Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Shock and Awe

We may never know just how shocked and awed the Iraqi regime was the first night we bombed Baghdad. It's pretty clear, though, that most everyone else was, a whole lot. My own experience of shock and awe was not over the number of nightly sorties we launched, or over the variety of bombs and missiles we put into each of them. Nor was it over the total amount of damage we inflicted. What quickly became overwhelming to me was our capacity for precision targeting of the destruction we can do, whenever and for whatever reason we choose to do it.

To be sure, there are a lot of positives about the capacity to fine tune our acts of aggression and our defensive responses to others'. One is that its exercise can help us to keep harm inflicted upon innocent people to a minimum. Another is that it can help us to think longer and harder about how we respond to perceived threats to our security, instead of acting indiscriminately, from some combination of fear and rage, before doing much thinking at all.

With all due respect to accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative, however, especially in a time of war, the downsides of the capacity to inflict harm in precisely calibrated doses are popping up all over the place. Exercising it has already moved the taking down of a nation's center of order and governance from the category of a reprehensible strategy of terrorists to that of an obligatory strategy of duly constituted, sovereign states. It has already diminished the will and patience of our own leaders to continue seeking nonviolent alternatives to disarming Iraq, and probably other rogue regimes as well. The capacity is like the capacity to relish liquor, sex, and drugs too much. Exercising the capacity to savor power, coercion, and control too much can put at risk other peoples' health as well as our own.

On July 26, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico, under the direction of the world renowned physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. At the detritus with which the explosion filled the sky, Oppenheimer impulsively chanted some terrifying words from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds." The context of this passage, as Oppenheimer knew only too well, has made its words profoundly disturbing across hundreds of generations: Prince Arjuna's chariot driver is revealing himself as God. For Christians, it should be supremely ironic that the name of the Alamogordo test site was Trinity.

The Nuclear Age that officially began on that day seduces us with the promise of enhancing human well-being everywhere by the peaceful uses of previously unimagined power, and at the same time horrifies us with vivid reminders that this same power can extinguish all life on our planet. What we have had most especially to fear is the ever-present possibility that once released, nuclear weapons would follow a trajectory of death on their own, freed from the hands and the buttons that sent them on their way. In such a scenario, there will be no victors, only a holocaust --- or Armageddon, perhaps --- of carnage and death, of destruction remedied at best only with the passage of time measured geologically.

Before the first week of the War on Iraq was over, our world's situation may have been changed permanently. Certainly it was changed dramatically. Along with a Doomsday scenario that can still be set into motion anytime by crazed world leaders with too easy access to red phones, codes, and mindlessly obedient intermediaries, we now have pressing up against us an armamentarium of devices by which we can impose our will on others selectively, but no less decisively, for purposes readily obscured in the language of double-speak and double-dealing ("national interest," perhaps?), but always for our own self-aggrandizement.

Hopefully, we can bring an end to this present war without having to confront something that is really scary: our "smart" bombs may turn out to be smarter than we are. If this proves so, then we will have to learn to be more fearful of ourselves than we have ever had to be of our weapons. In this light, it may be more important than we have yet imagined to take a second look at a disturbing text from our own scriptures: "When the Lord saw how great was the wickedness of human beings on earth, and how their every thought and inclination were always wicked, he bitterly regretted that he had made mankind on earth."

Robert Oppenheimer felt greater shock and awe in the presence of the Bhagavad-Gita than he did when he observed the world's first nuclear explosion. Genesis 6:5,6 just might be enough to do it for us.

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

The Kingdom And The Neighborhood

In my grief over the death of Fred Rogers, I have been thinking about the Kingdom of God a lot. Perhaps it is because he was not only a dear personal friend, but a friend in Christ who with great gentleness and powerful integrity has helped me over the years to glimpse just a little better what this Kingdom is all about. The outpouring of love that his dying has occasioned is staggering, but not surprising. It has been wonderful being in the Neighborhood together, and being reminded over and over again by his words and beautiful face that we are indeed special, just the way we are. Fred could keep on saying this with confidence and love because he knew that it is God who is making it so.

The first three Gospels present Jesus' core message with astonishing succinctness: the Kingdom of God is at hand. (cf. Mark 1:14) Jesus preached and taught a lot more than this, of course, but it is striking how consistently Matthew, Mark, and Luke kept coming back to this way of expressing the heart of it all. The Kingdom is all about God's incomprehensibly magnificent graciousness to us, to all of us, notwithstanding our sins and our difficulties trusting that his love is indeed all-surpassing, unconditional, never-ending, and ultimately transformative of all our defects and despair. It is God's countenance lifted toward us, his face shining on us. (Numbers 6:25,26.)

Is the Neighborhood anything like the Kingdom? Well, yes and no. Certainly Fred knew who our true King is. And he knew that the true Neighborhood is nothing less than the whole of the world that God is creating. What happens in Mister Rogers' smaller neighborhood is only a sign of what God is struggling to make happen everywhere. It's a good sign, though, for when God's work of reconciling the world does come to completion someday, the world will not only be a better neighborhood to live in; it will be everyone's very best neighborhood ever, and it will be more than just a little like Fred's. For now, though, his television visits have served more as a kind of refuge, against all the other 'Hoods' out there in which peoples' only specialness is as commodities for others' exploitation.

Like the Kingdom, the Neighborhood is both here, and yet to be. From a boat on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus told people sitting on the shore of seeds growing on patches of good soil surrounded by rocky ground, well-trodded footpaths, and choking weeds. (Matthew 13: 1-9) From a piano bench in a television studio, Fred told an interviewer of a little girl retreating to a small TV set, the volume too low for her abuser and rapist to hear, listening transfixed to songs about being special and having a true friend. Whether it is about the Kingdom or the Neighborhood, the question really is the same: can the world as we know it ever really become a place of safety, nurture, delight, and encouragement, in the midst of painful truths faced honestly by people who love each other without ceasing?

Only a few hours after Fred died, his colleagues in the television industry began airing video clips of his life and ministry. For me, the most poignant was one in which he spoke passionately about what television can and should be in our society. It reminded me of a number of conversations that he, his beloved Joanne, my own beloved Nancy, and I have shared over the years on the same subject. I couldn't help experiencing this particular clip against the backdrop of both the conversations and the painful fact that not even rapid channel surfing relieves us anymore from programs that denigrate, degrade, and deform the best that is in the human spirit.

The Kingdom of God is all around us, but in the midst of rocks, concrete, and weeds. Eventually, though, Jesus assures us, its seeds will produce crops thirtyfold, sixtyfold, even a hundredfold. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is just the next channel over from lonely and angry people vying to be their own neighbors' humiliators, falsely assuming that the only alternative is to be humiliated instead. Its creator never lost hope that the medium containing it is as capable of depicting the soul's inherent goodness as it is of exposing its wrecked possibilities.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Fred Rogers, for reminding us so many times that the Kingdom is within us as well as beyond us, and that it is within us now ---especially when we can hear over the din of other television programs his wonderfully kind voice telling us how special each of us really is.