No Power But Powerlessness

"So the devil tries again: worship me, he says, and the world is yours. It is mine to give, and the power over it all I give to you. And again, Jesus answers with Deuteronomy: "You are to pay homage to the Lord your God, and you are to revere him alone." There is no God but God, and no power but powerlessness. Worshipping God is not a stepping stone to power. It does not make us masters of the universe. It still leaves us in the wilderness, famished after forty days, and only the devil for company. God-forsaken indeed, or so it would seem to us. Jesus knows better." - Adventus.

No power but love. "The dehmanization resulting from an unjust order is not a cause for despair but for hope, leading to the incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by injustice. Hope, however, does not consist of crossing one's arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait." - Paulo Friere, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

This, however, is only one half of the equation of hope. Politicians such as Barack Obama are strong on this half, but hope uninformed by the substance of critical thought is as vacuous as the apparent "opposition" of Democrats to the President's war policy. "Critical thinking contrasts with naive thinking, which sees 'historical time as a weight, a stratification of the acquisitions and experience of the past,' from which the present should emerge normalized and 'well-behaved.' For the naive thinker, the important thing is accommodation to this normalized 'today.' For the critic, the important thing is the continuing tranformation of reality, in behalf of the continuing humanization of men." - Friere

Here we see why the Democrats are incapable of taking a stand against the war. They have sold their consciences to a normalized today in which "what is" has imperceptibly merged with "what must be." They are well-adjusted to the weight of history and have surrendered to the lovelessness which is the metaphysical foundation of that history. "Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible." - Friere.

It is simple and inspiring to speak about "hope" in the abstract, devoid of critical "thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people and admits of no dichotomy between them." The naive thinker, whose naivete in the case of Obama is carefully calculated, acts in the interests of the corporate master who wish their reality to remain untouched. He is happy to advise them on their plans to control Middle East oil as long as they adopt his notions of strategic success. But the weight of history will remain.

Here is a story you won't hear our progressive candidates talking about:

"'He was kept in a 9-by-7-foot cell with no natural light, no clock and no calendar,'Klein wrote. 'Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a 'truth serum,' a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP."

This is the loveless void in which our history has become embedded, from which no release can be expected by those unwilling to engage in critical thought that hopes that real humanity can be regained, rather than accepting the false humanity which Satan makes so enticing.

It Never Goes Away

"He was an Iraq war veteran, age 21. The guards were kind to him, but the young man was very disturbed and ended up fracturing his hand and fist, pounding a wall. After falling asleep, he repeatedly woke up, shouting and cursing, 'You killed my friend, - I'm gonna' kill you,' and intermittently sobbing, 'It doesn't change. It never goes away.'"

"The following day, Ash Wednesday, 25 Chicagoans held an ecumenical prayer service and then attempted to deliver a letter to Senators Durbin and Obama. Many in the group were clergy, vested in their clerical garb. They had gathered to pray for forgiveness, as a nation, for the times we all had not spoken out against the war. They wanted to assure that the Senators of Illinois heard their remorse and understood their opposition to the war and its ongoing funding." - "Do Something Good", Kathy Kelly, CounterPunch, February 22, 2007.

Many wonder why the Democrats seem so unable to make the stand the vast majority of their constituents clearly want them to make. An analysis of a recent anonymous Democrat's statement about the ongoing negotiations provides a clue: “People are unhappy with the war. We have to conduct oversight. We have to push the president in a new direction. We have to find a way to do that that makes the caucus comfortable, and I think we can.” First, note that the speaker said "People are unhappy", not "We are unhappy". Translated, this means: "Other people are unhappy with the war and we must find a way to appease their feelings." In fact, most Democrats in Congress do not seem to have strong anti-war feelings, or any anti-war feeling for that matter. They do not own the feeling in question - other people own it - but they have been given a reluctant custody over it and must somehow discharge their onerous obligation. "We have to conduct oversight" summarizes this obligation. "We have to push the president in a new direction" epitomizes their powerlessness. To push someone means to stand behind them and try to exert a surreptitous influence, at least initially. Once again, someone else owns the problem - in this case, the President. This statement acknowledges their powerlessness, reducing them to the level of children attempting to influence a stubborn father. Finally, they acknowledge their true goal: "We have to find a way to do that that makes the caucus comfortable" At the end of the day, they want comfort, not justice, much less peace. They fail to understand that God's peace is living justice, not comfort. Comfort is the reward given to slaves when their master is satisfied with their service. And I agree with the Democrats when they say, "I think we can." They can indeed please their master and will find a way to do so.

This is the justice which orders the universe: "Accordingly, justice, as such, excels among the other moral virtues, and is called the brightest, outshining the morning and evening star." - Thomas Aquinas.

Those who worship comfort will receive their reward, but they will not put an end to this war, nor will they aid the Lord to establish justice on this earth.

Strange Virtue

"Christ died on the cross with a crown of thorns on his head defying the might of a whole empire." - Gandhi

This is the power that we must wield, by our suffering and by our faith: "He or she must have a living faith in non-violence. This is impossible without a living faith in God. A non-violent man can do nothing save by the power and grace of God. Without it he won't have the courage to die without anger, without fear and without retaliation. Such courage comes from the belief that God sits in the hearts of all and there there should be no fear in the presence of God. The knowledge of the omnipresence of God also means respect for the lives of even those who may be called opponents."

The empire works by division - Shiite against Sunni, Iranian against Iraqi, secular leftist versus Christian, and so on. Perhaps no one analyzed this as clearly as Thomas Aquinas. Here he is analysing the common good, a concept that is more and more explicitly denied by the powers that rule the current empire: "Security is banished and everything is uncertain when people are cut off from law and depend on the will, I would even say the greed, of another. A tyrant oppresses the bodies of his subjects, but, what is more damnable, he threatens their spiritual growth, for he is set on his own power, not their progress. He is suspicious of any dignity that he may possess that will prejudice his own iniquitous domination. A tyrant is more fearful of good persons than of bad persons, for he dreads their strange virtue. Fearful lest they grow strong and so stout of heart as no longer to brook his wicked despotism, but resolve in companionship to enjoy the fruits of peace, a tyrant is constrained to destroy good people's confidence in one another, lest they band together to throw off his yoke. Therefore he sows discord among them and encourages dissensions and litigation. He forbids celebrations that make for good fellowship, wedding and feasts and such events that are likely to promote familiarity and mutual loyalty."

The spiritual growth which we seek is to become conscious of our inner power in order to end the anonymous impotence induced by the empire's propaganda. The spiritual disease we are suffering from is comfort. Bit by bit we have lost the taste for anything but comfort, until it becomes a treasure incapable of risk. This is the addiction that paralyzes our best efforts because it ultimately means that we would rather see hundreds of thousands of far-off people killed than risk losing the oil supply that makes our comfort possible. The Democrats efforts to stop the bloodletting will remain ineffectual as long as they accept the basic premise that our comfort is more important than the life of an unknown foreigner or the sovereignty of their nations.

The consequences of comfort are revealed in the very phrasing employed by the Democrats: "Questioned by a reporter about making 'an urgent end to the Iraq war and asking Congress to cut the funding immediately." he asked, 'Is that a bad idea?' Nancy Pelosi, whom most observers believe to be opposed to the war, said, 'Why would it be a bad idea not to support our troops?' - rephrasing a funding cutoff as an attack on the soldiers.

It is a demonstration of the entirely artificial and false character of 'official' US politics that sending hundreds if not thousands more soldiers to their deaths is hailed as 'support,' while removing them from the battlefield and returning them safely to their families is denounced as 'undermining the troops.'"

Here we can see that liberals have internalized the arguments, as well as the premises of those arguments, of those who would use military power to gain control of key economic resources. The louder and more incessant the cries that rise from the Democrats with their meaningless expressions of distaste for Mr. Bush's tactics, the more likely that the underlying hegemonic imperative is being buried beneath a waste dump of moralistic rhetoric.

To end the war means to end the taste for violence in ourselves - through action that risks comfort, career, and all the perks that the empire can provide to buffer us from the consequences of that comfort - the price of which is alway paid by others far away. The truth we cannot face is the truth Gandhi knew so well: "We must voluntarily put up with the losses and inconveniences that arise from having to withdraw our support from a Government that is ruling against our will. Possession of power and riches is a crime under an unjust Government, poverty in that case is a virtue, says Thoreau...if a Government does a grave injustice the subjects must withdraw co-operation wholly or partially, sufficiently to wean the ruler from his wickedness. In each case conceived by me there is an element suffering whether mental or physical. Without such suffering it is not possible to attain freedom." - Gandhi

Becoming Free

"Watada also provides a living example of what it means to step up to personal responsibilities. 'There was a long time when I went through depression because I told myself I didn't have a choice,' he told New America Media. 'That I joined the military and I had only one duty and that was to obey what I was told, regardless of how I felt inside. It really hurt me for a long time because I imprisoned myself by telling myself I didn't have a choice. It didn't matter that I might be sent to prison. I was already in prison, my freedom was already gone.

"When I told myself that I do have a choice, I have a choice to do what is morally right, what is in my conscience, and what I can live with for the rest of my life--even though that comes with consequences, I do have that choice. When I realized that, and when I chose what was right for me, I became free again. And I think everybody has to remember that and to realize that is what is important in life."

Instead, we behave thus: "Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself." - from a soldier currently stationed in Iraq.

What this leads to, beyond the moral catastrophe, are massacres such as the murder of 260 people near Najaf in southern Iraq on January 29 which was first portrayed as a highly successful U.S.-Iraqi joint military action, but has now been revealed as another uncaring blunder by those living in the necessary unreality engendered by the deceptions inherent to the occupation. The roads are filled with pilgrims walking on foot toward Najaf, the holy city of the Shiites. It was the festival of Ashura and the tribes were gathered and on the march to show honor to Hussein, Mohammed's son in law. But fear, nourished through the colonial brutality needed to dominate by division, rules the Iraqi army. When the time for a minor strike on a religious party came, there were various other people in the area--notably the al-Hawatim tribe. The rest of the story is best told from Patrick Cockburn's account: "The incident reportedly began when a procession of 200 pilgrims was on its way, on foot, to celebrate Ashura in Najaf. They came from the Hawatim tribe, which lives between Najaf and Diwaniyah to the south, and arrived in the Zarga area, one mile from Najaf at about 6am on Sunday. Heading the procession was the chief of the tribe, Hajj Sa'ad Sa'ad Nayif al-Hatemi, and his wife driving in their 1982 Super Toyota sedan because they could not walk. When they reached an Iraqi army checkpoint it opened fire, killing Mr Hatemi, his wife and his driver, Jabar Ridha al-Hatemi. The tribe, fully armed because they were travelling at night, then assaulted the checkpoint to avenge their fallen chief." - Patrick Cockburn, The Waco of Iraq? US "Victory" Against Cult Leader was a Massacre, CounterPunch, January 31, 2007.

Why was he killed? In an act of remarkable courage, the Hawatim had declared themselves opposed to the occupation-induced war between Sunni and Shiite. Far from being the mythical centuries-old struggle portrayed by the corporate media, the Shiite-Sunni civil war of today is primarily a consequence of the American occupation. The one unforgiveable crime in the current Iraq is to cry out for peace.

"Members of another tribe called Khaza'il living in Zarga tried to stop the fighting but they themselves came under fire. Meanwhile, the soldiers and police at the checkpoint called up their commanders saying they were under attack from al-Qai'da with advanced weapons. Reinforcements poured into the area and surrounded the Hawatim tribe in the nearby orchards. The tribesmen tried - in vain - to get their attackers to cease fire.

American helicopters then arrived and dropped leaflets saying: 'To the terrorists, surrender before we bomb the area.' The tribesmen went on firing and a US helicopter was hit and crashed killing two crewmen. The tribesmen say they do not know if they hit it or if it was brought down by friendly fire. The US aircraft launched an intense aerial bombardment in which 120 tribesmen and local residents were killed by 4am on Monday." - Patrick Cockburn, ibid.

The final count was 263 dead, plus a lie swallowed whole by the corporate media. Do we have a choice? Do we want to be free again?

God Weeps

"God weeps," Archbishop Tutu told participants in the ecumenical gathering near the conclusion of the World Social Forum in Nairobi, "and says, 'Who will help me so we can have a different kind of world, one in which the rich know they have been given much so they can share and help others?'"

"Bush and his inner circle," Floyd concluded, "believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives."

The "PSA chips" journalist Chris Floyd is referring to are the production-sharing agreements devised here in the U.S. by the oil majors that now sit as proposed legislation before the Iraqi parliament. They would give U.S. oil companies virtual control over the second-largest proven reserves of oil in the world. Don't expect to see this spotlighted on CNN anytime soon.

And so 655,000 people had to die. While we Christians sat in our pews and a tiny minority wrote emails to Congresspeople that went straight to the spam filters. What is this impotence that acts as a shadow over all our outrage? "We are at once overeducated and underpowered. We have knowledge that has no consequences for action and makes us helpless. Knowledge is not power, as the classical workers movement believed, but impotence. We do not use our education sensibly in the sense of turning back from the way we have found out to be wrong, namely the way of industrial society. We use it toward even greater hopelessness. In the rich world we still have to learn resistance." Dorothee Soelle.

We must learn the strength of the weak at the feet of our Lord. This is the resistance, the rebellion of the heart, that will end the paralysis of knowledge. "It is costly, and it disunites and unites anew. It is an irreversible step that we can forget or undo only at the price of self-betrayal. This step is a break with the bourgeois half-measure that ponders endlessly whether the other side might not be right as well; it is a break with the violence that so lives in me that I submit myself to it without a fight." Dorothee Soelle.

The Animals We Have Made

Standing outside Guantanamo, a mother reflects on her son's life inside:

"Journeying from Dubai to Guantanamo a little more than a year later, Omar’s brother Taher and his mother Zohra were now standing in the same spot. Zohra writes of the 'excruciating' pain of being so close to her son but unable to enter the base. Omar 'is in this cursed jail for so many years in conditions which are not even fit for animals,' Zohra writes. 'I pray to Allah during every prayer that he is released and that he finds people who treat him kindly and compassionately. My heart is ruptured with sadness.'"

The fact that he is an innocent man seems meaningless to our government and the Christians who support it: "By all reports, Omar is an innocent man. A devout Muslim who aspired to be a human rights lawyer, he traveled to Malaysia and Afghanistan in early 2001, got married, and had a child. When the United States invaded Afghanistan, the young family fled to Pakistan and made plans to return to England. Instead, Pakistani security forces arrested them in April 2002 and turned them over the U.S. forces in exchange for a $5,000 bounty."

This, of course, is the story of most the Guantanamo detainees, only ten of whom have received actual charges. The rest were turned in to get the bounty the U.S. was offering, so that bodies could be produced to prove the "war on terror" was working.

For Omar, his intelligence and knowledge led to special treatment by the guardians of democracy: "At Guantanamo, Omar says he was singled out for harsher treatment because of his familiarity with the law and his tendency to stand up for other prisoners. Permanently blinded in one eye when a U.S. guard jabbed him with his finger, Omar has also been subjected to sexual humiliation, has endured high power water jets forced up his nose, and was held in solitary confinement for over eight months. U.S. officials at Guantanamo also allowed Libyan intelligence agents to question and threaten Omar."

The corporate media has done a superb job. It has shined our honor, made us feel proud of our deeds in defending freedom and democracy from the "evil" that threatens it in these poor men sitting in cages at Guantanamo. Its masters must indeed marvel at the consumate job they have performed in turning our attention away from our darkened hearts.

Today's Gospel points the way out of Guantanamo: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, it profits me nothing.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

Crossing the Line

"Darrell Anderson went AWOL after serving a tour in Baghdad and Najaf. According to Darrell, standard 'procedure' for U.S. troops in Iraq who were fired on in a public space was to shoot everyone in sight. As Darrell put it, 'It is impossible to go to war, and not commit war crimes.'"

"He also recounted his thoughts as he guarded two Iraqi detainees after a long firefight. 'I was exhausted, I had shrapnel in my side, and the blood of my best friend on my uniform,' said Darrel. 'I had been in this hell for four months, and here I am in a room with my weapon, and two of our enemies shackled and hooded. They weren’t humans to me. I wanted revenge. I’m just glad I didn’t cross the line.'

But many soldiers do cross the line. Iraq war veteran Chanan Suarez Díaz described a platoon known for 'unleashing hell' on Iraqi civilians. In the mess hall, they would brag about 'massacring whole families,' Chanan testified."

The main job of the corporate media with regard to war-related reporting is to decontaminate stories such as these so that their explosive political potential can be neutralized. These stories will normally only be reported if it is somehow forced into public attention by an individual act of courage, as in the case of Haditha or Abu Ghraib. If there is an accidental spill of this kind, the news media acts as clean-up crew to reverse its potential effects by recontextualizing it, often by emphasizing minor legalistic issues so as to obscure the major thrust. The same applies to stories such as the Libby trial, which will be formatted as much as possible toward its entertainment possibilities, while serious issues will invariably be reduced to legal quibbles so as to divert the thrust of moral outrage into a dry dispute.

As Christians, we should begin our penance in reparation for these crimes as soon as we hear about them.

An Army of Principles

"An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot."
- Thomas Paine, 1737-1809

"Two Marines in their platoon had been killed, and they just went crazy. They were notorious. Everyone knew they killed a lot of innocent people because they would brag about it. They were in a souk, an Iraqi marketplace, they got engaged while they were doing some patrols, and they just opened up on the whole marketplace. It was midday, people were trying to do their shopping.

We reacted to that incident--we were their support. We left the houses and hauled ass to meet them at the souk, and I remember holding position in the souk for a little bit, and seeing shattered glass everywhere on the street, and bloodstains everywhere, and I remember a guy who was lying on the sidewalk.

A lot of innocent people died that day."

Day by day, the rebellion spreads. This can be most accurately measured by studying the media coverage of the war. If the corporate media is not fearful of a certain trend, such as Democrats standing on their hind legs and barking a little louder, or an event that can be milked for its entertainment value, such as the Libby trial, then they will give it the full treatment. But a genuinely disturbing trend, such as rebelling soldiers in Iraq or the trial of Lt. Ehren Watada or the current anti-war demonstrations, will receive little or no coverage. The same applies to the very wide current perception of an imminent war with Iran. While most of the world is preparing for a disaster of spectacular dimensions, the American public is being carefully isolated, most likely in anticipation of a "Gulf of Tonkin" incident that will spark the Middle East conflagration. I can find no better commentary on the mentality of U.S. ruling class and the spiritual resistance that all of us must begin to practice than these words from Gandhi:

"Kings will always use their kingly weapons. To use force is bred in them. They want to command, but those who have to obey commands do not want guns: and these are in a majority throughout the world. They have to learn either body-force or soul-force. Where they learn the former, both the rulers and the ruled become like so many mad men; but where they learn soul-force, the commands of the rulers do not go beyond the point of their swords, for true men disregard unjust commands."

The last word goes to Chanan Suarez Diaz, a Navy corpsman who was deployed to Iraq in September 2005: "So they keep a lot of news about combat refusals or resistance internal, so people don’t hear about it. Because they know if word got out, this kind of behavior will spread like wildfire within the ranks."

Give all the support you can to these troops by ending the violence that lives in our hearts and hands, that a rebellion of love may infect the Christian world.

Silence is Betrayal

If the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?

"Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment." - Martin Luther King.

It is our faith in right defeated that keeps us strong with real strength, not the bloatings of power that inflame, then abandon the dessicated wreck of lost humanity.

Will we heed the words of John Edwards, speaking the words that Martin Luther King would no doubt be speaking now if he had the voice, a voice which still speaks in our hearts:

"Silence is betrayal. Speak out, and stop this escalation now. You have the power to prohibit the president from spending any money to escalate the war – use it.

And to all of you here today – and the millions like us around the country who know this escalation is wrong – your job is to reject the easy way of apathy and choose instead the hard course of action.

Silence is betrayal. Speak out. Tell your elected leaders to block this misguided plan that is destined to cost more lives and further damage America’s ability to lead. And tell them also, that the reward of courage...is trust."

False Consciousness

"The fact exists; but both the fact and what may result from it may be prejudicial to the person. Thus it becomes necessary, not precisely to deny the fact, but to 'see it differently.' This rationalization as a defense mechanism coincides in the end with subjectivism. A fact which is not denied but whose truths are rationalized loses its objective base. It ceases to be concrete and becomes a myth created in defense of the class of the perceiver." Paolo Friere, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

This is practically all the commentary that is necessary on Bush's escalation of the war in Iraq. Defending the class interests of the occupiers requires a different perception of the war - once the production sharing agreements for the oil wealth of the country are in place, then perceptions will shift once again.

As Christians, when we see a fact such as an unjust war and fail to respond to that knowledge through acts of resistance, then we implant the seeds of false consciousness that ripen into the fruits of self-deception. We have joined hands with the liberator, the representative of the liberation movements of people who work to free themselves by God's power, which is not the power of domination, but of the free gift of self. To fail to act is to betray the gift, to diminish and ultimately to despise it. The gift is the strength he gives us to free ourselves by our actions, for without such action there can be no liberation, which is not an hypnotic state, but a concrete act of freedom.

This is the reality we have imposed on the Iraqi people: "Baghdad is dying, we are all just waiting in line." Khaled -- not his real name to protect his life -- one of our Iraqi employees, said the words softy, his eyes glossing over.

"It's so hard for me Arwa. This skull won¹t absorb English," he said, smacking both palms against his head. "I just have too much on my mind. I'm supporting three families, most of them women, each time my phone rings my heart sinks thinking that one of them was killed."

Khaled is a well-built man, proud and softly spoken. But like too many others, utterly broken by the hardship of life in the capital. Helpless in the face of the violence. Moving mechanically through each day, just hoping to reach tomorrow.

There absolutely nothing to say. Reassuring words ring hollow. And so I just said "I know." And his eyes glossed over even more.

Iraqis are strong and proud. You won't often see their suffering in their actions or in their voices. You see it in their eyes. Baghdad is dying."

In the face of such facts, we reach for the maneuvers of power politics, but somehow we must resist this as well. To use the tactics of our enemies is to be defeated by those tactics. To use them is to succumb to the logic of power. We must embrace another set of logics, those used by "the powerless Christ who was independent of authority, who has nothing but his love with which to win and save us. His powerlessness is an inner authority: we are not his because he has begotten, created, or made us, but because his weaponless power is love, which is stronger than death." Dorothee Soelle.

Without a Why

"The war in Iraq is the preeminent moral issue before the American church, and clergy are at the heart of what the nation does next." "How Many Deaths in Iraq Before U.S. Churches Say Enough?", Robert Parham, 1/2/07 (http://www.ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=8356)

If the Christian leaders of America extend their moral failure in the face of the crimes being committed in Iraq, then no institutional "strength" can redeem that failure. Their silence betrays Christ's heart which cries out for an end to bloodshed and wasted souls. It is their refusal to heed this voice that eats away at the foundations of Christian life. But they do not own all the guilt - "We want to kill the murderers, and Jesus says to us: 'You are all murderers. If you have called your neighbor "Raca, Fool" you are guilty of murder in your heart.' Again the stones drop. We are all murderers and adulterers and terrorists. And we are all precious." - Shane Claiborne.

The leader of the ideology we struggle against is the success God, who blesses only what succeeds directly in front of us. When nonviolent struggle, in both its lesser and greater forms, seemingly falls flat and achieves nothing but echoing silence, when our best efforts meet with blithe ignorance, I always try to keep in mind Meister Eckhart's sunder warumbe, the idea that creatures of God live without a why and act from the spiritual center of their lives without enslavement to an external purpose. In terms of striving for justice, we struggle not for mere worldly success but because this is what God's spirit demands of us even, especially, when we see not even a shadow of a response from the world around us. The God of success who speaks so glibly and convincingly in our hearts tells us that our efforts are wasted and more cunningly, that lack of success is testimony to a lack of understanding, that we are out of touch with the world around us due to a unknown, but devastating moral failure. When we correct this failing, then success will bless our efforts, much as those who accept the gospel of prosperity find their work blessed.

But we who struggle nonviolently often do not see our labors prosper. We need to keep this in mind when we characterize the war in Iraq as the result of incompetence. When we do this, we have once again accepted the God of success as the final arbiter of all human effort, and evaluations oriented solely toward success are fundamentally cynical. This cynicism corrodes every movement toward justice that it touches. We protest because it is the response of a living thing to the smothering creep of death over God's creatures, and though we pay with failure, there is a glory in this failure that no "success" can touch.

Our moral failure starts to end when we look on the face of those we have murdered, not with the silly triumph of a "tough-minded" pundit, but with the words of Henri Nouwen, "In the face of the oppressed I recognize my own face and in the hands of the oppressor I recognize my own hands. Their flesh is my flesh, their blood is my blood, their pain is my pain, their smile is my smile."

Delight not in the death of any man

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." = Elie Viesel

I do not applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created, nor do I delight in the death of the guilty. The God I serve is a God of life, who does not take pleasure in the death of the living. Who was the rich young man who goaded Saddam into the war with Iran which led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? Why can't we Christians look into our souls and see the the all-consuming desire for revenge that inhabits us? What overpowering need for absolute security led us to sell him "the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds?" (Robert Fisk, "A Dictator Created then Destroyed by America"). And what about "the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our 'bunker buster' bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our victory'"? And what about "the Shia who rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's executioners"? And in the end, what crime did Saddam die for? Not that he gassed his people - we supplied the gas - but that he failed to obey his orders from Washington. What reflections on the sacrifice of Christ does this bring to us, his tardy followers? We have no responsibility for these crimes because the God of security has absolved us of them.

When we will learn that most of our subject peoples do not wish to be encased in the skin of death that encases us? "Fullness of life, the reign of God, eternal life - all shatter before wealth of possessions, exploitation, and injustice." Who is the God we worship? It crouches in us; it has possessed us. We cannot experience fullness of life as long as we live beneath its shadow. It is the security we crave, the embalmed preservation of our own security, no matter what tortures and massacres must be permitted to ensure it. "Militarism is humanity's greatest attempt to get rid of God once and for all, to unmake creation and to prevent redemption to fullness of life." Dorothee Soelle, "Life to the Full". Whether it be gentle depression or desperate exultation, the Christians of America have made a deal with the God of death, "have made security their national ideology and armaments their political priority." And then we wonder why our lives seem so empty.

The king is not saved by his army,
nor a warrior preserved by his srength.
A vain hope for safety is the horse;
despite its power it cannot save.

The Lord looks on those who revere him,
on those who hope in his love,
to rescue their souls from death,
to keep them alive in famine.

Our soul is waiting for the Lord.
The Lord is our help and our shield.

Lay Down Your Weapons

"April 20, 9:40 in the morning. Headphones on, local Christian band Olivia playing a song called 'Heaven,' and Logan's thoughts on what in the world to do about his beliefs. Then, for a moment, heaven itself seemed to open.

'I felt like somebody was showing me something,' he says of the 'short video clip' from above that followed.

'I saw myself in the Middle East, I'm pretty sure it was Iraq,' he says, describing the emotionally vivid experience. 'What struck me were two things: number one, that I did not have a weapon.' The second thing was a feeling of 'confidence;' the confidence that he was 'doing what was right.'

It was his calling. He would go to Iraq, but without a weapon. At first he thought he might be able to do that as a non-combative member of his company. So after prayer and consideration, he applied for Conscientious Objector (CO) status, as per the Army regulation allowing a soldier to request discharge for reasons of conscience, as long as military officials deem the applicant 'sincere' at the end of the stipulated process. He was ready to go to prison if need be, which, in today's for-us-or-against-us climate is a real possibility for CO applicants. Major Jones says the majority of CO applications are denied."

Either love underlies our striving for liberation or else that striving is for something other than liberation - most often a hidden struggle for another type of domination. This is the power that that must ensoul all our efforts of resistance against the structures of sin under which our hearts bake like cracked earth. It is not sufficient to struggle for liberation - the struggle must be carried out in a liberating way. The word of God constantly reminds us that those at the pinnacles of power "wither quickly like grass", so our hearts must trust in the goodness of God and fight only with the instruments of love. If we struggle for power, then we become the tools of power.

"Christianity exists for slaves. It is the religion of the oppressed, of those marked by affliction...People are pronounced blessed not because of their achievements or their behavior, but with regard to their needs. Blessed are the poor, the suffering, the persecuted, the hungry." Dorothee Solle, Suffering.

The words of the soldier Logan Laituri, whose love for Jesus has called him to lay down his weapon in Iraq, show what this courage involves: "This is what He bid me to do; to be an active example for the unconditional love that He grants. This call does not have to make sense to me, I simply obey... Jesus came to protect us from evil, not seek and destroy evil (John 17:15). If he did intend to deliver us from the "evil enemy," why did he not conquer Rome, as the established religious leaders expected of Him, and other messianic pretenders of His time hoped to do? Perhaps he was preoccupied with personal sin and blindness; the same blindness that keeps us from seeing the plank in our own eye. How much more evil are our enemies to us than we were once to God, and don’t they deserve to be offered Grace just as we were granted it?"

May we all pray for the courage to lay down our weapons and open our hearts to the source of true strength, as Logan has done. Read his blog at http://www.xanga.com/courageouscoward.

Lay Down Your Fear

The following is from a blog by Logan Laituri, a soldier stationed in Iraq and a follower of Jesus who has chosen to lay down his arms because of the love that has been awakened in him:

"I actually sought to return to Iraq for a second tour, but I would not go as an agent of intimidation or fear. That is what a weapon does (short of killing or destroying); it incites fear. Those who have fear in their hearts are not made perfect in love, which Christ offers (1 John 4:16-21). Additionally, for the argument; "In order for evil to prevail, all it takes is for good men to do nothing (which has been leveled against me, based on the illogical argument that non-violence is ‘nothing’)" to work, one must base such an argument upon 1) there is nothing between violence and peace. (men do not exist in moderate disagreement, they can only exist in either absolute peacefulness or absolute violence), or basically 2) that there are no alternatives but war to solve the worlds problems (since we must have exhausted all other possibilities, even if you subscribe to Just War theory), and 3) that good men must go to war to prevent evil, which is hypocritical, since even the most conservative of religious folk know that war is not God’s hope for mankind.

So we have a catch-22. In order to quell evil, must good men commit a “necessary” evil in order to avoid doing nothing? Romans 3:5-8 has a grim outlook for those who claim evil is necessary for good; Paul says their condemnation is deserved. Additionally, that argument must assume that sin is necessary for salvation. What about other alternatives? I volunteered to lay down my weapon because having it gave me no real security whatsoever. It would cause me more moral and spiritual damage than anything else; continuously tempting me to use it to kill or harm our nation’s enemies (a direct contradiction of Christ’s command to bless them, see Romans 13:10 too), or worse, into thinking that carrying a weapon or wearing a Kevlar vest (physical security) somehow assures my moral or spiritual superiority over them. I trust in God, I do not need a security blanket to remind me that He loves me and the scary, 'evil' men who know nothing of His love for them. Aren't we charged, as disciples of Christ, to be the light for those deceived, mislead men? Do I lie that responsibility down for a nation of the earth? The challenge is simple; do I love my country? Yes, but I love Jesus even more.

This is what He bid me to do; to be an active example for the unconditional love that He grants. This call does not have to make sense to me, I simply obey. Do I need religious freedom to do that? No, they do it in restrictive countries just fine. I firmly disagree with the statement that without religious freedom we would not go to Church on Sunday morning. Men and women in the persecuted church do it all the time; that is when true faith comes into play, when it costs something, when the title 'Christian' comes at a great price, one which true believers are willing to give all (Grace comes at a scandalously high cost to some). We should not rely on temporal freedom to worship God, but only on a renewed heart and His Holy Spirit. Jesus came to protect us from evil, not seek and destroy evil (John 17:15). If he did intend to deliver us from the 'evil enemy,' why did he not conquer Rome, as the established religious leaders expected of Him, and other messianic pretenders of His time hoped to do? Perhaps he was preoccupied with personal sin and blindness; the same blindness that keeps us from seeing the plank in our own eye. How much more evil are our enemies to us than we were once to God, and don’t they deserve to be offered Grace just as we were granted it?

Finally; of course we do not live in a perfect world. However, we are undeniably called to begin His work so that when He comes in glory, it will be completed. Dispensationalist-type theology is flawed in that it effectively seeks to absolve us on earth of our responsibility to obey His commands. We then walk a precarious path; Matthew 7:21 - "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." He knows we will fail, but He is pleased by our faith that all things are made possible through Jesus. It is also a poor theology to live by since it insists that Jesus was simply an idealist. I think Man, in all his 'wisdom,' has distorted Jesus’ realism into non-reality; forever condemning the Kingdom of Heaven from ever taking root on earth as it is in Heaven. I, however, will continue in my foolish idealism, because it is the only way change has ever been accomplished. Jesus died rejected and humiliated on a Roman cross as punishment for proposing a new kingdom ('Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm' threatened both religious and national leaders’ sovereignty). It is this kingdom He calls us to be an active part of today and forever. All of His apostles were martyred for the same kingdom (except John, and believe me, the Romans tried…); most notably Peter and Paul, who remind us to be subject to government, not blindly obedient to it. Each follower must rely on his or her own conscience to discern how and when to 'obey God above man (Acts 5:29b).' As the reformer Martin Luther said; 'My conscience is captive to the Word of God, for to go against [my] conscience is neither right nor safe… Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.' Allow me to close with a request…

As a nation, let us repent of our political arrogance, economic obesity, and lack of concern for our fellow man (Ezekiel 16:49). Let us be as the publican Jesus describes, not as the Pharisee (Luke 18:9-14)"

This text is a fountainhead of raw truth. Now has the time come to lay aside the volumes of theology mounted like the Separation Barrier in Israel and open our hearts to the vision of heaven. We have piled up means such as Thoreau spoke of when he said, "The opportunities of living are dimished in proportion as what are called the 'means' are increased." But these means have not led to the fullness of life, rather to engorgement with the fruits of our obsession with security. "'Security' is hope reduced to middle-class terms, yearning on a small scale, a kind of self-limitation that already amounts to mutilation." Dorothee Soelle, "We Want Peace, not Security". This mutilation of the spirit is what Logan Laituri refuses. He refuses to cut off the arms of his awakening in order to protect the inner death that his country has brought upon itself. "Only life that opens itself to the other, life that risks being wounded or killed, contains promise. Those who arms themselves are not only killers; they are already dead."

"To have our fortunes restored, we must first admit that we are empty." - Adventus

Unconditional Forgiveness

"We three, members of a Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) delegation to Iraq, were kidnapped on November 26, 2005 and held for 118 days before being freed by British and American forces on March 23, 2006. Our friend and colleague, Tom Fox, an American citizen and full-time member of the CPT team working in Baghdad at the time, was kidnapped with us and murdered on March 9, 2006..."

"We unconditionally forgive our captors for abducting and holding us. We have no desire to punish them. Punishment can never restore what was taken from us. What our captors did was wrong. They caused us, our families and our friends great suffering. Yet we bear no malice towards them and have no wish for retribution. Should those who have been charged with holding us hostage be brought to trial and convicted, we ask that they be granted all possible leniency. We categorically lay aside any rights we may have over them."

Here indeed is the central creed that Jesus Christ is calling many to in our time: "Through the power of forgiveness, it is our hope that good deeds will come from the lives of our captors, and that we will all learn to reject the use of violence. We believe those who use violence against others are themselves harmed by the use of violence." Violence harms the perpetrator far more than the victim. Every act of violence is a wound in the soul, which can only be healed by Christ's love, which is often manifested in acts of nonviolent resistance such as the Christian Peacemakers practice.

But do we embrace weakness for the sake of weakness? Do we forgive because we lack the power to do anything else? Is this an acceptance, a resignation, to powerlessness, an acceptance of the fate of the slave? It is rather a knowledge of where true power lies: "But what is decisive for Christian mysticism is first of all the knowledge that the one who suffers wrong is also stronger (not just morally better) than the one who does wrong. That 'God is always with the one who is suffering' entails not only consolation but also stengthening: a rejection of every ideology of punishment, which is so useful the the cementing of privileges and for oppression."

We forgive our oppressors not because we love or even accept our oppression, but because we are stronger than they are and our refusal of their violence in itself contains their defeat.

The Awful Roar

"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick Douglass

Until Christians begin to roar, the darkness will endure. Christians are outraged by injustice and will not be silent - they cannot endure the darkness and would rather die than tolerate it. But this does not mean they embrace the laws of power:

"Power," wrote Rienhold Niebuhr, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party."

What is so disturbing about the current rebellion against the Iraq occupation is how it is being framed by virtually all parties, but especially the Democratic establishment. The argument that persuades Americans of all political stripes is that we have been ineffective and incompetent, but that implies that once we make our technical adjustments, the moral dilemma will be resolved. This is precisely the moral dilemma that Niebuhr saw so presciently: "Yet our American nation, involved in its vast responsibilities, must slough off many illusions which were derived both from the experiences and the ideologies of its childhood. Otherwise either we will seek escape from responsibilities which involve unavoidable guilt, or we will be plunged into avoidable guilt by too great confidence in our virtue."

To accept the end of childhood is to fully embrace responsibility as an inherent and inherently ambiguous part of our being. The American ideology acts as a hard and shiny shell from which this responsibility can easily be wiped, leaving us as "innocent" as we were in the misty beginning. Our leaders continue to cling to this childhood and in this clinging, violate every Christian law that such innocence ever embraced.

But my soul shall be joyful in the Lord
and rejoice in his salvation.
My whole being will say:
"Lord, who is like you
who rescue the weak from the strong
and the poor from the oppressor?"

Those Who Do Wrong are Silenced

Unlike Americans behind their cyberwall of entertaining blasphemy, God cannot remain indifferent. With regard to Palestinians, even the human rights organizations have condemned them to their fate, but God has not.

A few weeks ago, Nonviolent Jesus reported the following words from Patrick Cockburn: "Gaza is dying, its people are on the edge of starvation. A whole society is being destroyed. The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal."

In response, Palestinians have been placing their last weapon, their bodies, in front of the houses about to be destroyed, risking their own dismemberment to peacefully resist brutal and blatant injustice. Yet even these desperate attempts to stand for justice are condemned, and precisely by those who have accepted the mission of protecting human rights: "On November 18, hundreds of people crowded in and around the home of Mohammed Baroud, a leader of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) after Baroud received a telephone call warning of an Israeli air strike. The calls from the Israeli air force are meant to terrorize Palestinians into fleeing. But Baroud refused to leave his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp, and hundreds of neighbors gathered outside the building, with about 50 climbing on the roof to chant anti-Israeli slogans. With dozens of people remaining in the house in a round-the-clock vigil, the Israeli military called off at least two air strikes, according to the Kuwait Times."

The reaction from the human rights community was a swift and decisive condemnation: "Prime Minister Haniyeh and other Palestinian leaders should be renouncing, not embracing, the tactic of encouraging civilians to place themselves at risk." In other words, the tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King are now crimes, but the bombing of innocent civilian's houses in an act of collective punishment is not.

The Lord hears the cry of the poor. We Christians are too stupid and unhip to fill our ears with the nonstop blast of extremist chatter that has deafened the majority in this country. We are simple people who believe in simple justice, and we hear the cry of Jesus in the screams of the Palestinians as they wait to be slaughtered:

"Two weeks before, in the town of Beit Hanoun, some 200 women surrounded a mosque where a dozen Hamas militants were trapped inside by a siege of Israeli tanks and bulldozers.

Responding to a call by Hamas commanders, the women marched in front of the vehicles as they prepared to demolish the mosque. According to reports, the women went into the mosque, helped the male fighters disguise themselves and led them to safety. During the standoff, Israeli forces opened fire on the women, killing two in a hail of bullets. A few days later, the Israeli military took revenge--with a nighttime air strike on an apartment building in Beit Hanoun that killed 19 people, including eight children and 11 members of the same family."

Some will say that the Palestinians are guilty of violence, and indeed some are, but not as guilty as the Americans who sit with stuffed ears and folded hands while 3 billion dollars a year pours into corporate coffers to build weapons to shred human beings in Gaza. And, in the words of Moltmann, "He enters not only into the situation of the limited creature, but even into the situation of the guilty and suffering creature."

Blessed are Those Who Mourn

"The kindergarten teacher is lying on a stretcher, covered with blood. The minibus is parked alongside. From somewhere to the left, the army cannon is firing shells. The children are lying on the ground next to one another. That is how one of the children described the morning when they were driving to their kindergarten in Beit Lahia and an Israel Defense Forces shell or missile--the army spokesman refuses to say--exploded several meters away and mortally wounded the teacher before their eyes." Gideon Levy, CounterPunch, Nov. 25, 2006.

And when human hearts are breaking
under sorrow's iron rod,
then we find that self-same aching
deep within the heart of God.

We mourn for the kindergarten teacher murdered by an Israeli missle and thank God it did not destroy a busload of kindergarten children, which would be declared one more "tragic mistake" in a very long string of them. But we do not surrender to the paralysis of grief. We often speak of the impotence of love in these pages because it is critical to create a counterbalance the ideology of power which is so persuasive that the vast majority isn't even aware of an alternative, including "Christians". But there are deadening griefs and life-giving ones, a distinction which the one-dimensional world most of us inhabit is incapable of grasping. In the words of Jurgen Moltmann, "If fellowship with the dying and the dead takes the pain of love seriously, it will also protest against the conditions in pulbic life which do not allow people the liberty and free space to mourn, but compel them to repress their grief, because mourning is considered illegitimate." So we are the illegitimate mourners who continue to feel grief while the world shouts Enjoy! in our deafened ears and hearts. We resist the culture of Forever Young that tramples over the weak and the failures and those too abandoned by the world to defend their stolen land. We mourn and feel the resurrection hope in our grief.

Palestine is the conscience of us all

Alyssa Peterson:

"Gaza threatens to become Chechnya. There are thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people in Gaza, unable to receive any treatment. Those on respirators are liable to die due to the frequent power outages since Israel bombed the power plant. Tens of thousands of children suffer from existential anxiety, while their parents are unable to provide help. They are witnesses to sights that even Gaza's old-timers have never seen before...

"Brutal and dizzy ideas compete against each other," Levy continues, "the defense minister suggests liquidations and the agriculture minister proposes tougher action; one advocates 'an eye for an eye,' the second wants to 'erase Beit Hanoun' and the third 'to pulverize Beit Lahiya.' And no one pauses for a moment to think about what they are saying. What exactly does it mean to 'erase Beit Hanoun'? What does this chilling combination of words mean? A town of 30,000 people, most of them children, whose measure of grief and suffering has long reached breaking point, unemployed and hungry, without a present and without a future, with no protection against Israel's violent military responses, which have lost all human proportionality."

Christ died for the people of Beit Hanoun. Muslim or Christian, the question is the power of love. And the impotence of love. We fighters for human rights must accept our impotence, the deafness of those entranced by power, and continue to fight. We must be able to look at inevitable failure, at our inability to save even a single child from the jaws of the Israeli/US death machine and then swear we will never lower the volume of our No!

"Whoever abides in love abides in God and God in him (I John 4.17). Where we suffer because we love, God suffers in us." And we feel that suffering when we raise our impotent and invisible hands to shield the children and find that they go on suffering and dying. Then we look to the death of Jesus where we find the origin of this despairing love and suddenly, the strength to continue protesting floods our veins. "Where he has suffered the death of Jesus and in so doing, has shown the force of his love, men also find the power to continue to love, to sustain that which annihilates them and to 'endure what is dead'." Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God.

It is not a "mistake" or "incompetence" when forces are committed to destruction and the inevitable blood starts to flow. This arises in a hatred that objectifies the living flesh of God, our brothers and sisters. These are not tactics, but the eruption of sin's potency that condemns both itself and its victim. Let love's power connect your heart to the hearts of those suffering in Gaza and Iraq, so that you begin to see these brothers and sisters as God sees them.

Each time we deliberately dismiss our knowledge of these crimes and those our government is committing in Iraq, we diminish our humanity. The case of Alyssa Peterson, referred to a few posts ago, is emblematic of what participation in these acts, either silent or active, inflicts on the soul. Alyssa Peterson, as you may remember, died of self-inflicted wounds after two days of participating in interrogations in Tal-Afar, at a place referred to as "'the cage' - where she saw fellow soldiers hitting a naked prisoner in the face. She said, 'They stripped prisoners naked and then removed their blindfolds, so that I was the first thing they saw. And then, we were supposed to mock them and degrade their manhood.' Other soldiers later told her that the old rules no longer applied. This was a different world and a new kind of war."

She may have seen other things as well: "What happened to other prisoners was much worse. At the request of the White House, U.S. servicemen and women, contract interrogators and CIA employees have beaten, maimed, sodomized and killed prisoners held in custody by the United States. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and in secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, prisoners have been electrically shocked, water boarded, starved, beaten and frozen to death, suffocated with hoods, hung upside down until dead and had their flesh seared off with chemicals. More than 100 Afghan and Iraqi prisoners have died in this manner while in U.S. custody." Brian Moench, "Has the Military Lost its Humanity?", Nov. 22, 2006.

Alyssa perhaps felt that the loss of her humanity was the loss of everything that made life valuable - to be a part of the madness which our rulers have forced on us is to abandon membership in the fellowship of decency.

The Executioners Shall not Triumph

"God is greater than Israel and America!"

"The assault took place on a crowded apartment building in the dead of night. Eight of the dead were children, and 11 were members of the same family.

For days, the Israeli military carried on operations in Beit Hanoun. More than 53 were killed in one week, and more than 300 injured, and then the Israelis withdrew from the village. But the next day, they launched an artillery strike on a very crowded building, and the outcome of this one attack was 18 killed, and about 150 injured."

I should not have to make this story compelling and "interesting", politically aligned with what the pundits say Christian concerns should be. We should simply look on our brothers and sisters with the eyes of love that God has given us, and open our hearts. Each such death is our chance to quell the violence that lives within us through non-violent action.

"The message of the new righteousness which eschatological faith brings into the world says that in fact the executioners will not finally triumph over their victims. It also says that in the end the victims will not triumph over their executioners. The one will triumph who first died for the victims and then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through the vicious circles of hate nad vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes what is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is neither oppressed nor oppresses, can one speak of the true revolution orf righteousness an dof the righteousness of God." - Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God.