Once and For All

As I mentioned in my last post, my father-in-law died last month. This is an essay I wrote about him more than two years ago, as part of my coping with his Lewy Body Dementia.

My father-in-law, Dan Nyhart, is a man of bright wit and tender heart. He is only seventy-five years old, but for five years he has been fading away from us into dementia. It’s like watching someone we love sailing off in a little boat on a very still lake, slowly gliding away and away, alone, while we stand on the shore and wave farewell. The movement toward the horizon is relentless but incremental, the waving and the ache of saying goodbye seem endless.

With considerable effort last August we were able to bring both my parents-in-law to Maine with us, but by then Dan had declined so much in his mental state that he couldn’t be left alone. One afternoon I took my turn sitting with him in front of the cabin where he could look out at the inlet and islands he has known for so many years.

The precise spot where we sat is the gravitational center of the family camp. Five generations of Nyharts have hauled their rickety chairs off the porch and into the afternoon sun, to rub bare toes in the low-growing cranberries that invade the spotty lawn and watch the blue water flow in or out of the tidal marsh. From this place we see the terns in their acrobatic dives, or the gulls as they drop mussel shells to crack on the rocks. We hear the high ospreys as they whistle to each other and teach their fledglings to fly, and sometimes a bald eagle soars massively right over our heads. This is where we always sit as the sunlight begins to tilt and shift to gold and orange. We linger over a congenial cocktail and easily count our blessings.

On this particular August afternoon with Dan, I was immune to the blessings and saturated with sadness. So much has been lost, and there is so much to grieve in the losing. I long for the old personality, the days of repartee and humor, the many threads of exchange that have shaped our relationship over time. Now even a simple thought grows tangled for him as he tries to put it into words, and the words themselves seem to flutter away like bright birds, just out of reach.

I turned to look at Dan sitting next to me, tremors jiggling his arms. He falls asleep easily and often, and then his mouth goes slack and pulls his beloved features into the dreaded blankness we have seen so often in nursing homes. But just then he was awake, looking out at the inlet with a little half-smile.

Dan’s particular illness is dementia with Lewy bodies, which brings with it not only memory loss but hallucinations. The twilight shadows are the worst, sometimes giving rise to terrifying glimpses of men skulking in the trees with machine guns, but there are fanciful dream images he sees in broad daylight as well: a dancing elephant, a new Volkswagen skimming along on the waves, acrobats balancing on the telephone wires. So there was no telling what exactly he was “seeing” as we sat there: the wash of light and wind on waves, or something completely different.

“Dan, where are you when we’re just sitting here like this, not talking?” The question sounded a little desperate to my own ears: what in the world could the poor man make of it? But I had nothing more to say or to ask, and yielded without warning to an almost childish need to have him back, to hear some whisper of soul still retrievable among the fragments this illness has made of his mind. I wanted the existential answer to my question: Where are you now? Where have you gone?

There was a long pause as the question wound down into his mind and the response struggled up, intrepid messengers traversing a shadowed and winding trail. Finally he raised both hands up and said, “Well, it’s caught up in all of this”, waving at the sun, the water, the wind.

“You mean just sitting here and enjoying it?”

Very emphatically he corrected me: “Not enjoying: being in it. Being in it.” I was surprised and impressed by what seemed a burst of theological clarity.

“Dan, that’s very Zen of you!”.

“Hmmph. I never have understood Zen.”

We both laughed, and though I found myself crying at the same time, as I so often do these days, there was a shift in my load of sorrow. I felt myself cracked open at last to that sliver of a moment, and came home to the landscape, the afternoon light, the wind on the water.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So we could be blessed if we lived in the present always, and [received] every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it.” Lovely words of wisdom, Henry, but it is so much more easily said than done. To receive every accident that befalls us is a tall and terrible order. Yet what else can we do, when what happens to us lies outside all our powers to change it? This is the way we move through our fragile lives: we receive what befalls us, which includes, after all, the accidents of sun and sweetness, joy and love, the lucky accidents of people we cherish and receive so truly into ourselves that like the grass soaking up the rain, we are made something else because of them.

We can’t go back to what was before. Once those we love have gone from us we don’t get to touch a cheek or say what we meant to say, or hear that laughter rippling out again in the way that so delighted us. And yet it isn’t just metaphor to say that we carry them with us and remain bound to them, and they to us. Because we are more like the waters of the earth than we know: rain and snow and mist, ocean, lake and river, seep and puddle, falling and rising and falling and rising again in so many different forms. And nothing is ever lost.

Published in the Fall 2007 issue of the UU World.

The Long Farewell

My father-in-law, Dan Nyhart, died three weeks ago. It was sudden in a sense: we got a call on Thursday that he was running a fever, then were told Friday that it was looking serious, and by early Saturday morning he was gone. But he had been leaving us for at least seven years already, fading away piece by piece into one of the world’s cruel exit strategies, dementia with Lewy bodies.

There are many painful things about loving someone who is being lost to the fog of dementia, but one of the hardest is that there is no single, particular moment to say goodby. Instead, the losses begin subtly and pile up for months and for years. When a diagnosis is finally made and everyone feels the dread settle in, it’s already impossible to remember the first sign, the beginning of the unraveling. And by then, the one you love is already foggy around the edges. He’s still there of course, but he isn’t all there, and when do you get to grieve the part of him that’s already gone? Instead, you cling to what’s still there, knowing that what you have of him now will seem a miracle a year from now, or in two years, when he is that much more lost to the fog.

Nearly three years ago, the  summer before  Dan finally had to enter a nursing home, I sat with him in front of the cove in Maine at the family camp he loved so well.  He was already a long distance down his dim path of dementia, and it had been years since he had truly been himself. The sharp mind — a law professor at MIT most of his working life — had been so dulled by disease that it was hard for him to follow even a simple conversation. And sitting there with him, taking my turn babysitting really, I thought about  how much I needed and wanted a chance to say goodbye.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t understand much of what I said, but I held his hand and told him all I could remember about first meeting him, about how grateful I was for the way he welcomed me into the family, and how much I loved his kindness, his humor, his generous spirit.  I asked him to try to remember, in the times to come, that even if he felt afraid, we would not leave him to walk alone — that he would be accompanied through the illness. I told him I loved him, and he got teary and said he loved me too. I felt a little better after that; a sense that I had chosen for myself a random moment of farewell.

And then he went on living, and slipping away, for two and a half more years, the last two in a nursing home. How well did I keep my promise to walk with him through this? Not well, I think. We live just two hours drive away, but probably visited no more often than once every six or eight weeks. There were others to share it of course, my mother-in-law, my husbands siblings, family friends. But I always thought we’d go more often than we did. We’re all so busy, aren’t we? Three kids and two jobs and all the details that fill in the standard American life. But the rest of the truth is that  it was hard to want to go to the nursing home, hard to see him there and to not know, each time, how clear or foggy he would be.

So I feel lucky that in his last month of life I had two visits with him by myself, a couple of weeks apart; and I was especially blessed by the last one, the week before Thanksgiving. He wasn’t having a good day. He didn’t recognize me at first, and after fifteen minutes of trying to visit it was clear that he could hardly put two words together. He kept yawning hugely, so I finally suggested he just lie down on the bed and let me massage his hands. I pulled out some lotion and rubbed each hand for ten minutes, slowing myself down, willing my mind to be still and to just see the hand, hold the fingers, touch the skin. He gave little murmurs of pleasure, and that seemed to be enough.

When it was time to go I bent down over his slack face and said, “Dan, I’ll give your love to Nick and Sam and the girls”, and suddenly there was a momentary break in the fog and the sun came through. He opened his eyes and whispered, “Well, how can you give it if you don’t get it first?”, and raised his head up to give me a big kiss. That was the only full sentence he spoke in our whole visit, and that was the last time I saw him on this earth.

With his death, we are all free now to grieve him at last, to grieve all the small losses that litter the path of dementia and together add up to the huge loss of this beloved human being.  I have felt deeply blessed by that final goodbye, and the surprise of that little window of lucidity where I had no reason to expect one at all. There are so many mysteries in our dying, as in our birth, as in our living. Sometimes it’s enough to let the heart bow to it all: the great gift of loving, the great grief of letting go. It’s all tangled up together. And it is enough.

Cute Doesn’t Cut It

My oldest daughter has always been petite — one of the smallest kids in her class. As recently as last month, a woman in our congregation asked her whether she’d begun sixth grade this year (she’s a sophomore). My daughter takes it in stride — except if someone makes the mistake of declaring her “cute”. The deep-freeze chill that instantly enters the room makes it pretty clear to the transgressor that the word is not considered a compliment.

This attitude runs in our bloodlines: the women in my family don’t do “cute”. My younger daughter is far more interested in her skill and strength at riding horses than in how she looks in the latest fashion. My aunt was the first female ranger and then biologist in Yellowstone Park, and has faced off grizzly bears, rutting elk and renegade buffalo in the course of her years there. My Montana cousin and both her daughters hunt deer and elk enough to feed themselves and a few lucky relatives, and they do everything themselves: from tracking the animals to making them into steak and sausages. My sister sells commercial real estate in Chicago, where she routinely plays hardball with the big boys. And I came into ministry early enough to be told from more than one male colleague (though not within my own denomination) that a woman in the pulpit was an abomination.

We do very well, thanks. We’re tough and smart and skilled; we’re opinionated as hell, and sometimes way too judgmental and impatient. Along with these qualities, some of us are even damned attractive. But ‘cute’?

Please.

Enter Sarah Palin. During last night’s debate, I was startled the first time she gave that flirtatious little wink of hers. The second and third times I was simply revolted. This is the woman the Republicans think should be the political partner to the President of the United States? This is the woman who wants our help to bust through the glass ceiling right next to the one Hillary Clinton almost cracked? This is the woman we’re supposed to believe could competently lead our nation if a President McCain should die in office? And she’s letting us know that she’s ready for all of this because she’s so…cute??

It’s probably too much to hope that Palin feels a bit ashamed of herself. She’s been using these li’l lady tricks for much too long. But the Republican party, and especially smart, competent Republican women, should be ashamed. What we need is experience and savvy, intelligence and creativity, skilled diplomacy, intellectual curiosity, compassionate attention to those who suffer, brilliant problem solving, a good dose of humility and as little self-righteousness as is humanly possible.

“Cute” isn’t even on the list.

Take a Deep Breath

May you live in interesting times.

The phrase is supposed to be an English translation of an ancient Chinese curse, though it’s probably of much more recent (and western) origin. Whatever its roots, on first hearing it sounds like more of a blessing than a curse. After all, who would really want to live in boring times? But its meaning as a curse is clear to anyone whose life has been turned upside down by the large forces that can unravel whole nations and cultures: war, plague, hunger or economic upheaval. They make people wish for the stability and certainty that might not seem very interesting in historical retrospect but are in fact much more pleasant to live through.

We are now officially living in interesting times. Today the stock market fell by almost 800 points in reaction to Congress balking at the mind-blowing price tag of a bailout. Why would anyone think this debt-ridden and greed-driven economy could go churning on forever? My current favorite quote on the topic sounds as though it comes from some irate curmudgeon shaking his fist at the current news: “The budget should be balanced; the treasury should be refilled; public debt should be reduced; and the arrogance of public officials should be controlled.” In fact, it’s from Cicero, who lived 106-43 B.C.

It’s a weird time to be living through, since we have no idea at all how far the unraveling will go. Maybe in a few weeks everyone will dust themselves off and carry on as though nothing much has happened, but I doubt it. And wherever we collectively land, it is a time of high anxiety. People are losing their homes, and tent cities are already springing up in some towns. People without a job watch their chances dwindle, and a lot of others whose jobs seemed secure a month ago are waking up at night in a cold sweat. People who thought they could live comfortably on retirement savings can see those savings evaporate into thin air. And as the economy tanks, it’s pretty easy to predict that what’s left of the safety net for the most vulnerable will just disappear.

Those of us in parish ministry are each at the center of a little circle of stress, as our troubled people turn to one another and to us for a word of comfort. There’s not much that we or our congregations can do to impact a global economic crisis (but for God’s sake VOTE FOR CHANGE!). But there is a whole lot we can do to sustain one another in an age of anxiety. We can remind each other to take a deep breath, and look up at the sky so we can see that it isn’t falling. We can gather in worship, and in our smaller circles of study or support, sociability or labor, remembering to speak a calming word or add an extra kindness to what we’re doing. We can bind ourselves solidly to a particular small ship and its crew, in the faith that together we will work out ways to weather the storm. We can stay centered, sane and peaceful in our spiritual practices. And one day we will look back together from a safe distance, and shake our heads as we remember how interesting the times were back then…

When Hate Walks Into the Sanctuary

Within many different faiths, people name our halls of worship as “sanctuaries”. The word carries ancient connotations of safety, peace and contemplation – the qualities we hope to nurture when we turn our attention to prayer and devotion.

Last Sunday there was no sanctuary for those of my own faith gathered for worship in the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Knoxville, Tennessee. Instead, as 200 members and guests watched their children begin a musical performance, a stranger walked in and opened fire with a shotgun. Two people were killed, and five more were seriously injured.

The gunman, Jim D. Adkisson, told police that he targeted the church “because of its liberal leanings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country”. Adkisson was particularly disturbed by the inclusive nature of the congregation and of Unitarian Universalism itself, which welcomes people from all religious backgrounds and explicitly affirms equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

My own congregation is hundreds of miles from Knoxville, yet the ripples of shock and grief touch us deeply. Like the Knoxville church, our congregation is proudly public about our liberal religion and the social justice commitments to which it leads us. We have openly affirmed our commitment to equal rights regardless of sexual orientation, and our members are involved in many progressive peace and justice issues.

So along with our compassion for the victims and families in our sister congregation, we are vulnerable to the anxious question that arises from any hate crime: could something like this happen to us?

The simplest answer is ‘yes, it could’. Whenever people stand up for justice and equality there are others who react with anger, and sometimes the reaction becomes violent. But there is a better question to ask, one that tips us away from our anxiety and fear and back toward strength: what does our faith offer us, when hatred walks into our sanctuary?

Both the Unitarian and Universalist strands of our modern religion are rooted in a Christianity that has been at odds with the mainstream for centuries. Our ancestors studied scripture carefully and critically, and the conclusions they drew were sometimes radical. In Jesus, they found a spiritual teacher whose life was more important than his death: who consistently walked with the poor, the outcast and the reviled, and who insisted that we do likewise. They found a God who was not merely liberal but profligate in the love He promised: a love so universal that there could be no room for hell. They found a creation that was inherently good, laden with diversity and mystery that was there to be embraced and understood, not feared or rejected.

This is the large-hearted faith in which we are grounded, and it can sustain us even in the face of murderous violence. Our faith reminds us of the deep well of human goodness, evident in the outpouring of compassion and support for the Knoxville congregation from people of all religions. It insists on the challenge to cultivate compassion rather than anger toward the killer, recognizing in him a heart filled not only with hatred, but with profound pain and despair. And our faith calls us to courage rather than fear, reminding us that through the centuries of our history, many thousands of men and women before us have been steadfast in their religious and political convictions despite the threat of even mortal violence. They believed to their core in the healing power of love and justice. So must we.

Living Unplugged

I’m not a very good blogger, because as one day slips into another the notion of writing another post tends to drop to the bottom of the priority pile, behind the more pressing needs of work, kids, laundry, gardening and errands. It also ranks lower than a morning bike ride, spiritual practice (already slipping more than I’d like) and a bit of quiet time to sit on our deck at the close of the day and admire the changing light and the birdsong.

Consequently, most of what translates into a posting when I do get around to it is not what I envisioned when I first began to blog. I don’t have enough will toward speed and timeliness to read the news and other blogs first thing in the morning and then add my commentary or particular spin to whatever seems to be the breaking story. I’m not disinterested in most of it and I’m quite opinionated on a lot of it –  just not in enough of a hurry. So by the time I have the time, the pressing issues of the day seem to suddenly be the pressing issues of the day before yesterday or even of last week, and any commentary seems a bit silly. What I end up with instead are these ruminations on life, writ small: my life, my perspective, the bits of drama that unfold in my family or work or even in my garden.

And now I’m heading out on vacation for two weeks. Part of the time I’ll be in Spokane, where my mother’s slowly unfolding Alzheimer’s disease tinges all our gatherings with the low-horizon clouds of dread for what is to come. For now, she is very much herself: lively, competent, mostly keeping track of things, and prone to statements like: “I’m going to be senile one of these days but I’m not senile yet, so quit patronizing me!” Which tends to be deeply reassuring.

The rest of the time we will be gathered in the marvelous chaos of an extended family (and friends-of-the-family) that has happened for the last eight summers at Priest Lake, Idaho. Upper Priest Lake is wilderness, and we’ve seen moose and bear, elk, deer, porcupine and eagles. Where we spend our week is a sprawling, casual network of very basic cabins, where we’d be too much on top of each other except that we’re mostly outside hiking, kayaking, swimming or reading. For some reason known only to the gods of procreation, absolutely everyone my generation who has kids managed to reproduce female only, so there’s a posse of more than a dozen girls ranging in age from two to nineteen. It’s all pretty perfect.

I won’t be taking my computer. Sometimes that’s the only way to really be on vacation: to vacate the electronic premises entirely and remember what it’s like to be unplugged for two whole weeks. There are other networks to tune into, after all: lake water, wind, sun, birdsong, sunsets, leisurely conversations. And a hike to the top of Mout Roothann, where I’ve long demanded that my ashes be scattered once I’ve slipped this mortal coil. My kids prefer the beach, so I figure that’s the best way to make sure they get to the top one day and see that 360 degrees of Rocky Mountain horizon. It is one of the most exhilarating and deeply satisfying vistas I’ve ever known.

No postings for at least two weeks. Happy vacating.

Baby on the Doorstep

Remember the old movie cliché about a baby left in a basket on someone’s doorstep? The camera would pan in on the basket and show a cherubic baby, warmly swaddled in blankets, and this moment of hopeful abandonment would form the central tale around which the movie revolved. When I was a a little kid, I thought it would be thrilling beyond words to hear the doorbell and be the one to find the baby on our doorstep – a perfect baby, and of course I would be allowed to keep it for my own, and naturally it would prove to be a far more satisfying sibling than my actual baby brothers.

Last week I got a mini-version of this story, delivered by Mother Nature and the gods of irony. It was on a night when I was feeling crabby about the degree to which my own children’s activities have landed me the full-time job of Chief Chauffeur. As I opened the front door at 10:00pm to do the final pick-up for that particular night, I was probably complaining (perhaps even whining) about how much I would prefer to climb into bed with a good book. I took one step out the door and then found myself locked in the solemn gaze of a baby robin, standing in the pool of light right outside the door.

It was a very cold and blustery night, and fledglings like this routinely die if they’re caught out of the nest on nights like this (not to mention the predatory stray cats we’ve recently spotted, crouching hopefully directly under the bird feeder). There were no signs of frantic parental robins searching for their darling, and this little one had probably been blundering around in the dark for a long time hoping they’d show up. In their absence, he found and followed our light all the way up onto the porch, driven by the baby bird version of a last hope. He was so worn out he didn’t move at all as I came closer and then scooped him up. But as I held him, he looked at me intently with his shiny black eyes and then gave a loud cheep! and opened his mouth wide, apparently deciding that I would make a perfectly acceptable step-mother.

Well, what else could I do? I put him in a box with plenty of rags on top of a heating pad turned low, and made sure he was shut away from our curious (indoor, but still murderous) cats. In the morning, following baby bird instructions found online, I got some canned dog food down his hungry gullet. And then came the moment of decision: should I put him outside, despite the stiff breeze and chilly temperature, and hope that his real parents would come back in time? Or should I continue as foster mother, knowing that if I kept him longer, it would be highly unlikely that his birdbrain parents would even remember his existence?

I opted to turn him loose to the universe, despite all the dangers and uncertainties. Wild baby birds are very hard for humans to raise, no matter how good our intentions; and although I might be able to manage the feeding schedule (internet instructions: every ten minutes!!!), I have no idea how to teach a baby robin how to hunt for his own worms as he approaches adulthood, nor how to break the bad news that we’re actually different species.

So I set him out in the warmest place I could find, said a little prayer and turned him loose, resolutely climbing into the car and heading out to work. It wasn’t so easy — somehow, finding a baby on the doorstep has a way of making us feel we’re responsible, singled out for this duty. Who’s to say what is really the right thing to do? But it did make me think a little differently about my own fledglings, for whom I really am responsible. Sam has just graduated from the University of Chicago, an excellent and mature young man now, but still clueless about what comes next. This next one won’t be my flight to make, but his — whatever the direction he chooses, whatever the dangers of the storm. I resolved to complain a little less about these years as Chief Chauffeur for the two still at home. All too soon will come the moment to turn these fledglings loose to the universe as well, with all its glories and perils — on little but a wing and a prayer.

Finding God in the Clothesline

It’s a really small gesture, I know: finally getting an outdoor clothesline so I can abandon my electric dryer. I should have done it years ago; I have plenty of space in the yard, and it’s not as though it’s news that we should be looking for every way possible to reduce our gigantic carbon footprints.

I have no excuse for why it took me so long, but finally last month I went online and ordered one of those umbrella-type clotheslines, the kind with a tall pole in the middle and lines strung around it in a square. I had to mix and pour concrete for the first time (something the average six-year-old could do, but who knew?), and used a level to get it straight in its hole. I waited patiently for the required setting time, and then waited again for the rain to stop, and ever since then — for the last thirty loads of laundry or so — I have been hauling the wet clothes out to my line and pinning them up, one shirt or sheet or pair of socks at a time.

What I anticipated in making this shift was a mix of one part relief (finding another thing to do to cut energy consumption), one part hassle, half a cup of stress because of the time it takes to pin up all the clothes and take them down again, and a scant teaspoon of self-righteousness.

What I have found instead is pure pleasure. I had forgotten how wonderful clothes smell when they’ve been dried by the wind and sun. I had not realized how meditative each of those ten or fifteen minute spans could be when I stand there, feeling the sun on my face and being saturated by birdsong as I offer the clothes to the breezes or receive them back. I find myself filled with new awareness and therefore gratitude for this partnership — the natural energies of the earth’s air and heat moving through the mundane offering of my family’s clothing. It is swift, functional, easy; it is also grace and blessing.

A friend sent me this poem in response to my laundry epiphany. I guess I’m not the only one who finds God in the clothesline…

Laundry

by Ruth Moose

All our life

so much laundry;

each day’s doing or not

comes clean,

flows off and away

to blend with other sins

of this world. Each day

begins new skin,

blessed by the elements

charged to take us

out again to do or undo

what’s been assigned.

From socks to shirts

the selves we shed

lift off the line

as if they own

a life apart

from the one we offer.

There is joy in clean laundry.

All is forgiven in water, sun

and air. We offer our day’s

deeds

to the blue-eyed sky, with

soap and prayer,

our arms up, then lowered

in supplication.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day is right around the corner, and in my small New England town it will be celebrated with a very traditional parade down the middle of Main Street. We will go to it as a family, arriving an hour or so ahead of time at the home of friends who live smack in the middle of the parade route. Each year they host pretty much everyone they know to a huge pot-luck brunch, and when we’ve all eaten our fill and begin to hear the brass band in the distance, we amble out to the front lawn with our folding chairs and wait for the first glimpse of our fellow townsfolk who “march” in the parade (“amble” is more like it).

When my kids were little, this was one of the big thrills of the year, right up there with Christmas and Halloween. The parade has all of the elements that sound so hokey it’s hard to believe they exist, and yet they will be repeated in just this way in thousands of towns across the country, and each one will make the eyes of little children go wide with wonder. There will be people on horseback and elected officials riding in old jalopies (for no apparent reason — nostalgia?). There will be makeshift floats representing groups like the Gardening Club, the Cooperative Nursery and the Girl Scouts, as well as both the Democratic and Republican Town Committees. There will be marching bands from each of the public schools in our two-town system, and we will smile bravely through the sour notes and sincerity of the younger kids and applaud with genuine enthusiasm as the skill set improves with age.

And of course, there will be soldiers. Our town always has a fife and drum group as the first whiff of military remembrance. They march in replica Civil War uniforms and play vigorous old marching tunes from that era. A little later come the veterans of World War II — a sparser group every year — and Korea and Vietnam. Then there will be a few active duty soldiers in current-day uniform, looking sternly ahead as they march (no ambling here); their duty at the end of the parade will be to fire off three rounds of blanks to honor the dead from all of our various wars. And somewhere in the course of this parade, the Air Force will make an appearance as they apparently do at towns all over the country. We’ll hear the jets coming from far off and everyone will look up as they streak past us high in the sky and then –hold your breath, here they come! — loop back around and roar above our Main Street low enough to make the ground shudder beneath our feet.

At the end of the parade the mayor (who we call the First Selectman, though this year it’s a woman) will give a speech about veterans and sacrifice, freedom and its cost. The soldiers will fire their guns in tribute, a prayer will be said by one of the local priests or ministers, and the haunting sound of Taps will come floating from a trumpet on the other side of the Town Green.

I have always been ambivalent about this celebration of Memorial Day. As a parent of young ones, I loved seeing my children’s breathless excitement at every single element of the parade. As a neighbor and friend I am moved by the small town feel of this celebration, the easy companionship of people who in some cases have shared this event through generations. I bask in the mix of sincerity and humor, of self-conscious goofiness and home-town pride. I feel cradled in community because of this little time-out from busy regular lives, to just sit along the Main Street of our town and chat while we watch our kids get a little older each year.

It’s as a citizen and a peace activist that I run into trouble. I feel sorrow and regret for our dead soldiers from every bloody war, and deep respect for the men and women who have donned the uniform to serve their country. But at the Memorial Day parade, it always seems as though these feelings get conflated with support for war: the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the “war on terrorism”. When the jets fly over us and make the earth tremble, it’s the destructive power of their bombs that is really being celebrated. When the soldiers walk past us and we applaud them, how would anyone watching us know that it is not the war they are fighting that we support?

Since the start of our war in Iraq, I have come to the parade with a peace banner. So far, I have been the only one every year, though I know many of my neighbors also oppose this war. Somehow it seems to be seen as a sign of disrespect, this gentle piece of rainbow silk with the single word “PEACE” emblazoned on it. I will feel conspicuous holding it, among the little sea of miniature American flags in everyone else’s hands. I know it will make some people uneasy and others downright incensed. But I can’t bring myself to go to the parade without it. Memorial Day is supposed to be about remembering the fallen soldiers of past wars. How dare we forget the ones who are falling each day, in a war made of lies and greed?

Torture, Again

The first time I ever addressed the issue of torture from the pulpit was February 29, 2004 (www.usnh.org, click on sermons and scroll to the date). This was actually a month or two before torture at American hands became front-page news because of Abu Ghraib. But those awful photos and the brief uproar they caused were only the loudest part of the story. There was plenty to go on before that, if any of us wanted to pay attention. It was clear that with at least a wink and a nod, and often through direct orders, torture had become an accepted part of the American way of war.

Now here we are more than four years later, and I still don’t understand why there has never been a real public reaction. Is it pure fantasy to think that at some point in our history, Americans would have been shocked and furious to learn that our government tortured in our name? Is it beyond us to envision an America in which a government would actually be brought down by such a thing?

Not that I believe that we were ever a nation – or had a government – composed of saints. Our track record on human rights has been at odds with our self-image ever since our ancestors landed on soil that was inconveniently occupied by others. But there was surely a time in the not-so-distant past when a government that defended its right to torture prisoners would have been met by loud and sustained public outrage.

Now it seems the outrage has been replaced by mere uneasiness, and even this is not universal. A year ago, the Pew Research Center reported that when asked if torture can be justified “to gain key information”, only 29% of Americans said “never”. 12% actually said “often” (who are these people??), and the rest were in between. These figures are disheartening, to say the least. I can only make sense of them by believing that they reflect not an endorsement of torture but our own collective fearfulness. Fear causes people to do some pretty terrible things. Fear causes people to look the other way even when they know something unspeakable is being done in their name.

People of faith should not be looking the other way. If fear and the yearning to feel safe lead the public at large to accept the unacceptable, maybe we respond by challenging and expanding the notion of what it means to be “safe”. The old biblical question put it this way: What does it profit you if you gain everything, but lose your own soul?

There are lots of arguments against torture: that it is not effective and results most of the time in bad information; that it will always include the innocent as well as the guilty, simply because of human fallibility; and that its use loses America much credibility in the world’s eyes. But religious people should also be wiling to argue that it is morally wrong, and that it damages our own selves, our own souls. Because torture is morally wrong – like rape, murder and genocide – it should never be accepted as “necessary”.

NRCAT (the National Religious Campaign Against Torture) has declared June “Torture Awareness Month”, and congregations of every faith all across the country will display banners that simply say, “Torture is Wrong” or “Torture is a Moral Issue”. I am glad my own congregation will be among them. It is such a strange thing to find ourselves doing — can you imagine having to proclaim “rape is wrong”, or “child abuse is wrong”? But in these strange times, it falls to religious people to do what we can to spread the word. Torture is wrong. Period. Get your congregation to put up a banner.