Here’s a story. It begins in the parking lot of the Denton (TX) Islamic Society, a tiny congregation named so as to claim standing in the world outside the traditional Islamic realm. It was Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. Three hundred or so local citizens, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others gathered in the back parking lot of the society’s tiny mosque in order to express our solidarity after someone had fire bombed the place. I didn’t visit the interior of the building because I didn’t know whether I should take off my shoes, and I don’t know today whether the Sabbath has any standing in Islam.

Tuesday the week before–I won’t put the date down–a thing occurred that I never dreamed I would live to see when terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the main towers of the World Trade Center in New York and destroyed them, together with other buildings nearby and the lives of several thousand souls. I should set it down that other terrorists also hijacked airplanes that were crashed into the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside. These terrorists were almost immediately identified with Islamic fundamentalism by government and press–hence the bombing of our little mosque in Denton.
 
I’d been stunned since the destruction of the World Trade Center. Our very young President (he seemed so at the time) had told us we were at war. I had acknowledged that in my own heart since I watched the first news reports and believed them to be true. I couldn’t find any anger in myself, though perhaps it was there and I didn’t recognize it. What I remember now is that as the Imam began to chant the prayer with which we began the little service that afternoon, I wept.

Bishop James Stanton was here, having come to town for a confirmation service at my church. His preaching had urged the proposition that we all needed to touch one another in the aftermath of our communal loss. Those of us who remained alive needed to touch, I think he meant. I thanked him for his sermon and his presence at the mosque, felt close to him for a moment and was surprised because I disagree with him more often than not. I was struck too by a dear old friend’s comment as we walked around the parking lot together, exchanging greetings after the service, when he said to me that he didn’t want to go to war without God (without something he could pose to himself in his own mind as God–those were his words). I can go along with Bishop Stanton that we seek to touch what grounds us in times of great crisis. I’m not sure I understand my friend’s anxiety about going to war without God.

The Imam chanted and then translated. His prayer expressed gratitude to God for his beautiful creation. “This is my Father’s world,” as we sang in the Methodist Sunday School of my childhood, I thought–I will take the memory of that prayer, which I didn’t initially understand, as a symbol of our struggle to find community with inadequate language and an inadequate minds as we stood there in the hot sun on that concrete parking lot, greeting one another with words expressing our knowledge that we are not one people. I believe we stood in grace there, however much God may have turned his attention from his beautiful creation as the World Trade Center exploded. The next evening I opened my class at the university with the statement that I’d be glad to hear thoughts and expressions in regard to our country–we’d been asked to do this by the president–and I let my students talk for an hour and a half. There was a variety of expression, including that of one student who left the room because the discussion disturbed him. Later I put my arm around him, and the other students welcomed him back for the remainder of the evening.

I can now report that my eldest child, who is 45 years old, is as likely to have another birthday as I am. He worked in the World Trade Center–when there was a World Trade Center. Fortunately for him and his coworkers and their families and friends including yours truly, his office didn’t open until 10:00. St. Paul says “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” I’ve always loved that sentiment; somehow, it suggests to me the kindness of strangers. Maybe that’s why I felt at church the next week that our processions and triumphal evocations of God were not just pretentious but wrong headed. I thought of a Quaker meeting house I know and wondered if real piety waits upon grace without asking any questions.

I tend to think the moral universe is a human creation, more like a town than like the vast reaches of interstellar space. What I believe in outside that is grace and the human struggle for community, a version perhaps of what we used to call in my church ‘the summary of the law.’ I remembered my son’s words as he looked from his apartment in midtown Manhattan and described the smoke and the smell of the great explosions at the World Trade Center. That awful thing caused many New Yorkers to remember their town and to become citizens behaving like citizens in countless ways that filled the news reports in the aftermath. Perhaps something similar happened to us in Denton; perhaps we remembered our town, and remembering, perhaps we transcended our differences for a while.

And I’m remembering now a notion of Karl Jaspers’s, in a little book entitled Die Schuldfrage, that in the aftermath of the Nazi terror perhaps all who remained alive felt a sense of what he termed metaphysical guilt, a sense of estrangement from the body of humanity. I have felt and talked with others who have also felt, in the aftermath of the terror of what we now call nine-eleven, a sense of alienation from the body of humanity and the world, not guilt but something that makes us reach out for one another. Was God in those terrible explosions that destroyed so many innocent? Was God absent? I don’t know. I can’t believe God caused them in the sense that some religious zealots have claimed. To my mind the question is something like asking if God was in the Tsunami of 2004. All fear and trembling is not hierophany. Some of it is the ordinary terror of the world, even the unthinkable. This makes us feel uneasy in our skins sometimes, to experience ourselves as painfully other. Jesus, we like to say, undid our alienation just as he healed the eyes of the man born blind; and perhaps it is significant that the mud Jesus placed on the blind man’s eyes is mixed with spittle, earth and human stuff.

The blind man’s answer when he is asked what occurred is enigmatic: “I only know that before I was blind and now I can see.” The wind of God blows where it will. But in the interstices of the world, where we are who mostly lead ordinary lives, it often seems good that we touch each other, that we love as much as we can and do what we can to make the world better than it often manifestly is. We’d like to think that the world as God made it is as fresh as we’d like to find it on Easter morning. We’d like to think that the one who taught us to love his father’s world was right and that it is indeed a good and joyful thing to give thanks for it, even on a hot Texas parking lot in the aftermath of a fire bombing.

A few days ago, Dale Cannon referred us all to sojourners, a Methodist social justice network that seeks connections outside denominational lines. The sojourners’ website incorporates some serious expressions of opposition to the war in Iraq, such as this one, though no more serious than this one, which can be found on the Jesuit website. Sunday morning I received a letter from Henry Taber that expresses an opposing view. Henry’s letter can be found here. Since both Dale and Henry addressed a number of us at St. John’s Church, I thought I’d reply.

Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a piece I think is good about how Americans tend to argue these days. It’s a well-known theme, perhaps most passionately explored in Deborah Tannen’s book, The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words. While I don’t agree with Post columnist, Shankar Vedantam, or with Tannen, in all respects, I do think we Americans tend to argue ad hominem, accusing one another of bad faith and attacking one another personally instead of addressing one another’s ideas, and I do think this has something to do with mass culture and the emphasis our increasingly tribalized way of life places on winning. I also think Vedantam is right when he raises this question: “If you believe that you are a patriot but that those who disagree with you about the Iraq war are self-interested zealots intent on destroying America, what can you possibly have to discuss with them?”

So I’m going to digress a little first, ad hominem, in hopes of decentering things. I’m glad to see that the Methodists are still working at social justice. I grew up a Methodist. My maternal grandmother taught the Berean Class at St. Paul Methodist Church where I was baptised and confirmed (though we didn’t call it confirmation) for thirty years. My mother became a professional Methodist educational director after my father’s death in World War II. I myself was once a local Methodist preacher. The Methodist preachers used to sing a Charles Wesley hymn that celebrated the uncertainty of their itinerant life at the beginning of every annual conference. The first verse goes like this:

And are we yet alive
and see each others’ face?
Glory and thanks to Jesus give
for his almighty grace!

The tune is called Dennis. It sounds a lot like Bless’d be the tie. 

My life has pretty much been shaped by by war. I have a little photo album here that shows a couple of pictures of my father in his military uniform. The first was taken at Ft. Bliss during training exercises before he and his comrades in the New Mexico Militia were sent to the Philippines as the United States 200th Coast Artillery in August 1941. The second was taken after he had been in the Philippines for a couple of months. He was a physician and a volunteer–at the time his unit was federalized physicians couldn’t be drafted–though he didn’t want to go and hoped for a long time that the unit would be reprieved. We saw him off on the train–he told me to take care of my mother.

More recently, I’ve read his letters to my mother. They describe his voyage to the east, his arrival, much experience in the first heady weeks of his encounter with the MacArthur establshment. He didn’t like MacArthur, but I think he loved the old brown shoe army and relished being even a very lowly Captain, as he puts it in one letter, in that foreign outpost which must have had a certain old fashioned clubbiness and esprit. Then, of course, things turned sour. The letters are fewer from mid October on, and stop altogether in late November. One letter arrived after Pearl Harbor, written from a tent on Bataan in February, 1942. He died in 1944, somewhere in the South Pacific on an unmarked prisoner ship that was torpedoed by the U. S. Navy. The story of the sinking made the papers back home, with tales of escaping prisoners being clubbed to death by Japanese marines. Of course that wasn’t anywhere near the horror of it.

I learned a bit more about the Japanese death ships when I read Dorothy Cave’s Beyond Courage a few years back. That book also confirmed my impression from family and other history that my father and his comrades had been abandoned by their government when it was decided that the war in Europe took precedence over the far east. I learned too that my mother had been a member of an advocacy group, during the war, that attempted to pressure congress and the president to rescue the men in the Philippines. I found a collection of newsletters among her effects after her death. I also found a check for $100 that my father wrote to someone with a Filipino name. It was presented to my mother for payment after the war. The letter that accompanied it explained that my father had written it for black market medical supplies that he managed to smuggle into the prison at Camp O’Donnell.

He had survived the Death March and for a good while after his death on the ship was reported missing in action. After his death was confirmed, they promoted him and gave him some medals. One was a Bronze Star, the highest military decoration awarded to noncombatants. The citation reads in part, “Though exhausted and sick, he distributed smuggled medical supplies where urgently needed, and by his inspiring efforts greatly reduced the suffering of his weaker comrades.” He also received a Presidential Citation, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, which my mother always cherished. I didn’t know much of this as a child. I thought my father’s Purple Heart more important than the Bronze Star, bigger and more imposing. And for a long time I refused to believe he was dead. I fantasized that he would come around the corner of my school one day and grab me up in his arms.

So I sort of understand Cindy Sheehan because I know what it is to lose somebody in war and to believe that the loss may have been unnecessary; and I sort of know what it’s like to yearn for an end to war. I still sing to myself sometimes that wonderful song from the 1940s.

There’ll be bluebirds over
the white cliffs of Dover
tomorrow, just you wait and see.
There’ll be love and laughter
and peace ever after
tonorrow, when the world is free. 

And I think the dream of world peace–it had good a run in the last century and seemed almost attainable when the Berlin Wall came down–is one of the noblest dreams of humankind.

On the other hand, I have lived most of my almost seventy years during times of war. I think a pretty good case can be made that war is the common condition of human life, that is that war is the norm. Still, I did not support the war in Iraq and do not support it now, any more than I would have supported the policy that resulted in my father’s being abandoned in the far east, though I certainly supported him. I also think the mismanagement of the Iraq war amounts to criminal malfeasance, and there is plenty of blame to go around for that. 

To end where I began, I am closer to the Jesuits than to the Methodists on the one hand or to Henry on the other. Generally I now support a position more or less like that staked out in an editorial in today’s Washington Post. The Post writers are sharply critical of the Pelosi plan for Iraq presently before the House of Representatives, arguing that it “leads not toward a responsible withdrawal from Iraq but to a constitutional power struggle.” But they also urge aggressive congressional oversight of the war from here on out. I do not want the war in Iraq to end ignominiously. I think that would be a terrible tragedy for my country, for the brave men and women who have served because, like my father in that other war, they believed it was their duty to do so, and for the Iraqis, if the result of our intervention in their country results only in a kind of Palestinianization, to use a made-up word.

But I agree with Henry to the extent that I believe we may have to put the dream of world peace aside for a season and deal with the realities of life in a post-colonial world. One of those realities is militant Islam. I don’t think we’ve made a very good start, but I think it’s what we have to do.