One warm night on the St. Mary’s River, shouts echoed across campus. We looked out our dorm room window to see an elated crowd waving a large American flag. It was May 2, 2011 and Osama Bin Laden had been killed.
I had such a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach looking out at the enthusiastic crowd of students. They were clanging beer bottles and singing God Bless America.
My undergraduate alma-mater was a haven for hippie nature types. To give you an idea of the sort of place this was - at one point a large group of students decided they didn't want to live indoors (so suffocating! so unnatural!) so they hung rope hammocks behind their dorms. It was some months before administration decided they had to put a stop to it.
Our nights were spent by firelight on beaches, taking stolen moonlit swims in the river, floating on our backs, looking at the stars. This was also a time (strange to think) when nobody asked much about your politics - right or left, woke or trad. We just liked to say ‘cheers’ and give hugs to strangers and breathe in the night air. It was - cliche, but true - ‘a simpler time.’
So it was also strange to me to see these students, these peace-loving happy-go-lucky peers of mine, all fired up with a sort of giddy hate. Ding-dong, the Witch is Dead!
And well, why not? you might ask. An evil man had been obliterated from the face of the Earth. Huzzah all around.
But I’ve never been able to toast Death. Not like that.1
I didn’t even want to write about what is going on in the Middle East because I feel speechless to do so. I don’t understand it. I know the broad strokes as everyone does, but I don’t understand the intricacies or the history or the very complex reasons we ended up in this horrific moment. It would be irresponsible, silly, vain, of me, to pretend I had some unique ‘take’ to contribute. I don’t.
But it felt strange to not at least acknowledge what is happening.
Some of you know I received my Masters in Conflict Resolution - the sort of degree that usually elicited the hearty response, well we certainly need help in that area, ha! I’m going to admit something to you - I learned very, very little earning this degree. At least when it comes to Conflict Resolution. I learned a lot about conflict beginnings and conflict realities, about the harshness of the human heart and how quickly the mind can turn toward violence.
In Rwanda, I sat in classrooms where militants had gunned down school children. I kneeled in a Church where people had hid underneath the statue of the Virgin Mary and were killed at her feet.
These places were haunted. And I mean that in the most literal sense.
We would all be chatting en route and then, inevitably, a mile or so away, we’d all go silent. There was Death and Evil in the air. These places kept it like a huddled, broken thing, and it was awful to bear witness to.
But bearing witness is powerful, and perhaps the only thing to do in such a moment.
Why do we visit Dachau? Why do we walk in the gas chambers or visit mass graves?
I still remember as a 16 year old in Europe, the field trip of a lifetime, a time when I fancied myself a budding Hemingway, drinking too much wine in cafes. It was a time of lightness and joie-de-vivre, pink elephant cigarette smoke and afternoons in museums.
Then one grey afternoon, we visited Dachau and we were stunned into weeping or silence. None of us talked for a full day after. There was nothing to say.
What I focused on during my graduate studies was Post Conflict Reconstruction. To me this was always different than Conflict Resolution - in fact it was an acknowledgement that many conflicts would never be solved. There was never going to be any resolution.
I took a course with Charles Villa-Vicencio, the Director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. I can still hear his big booming voice - This is not the Kingdom of God! But we have to do SOMETHING!
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission attempted to acknowledge a terrible wrong: To have the public, the world, hear what had happened during Apartheid. It was the only way to move on. Public guilt, public suffering, public healing. Forgiveness was not a requirement. But it was important - vital - to say It Happened.
Professor Villa-Vicencio always said that America’s failure to deal with our history of slavery in a similar way would be our undoing. Here in America we love to jump to the next step. We love to say we’ve figured it out, let freedom ring, onward and upward. Progress!
But the human heart and the human person is worth too much for these quick reactions. When we toast the death of our enemy, we also kill a small part of ourselves, the part of ourselves that can remember our shared humanity.
Maybe this will sound strange but perhaps my current proximity to the vulnerability of infancy makes me think in these terms. We were all at one point, an innocent baby, swaddled and held, defenseless and new and without blame.
Certainly we make choices in this life. We can damn ourselves consciously and viscously. But we also always hold inside us the moment of our birth, of smallness and weakness and total dependency.
To fall off course, to make decisions so vicious and ugly that there are strangers toasting our demise, seems to me the stuff of great tragedy, not great triumph.
I’ve talked in circles here because I truly do not have a ‘side’ or a ‘take’ on the situation in Israel and Gaza. I have friends and family with very real reasons to feel more sympathy in one direction or the other. This is understandable. We have tribal hearts. This can wrap us in the glow of community or the abstraction of a common enemy.
I’m not on social media anymore, as many of you know, but friends tell me it’s awash in hot takes and flag emojis and “we see your silence! you’re complicit!”
It may feel productive to read the news and post to an Instagram story, but in reality this has done nothing to solve the conflict in the Middle East.
I’ve talked here about bearing witness. I want to also say that so much of bearing witness is grieving, praying, listening. It is rare that this can be captured in a hashtag or a Story Share.
All this noise online seems so foreign to the stunned, gaping wounded feeling I felt in Rwanda, in Dachau, in South Africa. Encounters with such naked violence, such horrific evil, should humble us, not embolden us to get on ‘the right side of history’ via the latest Share.
I’m not telling people to not discuss these worldwide events. Discuss them, debate them, by all means. We are living in times that are shaking the foundation of the world. We are living in times that can topple toward genocide or mass killing in a moment. It would be foolish to pretend it wasn’t happening.
But I am saying don’t say a toast to Death.
And don’t be afraid of the Desert. Christ retreated to silent places, lonely places. John the Baptist ran wild, a lone voice, crying in the wilderness. If you’re only scrolling Stories or the Times or getting ready to post, you’re missing the chance to weep, to mourn, to hope, to be a human being.
And to assert one’s love and grief and hope in times of great inhumanity is perhaps the greatest rebellion, the only rebellion, we can offer against such awful hate.
And to be charitable, their enthusiasm was likely in large part because this was seen as the end of violence, the avoidance of a greater conflict - which makes it somewhat different than some of the current responses to escalating violence in Israel and Gaza.
I remember visiting a huge garbage dump in Nicaragua where people lived. The place had such an evil heaviness to it that a few fellow missionaries couldn’t get off the bus. The place was full of violence, poverty and drug addiction yet just behind it was a beautiful mountain. Our “job” was to hand out cookies to anyone who wanted them. A cute little boy came up to me. I forgot all my Spanish except the phrase How are you? He smiled, bit into the cookie and said “I’m very good.” Life is just beyond understanding.
Wow. Thank you for your words. I love how contemplative this piece was. It gave me permission to just “be” in the same way I felt like the writing just “is” without being a means to try and persuade or come to some great realisation. Very beautiful and much needed words, in a time where it is so hard to find any words.