Survivor of Shiny Murder

The following is a video record of a gracious visit from Peter Pintus, a Holocaust survivor, to an English course, "Life in Wartime," February of 2010 at Iowa State University.  Mr. Pintus is also mentioned in this blog: [Link]

Haley's Ham Sammy

Travels bring unexpected events, of course.  Sometimes big ones, sometimes small.

In Breckenridge, Colorado last night we had the chance to meet 7-year-old Haley who came over to play with a new friend, Breslyn, and to have dinner.  This was after a fine day of skiing; we pulled out some steaks, cut them into cubes, got out the skewers, put out some glazing sauce and the ingredients to make S’mores — all to be roasted over some little, cast-iron burners.

And?  Haley pulls out a little baggie in which were some yummies: cheese curls, pretzels, and a ham and cheese sandwich.  So.  What’s this?  Better than steak?!

Her mom said Haley had made it: she was bringing her own dinner and loves ham and cheese sandwiches.  And she opened her baggie and brought out this lovely ham sammy with cheese.  As she was munching away at this gourmet sandwich, I asked her (joking), "can I have a bite?"  She shook her head no, but then pulled out the half she wasn't eating, actually tore it in two, and..?

Handed this great hunk of sammy to me.  Bite.  Oh, what a sandwich!  So good.  Brilliant!  Moist, buttery, cheesy.  The BEST.

Soooo Yummy!

It's a big deal to share such a great sammy with someone!  She was so generous!  You might go to Paris and never find a sandwich like this one!  Who knew such a simple bite could be SO good?

And then I made her a luscious S'more with dark chocolate as a thank you.  She said it was very good, too.  But that sandwich she made!

Haley and her new buddy, Breslyn, finished their S’mores and went off to play.

Thank you, Haley.  You're a dear!

Groundhog Day

 To Be or Not To Be on 2 Feb?

How many times have we said, "If only I could relive that day...I'd do things differently"?

Most years on 2 February, I watch Bill Murray in Ground Hog Day.  You know the story: how Phil (Murray) -- a man with an immense cavity where anything resembling a caring human being should be -- cannot move from 2 February to 3 February.  He lives a single day over and over in his least favorite town, with each repeated day being perpetually and precisely the same.  Broken record.

The real story is not Phil being stuck in Puxatawney, PA, but stuck within a single day as himself.

As with the movie Back to the Future, it's not where he's stuck but when he's stuck -- and in what condition.  In Phil's case, he's on a modern "Quest," a Quest to see just what a rotten person he is and to embrace the needed change of character. Never was a man set upon a Quest with such reluctance.

It's not unlike Robinson Crusoe's quest on his little island. Before Crusoe went to sea to make his fortune, his father advised against it and predicted that, should Robin do this thing, he would get two things as a result: "solitude and leisure to repent it."  Ol' Robin Crusoe, landing on the island, ends up completely alone and with lots of leisure.  (Well, he's alone until...Friday, heh heh.)

So with Phil's Quest in Groundhog Day.  He has lots of leisure, and there's that solitude of his situation: unlike everyone around him, he alone is re-living the same day. His real Quest?  He must search for himself, look into the abysmal person that he has been, see how he has failed at life and relationships, and then become a person -- and make some reparation.

That is, he has leisure to repent his previous choices and time to grow into an actual human being.  A lot about becoming a human being involves just finding something useful to do each day.  And that's Phil's mission, his quest, should he decide to accept it.  If he doesn't, he will never get past 2 February -- at least in terms of his character.

Quest Stories
These date from millennia ago and have standard features we have learned to expect in them.  And more: Quests have changed from what they once were.

Take The Odyssey: there's an old epic with the standard epic formula — an epic hero who is on a Quest.  Odysseus' 10-year journey to get home from the Trojan War delivers a wild ride: he pokes a Cyclops in the eye.  He has an affair with a nymph.  The nymph, by the way, turns all of Odysseus' men into pigs (and all the women ask, "How could you tell?!")  And he hears the Sirens sing their alluringly fatal song -- the only human to have done so and survived it.  And he scarcely escapes Charybdis and Scylla -- some sorts of sea monsters that devour most of his men and some of the boats.  Would we ever be the same after facing these phenomena?

Odysseus and the Sirens

But here's the rub: Odysseus, at the start of the tale, is the epitome of all the heroic qualities a Greek hero possesses.  And despite the fact that he faces all these events, at the end of the tale he is precisely the same character he was at the start: he's still the epic hero. That's because the grand tales of older Quests focused on the external events, exploring precious little of the interior life of the epic hero.  (The only change is that he certainly learned not to irritate Poseidon by poking his son, the Cyclops, in the eye...but in a pinch -- facing death -- wouldn't Odysseus just do exactly the same thing again?!)

Quest tales change along the millennia to focus not on the external but on the internal life of the hero.  Take Gatsby: his Quest is to retrieve Daisy, the love of his life -- but not Daisy of the present.  He seeks the Daisy he had known in 1917 when they first met and fell in love.  Gatsby's quest is an internal dream to stop time, to go back to the way they were, and to begin again.  As Nick, the narrator, tells Gatsby, "you can't stop time, you know": Daisy has married, had a child, and lived life into the 1920s; time didn't stop while Gatsby was busy building the fortune that alone would attract and hold onto Daisy.

Ironically, in Groundhog Day Phil gets what Gatsby can't: time past.  Phil gets the same day repeatedly.  For Gatsby, not one single second will be repeated -- even though, ironically, his past with Daisy is always present in his mind.  Of course, after Daisy returns to her husband Tom, Gatsby must confront reality: you can't get the past back; Daisy is not the same.  And we see that Gatsby has lived with that one Dream, a dream which obscured his life, his vision, and his character.  He has established an external and ill-obtained wealth, but his interior life had devolved into a sham like his palace -- a facade devoid of anything veritable.  It's a great Dream, but as in a dream, it all comes to nothing.  It all vanishes when we awake.  In the end, we get a sense that Gatsby has been having a very deep look at himself -- he wakes and understands, however briefly, and -- there, at that point, began a change.  That is the ἀναγνώρισις (anagnorisis): the moment of awareness of the true situation.  No spoiler here....

So what does Phil do with his time upon time?  He does every single thing that numerous humans do every day to avoid realities about themselves.  He gets drunk with some new buddies.  He carouses, drives a car over a mailbox and down some railroad tracks while fleeing police, and gets thrown in jail.  He manipulates at least two young women to get them into bed and attempts to get the object of his affections into that cheap bed as well.  He robs an armored car, buys an expensive and luxurious sedan, gets a new girl on his arm, and goes to a Western movie dressed as one of Clint Eastwood's Old-West Equalizers.  What's T. S. Eliot's line?  "Distracted from distraction by distraction."  Phil is.  And none of it works: he can't manipulate himself out of 2 February.

Tiring of the avoidance, he kills himself -- repeatedly, to no avail.  As suicide does, it accomplishes nothing except to give others pain (but there's not all that much pain in others regarding Phil's death...).  He even attempts to kill himself with the groundhog, but the groundhog is not the key: Phil is the key.  Nothing else will work because he will not face the person he has been and is, nor make reparation.

So each day Phil re-awakes at 6:00 a.m. on 2 February to the radio alarm clock playing Sonny and Cher and inane chatter from the DJs.  There are no consequences from whatever Phil has done the "previous" day.  But he doesn't do anything to change himself into a viable human being instead of the narcissistic vacuum he is.  He is stuck in a hell of his own making.  His Quest hasn't begun because he's avoiding it.  As he gets sick of himself in the day-after-day sameness, he remarks, not on Groundhog Day but on his own inner being, "It's gonna be cold.  It's gonna be gray.  And it's gonna last you for the rest of your life."

Sonny & Cher? Thanks, No. I'd Rather Not Relive This.

There's another very interesting Quest in Star Wars: Luke visits Yoda for "Jedi training" -- lessons about himself which (like Phil stuck in his 2 Feb.) he does everything to avoid.  To start right, Luke must enter the Dagobah cave.

Luke Enters the Cave: Lots of Roots

When Luke asks Yoda what is in the cave, he gets the frank and ominous reply, “Only what you take with you.” That's loaded. It is not some external phenomenon he can battle.  It is himself, his lack of BE-ing, his lack of character, that Luke must meet and conquer.  The monster he meets is himself.  Luke emerges from the hole having seen something of what he is.

Till We Have Faces....  Luke Meets Himself

And just so Phil, seeing what a horrible creature he is day after day, starts to come out of his hole, like the groundhog, and sees just how much of his cold nature is left.  Will he remain a perpetual winter or will he grow into a spring?

Of course.  Right.  We all live in a Groundhog Day.  We, in fact, do get our days over and over, and do so in order to look at ourselves -- not, that is, as in a selfie, emptily external and narcissistic -- but to see into ourselves and decide to grow into a being somewhat worthy of the life we have.  If you're not looking into what can be an abyss of former days now and then to see what kind of being you've been...well, your Quest awaits.  It's hard to face, sometimes terrible, to understand who we've been at given moments and what that has meant for others.  But if you've not faced that image, there's no escaping that day, and you may be doomed to repeat it over and over.

And...it's true: we waste time, avoid, distract ourselves and others, excuse ourselves, and will not look for the shadow we might have cast on someone else's life.  But perhaps...there's the day we'll learn a musical instrument.  Learn French, or at least read some kind of literature -- not so we can schmooze and manipulate someone but read it for what it teaches us about life and love, see what another person has seen as they passed through their days.  Perhaps we'll learn to listen, learn to help, learn to live, and learn to love others while we learn to love ourselves out of a perpetual sameness of a day without BE-ing [Link].  We need those moments of ἀναγνώρισις -- awareness of what is really going on.

The ideal?  The quest starts by learning to know and love Him who alone can re-make our being.  After all, one has the distinct sense in watching Groundhog Day that Someone is definitely in control of whether or not he gets out of 2 February.  In the movie that Being is hidden, but we might glimpse him incarnate in the movie's bartender, who smiles but shakes his head as he looks past the facades of the main characters, straight into their interior lives.

What you will see in your cave is something no one else can tell you, just as Yoda said to Luke.  And that is why it takes honesty.  If you can't face what is there honestly, you'll have to revisit it -- or remain with some occlusion in your being.  What was it George MacDonald said? "Don't argue for your faults: God may let you keep them."  It's best to face things honestly and with empathy -- clearly, and with the pain it may bring -- than to equivocate over half truths about yourself.  Sheldon Vanauken put it this way: "Honesty is better than any easy comfort."

Solitude and Leisure...Once upon a Long Ago

If you're like me, you may have to face a much longer time in Groundhog Day than other people do.

And visits to the cave: it may be in the wee hours of a thousand different nights -- parades of ghosts.  And then, not in the night but in another moment during a long commute, looking at yourself in a moment of a day long past, or on this or another day, and seeing not merely your motives but the consequences of your actions for others -- pondering connections lost, people you'll never see again, conversations you will never have, and that you're left carrying the things you needed to say.

Or it may occur over a book -- a sentence, a phrase -- and you find yourself alone in the cave, understanding clearly, for the first time, something you did long ago: what it meant for someone else and what it meant along eternal lines.  'Aναγνώρισις.  It all involves leisure and solitary moments, as on Crusoe's island.  And as with Skywalker, no one can go with you into your cave.

 Get Rid of the Shades; Look It Straight in the Eye

Some time there will be a literal visit: a return to actual places where we must re-visit what we once were at one time or another -- after all, part of a Quest is the journey, literal as well as metaphorical.

[Edit: 22 March -- over a month after writing this blog entry:

A literal visit?  Here's an ironic example: just yesterday, I was on a spur-of-the moment side-trip in Colorado.  I ended up (silently but unwillingly -- others in the car wanted to go) on a detour from our intended destination -- to a place where, completely unknown to the driver or others in the car, very important events had occurred in my life 40 years before.  I had not been to that place again since that time.

So there I was: a parking lot and amphitheater, face-to-face with ghosts of people who were vitally important to me...and facing as well the ghost of my former self -- re-viewing decisions made, things done, consequent conversations, and events changing time and relationships.  Most important were those long-ago words, both spoken and left unspoken, that opened paths for people to carry on happily with their lives -- which is a gift everyone needs.  The significance of these moments...?  They were ponderously heavy 40 years back, are so today, and certainly are so eternally.

Was this trip unplanned?  Well, there's a question!  This visit was too ironic to be "unplanned" -- at least by me.  The driver had no idea of my life events unfolding in that place 40 years previously.  Looks like it wasn't a detour at all but the intended destination for me that day -- a destination Someone else seems to have planned.  The others toured an amphitheater; I toured a cave...and had to face myself...again.

40 Years Later

End of edit.]

While the most valuable moments of clear vision are made in solitude, there comes a time to talk with another person, restitution to make, if possible -- at the very least to offer, to let them know that you know....  In my experience, there have been people to talk with -- and it's always best to talk to people who will not judge but can receive you honestly, openly, not dismissing your responsibility, but listening without judgement [Link].

Some other people, shining their halos and looking benevolent, will judge you severely and, smiling, will not really forgive you (although they might say they do).  That'll hold consequences for them...; still, they are allowed: you are the one who has erred, has caused pain.  Yet they are wrong to kick you when you are making an effort to own it all; they are cruel to heap more judgement on your back.  But you can't talk to them: they can't hear you.

You know what a martyr is?  It's a person who seeks forgiveness from someone who thinks they're a saint.

And yet others: some people I wish I could speak to...but I cannot -- I don't know where they are, and perhaps they are at a peace which I would not disturb.  This I cannot know, and so I leave a door open for them -- which is all one can do sometimes.

That's the way it is on the Quest.

What's Phil's line when he finally gets to 3 February, the end of his Quest?  "This has been the end of a very long day...."

The purposes of Groundhog Day, of visits to the cave, are not to make us dwell in the past.  That was Gatsby's mistake.  No: it is instead to enable us to see who we are to be in the present.  It is solely preparation to move ahead in the right direction.  That is all-important.  We can't move ahead if we don't examine what we've been, who we need to become, and what reparation we might make.

Phil arrives at 3 February only when he is fit to move ahead.  And I think we can only move ahead (I mean internally, that is -- not repeat the same mistakes) when we've clearly seen and owned what we need to see.  And then the past can be left behind.

Even then, sometimes someone you harmed in the past will attempt to hinder you: will claim you are "forgiven," but will never allow that you're no longer the person who did this or that thing....  They may even prop up a picture before others that is a snapshot in time -- one sole image of what you were (and were so perhaps for repeated days), but not what you are today.  And then others will judge you by that false picture -- a picture produced out of self-righteousness but, still, from a petty vengeance.  They've been hurt.  They cannot move on....

Still, the picture they paint of you is not the reality; you will move ahead regardless.  And even that move is not entirely up to you, just as it wasn't completely up to Phil when he would be allowed to move on.  There's that greater Someone who....  How does Hamlet put it?

...our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will -- (V.ii.9-11)

What about the wrongs that Phil has done?  It is precisely, in Phil's case, what Backman observed:

"'They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on, more than if they'd never done anything wrong,' she said gently." (132) 

The only ones who will not allow you to move on, who would perpetually remember and display only your misdeeds in life, not the changes for the better, are those who would always hold them against you -- yet these same would want you to forget their misdeeds without mention.  You may forget them.  These people are never, in that condition, worth your attention.

And when you move on?  You are fit to meet all the wonderful gifts in the days ahead, and that is nothing but a gift in itself, the highest Joy.  Phil is happy at the end of Groundhog Day not because he gets the girl.  He is happy precisely because he now has the capacity to welcome real happiness -- and has become a being who can enjoy and add to others' happiness as well as to his own -- and not ruin it.

So.  Shall we get on with our Quest?

 

 

Sources

 

Backman, Fredrik.  A Man Called Ove.  Trans. Henning Koch.  London: Hodder &

     Stoughton, 2014.

A Snapshot in Time 1: Get the Picture

"'They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on, more than if they'd never done anything wrong,' she said gently." (Backman 132)

 

George MacDonald, the Victorian Scottish writer, wrote his children's book, The Princess and Curdie, about a young man, Curdie, who works in the local mines and who receives a special gift: when he touches a hand, he can feel the inner nature of the being he touches. For example, when he passes a shovel to a fellow miner and their hands touch in the process, Curdie feels a wolf's paw. When he touches the thickened, old, work-worn hand of his devoted mother, he feels the smooth and lithe hand of a young maiden.

Hipster! George MacDonald (1860s) Source: Wikipedia

That is, he can tell what kind of being he is dealing with at the moment: in the first case, it's someone who appears to be a man but is actually a wolf in his nature. In the second case, he can tell it's the young, lovely, and gentle woman that his mother actually is in her character despite her appearance as a elderly and work-hardened woman.

Curdie, however, is limited in one important point of his knowledge: he can only tell what kind of being it is at that very moment he touches its hand. He cannot know the direction the creature is heading in life: is the man becoming more human and less wolf, or is he becoming more wolf and less human?  Curdie cannot tell which, only what he is at the present moment.

The woman who gave Curdie this gift warns him about judging the beings he touches:

But you must beware, Curdie, how you say of this man or that man that he is traveling beastward.... Just so two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better and the other worse, which is just the greatest of all differences that could possibly exist between them. (MacDonald, p. 69)

And that, my friend, is a point.

Curdie Defies the Goblins (...of Quick Judgement)
(Source: Gutenberg)

A person on an internet broadcast put it this way about a woman who was thinking about cheating on her fiancee: "She's crazy because you can't actually have one incident like that in a vacuum and it doesn't rear its ugly head at some point in the future.  It's always going to have a bearing..." (Leasure). No doubt there are very serious issues underlying a choice like that -- and if the woman went ahead with that action, there would be painful consequences.

But there's that word: "Always." That word sounds more like Freud, B. F. Skinner, or anyone else who believes more in Logical Positivism and social/psychological/environmental determinism than in God, His forgiveness, and -- shall we call it -- "Reconstruction" as well as "Redemption."  This is not to say we all haven't at some time loaded an "Always" on someone's back -- and perhaps, just as sadly, on our own backs.  That's what this blog entry is about (and thanks to Leasure for the example, one that is common to us all).

So yes: if we're honest, we all do this: we all tend to make and hold onto our judgements about individuals, condemn them to an "Always," making a judgement once and holding it forever.  It can be an individual we've never met -- just someone we've heard something about.  Still, we create an image of that person based on little or no evidence -- and without understanding.  We hold onto and preserve that image as something that's true for all time -- that sad "Always...."  To put it in light of George MacDonald's tale, unlike Curdie, we assume that when someone does something wrong, the deed defines that person for life and eternity.

Yet our images of people have a simple but radical flaw: as with a photograph, our images show people only at a particular millisecond in time, not where they may be headed the next moment, not what they might be for the rest of life, nor what they will be for eternity -- for better or worse as that may be.  And -- as with a photo, even one taken using a "wide" point of view (a wide-angle lens) -- we will never get the whole picture, just a very narrow vision of a scene. Things are left out of the picture that we can't see, let alone judge.  It is only a snapshot in time.

Got the Shot? Maybe Not. (Source: A Canadian Family)

It might be that we find even two or three images of a person in a habitual pose...but is it the whole story?  How do we interpret that?  It may say something important about the person in some moments if there are multiple images; yet it may not define that person's "Always."  I don't think anyone would want to be judged by even a few pictures of themselves along life's way.  It may be that those poses do not define them at present; nor will the images define their future.

Here's the rub: if we actually believe in the rehabilitation of the human being (and as a Christian, I'd say the redemption and renewal of a human soul), then snap judgements go directly against a hope and belief for individuals to be remade -- just as we hope for ourselves.  Ironic, that.

Here's even more irony.  When we hold someone in judgement, it's certainly a problem for the person we judge -- but it's more serious for us. "Judge not lest you be judged." There's a word.  And it continues: "For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you."  You ready to welcome that?

Yes, true: sometimes we need to make judgements about a person for a moment, to make distinctions (we're not very smart if we set up to play cards with a shark -- or go shop for a car from a snake); even then, we're only making a judgement of what the condition is at present (like Curdie's gift -- knowledge applying only to the present moment).  We cannot say where the being is headed: for better or worse?  And C. S. Lewis points to the future of every being we meet:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible Gods and Goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature, which if you saw now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no “ordinary” people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. (Lewis 45-46)

To judge them for "Always," we'd have to build an understanding from a broad context of a person's life -- things we may not be able to know, past and present. And we'd need to be able to see the future: what might they meet that would change things in them?  And that runs straight into "Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”  There's another word.

"Right judgement," an accurate picture, is exactly what ratings and review sites on the web attempt to show us: a clear tendency, for good or ill.  But even then, an online review -- just like the banter of people in a circle of gossip -- can warp the truth we need to make an accurate judgement.  And because judgements often create more division than unity, they must be accurate.

 

The Big Picture or Narrow Opinion?
Can You See the Future Through That?

What if our judgement, our view, is not accurate?  A picture out of perspective is, simply, a false image.  There is no accurate context for reasoning in such a judgement.  It is mere opinion unsupported with fact, context, or understanding of what is real -- it's opinion: the pablum of thought.  That, for instance, is what Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is all about.

So?  If we heap a load of false judgement on someone's back, he must labor under it in some respects -- a weight which we ourselves wouldn't want to carry. That is precisely why Jesus condemned the lawyers and religious leaders of His day: "They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger."  Ironically, those who judge in such a way are those He condemned while the person strapped with a load of false judgement goes off justified -- forgiven.

The fascinating thing is this: holding people to a judgement (holding them "Always" to a snapshot, to a single past moment in life) not only binds on their backs something that they may well have grown beyond but also binds them with the guilt of something for which they've already been forgiven.  You get that paradox?  They've been forgiven; we attempt to re-instate their guilt.  We're loading them with that sad "Always...."

Irony yet again: when we load others, we load ourselves with the same judgement.  We heap on our own backs the guilt for things we may have grown past, things for which we may have been forgiven: we place an "Always" on our own backs.

How so?  When we judge, we condemn ourselves as certainly as we condemn others.  That's the great paradox: "Forgive others as you would be forgiven"; and "unless you forgive, your Father in heaven will not forgive you." That's yet another word.  So we're forgiven by God...only when we forgive others?  Yep: forgiven except if we extend condemnation -- unless we are someone who refuses to connect the dots of our own sins.

"Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others." (C. S. Lewis)

And let's see: my sin is less than someone else's?  Yeah, well.  It's never good to run with sharp objects -- or thoughts like those.  In fact it's pretty stupid if I begin to believe that a white lie is worse than stealing (or any other sin) in God's eyes.  They are the same, though consequences in this life may be different.  They both equally move the soul from the condition and the relationship to God it should be in.  Even one.

So what about any single misdeed, any wrong done, any sin?  Evelyn Waugh (referring to a French maxim) has it this way: "To understand all is to forgive all."  I doubt that any human will ever understand all.  But there's Jesus, who hangs on the cross and says "Forgive them, Father; they know not what they do."  He understood all and did not condemn, and then He did even more.  He took the weight off of us.  "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

 
Modified from Banksy

Let's turn this around: instead of the absence of a negative ("not putting judgement on someone's back"), let's go to the positive: "lift the weight off."

When we help to lift the weight of judgement -- and even the just consequences of bad choices -- off others' backs, it is freeing for both us and them.  That's the moment we allow another person to become more himself, we give him hope and help him to rise above the past, and we are allowed to see and enjoy, to benefit from, the person as he really is and becoming as opposed to what our snapshot-judgement tells us he is.

A good friend -- a friend of over 40 years now -- and I have seen one another at our best and at our worst. When at the worst, neither of us has judged the other; we have never laid down the "law" to one another (we already speak the same language of what is right and true and good -- it need not be said).  In our worst of times -- times when we have "lost" ourselves and have suffered grim consequences -- we have prayed for the person to return to what is good and right; and on that return, we have been confessors to one another and commiserated together over inevitable and sometimes unalterable consequences.  The reason we have been able to grow out of past things is precisely this: we have not judged, we have not condemned to an "Always" but rather helped to lift the load from one another's backs.  We have advised one another, but not judged.  We have understood our own failings while looking on those of the other.

So it is with every relationship in life (can any marriage, can any family continue soundly if not for this place, this "home," which is not judgement but openness and acceptance, albeit with the happy expectation and commitment to being on our way to growing better -- together?).  And so should it be with any friendship -- a place with room to grow together.

By removing the load -- by removing the judgement and the consequences of a bad past -- from someone's back, we allow that person to grow, to change, to live.  And it opens doors in our own lives as well as in the other person's life.

If faith can move mountains, why can we not help lift a mountain off someone's shoulders?  Zacchaeus sits in a tree, a small man loaded down with guilt, rejection, and loneliness.  The woman caught in adultery sits before her accusers, loaded with the shame of her deeds and the fear of being pummeled to death.  The man stands in the temple, unable to look up to heaven and pleads, "Lord forgive me, the sinner" -- all of them loaded down with the simple consequences of their own misdeeds.

In the Psalms (81) is this:

I heard an unfamiliar voice: I lifted the load from his shoulders; his hands let go the builder's basket. When you cried to me in distress, I rescued you; I answered you from the thunder-cloud....

Georges Bernanos expressed it this way in his brilliant work The Diary of a Country Priest:

And yet I feel that such distress that has forgotten even its name, that has ceased to reason or to hope, that lays its tortured head at random, will awaken one day on the shoulder of Jesus Christ. (p. 42)

And what about judging yourself?  Bernanos again:

How easy it is to hate oneself!  True grace is to forget.  Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity--as one would love anyone of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ. (p. 231)

So.  What else is there to say?  How about this: "Who are you to judge the servant of another?  To his own master he stands or falls, and stand he will because the Lord is able to make him stand."  That's a huge word for both how you picture yourself and picture others.

And (I mentioned it earlier) just what is gossip?  Gossip is presenting a snapshot of someone in their worst moments and leaving it there as an always.  Does the image provide a context, reasons, understanding?  Does it take into account what that person is today, quite removed from those images shaped out of former deeds?  Does the image allow for the same hope, the same mercy, the same grace you would allow yourself for the future?

How about this: "One who covers up another's offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends."

To present before others an image of a person at his worst and let it remain as an always is a great wrong.  It is a metaphorical stoning, an obliteration of a person created in God's image, someone who isn't finished becoming.  It is to prohibit that person from becoming -- at least in others' minds -- and clouds the image of God and His continuing work in them.  Most often those gossiping over an always image are those who believe themselves to be without -- or certainly to be with less -- guilt.  Gossip always comes from people who sport flowing robes of self-justification and sanctimony -- all for the purpose of throwing the stones of condemnation.  More often than not, it's done for revenge, from insecurity, out of jealousy....

How does Shakespeare say it?  The Merchant of Venice:

"How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none?" (4.1.88)

and

"The quality of mercy is not strained....
.     .     .    .     .
                                 It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
.     .     .     .     .
                                 Therefore...
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation."  (4.1.182-185; 195-198)

"Let he who is not guilty cast the first stone."  Just drop the bucket of rocks and step away. "Neither do I condemn you."

So.  Find me in these fields alone.  Let's talk.

Sources Cited

 

Backman, Fredrik.  A Man Called Ove.  Trans. Henning Koch.  London: Hodder &

     Stoughton, 2014.

Bernanos, Georges. The Diary of a Country Priest.  Trans. Pamela Morris.  New
     York: Image, 1974.

Lewis, C. S.  The Weight of Glory.  New York: HarperOne, 2001.

MacDonald, George. The Princess and Curdie. Harmondsworth, England: Puffin,
     1982.

Measuring Peace

In the Wee Hours before Speeches

Arc de Triomphe, November 11 2018

If you were in Paris at 11:00 a.m. on 11th November 2018, the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, you would have stood for hours in an autumn drizzle that seeped into your skin and sapped your body heat.  And somewhere along those hours, the measures from Yo Yo Ma's cello -- that enigmatic Sarabande of Bach's Cello Suite No. 5 -- would vibrate into the silent and shivering crowds.  Then, precisely at 11:00, every bell in France -- not merely Notre Dame's and those of other churches in Paris but across the whole nation -- would shingle the air, and the country would remember for 11 minutes: 100 years ago the killing in the mud had stopped at that very moment and these very bells had rung, bells all across France, to announce the end of The Great War's alliances with death.

And then you would have listened to political speeches that were doing the same thing that speeches at memorial events after the Armistice, a century earlier, had attempted to do: to cast the horrible events of WWI in a way that politicians wanted you to remember them.  Not, that is, understand them, but remember them in a particular (politically influenced) way.

Remembering and Understanding.  These are not the same.

Remembering?  I remember finding unexploded egg grenades and mills bombs, stokes and other unexploded mortar rounds, unfired bullets pulled from the mud, untouched after a century and still in their stripper clips into which an individual soldier had loaded them by his own hand; and unexploded shells (gas, shrapnel, and high explosive fragment shells). Soles of shoes.  Leather horse harnesses. Strands of barbed wire -- each distinctly French, British, or German. A German canteen.  Shrapnel balls and steel fragments -- everywhere. A French soldier's cup. A fin off a French mortar. Fuse caps. The split metal casing of a "Flying Pig" that burst wrong and which a student actually took home in a suitcase. Wire holders. A primer guard off a British 18-pounder shell. An unexploded French Petards Raquettes, detonating wire still intact. Fragments of rum jugs.  All of these, among other things, I remember finding.

But the buttons and such things as a clay pipe's bowl are those which move one to lament, things one knows were handled by some young man, a fiancee, a husband, a son, a father, an uncle, a friend....

And being in these fields and villages is not a passive remembrance.  As my wife and I once ate lunch in a small village, just outside a cafe near the pits (where the "iron harvest" -- unexploded munitions -- are set off), a pile of 90-some-year-old shells were made to detonate and split the air.  It's a sound that those in the war heard by the hundreds and thousands -- hourly -- when under some massive attack. A century later it still goes on: not merely the sound...that tearing of the air. It is also that simultaneous jarring of the earth under you, as if it were hit by an immense meteorite. But more: as additional piles of munitions are set off, each detonation sends a massive, concussive wave of explosion, again the shock in the air around you that you feel in your lungs and head; it's an invisible but moving wall of sheer and sudden force.  And then...quiet.  Some half hour later, the bomb disposal personnel drive tranquilly up in their little truck to the French cafe in the tiny village, pile out chatting, and order their lunch.  It's a daily event in the area.  You can read about this "Iron Harvest" here: [Link].

I also remember standing in craters (at Hawthorne Ridge, at the Butte de Vauquois, at Haute Chevauchee, at Vimy Ridge, at Lochnagar) -- the immense and vacuous bowls scooped out of each place, massive craters blown out by thousands of pounds of boxed high explosive buried deep beneath the trenches and towns, instantaneously sand-blasting, fragmenting, and lifting everything -- complete towns, vast trench lines with dugouts, tunnels, and of course, soldiers -- thousands of feet into the air.  Bits of war materiel and bones are still scattered everywhere.  Estimates are that for another 500-700 years pieces of it all will continue to rise to the surface of the fields.

Undetonated Gas Shell, Hawthorne Ridge Crater, 2000 (Source: Author)

How could veterans remember such things, and why remember their war?  Isn't it best to forget?  As one veteran of another war put it, how could you ever forget?  The pieces: fragments I picked up just days before writing this will be added to the other inert (and non-human) detritus of war that I collected from the cratered fields over the years.  Because they mean something.  They mean that something horrible happened here, and it happened to people because of other people -- mostly politicians.  As Auden brilliantly put it in his later, WWII, poem -- a poem fit for today as well as helpful for remembering past wars,

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
                (excerpt, W. H. Auden, "1 September 1939")

"There is no such thing as the State": it is an individual who, with other individual people who grow hungry, sleepy, and lustful, choose to send other people to be killed for a dream, a dream cast so often as "the lie of Authority."

All of these objects I have gathered from the fields of battle and thus remembered for their context -- they all have had one important effect: they have helped me to better understand the war to some degree for its realities, realities that are set against politically "directed" remembrance.  This is not what politicians want you to do: understand.  Politicians want you to remember something as they cast it for their own, present, and political ends.  The lie of Authority.  This is how it is possible for history to repeat itself: by people not understanding but "remembering" through guided (more often misguided) means.

There are other ways to understand: for instance, two WWI veterans -- one whom I interviewed when he was 103 years old, and the other a friend's old grandfather, who served in France in a machine gun battalion.

These people were actually in France in November 1918, and they helped me to better understand things about WWI.  One of them squatted in a trench line on the edge of village occupied by the Germans.  His orders were for his unit to attack and capture this largely insignificant little village in the minutes just before 11:00 a.m. on 11 November 1918.  He knew that most of his unit would be killed in that attack.  The guns all along the front were firing shells in the quickest succession possible -- for mere practicality: that is, if the Armistice were going to occur (as the rumor had it), all those heavy, unfired shells would have to be loaded again into boxes, back onto camions, and then hauled back to the ammo depots -- immense work that absolutely nobody wanted to do.

Just before the order came to attack, everything boomed to a ragged stop.  The last masses of shells exploded at 11:00 that morning and silence fell -- a silence interrupted only by some birds chirping and a French soldier running down the road announcing "Le guerre est finie!  Le guerre est finie!"  And that was how Emmet Johns experienced and remembered the end of his war.

Whether from people or objects I've encountered, the understanding they have brought was shaped more by reality than by the too often delightedly grim scholarship (detached from experiential understanding) that hovers over events of this war and tend to form our remembrance of it.

Understanding begins with experience: walking the old trench lines with maps, standing in fields, and seeing personal items -- or even a fragment of bone -- besides (more commonly found) the bullets they carried, the buttons they buttoned, the pipe that one smoked....  And reading memoirs of those who were there.

Pieces: Barbed Wire (French), Pipe Bowl, British .303 Casing, French Lebel Round, and Rum-Jug Fragment

Shrapnel Balls, Fuse-Cap Rings, Bullet, and Rifling Band

Fuse Cap (L); Rifling Band/Fragment (R)

There is much to understand, and -- true -- some of it comes from selectively reading the books and watching the silent films that shaped the understanding and remembrance of the generation of those who lived through the war years.  While we cannot experience things as they did (and should not blithely attempt such an artificial event), as with reading any memoir, play, novel, or watching a movie, we can suspend our own, immediate responses and attempt to understand something of what their experiences meant then...and what they mean now.

If you are interested:

WWI UXBs and war materiel/Verdun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqMOjpFH6g8

WWI UXBs and war materiel/Somme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GNH-douids

Battlefield finds/France 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7aLh270wV8