis on settlement activity.” He also writes, “Long after Rabin’s death, the pattern set by Clinton in the early years would continue. ...”
Mr. Miller, who earned a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from the University of Michigan and in the 1980s wrote two books on Palestinians and the P.L.O. while having almost no contact with actual Palestinians, pitches this book as a kind of nonfiction bildungsroman, taking him from political innocence to a tough maturity. The son of a prominent Jewish family in Cleveland with close Republican ties, Mr. Miller offers a picture of himself as someone who slowly and painfully learns that the Middle East conflict is far more complicated than a contest between good guys and bad.
“When you get to know people by actually sitting down and listening to them,” he writes of the Palestinians, “your views begin to change.” He quotes the Palestinian negotiator and intellectual Hanan Ashrawi as saying that Israelis were given all the carrots, and the Palestinians the sticks, and adds, “She was basically right.”
Apart from such self-criticism, what is unusual about this memoir when compared with other, similar ones is how lively, even irreverent, it is. Mr. Miller is a fine raconteur who fills his pages with real characters and sly observations. When he first met Arafat, he says, he was struck by how much he looked like Ringo Starr in Arab headdress. When the Oslo process was in full bloom, and negotiating sessions were dragging on, Mr. Miller observed at one point in a Jerusalem hotel the Palestinian security chief, Jibril Rajub, and the Israeli Army’s central commander, Shaul Mofaz, jokingly pretend to take a nap in the same bed, a remarkable tableau to contemplate.
In the end Mr. Miller seems to admire most the approach of Mr. Baker, a man who is anathema to most American Jews because of his toughness and lack of sentimentality. But this is precisely Mr. Miller’s point: Israel, he says, needs tough love, and American officials must resist American Jewish pressure to give in always to Israeli demands. Here is his advice for the next president contemplating Arab-Israeli diplomacy: “If you’re not prepared to reassure the locals while cracking heads as needed (and both will be needed), don’t bother.”

Keenan Lecture at Spalding University by Louisville peacemaker Joe Grant on April 3

2008-04-07T12:31:00.001-04:00

© 2008 Joe Grant

Seeing in the Dark
Spiritual Resources for Peace and Justice in Troubled Times

And after the great wind, the terrible earthquake and the spectacular fire, there came a sound like sheer silence.
When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance to the cave. Then there came a voice that said,
“What are you doing here, Elijah?”

Early in the morning on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, they came to the tomb and found it wide open. When they went in they found no-body. Deeply troubled they were suddenly they were dazzled by the brilliance of the messengers, so they buried their faces in fear. And the voice spoke to them saying: “Why do look for the living among the dead?”

Darken the room…
I would like to ask us to take just a few moments to sit together in the dark.
If you have not done so already, please turn off your cell phone.
If you are not in the habit of doing this, I invite you to tuck your cynicism away for the time being (preferably somewhere you won’t be able to find it).
If life has not already done this for you yet, I beg you to lay your certainties down and just for “the now” put to rest any well-crafted answers or sureties you are currently working on. (I’ll give you a few moments for that one.)

Now I implore you to enter the darkness with me … the darkness of not-knowing… the place where real wondering begins… If you want, just for the moment you can close your eyes.
Most of the grace in life comes from learning to receive… so put yourself in a receptive mode…

I realize I am taking a huge risk right now, inviting a bunch of hardworking, committed and conscientious folks to sit quietly in the dark, in comfortable chairs…if you’re like me a trip to movies anymore is an invitation for 90-minute nap. Nonetheless I ask you to close your eyes now that you might see more clearly.

Quiet Still Dark Presence Together

Now, become aware of your breathing… the in and out, the give and take transaction of life… Be attentive to the movement within you- blood rushing back and forth, images that flicker and die.
Become sensitive to the movement of the earth beneath your feet- spinning at 700 miles per hour while we travel at 20 miles per second through darkness we call space.
Let yourself become conscious of all the living that shares life with you – all the breathing and pulsing, chirping and buzzing, scratching and swimming, blossoming and bleeding life that saturates this blue pearl we call mother.

Finally extend a radar sweep, as wide you dare to go, around God’s neighborhood, and make room for the traveling companions with whom we share this singular moment of presence: factory and farm workers, prisoners and police, nurses and nightwalkers, aged and new born, sick and strong; alone and embracing; suffering and celebrating; the killers and the healers; the engaged and the indifferent … the great living sacrament, blessed and broken…

There are a few sore spots I want to draw your heart’s attention to:
Kosovo, Kenya, Congo, Somalia, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tibet, Burma, Sudan…

We pray because there is a vast disproportion between human misery and human compassion. (Heschel)

So, now, just for a moment… I ask you to hold it all… to keep it together, to bear witness. Keep vigil, the night watch, over all these God’s own children… spinning in the dark. And let prayer rise from the dark center, the depth within you …

God IS…
God IS with us…
God IS with US… in the dark!
It is good to be here… with YOU in the dark.

Do you see? You can open your eyes…
Do you see now? You’ve got to BE in the dark to see in the dark.

Light the candle.
By now you’re probably wondering whether you’re in the wrong room, or when the lecture is supposed to start. Certainly this is the strangest kind of lecture I’ve attended and I’m the one giving it!

I have a confession to make… I’m not at all sure about lectures and lecturing. A few weeks ago while I was at table, fully engaged in a “teachable moment” with my teenage children, and just reaching the crescendo of an impassioned dissertation on the importance of making alternative choices, my daughter deflated me with a few curtly delivered words accompanied by some sardonic eye-rolling: “Dad let me know when you’re done with the lecture, will you. I got a lot of homework to do…” Now I certainly learned something from that lecture!

The older I become the less sure I am about anything. In the true sense of lecture -reading that which has been gathered (as in gathering firewood) – tonight I hope to share with you some gleanings, picked up from being in the dark with people who are familiar with darkness. I fully expect that I am sharing insights that you will recognize, wisdom that life has given up to you. With I hope we can we can kindle a fire to gather around, and enough light to really recognize one another I main the gloom of these troubled times.

GLEANINGS:
Spirituality is eminently practical - a way of being present.
Some practical orientations for times of trouble
A word of warning:
In large part the tasks of spiritual re-sourcing (returning to the source) involves making space, letting go, putting down and stepping aside.

1. Turn Off The Lights and Listen!

Rabbi Abraham Heschel warns us that: The future of all people depends on their realizing that the sense of holiness is as vital as health.

I wonder: since most of the universe is dark, can darkness be holy?
Darkness has a way of putting things in perspective. All enlightenment happens in the dark- otherwise there’d be no need for it! Turning off the lights –especially our own lights, our inflated sense of ourselves (as Peter Pan would say, “the cleverness of us”)- is a necessary spiritual practice for troubled times. When we dampen down our need to be right, and blinking step from the limelight into the shadows, and while our pupils widen in their hunger light, we are given a new vantage point, a broader and deeper perspective.

One of the consequences of the electric illumination of the nighttime has been the loss of our window into the cosmos. We are literally blinded by our own light! Most people on earth now need to travel to remote locations in search of darkness and its enlightening perspective. As we gaze into the vastness of the Milky Way and beyond, we can get an inkling of our own smallness, we who cling to this cosmic dust-mote. We expose the illusion that we are really in control of anything, except our decision to care! The infinity of space ignites our appreciation for mystery. In a world lit by fire the nocturnal sky-scape and the limited reach of the campfire offered our ancestors a nightly contemplative touchstone to put the day’s troubles and triumphs into perspective.

Without this long view back through time we so easily forget where we came from, and we overlook just how long it took to get here. We forget that here is always moving. When the cosmos revolves our own ideas we are blind to the infinite encircling miracle. Instead we equate value with quantity; what counts is what WE can count. (As the Psalmist says, count the stars if you can.) We even tally our own lives and dedicate our days to categorizing and enumerating, defining and classifying. We may claim a great intelligence, yet it seems we fail to recognize the difference between knowing and understanding (standing under) our shared reality.

Living under the buzzing glare of neon and the incessant buzz of ideas and images, we fall prey to our own self-deceptions. Motivated by polarizing ideologies we crudely dissect One Planet, One God One People, One life into competing camps. Our conversation (dance) with LIFE becomes one endless run-on that lacks the punctuation of quiet, dark space in which to listen and know and relate, and come to understanding. Without the humbling, stumbling of candlelight, we lose an appreciation for discretion, the dancing shadows, the half-light, the shades and tones of truths were imagination comes out to play. We must be very careful, because when justice and hubris meet we can expect only the heavy hand of self-righteousness (the rightness of might). And when peace and pride embrace they masquerades as triumphalism.

Listening is the highest form of love- Paul Tillich

Perched on the precipice of global catastrophe, we need the wisdom borne of patient listening, that is a kind of unlearning (putting down our own ideas). Otherwise we default to relying on the same devices that have brought us to the brink of disaster. It’s hard enough to convince someone to turn off the overhead lights, let alone invite people to humbly turn to one another, and extinguish our own head lights in order to make space for holy darkness and listen to the wisdom of the ages.

The Story of the Star People! (Unwritten)Ancient wisdom for our time

This is an hour of change.
Within it we stand uncertain, on the border of light.
Shall we draw back, or cross over?
Where shall our hearts turn?
Shall we draw back my brother, my sister, or cross over?
This is the hour of change, and within it we stand quietly together on the border of light. What lies before us?
Shall we draw back my brother and sister, or cross over?
(Adapted form the Jewish Shabbat Prayers)

Can we turn off the lights and listen?

2. Recognize the Crisis of Spirit!

Thomas Merton writes: “We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and of love than we have ever been.”

I wonder: In a universe of infinite possibilities how on earth
did we end up with this one?
These are troubling times indeed (walk the streets of Mumbai, Managua, Port–au-Prince, Basra, New Orleans, Tijuana, Nairobi, downtown Louisville…).We ought to be deeply disturbed. If you know people who are untroubled, pinch them, because clearly they are not awake! These troubles should be interfering with more than our sleep. They need to get under our skin and disturb our life patterns, our habits and expectations. We who are fashioned in the image of God (who have been brought forth from the dark and deep imagination of the infinite heart of the cosmos) are facing such a crisis of spirit that the lives of God’s children’s children hang in the balance.

Spirituality could be described as that deep motivating force that defines the quality of our lives… come what may! Spirituality is never a private matter. It informs our social order and vice versa. In fact the human communities we create reveal the state of our soul. (Pilgrim walking on the edge of the road... a praying people would never leave s this behind…)
The quality of our relationships, our stance toward life in general, is a reflection of what lies within us. If we could only realize that we are enspirited people learning how to be human, perhaps we would “re-source” our spirits to address this crisis. And we do have tremendous spiritual resources precisely for such times… resources that re-directed us back to the source, the font of our dreams and the source of our hope.

What moves you deeply, guides your thoughts, shapes your actions?
Jesus admonished us to set our hearts on God’s Reign and God’s Justice, for where our hearts are our treasure will be. What lies at the heart and center of your life? Where is your passion… suffering-joy?

When possible, on Sunday mornings I walk to church. It is a spiritual practice I enjoy, especially because, at first glance, my neighborhood is neither beautiful nor inspiring.
In fact I live in a “drive-through” part of town. After 14 years I am still disturbed and upset by the neglect and abuse I witness every day in this maligned patch of Eden. I have even been rebuked by well-intentioned police officers for living in the “wrong part of town.” I am aware too, that how I respond to this, my neighborhood is simply a reflection of what lies in me. When I intentionally open my eyes, purposefully pay attention and take the time, I am always amazed. You know there’s is a mocking bird who assaults me with song and a chattering gaggle or sparrows that live alongside the stench of the recycling station. Moved by these encounters, I wonder out loud: if had the wings and opportunity I’d choose a prettier place where the songs would be appreciated. Then I think of how this neighborhood would be without them. And I remember too why I choose this place to be in. The point here is that the Gospel Spirit calls out of our cave, down from the mountain, and into places that may at first seem desolate (like a desert). The work of the Gospel happens here (the Gospel works here… on us and in us)… and in here too. Without practicing peace of mind and heart, I overlook the music in the bushes, or worse still fail to notice the hint of Christ in the stranger’s eyes.

The practice of Gospel Justice and Peace starts from here on out! Every day of our lives we need to practice exposing our hearts and opening our minds to the peaceful center of our lives eve as we walk the concrete desert littered with all the society has cast away.

To be created in the image of God is to come into this world with a spiritual center
that is an avenue for divine wisdom.
To find this center, listen to the silence.
Remember to imagine, to dream, to envision, to create.
Recognize this internal beauty as the holy within your being.
Act as if you are worthy of divine command.
To be created in the image of God is to be grated a great gift.
(Adapted form the Jewish Shabbat Prayers)
Do we recognize our spiritual crisis?

3. Raise Your Gaze and Be Amazed!

The popular historian Howard Zinn commented: What we choose to emphasize will determine our perspective.

I wonder: Could we be seriously vision impaired?
This question is illustrated well by an old Jewish Midrash (Lawrence Kushner- adapted):
Now in those days, among the chosen people who wandered into the desert with Moses were two characters, Reuven and Shimon. And like you and me, they were accomplished complainers. So as they walked across the Red Sea, the great miracle of the parting of the waters was lost on them, because the whole time they kept their eyes on the ground. Without ever lifting their gaze they noticed only that the ground beneath their feet was muddy –like a beach at low tide.
“Oi-veh! This mud, its terrible!” complains Reuven.
“Don’t talk to me about mud!” retorts Shimon. “Up to my ankles, I am in all this filth.” “Well, you know what this reminds me of.” cries Reuven.
“Do I know? How could I know?” Shimon responds, “Except this I know, when we were in Egypt we had to make bricks out of mud like this.”
“You know what I think?” Reuven adds, “There’s no difference between being a slave in Egypt and being free here!”
And so Reuven and Shimon went on complaining the whole way across the bottom of the sea. For them there are no miracles, only mud.
And the Talmud reminds us: We don’t really see things as they are. We see things as we are.

When we turn out the light, pay attention, and tune into silence, we become aware (amid all the analysis and speculation), that we are suffering from a catastrophic failure of imagination. More than ever before, we need a vision to penetrate the haze, insight to see through the dark!

I have attended a good many Peace and Justice events. Most of them have focused on the tangled world-wide web of violence and greed. Rather than feeling enlightened I usually leave with the weight of the world on my shoulders. While we have become experts at injustice, we have failed miserably to present (especially to our young people) an exciting imaginable alternative. Granted, we cannot afford to disregard the cruel cost of living paid by our impoverished sisters and brothers … nor can we allow these grim realities to consume us. But it is easier to be mesmerized by injustice than to allow our lives to be illuminated by the Gospel vision of good news and the creative imagination of God’s dream.

There is ancient wisdom that chastises us: You are where your thoughts are, so make certain your thoughts are where you want to be! We cannot afford to simply bemoan the darkness. Far too often the vital spark of God’s dream fails to ignite us because we are wallowing in the violence and oppression that surrounds us on all sides.

Sometimes it seems like the world as we know it is falling apart… thanks be to God!
So I wonder, what does peace and justice look like, feel like to you?
Can I imagine a better world than this? Am I hungry for good news, hoping for change?
How much of my life’s energy do I dedicate to dreaming and scheming, wishing and hoping and praying and waiting for a vision of a world re-born?

When will justice come?
Justice will come when those of us who are not injured are as indignant as those of us who are. (Greek Proverb)

Sometimes it feels like I’m being consumed just trying to keep up with this consumptive life. Or could it be that I’m so invested in the way things are that I’m unable to conceive of any other way of being human? At these times it all looks like mud to me… And usually that happens when I’ve forgotten to look up at be amazed when I’ve forgotten that God is the agent of creation and transformation... the One whom Rabbi Heschel called the most moved mover!

There is a saying in the Jewish Kabbalah which teaches:
All things are in heaven save one: whether (or not) we choose to be reverent.

If this is so, then let’s commit to NOT being transfixed by the powers of darkness; by not taking ourselves too seriously; by believing in the greatness of the small; by letting go our need to win; and getting free enough to respond to life with reverence and to love with abandon.

Steady yourself. Living takes time.
Every moment is a moment to be lived.
Patience, steady.
Rush and race banish joy and peace
There is wonder to experience if you take the time.
Step softly and deliberately.
To force the natural rhythms of life is to deny the divine wisdom in each experience.
(Adapted form the Jewish Shabbat Prayers)

Will you raise your gaze to be amazed?

4. Be Still In the Storm!

There is an indigenous proverb which teaches: When the river runs fast, sit still in your canoe.

I wonder: What’s the first thing you do when you can’t see where you’re going?
Gandhi once remarked that there is more to life than speeding it up! When was the last time you confirmed a date with a friend without having to check your calendar or plan a month in advance? Doesn’t it seem that our plates are too full while at the same time one-in-six children of God on our planet have empty plates? I believe the two realities are intimately interconnected. In our frenzy we forget that starvation is a form of genocide. Do you remember those days when we argued about whether we should acquiesce to cultural pressures and buy an answering machine? Nowadays people are physically attached to communications devices so that they respond to signals from somewhere else, while ignoring the reality and relationships right under their feet. What would our ancestors think of us? How will our children’s children judge us?

The terrible storm brewing in the atmosphere has been whipping up for several generations. We are all part of the environmental catastrophe that has already laid a heavy burden on the improvised people of the underbelly of our world. As the pace of the storm quickens so we rise, panic and try by all means to save ourselves. When fear is our motivator we quickly collapse into ruthlessness.

“Jesus, don’t you care that we are going to drown?” He awoke and cried out:
BE STILL!

Pope John Paul II reminded us that war is a complete failure of our faith and our humanity. As the resources of God’s planet (the God of all) are wantonly depleted (oil, water, food, energy) is it inevitable that we should collapse into factional fighting? Such are the dystopian images of a violent society caught up deadly global competition.

But wait…take a breath… re-source and recollect…
Rabbi Heschel says: God is not always silent and people are not always blind!

Let us not forget that we are God’s people and this is God’s universe. Justice takes time. We need to take the longer view, to resource ourselves for the long haul. As Dr. King taught: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends… toward Justice.” We cannot be sure, we can only believe! But, if we take the time to still ourselves, we come to experience God as the center of the universe. Then in the eye of the storm we stumble upon the love force that holds all things together. Because justice is God’s desire, and mercy is God’s nature, this is precisely what God teases out of us in stillness, in silence, in solitude.

Sabbath is where we meet God not in space but in time. At the eye of life’s storms there is sacred time, that God has opened up… time to rest, to trust, to celebrate and experience life together; time to laugh and cry play and work and wonder, to love and let go. This is what life is for. And for all our busyness, we may be running away from living and opting for surviving. As they used to call it: dying of consumption. The human task, because we are children of God, is to live from this center, God-With us (in Latin cumtemplum- with temple). When we live form our center, we activate contemplation in all the aspects of our lives. This is what it means to be gracious in a state of grace, a little bit of heaven.

Lead us from the unreal into the real… faith, spirituality are not an escape from the demands and rigors and losses and tragedies of life… they are a gateway into them.
Consider the recent witness of the saffron-robed column of Buddhist monks in Burma who walked calmly into the fury of the military regime chanting: “Let everyone be free from harm. Let everyone be free from anger. Let everyone be free from hardship.”

Storms too are holy ground- the place where faith and spirits are tested, where are forced to seek out the shelter of Sabbath that makes things holy. Do we presume abundance or arm ourselves for scarcity? Do we share resources (especially time and presence) or do we hoard and consume with avarice? The choice is ours ad as are the consequences. Let us pray for the patient urgency of the prophets and make the commitment to slow down, stop running around and be still.

Weave a silence into our minds
Weave a silence onto our lips
Weave a silence over our hearts.
Calm us O Lord as you stilled the storm.
Still us O Lord and keep all from harm.
Let all tumult within us cease.
Enfold us Lord in your peace.
(Celtic Prayer –unknown authorship)
Do we dare to be still in the storm?

5. Dance In the Dark!

As Dorothy Day challenges us When we really come to know the seriousness of our situation, the racism, the war, the injustice, we recognize that it not going to remedied just by demonstrations, but by living our lives in dramatically different ways…

I wonder: when was the last time your heart was broken?
It was early in the morning, before the sun had come up over the hills of Nyange parish in Rwanda. I awoke to the distant singing. At the edge of the road I peered down the valley into the gloom and I was told: “The widows and orphans are coming to speak with you.” As the shadows shortened, I glimpsed in the columns of colorful people chanting as they twirled umbrellas and sang. They we walking in single file along narrow paths that skirted both sides of the green valley. “Why are they singing?” I asked the resident priest. “They sing,” he said (quoting an old African proverb) “to know that they are not alone.”

Pass the rock: Touching genocide -Dancing with the widows and the orphans.

Suffering is a necessary party of being alive. (My dad says: “I’ll know I’m the day that nothing hurts). In addition to this there is so much more unnecessary suffering that ought to break our heats and brings us to our knees.

When we spend time with people who are familiar with the dark surely we will have our heart’s broken. Here we come eyelash to eyelash with the scandal of a broken God. A God defamed and abused who suffers-with us. At this point we recognize that love hurts, that’s why we call it passion. It hurts because we only truly love the very act of letting it go (our health, our youth, our parents, our children, our very lives). It is in our suffering-loving that we express our God-likeness. You will know this well, if you’ve been invited into this intimacy with human suffering. It changes you forever. It breaks open your heart. And with the outpouring of lament and sorrow there is finally an opening for joy. We must learn the dark dance of lament- how to hold onto those whom life has mutilated, and grieve for all that has been unrealized, defamed and destroyed. Finally we are free of callous cold heartedness. The Spirit of Jesus is raucous, fiery, liberating forces that disturbs our peace to set free those in bonds of boredom and cynicism by linking them with their brothers and sisters chained to addictions, sexual slavery and starvation…And then we will all be free and then we will sing and then we will dance and laugh. And we will know that joy is the single infallible sign of the presence of God-with-us.

The tomb is opened so we all can enter. And all of us must enter tomb or cave; to face the suffering that will catch up with us; to come to terms with evil in us and around us;; and in real ways come face to face with the harsh tragedy that living and loving requires of us; to find our backs against the wall. And there, once we accustom ourselves to the dark and the quiet we will encounter a presence (the wall is God)… that draws us out and into the light.

There is dignity here we will exalt it.
There is courage here we will support it.
There is humanity here we will enjoy it.
There is a universe in every child we will share in it.
There is a voice calling through the chaos of our times.
There is a Spirit moving across the waters of the world.
There is a movement, a light a promise of hope.
(P.Andrews)
Are you ready to dance into the darkness?

6. Mend the Gap

There is a cult, an idolatry of action. There is an idolatry, a cult of prayer.
The first is mad escape, the second a consumer item, a narcotic.
Each taken alone, activism, passivism, without the other, is hardly recognizable as a human activity; the activists grow sour, violence prone; the meditators dwell on the moon, lunar. The question is not merely one of integrating these two. The question is how to recover each of these two, shapeless, defamed and lost: meaningless action and pointless prayer. Daniel Berrigan

I wonder: what would happen if the doers prayed and the prayers did?
You can tell the people who pray and the ones who don’t! You can what people care about by where they locate their lives. The friendships we nurture will determine the depth our discipleship. As Jesus reminded his followers… whatever you did for the least.
True prayer changes everything because we allow it to change us from the inside out. Everything changes when our perspective, our vision changes. What we see depends on what we we’re looking for. (Trees in the sunshine)

It is our life’s task to locate our lives in the gap between love for God and love for our neighbor. How else are we healed of schizophrenic living that splits one love in two? Essentially they are the same love and neither can be without the other.
Hear O People… God is one, and you shall love one God with one complete love.

God hungers for full communion- all of us, all together, all the time. This is the meaning of integrity. This is holiness, the fruit of mystical awareness- to uncover the oneness that permeates our ordinary divided awareness.

But how do we do this? By weaving networks of relationships and care, reverence and solidarity justice and mercy, we transform our prayer into action and our actions into prayer. “Follow me and you will be catchers of people!” Forever like the Catcher in the Rye, we weave safety nets to catch each other, and bring things back form the precipice the margins and into the center. This is how we touch God and enter into Holy Communion. In Christ there is no spirit of holy isolation! The spirit force that draws us together is a spirit of integration not segregation. God’s love is not divided but is poured out to all shaken, pressed down, in overflowing measure as seeps into the cracks and broken live where is most needed. And our task… not to get in the way, or try to impede the free flow but let it sweep us off our feet and get caught up in this divine extravagance.

We cannot deal with the wounds of this blest and broken world, unless we are inspired by its wonders. The wonders are illuminated when awe dare to reach into this world’s wounds. Like Thomas, when we encounter a wounded stranger we respond: “My Lord and my God!”
If the word were merely seductive, that would be easy.
If it were merely challenging, that would be a problem.
But I arise in the morning torn
between a desire to save the world and to savor it.
That makes it hard to plan the day.
(E.B. White)
Summary
“Certainly, it is easier to believe now that the sun warms us, and we know that buds will appear on the trees in the wasteland across the street, that life will spring out of the dull clods of that littered park across the way. There are wars and rumors of war, poverty and plague, hunger and pain. Still, the sap is rising, again there is the resurrection of spring, and God's continuing promise to us that He is with us always, with His comfort and joy, if we will only ask." Dorothy Day

By his dying and rising Jesus released that powerful liberating spirit, who makes of us good news, who opens blinded eyes, who takes away all that divides us and sets prisoners free, who declares that this is God’s universe, redeemed not abandoned. In our living, in our dying and in our rising we belong to God. We all belong to God, we all belong together. We long to belong to God together.

Let us rinse out our eyes!
Darkness is a necessary dimension of reality, a crucible of change where new things take shape. We spend half our lives in the dark- the darkness of the womb and of sleep, the darkness of our losses and longings, of alienation, absence and death. Darkness compels us to reach out to others, to gather around the fire, to come to terms with mystery and all that remains unresolved. We do not need to be wise to see in the dark, but we do need to have suffered, to have lost to have listened. Like Merton we need to practice seeing this world with rinsed eyes, because darkness is only the half of it. Jesus came into this world to throw the darkness into relief, in the love-light of a longsuffering God. And each morning we awaken to a nuclear blast of light, piercing the darkness at 180 thousand miles per second broadcasting the mystery, the gift and the awe of it all. Blindly we overlook the miracle and fail to be astonished.

This Dark Age is our time of awakening.
On the first day God created a different kind of darkness by mixing light into the primordial darkness. Therefore there is light even when darkness seems deepest. The smallest amount of light banishes the absolute of darkness, yet no amount of darkness can eliminate the tiniest spark of light. In every dimension of life, even in cruelty and tragedy cruel God is somehow manifest, especially when we feel most alone.

This is our time to wake up, to risk ridicule and persecution by choosing astonishment and gratitude over self righteousness or cynicism. Every Dark Age gives birth to new awakenings. God knows we could use the light! Surely this is OUR time. If we choose together to walk away from small-minded thinking and closed-hearted living, and spend time in the dark together, we might just begin to see our way clear to that love-light our world so desperately needs.
Pray as if everything depended on God.
Act as if everything depends on you.
Spiritual Re-sourcing for the vision-impaired:
• turn of the lights and listen
• resist the urge to blame
• ask questions and question answers
• share struggles
• be grateful for all of it, sunrises and sufferings
• kindle a flame and gather around it
• recover a sense of wonder and respect for mystery

God wants our heart, all of it. In the end there is no God-without-us! God wants us all of us...together… God-together-with-us. Do not be afraid! Peace with you! Be Bold- these times will require nothing less of us.

When it was evening on the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked, for fear of the authorities. Jesus appeared, stood among them and said: “Peace be with you”. He showed them his and his side and said to them again: “Peace be with you!” As God has sent me so I am sending you. He breathed on them and said “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

THY Kingdom come, THY will be done unto us and through us … Amen

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's Lasp Speech, April 3, 1968

2008-04-04T13:31:00.001-04:00

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.:

Introduction
Thank you very kindly, my friends. As I listened to Ralph Abernathy in his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about. It's always good to have your closest friend and associate say something good about you. And Ralph is the best friend that I have in the world.

I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow. Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world.

Body of speech
As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?"-- I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land.

And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and esthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I'm named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But I wouldn't stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy."

Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding--something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya: Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee--the cry is always the same--"We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.

That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that he's allowed me to be in Memphis.

I can remember, I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn't itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God's world.

And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God's children. And that we don't have to live like we are forced to live.

Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.

Secondly, let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers were on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn't get around to that.

Now we're going to march again, and we've got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be. And force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God's children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That's the issue. And we've got to say to the nation: we know it's coming out. For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.

We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do. I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round." Bull Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water.

That couldn't stop us. And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we'd go on before the water hoses and we would look at it, and we'd just go on singing. "Over my head I see freedom in the air." And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take them off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in the jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.

Now we've got to go on to Memphis just like that. I call upon you to be with us Monday. Now about injunctions: We have an injunction and we're going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

We need all of you. And you know what's beautiful to me, is to see all of these ministers of the Gospel. It's a marvelous picture. Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, and say, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Somehow, the preacher must say with Jesus, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor."

And I want to commend the preachers, under the leadership of these noble men: James Lawson, one who has been in this struggle for many years; he's been to jail for struggling; but he's still going on, fighting for the rights of his people. Rev. Ralph Jackson, Billy Kiles; I could just go right on down the list, but time will not permit. But I want to thank them all. And I want you to thank them, because so often, preachers aren't concerned about anything but themselves. And I'm always happy to see a relevant ministry.

It's alright to talk about "long white robes over yonder," in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's alright to talk about "streets flowing with milk and honey," but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's alright to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.

Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nation in the world, with the exception of nine.

Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda--fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy--what is the other bread?--Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.

But not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take you money out of the banks downtown and deposit you money in Tri-State Bank--we want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. So go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something that we don't do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We're just telling you to follow what we're doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies in Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in."

Now there are some practical things we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through here.

Closing remarks
Now, let me say as I move to my conclusion that we've got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis. We've got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base.

Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need.

Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother.

Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn't stop.

At times we say they were busy going to church meetings--an ecclesiastical gathering--and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn't be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that "One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony." And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem, or down to Jericho, rather to organize a "Jericho Road Improvement Association." That's a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the casual root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effort.

But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that these men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the day of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass."

And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?".

That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" "If I do no stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.

Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.

You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"

And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood--that's the end of you.

It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said.

I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze.

Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great movement there.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.

And they were telling me, now it doesn't matter now. It really doesn't matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us, the pilot said over the public address system, "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say that threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

New Book About the Dalai Lama by Pico Ayer

2008-03-27T09:20:00.001-04:00

Books
Holy Man
What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?
by Pankaj Mishra

Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. He is the only Nobel laureate to appear in an advertisement for Apple and guest-edit French Vogue. Martin Scorsese and Brad Pitt have helped commemorate his Lhasa childhood on film. He gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C., in 2005. This spring, in Germany, he will speak on human rights and globalization. For someone who claims to be “a simple Buddhist monk,” the Dalai Lama has a large carbon footprint and often seems as ubiquitous as Britney Spears.

As Pico Iyer writes in his new book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama” (Knopf; $24), it is easy to imagine that the Dalai Lama is “the plaything of movie stars and millionaires.” Certainly, like all those who stress the importance of love, compassion, gentle persuasion, and other unimpeachably good things, the Dalai Lama can appear a bit dull. Precepts such as “violence breeds violence” or “the quality of means determine ends” may be ethically sound, but they don’t seem to possess the intellectual complexity that would make them engaging as ideas. Since the Dalai Lama speaks English badly, and frequently collapses into prolonged fits of giggling, he can also give the impression that he is, as Iyer reports a journalist saying, “not the brightest bulb in the room.”

His simple-Buddhist-monk persona invites skepticism, even scorn. “I have heard cynics who say he’s a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes,” Rupert Murdoch has said. Christopher Hitchens accuses the Dalai Lama of claiming to be a “hereditary king appointed by heaven itself” and of enforcing “one-man rule” in Dharamsala, the town in the Indian Himalayas that serves as a capital for the more than a hundred and fifty thousand Tibetans in exile. The Chinese government routinely denounces him as a “splittist,” who is plotting to return Tibet to the corrupt feudal and monastic rule from which Chinese Communists liberated it, in 1951. Many Tibetans in exile grumble that he is too attached to nonviolence, and too much in the grip of Western event coördinators, to prevent the Chinese from colonizing Tibet.

But the events of recent weeks are a reminder of the fervor he inspires among the six million ethnic Tibetans. It was a protest on the forty-ninth anniversary of his exile that led to the current civil unrest in Lhasa; the initial peaceful demonstrations met with a predictably harsh response from the Chinese authorities. As the prominent Chinese intellectual Wang Lixiong acknowledges, “Virtually all Tibetans have the Dalai in their hearts.” And the more that their economic prospects and traditional culture are undermined by Han Chinese immigration, the more this long-distance reverence is likely to grow.

Iyer writes that “the heart and soul, quite literally, of the Dalai Lama’s life existed precisely in parts that most of us couldn’t see.” His arduous daily regimen begins at 3:30 A.M., after which he proceeds, as he told Iyer, to “meditation, prostration, reciting special mantras, then more meditation and more prostrations, followed by reading Tibetan philosophy or other texts; then reading and studying and, in the evening, ‘some meditation—evening meditation—for about an hour. Then, at eight-thirty, sleep.’ ”

This sounds like a lot of meditation and reading for a monk in his seventies—especially someone who, beginning at the age of six, underwent a gruelling education for nearly two decades in Buddhist metaphysics, Tibetan art and culture, logic, Sanskrit, and traditional medicine, and eventually secured a geshe degree (roughly equivalent to a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy). But Buddhist spiritual practice is relentlessly exacting. “Strive on diligently” were the Buddha’s last words, and even the Dalai Lama can’t presume to have reached a summit of wisdom and serenity. It is his fairy-tale childhood that exalts him above most mortals. Born in 1935 to a family of farmers in the outer reaches of the Tibetan cultural domain, he was a two-year-old toddler when a search party of monks from Lhasa identified him as the potential reincarnation of the recently deceased Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Rainbows arcing across the northeastern skies of Lhasa were among the colorful portents that alerted the monks to his presence. In 1939, the child was brought ceremonially from his mud-and-stone house to Lhasa, and given the run of the marvellously labyrinthine Potala Palace.

The Dalai Lama learned calligraphy by copying out his predecessor’s will—which, in its prophetic cast, is one of the spookiest documents in Tibetan history. It was written in 1932, when Tibet, after centuries of uneasy coexistence with its big neighbor in the East, enjoyed a degree of political autonomy. Mao Zedong’s Communists were still far from winning their civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Nevertheless, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama sensed that Tibet’s isolation would soon be shattered by “barbaric red Communists”:

Our spiritual and cultural traditions will be completely eradicated. Even the names of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas will be erased. . . . The Monasteries will be looted and destroyed, and the monks and nuns killed or chased away. . . . We will become like slaves to our conquerors . . . and the days and nights will pass slowly and with great suffering and terror.

Even if the Dalai Lama shared his predecessor’s forebodings, he couldn’t do much about them. In the Potala Palace, he lived perilously close to the dark intrigues and conspiracies that had undermined his predecessors, and exposed Tibet’s weakness to its overbearing neighbors. The Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Dalai Lamas died young, some rumored to have been poisoned. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who barely escaped an assassination attempt allegedly by his own regent, recognized his insular country’s vulnerability to the highly organized empires and nation-states of the modern world. But his plans for upgrading the Tibetan administration and Army were thwarted by a monastic élite that lived off the labor and taxes of peasants and fought brutally to preserve the status quo. In 1934, shortly after the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s death, the reformist politician Lungshar was punished by an ancient Tibetan method of blinding: the knucklebones of a yak were pressed on both of his temples to make his eyeballs pop out.

In 1947, the Dalai Lama, then eleven years old, watched from the Potala Palace through a telescope as monks shot at the Tibetan Army. The weeks-long battle had been sparked by the arrest of his former regent, and it killed dozens. Finally, in 1950, he assumed full political authority as the Dalai Lama. But he had no time to heed his predecessor’s warnings against Tibetan apathy. The Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army had invaded Eastern Tibet and was standing poised to overrun the rest of the country. A decade later, the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of Tibetans were forced into exile.

The story that the Dalai Lama himself emphasizes to his Western audience is that of his initiation into the modern world—both its vicious ideologies and its redemptive knowledge of science and democratic governance. This intellectual journey is what principally interests Iyer, a novelist, travel writer, and contributor to Time, who has written incisively on the dawning of our present moment in history “in which almost every culture could access every other.” He presents the Dalai Lama as a heartening product of the same encounters between the old and the new, the East and the West, that have stung many other tradition-minded people around the world into a reactionary fundamentalism.

“In Tibet, the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism,” Iyer writes. “Now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, as if having travelled eight centuries in just five decades, he is increasingly, with characteristic directness, leaning in, toward tomorrow.” Iyer marshals a variety of evidence for the Dalai Lama’s forward-looking program. The Tibetan leader cast doubt on his divine ancestry, pointing to his premature endorsement of the founder of the Aum Shinrikyo group, which released sarin gas in Tokyo subways, as an indication that he is not a “living Buddha.” The most famous Buddhist in the world, he advises his Western followers not to embrace Buddhism. He seeks out famous scientists with geekish zeal, asserting that certain Buddhist scriptures disproved by modern science should be abandoned.

In his public appearances before English-speaking audiences, he prefers to speak of “global ethics” rather than of the abstruse Buddhist concept of Nirvana. Doubtless he doesn’t want to put off the largely secular middle-class Americans in weekend casuals who crowd Central Park to listen to him, but, as Iyer points out, this is also a reaffirmation of a Buddhist philosophical vision in which all existence is deeply interconnected. Indeed, this notion may be why the Dalai Lama was early to grasp the existential and political challenges of globalized human existence, decades before they were underlined by the disasters of climate change.

“For the first time in history,” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1957, “all peoples on earth have a common present. . . . Every country has become the almost immediate neighbor of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other end of the globe.” Arendt feared that this new “unity of the world” would be a largely negative phenomenon if it wasn’t accompanied by the “renunciation, not of one’s own tradition and national past, but of the binding authority and universal validity which tradition and past have always claimed.”

As the spiritual leader of six million people, the Dalai Lama can be credited with a significant renunciation of the authority of tradition—of the conventional politics of national self-interest as well as of religion. Such is his influence that a curt decree from him in the past weeks could have triggered a massive, probably uncontrollable, uprising in Tibet. Yet he continued to reject violence as unethical and counterproductive, even threatening to resign from his position as head of the government-in-exile, in Dharamsala, if Tibetan violence against the Chinese persisted. Increasingly, he has been forced to walk a difficult rhetorical line, accusing China of “cultural genocide” while still supporting its stewardship of the Olympic Games. He has consistently disapproved of even relatively modest attempts to influence the Chinese government, including hunger strikes and economic boycotts. In his view, Tibet needs good neighborly relations with China: “One nation’s problems can no longer be satisfactorily solved by itself alone,” he has said. He bravely promotes “universal responsibility” to people who want to be citizens of their own country before they start thinking about the universe.

He speaks remorsefully about Tibet’s retrograde and self-serving ruling élite in the pre-Communist period, and the country’s fatal lack of preparation for the twentieth century. For the Tibetan community in exile, he has introduced a democratic constitution and legislative elections. Recently, he offered his most radical idea yet, one that overturns nearly half a millennium of tradition: that the next Dalai Lama be chosen by popular vote.

The Dalai Lama’s awareness, deepening over decades of exile, of the high costs of Tibetan isolationism has helped turn Dharamsala into an exemplary cosmopolitan community, where young Israelis coming off compulsory military duty mingle with freshly arrived refugees from Tibet. Still, it seems remarkable today that the boy who once perched upon a golden throne in a thousand-room palace has become an icon of “globalism”—the word Iyer uses, occasionally a bit broadly, to denote the decidedly mixed blessings of speedy communications and easeful travel. After all, the Dalai Lama’s only consistent lifeline to the metropolitan West when growing up had been the magazine Life. (He moved on to Time and to the BBC.) Regular exposure to Henry Luce’s periodicals did not, however, inoculate the Dalai Lama against Maoism. Visiting China in 1954, during a period of uneasy collaboration with Beijing, the Dalai Lama declared himself to be impressed by the Chinese Revolution. Charmed by Mao’s unassuming demeanor, he was startled when the Great Helmsman announced on their last meeting that “religion is a poison”—the belief that, over the next two decades, helped the Chinese justify killing thousands of Tibet’s monks and destroying most of its monasteries.

Arriving in India in 1959, the Dalai Lama was still, Iyer points out, “an innocent in the ways of the modern world.” He did not visit the United States until 1979, and then his highly technical discourses on Buddhist philosophy baffled his listeners, especially those accustomed to the brisk epiphanies of Zen, the Buddhist tradition in vogue at the time. No celebrity glamour attended the Dalai Lama’s initial visits to the country where he was to achieve his greatest fame. The Dalai Lama’s Western fan club began to grow only after he received the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1989.

His popularity seems to have been helped, at least partly, by a romantic idea of Tibet promoted in the nineteen-thirties by James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon,” an account of Westerners chancing upon Shangri-La, a valley near the Himalayas populated by a harmonious and pacifist society. Frank Capra’s movie version of 1937 (which inspired Franklin D. Roosevelt to anoint his Presidential retreat in Maryland Shangri-La, before the prosaic Dwight D. Eisenhower renamed it Camp David, for his grandson) opens with the lines “In these days of wars and rumors of wars, haven’t you ever dreamed of a place where there was peace and security, where living was not a struggle but a lasting delight?” Despite an ample Tibetan history of brutality, Tibetans are still primarily seen in the West as a blessedly premodern people, who naturally possess rather than pursue happiness.

Iyer acknowledges this romantic misconception as a political problem for Tibet: “It feels—or we need to make it feel—more like Shangri-La than a place that could have a seat at the United Nations.” Often, too, the Dalai Lama seems ready to oblige. His decision to simplify and secularize Buddhist teachings has brought him a much bigger audience than the Japanese Zen masters or the Tibetan sages, such as Allen Ginsberg’s guru Chögyam Trungpa, who preceded him to the West. But the gentrification of an ancient and often difficult philosophy has not been achieved without some loss of intellectual rigor. In best-selling books by the Dalai Lama, Buddhism can appear to be a ritual-free mental workout, but the form that religion takes for the geshe student cramming the three hundred and twenty-two volumes of the Tibetan Buddhist canon is considerably more severe.

The Dalai Lama can claim the sanction of the Buddha, who is said to have altered his teachings in order to reach a diverse audience. Still, there are some limits to the Dalai Lama’s pragmatism, however mindful he is of contemporary liberal sensibilities. He supports full legal rights for all minorities, including gay men and women. But, citing Tibetan texts, he remains disapproving of oral and anal sex. (“The other holes don’t create life.”) Disapproving of sexual laxity and divorce, he can sometimes sound like a family-values conservative.

None of his compromises, however, have aroused as much bitterness as his decision, first announced in 1988, to settle for Tibet’s “genuine autonomy” within China rather than press for full independence. As the Dalai Lama sees it, countries must pursue their interests without harming those of others, and Tibetan independence, in addition to being an unrealistic ideal, needlessly antagonizes Beijing. This stance has failed, however, to convince the Chinese that he is not a “splittist”; they have accused him of having “masterminded” the latest disturbances. It has also made many Tibetans suspect that what makes the Dalai Lama more likable in the West—mainly, his commitment to nonviolence, reiterated during the current crisis—makes him appear weak to the Chinese.

“The more he gave himself to the world,” Iyer writes, the more Tibetans have come to feel “like natural children bewildered by the fact that their father has adopted three others.” The Tibetan novelist Jamyang Norbu complains that Tibetan support groups and the government-in-exile have become “directionless” in trying to “reorient their objectives around such other issues as the environment, world peace, religious freedom, cultural preservation, human rights—everything but the previous goal of Tibetan independence.”

Avidly embracing the liberating ideas of the secular metropolis, the Dalai Lama resembles the two emblematic types who have shaped the modern age, for better and for worse—the provincial fleeing ossified custom and the refugee fleeing totalitarianism. Even so, his critics may have a point: the Dalai Lama’s citizenship in the global cosmopolis seems to come at a cost to his dispossessed people.

As China grows unassailable, it is easy to become pessimistic about Tibet, and to imagine its spiritual leader becoming increasingly prey to fatalism. The Dalai Lama’s retreat from the exclusivist claims of ancestral religion and the nation-state can seem the reflex of someone who, since he first copied out his predecessor’s prophecy, has helplessly watched his country’s landmarks disappear. The bracing virtue of Iyer’s thoughtful essay, however, is that it allows us to imagine the Dalai Lama as something of an intellectual and spiritual adventurer, exploring fresh sources of individual identity and belonging in the newly united world.

Certainly, Arendt’s “solidarity of mankind,” enforced by capitalism and technology, has become, as she observed, “an unbearable burden,” provoking “political apathy, isolationist nationalism, or desperate rebellion against all powers that be.” There are few things that Tibetans lashing out at the Chinese presence in Lhasa today fear more than absorption into the ruthless new economy and culture of China. Iyer’s book makes it plausible that the boy from the Tibetan backwoods may be outlining, in his own frequently Forrest Gumpish way, “a process of mutual understanding and progressing self-clarification on a gigantic scale”—the process that Arendt believed necessary for halting the “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else.” It is hard to see the Dalai Lama bringing about mutual understanding in the world at large when he has failed to bring it about between China and Tibet. Such, however, are the advantages of being a simple Buddhist monk that he is less likely—indeed, less able—than most politicians to compromise his noble ends with dubious means, even as he, following the Buddha’s deathbed exhortation, diligently strives on. ♦

Many Muslims Turn to Home Schooling

2008-03-26T09:23:00.001-04:00

March 26, 2008
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

LODI, Calif. — Like dozens of other Pakistani-American girls here, Hajra Bibi stopped attending the local public school when she reached puberty, and began studying at home.
Her family wanted her to clean and cook for her male relatives, and had also worried that other American children would mock both her Muslim religion and her traditional clothes.
“Some men don’t like it when you wear American clothes — they don’t think it is a good thing for girls,” said Miss Bibi, 17, now studying at the 12th-grade level in this agricultural center some 70 miles east of San Francisco. “You have to be respectable.”
Across the United States, Muslims who find that a public school education clashes with their religious or cultural traditions have turned to home schooling. That choice is intended partly as a way to build a solid Muslim identity away from the prejudices that their children, boys and girls alike, can face in schoolyards. But in some cases, as in Ms. Bibi’s, the intent is also to isolate their adolescent and teenage daughters from the corrupting influences that they see in much of American life.
About 40 percent of the Pakistani and other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the district here are home-schooled, though broader statistics on the number of Muslim children being home-schooled, and how well they do academically, are elusive. Even estimates on the number of all American children being taught at home swing broadly, from one million to two million.
No matter what the faith, parents who make the choice are often inspired by a belief that public schools are havens for social ills like drugs and that they can do better with their children at home.
“I don’t want the behavior,” said Aya Ismael, a Muslim mother home-schooling four children near San Jose. “Little girls are walking around dressing like hoochies, cursing and swearing and showing disrespect toward their elders. In Islam we believe in respect and dignity and honor.”
Still, the subject of home schooling is a contentious one in various Muslim communities, with opponents arguing that Muslim children are better off staying in the system and, if need be, fighting for their rights.
Robina Asghar, a Muslim who does social work in Stockton, Calif., says the fact that her son was repeatedly branded a “terrorist” in school hallways sharpened his interest in civil rights and inspired a dream to become a lawyer. He now attends a Catholic high school.
“My son had a hard time in school, but every time something happened it was a learning moment for him,” Mrs. Asghar said. “He learned how to cope. A lot of people were discriminated against in this country, but the only thing that brings change is education.”
Many parents, however, would rather their children learn in a less difficult environment, and opt to keep them home.
Hina Khan-Mukhtar decided to tutor her three sons at home and to send them to a small Muslim school cooperative established by some 15 Bay Area families for subjects like Arabic, science and carpentry. She made up her mind after visiting her oldest son’s prospective public school kindergarten, where each pupil had assembled a scrapbook titled “Why I Like Pigs.” Mrs. Khan-Mukhtar read with dismay what the children had written about the delicious taste of pork, barred by Islam. “I remembered at that age how important it was to fit in,” she said.
Many Muslim parents contacted for this article were reluctant to talk, saying Muslim home-schoolers were often portrayed as religious extremists. That view is partly fueled by the fact that Adam Gadahn, an American-born spokesman for Al Qaeda, was home-schooled in rural California.
“There is a tendency to make home-schoolers look like antisocial fanatics who don’t want their kids in the system,” said Nabila Hanson, who argues that most home-schoolers, like herself, make an extra effort to find their children opportunities for sports, music or field trips with other people.
Lodi’s Muslims also attracted unwanted national attention when one local man, Hamid Hayat, was sentenced last year to 24 years in prison on a terrorism conviction that his relatives say was largely due to a fabricated confession. (Had he been more Americanized, they say, he would have known to ask for a lawyer as soon as the F.B.I. appeared.)
Parents who home-school tend to be converts, Mrs. Khan-Mukhtar said. Immigrant parents she has encountered generally oppose the idea, seeing educational opportunities in America as a main reason for coming.
If so, then Fawzia Mai Tung is an exception, a Chinese Muslim immigrant who home-schools three daughters in Phoenix. She spent many sleepless nights worried that her children would not excel on standardized tests, until she discovered how low the scores at the local schools were. Her oldest son, also home-schooled, is now applying to medical school.
In some cases, home-schooling is used primarily as a way to isolate girls like Miss Bibi, the Pakistani-American here in Lodi.
Some 80 percent of the city’s 2,500 Muslims are Pakistani, and many are interrelated villagers who try to recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home. A decade ago many girls were simply shipped back to their villages once they reached adolescence.
“Their families want them to retain their culture and not become Americanized,” said Roberta Wall, the principal of the district-run Independent School, which supervises home schooling in Lodi and where home-schooled students attend weekly hourlong tutorials.
Of more than 90 Pakistani or other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the Lodi district, 38 are being home-schooled. By contrast, just 7 of the 107 boys are being home-schooled, and usually the reason is that they were falling behind academically.
As soon as they finish their schooling, the girls are married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.
The parents “want their girls safe at home and away from evil things like boys, drinking and drugs,” said Kristine Leach, a veteran teacher with the Independent School.
The girls follow the regular high school curriculum, squeezing in study time among housework, cooking, praying and reading the Koran. The teachers at the weekly tutorials occasionally crack jokes of the “what, are your brothers’ arms broken?” variety, but in general they tread lightly, sensing that their students obey family and tradition because they have no alternative.
“I do miss my friends,” Miss Bibi said of fellow students with whom she once attended public school. “We would hang out and do fun things, help each other with our homework.”
But being schooled apart does have its benefit, she added. “We don’t want anyone to point a finger at us,” she said, “to say that we are bad.”
Mrs. Asghar, the Stockton woman who argues against home schooling, takes exception to the idea of removing girls from school to preserve family honor, calling it a barrier to assimilation.
“People who think like this are stuck in a time capsule,” she said. “When kids know more than their parents, the parents lose control. I think that is a fear in all of us.”
Aishah Bashir, now an 18-year-old Independent School student, was sent back to Pakistan when she was 12 and stayed till she was 16. She had no education there.
Asked about home schooling, she said it was the best choice. But she admitted that the choice was not hers and, asked if she would home-school her own daughter, stared mutely at the floor. Finally she said quietly: “When I have a daughter, I want her to learn more than me. I want her to be more educated.”