Weighing the torturers' defense

Any ambiguity about the significance of the newly declassified memos on torture is due only to the moral incapacity of the subservient media—these documents are incontrovertible evidence of conspiracy to commit heinous crimes. It is also a clear indication of the political corruption of our judicial system, and the crippling of constitutional restraints on executive power, that

Dick Cheney is defending his actions on Fox News rather than in a courtroom.

That being the case, it seems likely that this trial-by-punditry is the closest Mr. Cheney and his co-defendants will ever come to answering for their crimes (at least in this country), and as we the people are being appealed to, however cynically, to judge the case, we should be diligent in doing so. So I have three points for us all to consider that I haven’t heard made elsewhere. The first is that Cheney is not contesting his guilt of the crime. Rather, he is basing his argument on the so-called “necessity defense.” Defendants in trials involving crimes of nonviolent civil disobedience have used this tactic many times over the years, not disputing that crimes were committed, but that they were necessary actions to prevent far worse crimes. To my knowledge, no judge, at least at the federal level, has acquitted on the basis of this defense. Most often, evidence of the crimes--nuclear holocaust, genocide, etc. that protesters tried to prevent, was disallowed in the courtroom. Are we, then, to establish a legal precedent for a principle of necessity in the commission of war crimes and torture that does not apply in cases of trespass and destruction of property? The second point is that when Cheney and the other torturer masterminds were in power they sought to suppress evidence of their crimes, saying that it would threaten national security to reveal information about their techniques to those who might someday be tortured. It seemed a feeble and self-serving argument at the time. How curious it is that the same people are now crying out for the declassification of evidence obtained through those techniques, to build the case for their necessity defense. Never mind that common sense tells us that intelligence about the working of terrorist organizations, their members and methods, is of far more tactical importance to the anti-terrorist campaign, and has a far more legitimate claim to classification, than information about how it was extracted. It is curious to see so-called “hardliners” demanding that the wall of secrecy they erected be heedlessly dismantled in the hope of bringing exculpatory details to light. Finally, the torture apologists decry the President’s action in declassifying this information on the grounds that this helps terrorists resist torture. If the tortured know the limits beyond which the torturers will not go, they say, they are better able to maintain their psychological resistance to torture, and conceal information that could save lives. Leaving aside the question of the efficacy of torture as an interrogation technique, which, though highly pertinent, others are more qualified to address, I am prepared to concede that this argument makes sense. However, it only underscores the fundamental illegality of what Cheney, Tennant, and their lawyers conspired to do. The limits of humane treatment of prisoners under interrogation are not for CIA operatives, or the CIA director, or the Vice President of the United States, or the Office of Special Counsel, to decide. They are established by international humanitarian conventions, to which the United States is signatory, and further codified in United States statute and a massive body of precedent. The argument that the freedom to exceed those limits was expedient for the torturers in extracting information is no doubt factually true. It is also a naked admission of guilt.

Evolution Waterfall 98

Evolution Waterfall 98
Originally uploaded by dancgrn

I took this photo with a disposable camera with a panoramic format on a backpack trip with my dad in early July 1998. This is Evolution Creek running down to join the South Fork of the San Joaquin River.

Working Paper

This paper was written for a seminary class in 2005 on the work of the African-American theologian, mystic, and pastor Howard Thurman, who was Martin Luther King's spiritual director.

It's as pertinent now as it was then...

Throughout his written works Dr. Howard Thurman talks of the necessity for each person who seeks to live a spiritually committed life to have a “working paper”--a statement of one’s highest ideals, deepest beliefs, and guiding purpose, and how these work together to form a sense of what it is one is doing with one’s life and how one is going about it. So I would like to compose a paper with this wide sense, relating it to the “search for common ground” as it is operative in my life, and with an eye to the way that Dr. Thurman’s work sheds light on that search.

My aim in life stems from the hunger of my heart for belonging, a hunger that I believe I share with many people in the world today. It is a response to an urgent hope, but also betrays a hint of bitterness and disillusionment with those ways of belonging that modern mass society affords, ways that I feel are destructive to that innate human desire to know oneself and be known as significant, individual, as an “I”. Thurman speaks often of the power of this desire, but also of his faith that the very nature of human existence, and indeed of the cosmos itself, involves us in community. He implies that any idea of personal fulfillment that does not embrace the reality of the interdependence of life is a false hope when he offers this definition of “actualizing one’s potential”:

“The degree to which the potential in any expression of life is actualized marks the extent to which such an expression of life experiences wholeness, integration, community.”

--The Search for Common Ground, 4

Thurman writes eloquently in the final chapter of The Search for Common Ground of the problems raised for the individual, especially one in whom a religious conscience is active, in the modern context where the sovereignty of the nation-state is the comprehensive and definitive horizon of belonging. This problem is especially acute for those ethnic “minority” groups to whom full participation in national life is compromised or denied. I would add to Thurman’s analysis a further problem that recent decades have brought into sharper focus: what does it mean for the search for common ground when the institutions of the state are bent toward maximizing the interests of a small corporate-capitalist elite at the expense of the rest of the citizenry? This problem is more than a political one, as that same elite exerts ever more dominant control over culture and the economy, so that every aspect of social life from birth in the hospital to education to the disposal of one’s earthly remains at death has become a profit-making enterprise within the overarching system of global finance and market competition.

This corporate totalitarianism cloaks itself in the mantle of liberal institutions such as the “free press”, the university, and “democracy”, but its true nature is revealed in a variety of phenomena that are rarely held together and considered as parts of an interrelated picture. Yet if we are concerned about the common ground of life, we cannot avoid looking at the connections between rising global temperatures, genetic contamination of the food supply, resource wars and repudiation of international humanitarian law, Wal-Mart’s forcible invasion of local communities, the privatization of water, the epidemic of teen suicide and childhood autism, the growth of the prison-industrial complex, the new nuclear arms race and so on. My point is not that the world is going to hell, which it manifestly is, but that some kind of powerful conceptual shift in our understanding of where we belong and what is possible and desirable for human community seems to be in order.

During the era of the Cold War there was the perception of a grand ideological conflict, embodied in the two Superpowers and their respective blocs, which were contesting each other for the loyalty of the world’s inhabitants. On pages 87-88 of The Search for Common Ground, Thurman describes this from the point of view of the global “outsiders” as a choice of coming under that sovereignty which offers the most credible opportunity for the fulfillment of human potential. While the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicated the Western capitalist order over the Communist bloc, it remains an open question whether the sovereignty of the new global empire does in fact allow a free and supportive space for human flourishing. A relentless campaign of state and commercial propaganda makes the case that it does, but the real on-the-ground experience of most of the world’s people is of a steady erosion of the sovereignty of local communities and even of historic nation states under the onslaught of transnational corporate power, its client elites, and their allied military and paramilitary security forces.

What is rarely reflected on in the mainstream of public opinion is that the Capitalist and Communist systems were fundamentally identical in many of their key attitudes toward human community and the relationship of it to the larger web of life. The difference between public and private ownership of capital is of little consequence compared to the shared commitment to industrialization, urbanization, the suppression of cultural and linguistic minorities, and the collectivization of people into centralized systems of indoctrination, dependence, and control. In both systems, the rise of the modern state was achieved at the expense of the inhabitants of the places where the primary “resources” of industrial exploitation were to be found. Economies of scale in manufacturing and transportation, afforded by the temporary availability of abundant cheap energy as fossil fuels, drove the further process of moving vast populations off the land, making way for industrial agriculture and creating a cheap labor pool for expanding factories in the towns. From a society of communal small producers, both systems created societies of “autonomous” (that is atomistic and anonymous) wage-earners and consumers.

Too often consideration of these problems gets sidetracked into acrimonious fault-finding, and inaccurate accusations about seeking to “turn the clock backwards.” The prickly defensiveness of the modern urbanite covers a deep psychic vulnerability, however, that lies precisely in the area that Thurman summarizes on page 83-4 of

The Search for Common Ground:

“Our atmosphere is polluted, our streams are poisoned, our hills are denuded, wild life is increasingly exterminated, while more and more man becomes an alien on the earth and a fouler of his own nest. The price that is being exacted for this is a deep sense of isolation, of being rootless and a vagabond. Often I have surmised that this condition is more responsible for what seems to be the phenomenal increase in mental and emotional disturbances in modern life that the pressures—economic, social, and political—that abound on every hand. The collective psyche shrieks with the agony that it feels as a part of the death cry of a pillaged nature.

Nevertheless the importance of territory in the experience of community remains. Territory is one of the perennial guarantors supporting man’s experience of community. Man has to feel at home if he is to be nurtured; home means place and the place means territory.”

I believe that Thurman is speaking the truth in this passage, and it is a truth of the first importance. I would go further, in fact—the consequences of a life out of harmonious balance with the territorial or ecological community is not only psychically and aesthetically deadly, it tends toward social fragmentation, economic disintegration, and political chaos. A truly democratic polity, a political sovereignty, or a cultural identity that is not rooted sustainably in the ecological community with its compulsory disciplines of scale and its peculiar life-sustaining niches, is an empty abstraction that inevitably fails to provide any possibility of effective wholeness because its ultimate loyalty and actual power resides somewhere else in space and time. The modern world system is founded on a massive overdraft on a deposit of fossil energy that was fixed by a life-community that died millions of years ago. In a few short years that account will be closed, and humanity will be faced with the challenge of rediscovering its dependence on a living earth-system whose health and fecundity it has abused to the point of collapse. All the fantasies of technological wizardry notwithstanding, we will have no choice but to begin the long, slow regeneration of the earth. This crisis will also afford us the opportunity to rediscover our sense of wonder and gratitude for the amazing creative and adaptive power of the earth’s living systems. It will reawaken in us the spiritual, ethical and aesthetic satisfaction of a human cultural creativity that recognizes what it means to be located elegantly, intimately, and responsibly, with kindness and accountability to one another, to share a common heritage, a common purpose, and a common destiny.

This merciful necessity will demand a process of collective death and resurrection unprecedented in severity and scope. Prophetic voices have long been pointing the way, but the transformation that is demanded is of such magnitude that a powerful movement of resistance is already mobilized, led by those who have the most (as they see it) to lose, but operative even among those of us who know better, who obsessively cling to the consolations of an age that is ending. The spiritual benefits of embracing the new/old vision of harmony, however, are scarcely conceivable to us now, deeply embedded as we are in a materialistic and mechanistic worldview. The psychic disorientation involved in watching the pillars of modern bourgeois identity crumble one after another, and the courage and imagination required to forge new forms of community, new ways of relating, new spiritual, somatic, and aesthetic capacities, all will demand an unwavering fidelity to ourselves as beings grounded in God, in our common and diverse humanity, and in the hope of Earth’s future. The great religious traditions of humankind, engaged with a highly developed sense of “negative capability” (Keats’ term for the capacity to hold two mutually contradictory aspects of the same underlying truth in one’s mind at the same time) will be indispensable in this process.

It is for this reason that I am dedicating myself to ordained ministry in the Christian church. I feel that the Judeo-Christian heritage offers vitally important teachings for the times we live in, which must be drawn out of the fire of a death-seeking and Earth-hating apocalypticism, and offered at the table of the world’s wisdoms. Dr. Thurman has done an admirable job in The Search for Common Ground of bringing forward the continued relevance of the Biblical creation myth as an expression of the racial memory of life in harmony and kinship with the whole cosmic order. In Jesus and the Disinherited he offers a radical interpretation of the historical Jesus as a teacher of the spiritual path of nonviolent resistance and community survival under conditions of colonization and oppression. In Disciplines of the Spirit and The Creative Encounter he describes the inner dispositions and classic religious practices of the experiential “hunger of the heart” that makes the Divine presence a lived reality of worldly existence.

To these I would add three more properly sectarian dimensions, all of which bring into focus the remarkable interpenetration of the universal and the particular that I see as the fundamental Judeo-Christian insight. The first of these is the central motif of The Promised Land. In the Biblical tradition the ultimate religious goal, and the only final measure of spiritual achievement, is the establishment of an egalitarian and ecologically harmonious social order in the place which God has given to His people. This motif is developed in the New Testament tradition in a more universal direction, but the Kingdom of God and the New Jerusalem are symbols deeply rooted in the former image.

The second is the Trinitarian and Incarnational Christology of the undivided church. Liable as this theology is to doctrinal quibbling and arid metaphysical aridity, there is at the core of its synthesis of Jewish and Greek humanisms a stunning affirmation of the spiritual potential of personal human nature for dynamic and intimate communion with its own collective totality across time and space. This glorified humanity is capable of the most profound and creative expression of cosmic being, in conscious and unimpaired relation with the whole of creation and even with the uncreated and fecund abyss of the Divine essence, and all this in and through its concrete, embodied, earthbound existence.

Finally, I see this interpenetration of the universal and particular beautifully and powerfully expressed in the sacramental liturgies of the Christian community. Investing ultimate religious meaning in the mundane and elemental acts of forging human community—taking a bath, sharing a meal—makes a profound statement about the human encounter with the divine. These symbolic acts, which claim universal validity and significance, are nevertheless only possible within the gathering of a particular community in its own place, where they are sufficient to embody the life of the entire church across all time and space. Sadly, the full implications of this vision have been forgotten by the churches until the very recent past, and the recovery that is underway is still a long way from grounding the prayer and faith of Christians in living communion with the very water springs and wheat fields that are the elemental sources of their own particular saving mysteries.

Our semester-long conversation with Dr. Thurman has helped me to sense the possibility of integrating religious practice, insight, and community in such a way that it opens up the sacred dimension of life in all its aspects. I found him to be a trustworthy guide because he remained so resolutely faithful to the measuring rod of his own experience. It is this kind of religious leadership—disciplined, committed, humble, questing, ruthlessly honest, and always aware of the prior claim of life as one must live it day to day in one’s real context—that I think the world needs more of right now. I hope I can learn to be that kind of leader, at least a little bit. I believe Howard Thurman is one of the spiritual masters I will keep close by me and return to again and again for insight, encouragement, recollection, and friendship along the way.

What have you to do with us, you Jesus, you Nazarene?

It can be painful to have somebody speak to you with authority. When I was a much younger man I lived in a Zen Buddhist community that owned and operated a small organic farm. I was the foreman on the farm crew. The Farm Manager believed passionately in the rightness of organic farming, and so did I. I did not declare publicly and often, as he did, that “farming is my religion.” I did not share his resentment of those whose work focused on Zen meditation in the temple, whom he thought under-valued the place of farming in the community’s mission. But I did share enough of his drive for perfection, and self-righteousness, and self-destructiveness, that I couldn’t see what was out of balance about him, but added my weight to it.

So we drove ourselves, hard. And we drove the people around us, too.

Most of the farm crew were sensitive and idealistic young people who just wanted to find some healing and direction by spending intensive time getting close to the earth, and to their inner lives. They hadn’t signed up for any organic farming crusade, and couldn’t quite comprehend our obsession, but they showed up every day for the hard work, and tried to respond when I urged them to do it faster and longer and more efficiently. I think some of them even tried to care as much about it all as Peter and I did. But it was never enough, and one evening, as I was expressing frustration about some work left unfinished, one of our crew who was older and wiser than the rest said to me, “y’know, Daniel—people are more important than work.” It was the voice of authority, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Power, the kind that I wielded on the farm, the crazy kind that pursues some ideal of perfection and cajoles and bullies and manipulates others into going along with the crusade, always thinks of itself as good. And because people really want to believe in themselves and that they are working toward something good, this power can mobilize incredible energy. But God always breaks that kind of power--gently, patiently wielding the authority that humbles power with truth. So empires overreach, companies get over-leveraged, leaders succumb to heart attacks, or coups, or madness. And suddenly, people wake up and realize that in the name of good they have bound themselves to the service of evil.

Jesus comes into a world of economic inequality and ethnic division, of unfair taxation and crushing debt, of imperial occupation and seething unrest. As if out of Nowhere, he appears, announcing the victory of God and the fulfillment of heaven’s just and peaceful rule.

“What?”

In he walks to the synagogue in Capernaum on the Sabbath day, where people are used to going along to get along, where people go to hear the rules interpreted for them about how to stay on the right side of the line and be good so that they have honor and prosperity, rather than disgrace and poverty; the synagogue, where people go to hear comforting words, or bloodthirsty ones, about what God will do for us someday when Messiah comes, and in walks Jesus and begins to teach with authority.

It is significant that Mark doesn’t give us the content of this teaching—Mark’s Jesus is more about actions than words.

His authority is more than rhetorical art or compelling persuasion—it is the power to effect the reality he is talking about, in this case a spiritual reality.

And this authority provokes an immediate counterattack.

There is a man in the synagogue possessed by an unclean spirit, and that spirit recognizes the danger Jesus’ authority poses—it knows who Jesus is and fears him: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have come to destroy us?”

There are spiritual forces in the world that resist change, that fear the truth, that do not want God to be present and active where they are. These forces are around us and within us and the exercise of real authority never fails to arouse their opposition. Jesus’ teaching is accompanied by actions which are a provocation to the evil powers of this world, and his ministry will be an ongoing struggle to free people from their grip. This first revelation of his authority shows us the significance of all his subsequent healings and exorcisms. More than that, it sets in motion the conflict that leads to the greatest of all his demonstrations of power, his self-offering on the cross.

The power of the established religious leaders, symbolized in Mark by the settings of synagogue and temple, is opposed to the authority of Jesus, which is authentic spiritual authority. This may reflect what we would call historical truth—Jesus may indeed have experienced opposition and rejection in the synagogues of Galilee. What seems almost certain is that the author of this Gospel, and the community for which he wrote, experienced such rejection.

It has been a temptation to the church since Mark’s day to construct a tidy opposition of church and synagogue and say that God is in one, and Satan in the other, and that is the key of interpretation for passages like this one. But I hope we know better than to make that move.

I wonder, rather, whether we can receive this gospel as a challenge to our discipleship, and a test of our community. Can we imagine Jesus present today in this synagogue, teaching not as I do, but with the authority of God? Would we acknowledge his authority over those forces that hold us in bondage? Do we invite and encourage him to drive out of us all those complacent opinions, defended prejudices, repressed desires, and devil’s bargains that diminish our life and impair our freedom? Or do we want to keep Jesus where we can see him and control him, admiring our image of him, but denying his power to transform our lives?

In the gospel the religious house is a place of conflict, because it is a place of power. The power of God’s light of beauty, truth, and love is concentrated here, and where the light is, there the shadows gather. God’s house is a place of conflict because God wants us to change, and change is never easy. Change involves conflict because we are not just meant to change privately, as individuals, but to change together. Jesus doesn’t merely call us to celebrate and praise him for his saving grace, but also to grow into his stature, in the quality and range of our relationships, and in our capacity to make true and lasting community. This house is meant to be a place of spiritual struggle, where we learn to exercise authority rooted in the rule of God, which is love.

While we can choose that kind of authority, there is no shortcut, no technique to making it ours. It can only grow in us, like a seed germinating in the dark, by the gift of God. When we reach out to grasp it, we stumble. More often than not it grows in us only when we have been convulsed by the departure of some unclean spirit that held us captive. It is a tool that works on us as we try to wield it, a journey homeward that takes us where we do not want to go. When we see it happening, it is amazing.

The power of Jesus is the power to silence the fury of the world, the power to cast out the lust for power and the thirst for control, the insatiable urges of restless anxiety, to cast fear, enmity, false pride and despair. It is the power to heal others, and to set them free. Jesus wants nothing more than to give that power to us. All he asks is that we follow him, and follow him all the way.

Gratitude for now

From Simone Weil, Waiting for God (Putnam, 1951)
p. 88
Near the beginning of her letter of May 26, 1942, published under the title "Last Thoughts", Simone Weil wrote:
"I do not need any hope or any promise in order to believe that God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience; I have touched it. What I know of it through actual contact is so far beyond my capacity of understanding and gratitude that even the promise of future bliss could add nothing to it for me; since for human intelligence the addition of two infinites is not an addition."

This is the essence of human religion--to love and be thankful as a pure, formless response to having tasted the goodness of God. Whatever can be said about human nature and the disciplines of moral correction or mental attention that are therapeutic or atoning, it is reality itself, experienced at its essence as infinite grace, infinite love, infinite compassion, that is salvation.

Last hours of Christmas

Today the question of “who is Jesus?” still matters to many people. To some it is still causes enough irritation to be a cause for argument.

Surveying the contemporary scene we find many well-meaning ways of trying to clear up the confusion.

Historical/Critical scholars variously describe him as

A charismatic healer and rabbi, especially gifted in Midrash, the creative reinterpretation of scripture

A peasant revolutionary

A Stoic philosopher

Essentially a fictional figure, a creation of the gospel writers

A composite archetype created from a synthesis of the mythological and legendary background of the Eastern Mediterranean.

A wise sage, whose teachings accord with the “perennial philosophy” found in the fundamental teachings of the world’s wisdom traditions,

A mystic, someone who had attained a particularly intense and profound spiritual consciousness.

Maybe even a yogic adept, shown by ancient scriptures and oral tradition to have traveled in the East during his youth and mastered all the spiritual teachings of India and Tibet.

Or, we can stand at yet a further distance from him and analyze his significance in terms of his impact on history, how Western Civilization has been changed for the better because of his influence, or evaluate whether the practical application of his teachings makes people happier or morally better.

But all these ways of understanding Jesus share a fundamental skepticism about the unequivocal claim made about him, even in his own words, in the Gospels. They are all ways of describing his origin, his power, and his purpose in finite and graspable concepts which we can accept or reject, approve or deny.

To tell you the truth, the same could be said of the proposition that “Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the incarnate Word of God the Father, the second person of the Holy Trinity, the only-begotten Lord and Savior of all humankind” if it is rattled off as a statement of fact and the last word in an argument, rather the preamble to a life of openness to the indescribable riches of grace.

One way or another, these approaches represent the safe way to go, but none will bring us the peace that eludes us.

They each make their own kind of sense, but none will make of us a new creation.

So who is he?

When we stand before the infant Jesus, cradled in his mother’s arms, what do we see but ourselves, fresh-sprung from the mystery of the infinite?

We can never receive the whole gift of who we are unless we follow the call that draws us toward Christ, follow it all the way back to its source in God. That is why the world grumbles in frustration, looking vainly for God in the mirror. “No one has seen the father except the one who is of the father, this one sees the father.” Our own refusal to be from God, to be in the world as one doing the will of God, to have no purpose or identity other than one derived from God--how could it diminish the one who is like that?

On the other hand, to deny that gift when it lies before us, waving its little arms and crying for milk—how very, very sad that is.