Remembering True Martyrs

Today thousands of peacemakers will gather in Columbus, GA outside the gates of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning. With “Cooperation” on the end of this title, this “institute” sounds positively civilized. 

But the history of this agency is anything but civilized. This is simply a new name for an actual terrorist organization once named the School of the Americas. Often referred to as the School of the Assassins in Latin America, the School has trained members of the military and paramilitary all over Latin America in methods of terrorism designed to combat popular uprisings in Central and South America since 1946.

Under the rubric of anti-communism, students, clergy, unions, media and farmers have been targeted for kidnappings, torture, murder and mutilation. Like ISIS, the mutilated bodies were often left in high visibility locations such as highways and garbage dumps where they could send very clear messages to the population at large: Do not challenge the regime. We will crush you. 

Your Tax Money at Work

Today’s commemoration has particular significance. It is the 25^th anniversary of the murder of six Jesuit professors at the University of Central America in San Salvador along with their housekeeper and her daughter. These brutal murders were carried out by the Atlacatl Battalion, a self-described counter-insurgency military unit trained, armed and largely directed by the US Army’s School of the Americas then headquartered in Panama.

The Battalion was responsible for a high profile act of genocide in the northeastern village of Mozote in which the more than 700 residents were rounded up, tortured, raped, killed, their mutilated bodies hung from trees and burned in the rubble of their village.

The very clear goal of all these highly public acts of brutality was obvious: to terrorize the population and frighten the people into submission. It was a brutal terrorism taught these Latin American soldiers by agents trained in America and paid for with American taxpayers’ money. 

ISIS has got nothing on us. 

I visited this place of death on a peaceful university campus during my first trip to El Salvador in 1993. It was a very difficult time to be in that country, then under a cease fire monitored by the UN with no accord yet in place to prevent a resumption of the bloody civil war that had been raging there for 13 years. Through the aegis of the Episcopal Diocese of El Salvador and the World Council of Churches, our small group of seminarians was able to serve as international monitors of the cease fire for the week we were there.

The civil war was predominately funded and largely directed by the American military and the CIA. The uprising of campesinos who had taken over many less than fully productive farms owned by Salvador’s famed Fourteen Families had brought the US into this conflict. Our government sought to protect American business interests in Salvador and to prevent the successful Sandinista leftist revolution in Nicaragua from spreading to its neighbor to the north. Under the rubric of fighting communism - whether it actually was present or not - the US became embroiled in wars up and down Central America and generated some of the more brutal acts of terrorism known to humanity.

We Were Not the Good Guys…

One memory of that visit occurred at the base community of campesinos who had overtaken a large cattle farm in the country. The leader of the community said to us, “You may think we live like animals because we live in cattle stalls. But this is the first roof I’ve ever had over my head in 30 years.” About this time a group of children with distended bellies came up to our group and the leader continued, “We have had two children die in our community in the last week from hunger. The oldest one was 10. He was my son.”

That visit also included meeting victims of napalm dropped from US helicopters onto villages. One of the survivors bore horrendous scarring from his encounter with death which rained from the skies. As we spoke with him, the charred barren hillsides around the base community in which he and other burn victims lived still bore witness to that deadly encounter years after its occurrence. In some places the landscape was charred right down to the stone.

Napalm is a terrible thing.

When we asked the man how he had managed to survive, he quickly responded, “It was the Cuban doctors who helped us.” Suddenly I found myself reeling from cognitive dissonance. A child of the Cuban missile crisis in Florida, Castro’s Cuba represented all that was evil in my childhood. The reality I encountered that day in the countryside of El Salvador was a complete reversal of roles. Here it was America who was the author of evil. And it was Castro’s Cuba whose policies were life giving.

As I watch the waves of children coming to our border from El Salvador, I do not have to wonder what would prompt their desperate parents to send them on such dangerous journeys in the hopes of new lives. I’ve seen where they come from. And I know what happened there. At a very basic level, these children are coming to reclaim the lives that were stolen from them.

This is what happens when you use your brains….

The afternoon we visited the university was the occasion of the third anniversary of the massacre at UCA. We got there early enough to see the actual site of the killing which was now a museum. The victims were taken from their dormitory at UCA into a rose garden and shot point blank. To make their point, their assassins used their rifle butts to beat the brains out of the heads of some of the professors. Their point was pretty clear:

This is what happens when you use your brains to challenge the regime.    

These killings occurred nine years after Archbishop Oscar Romero was gunned down at the altar of a convent in the middle of mass. Romero had long predicted his death: “If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood to God.”  Romero was also prone to cite Tertullian’s maxim that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” I have stood in that very spot and felt the palpable chill of death.

There was never a shortage of martyrs in El Salvador.

Latin Americans tend to be pretty graphic with their depiction of horror and somewhat literal in their appropriation of religious symbols. When the bodies of the Jesuits were discovered, some of the people scraped the brains beaten from their heads into glass jars and saved them. They are currently on display in the museum, a sight which prompted me to go running from the museum to the rose garden where they had died to vomit between sobs.

The chapel at UCA contains a set of unbelievably graphic scenes of tortured campesinos that serves as the Stations of the Cross. They are powerful in their witness to the terror systematically generated in El Salvador during the civil war to coerce the populace into control. They are also powerful voices of protest against this brutality and insisting that this violence end.

That evening we attended an outdoor mass on the UCA campus. Under the gaze of the ubiquitous military guards with their automatic weapons, we entered into what was an incredibly joyful rite of remembrance, resistance and hope for reconciliation. It was my first encounter with the Misa Campesina, the liberationist eucharist that arose out of the struggles of Central America. It closed with a rousing hymn:

Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre:

Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre             When the poor believe in themselves

Ya podremos cantar libertad                      Then we will sing liberty

Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre             When the poor believe in themselves

Construiremos la fraternidad                      We will build a brotherhood.

This would be the first of two trips to El Salvador. The second I would serve as an international election monitor for the 1994 election in the country. I would watch illiterate peasants standing in the tropical sun for hours to dip their thumbs into purple ink and mark their ballots under the photos of the candidates. It provided a stark contrast to the recent shameful elections in America where about a third of the electorate bothered to show up, our worst participation rate since the Great Depression.

An Obligation to Bear Witness

My time in El Salvador changed me forever. I no longer had the luxury of naïveté in looking at my country’s foreign policy through the lens of generosity. I had seen too much. I also came away with a decided admiration for the tenacity, the generosity and the hopefulness of the poor despite the unbearable hardships they bear daily just to survive and the demonization they endure which threatens to take away their remaining dignity.

I promised myself that I would return to America to tell what I had seen and experienced there. Sadly, I cannot be present in Columbus this day. I have a funeral of a long time friend to attend. But a candle burns before my Guadalupe shrine this morning and my prayers ascend to heaven along with a curl of frankincense smoke in memory of the many martyrs of El Salvador. My heart and my spirit are with the protesters who stand at the gates of the sanitized School of the Assassins this day even as my body is not. And I join them in solidarity as they make their demands:

No more terrorism! No more war! Not in my name and not with my tax money!  

Today I give thanks for the lives of true martyrs, those who died fighting for human dignity, those who understood that the right to life is broader, deeper and much more involved than the shallow politics of abortion. As a follower in the Way of Jesus, I give thanks for those who recognize that the good news of Jesus means nothing so long as it remains silent in the face of ongoing degradation and demonization of the little ones that Jesus loved.  

The poster for the third anniversary commemoration I brought back from El Salvador contains a quote from Salvadoreño writer Rafael Rodriguez Diaz. Speaking on behalf of the martyred Jesuits, he believes they would stand in the face of death again and say:

We want to say for the record that if we were given new life to decide again what to do, they would again find us dying for this town and its people.

Martyrs of El Salvador!

 ¡Presente!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

Osceola Campus, University of Central Florida, Kissimmee

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Red Tide

In the disturbing election which mercifully concluded last week, a Red Tide swept across America and returned a corporate con man to the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. A look at exit survey data allow us to comprehend what has just happened.

Survey Says….

The NBC Exit Polling in Florida revealed a very interesting picture regarding the gubernatorial election. To wit:  

Age

Among age cohorts, the only group which strongly supported the Republican governor was those over 65. They voted for Scott by a 56-40% margin. All the rest supported Charlie Crist, his Democratic challenger. While Gen X was close at 48/47% and Boomers were only a little more inclined toward Crist, 49/46%, Millennials were as strongly for Crist (D) as their grandparents were for Scott (R), 51/41%.

In short, the only age group to strongly support Scott was the over 65 cohort, largely retirees. While they make up only 13% of the population, they comprised fully one in four of those who actually voted Tuesday. Their impact was greatly disproportionate to their presence in the population. The youngest voters, by contrast, comprise a full 17% of Florida’s population according to the US Census Bureau’s current estimates but had the least impact on the election, comprising but 13% of the voters.

Ethnicity

Similarly, white non-Hispanic Floridians currently comprise just over half of the state’s population at 56.5% though they are 66% of the state’s registered voters, a legacy to both a history of racism and recent voter repression measures. Tuesday white electors made up seven out of every 10 voters. Of the three identified racial and ethnic groups, white voters chose the Republican Scott by over 20 points, 58/37%. Black voters (17% of the population,9% of the registered voters, 14% of Tuesday’s electorate) chose Crist by an 85/12% margin and Hispanics (24% of the population, 15% of registered voters but only 13% of the participants in Tuesday’s election) chose Crist by 20 points, 58/38%.

Educational Attainment

The largest single group of voters to support Scott by formal educational attainment was white non-college graduates, 61/32%. The largest group to support Crist was non-white college graduates, 76/22%. Among college graduates generally Crist won 50/46% while among non-college graduates, Scott won 50-44%.

This also generally reflects the urban/suburban/rural splits in which blue urban islands like Orlando, Tampa Bay and the Gold Coast metro areas along with university centers like Alachua County (UF) and Leon County (FSU/FAMU) which are surrounded by a sea of red suburban counties and a phalanx of rural counties in the interior of the peninsula and across the top of northern and western Florida. College graduates tend to be more concentrated in urban areas and the rates decline with proximity to those urban areas. 

Older, Whiter, Wealthier, Fading

This majority in Tuesday’s election who returned the medicare defrauding (largest fraud settlement in US history) and croney-rewarding (campaign manager John Thrasher now FSU president) Republican governor to power Tuesday was much older, whiter and less formally educated than the 47% of Floridians who voted for his Democratic opponent. It is hardly an electorate reflective of the Florida their choices will govern. But it is the electorate who showed up Tuesday for any number of reasons.

In all fairness, the governor’s race wasn’t much of a choice. Scott’s opponent was a rather blatant political opportunist. But the return of a governor attuned to the wealthy, particularly its wealthy retirees, and completely tone-deaf to the needs of the average Floridian bodes poorly for the next four years in the Sunshine State.

It is a particularly crippling blow to Florida’s public education already facing the impacts of budget cuts and efforts to defund public schools as a means of funding private charters. And it is a potentially lethal blow to the one in four Floridians under 65 who have no health insurance to assure them of medical treatment when ill or injured, the second highest state in the country in this shameful category.

However, this pattern was hardly relegated to Florida. This wave of conservative elderly white voters propelled the Red Tide that swept much of America on Tuesday.

The vast majority of over 65 voters are part of the Silent Generation, the cohort born during the last Great Depression and WWII. It is a cohort marked by its focus on achievement, power and status. Their behaviors and attitudes are largely shaped by their experience of the Depression and they tend to be marked by conformity, conservatism (McCarthy’s Red Scare informed their youth) and the demand for comfort. They represent a major shift away from the self-sacrificing qualities of the Greatest Generation that preceded the Silents and the idealism that would mark their successor cohort, the Boomers.

The Silents  are currently the largest voting cohort and the wealthiest. One description refers to Silents as an “early-marrying Lonely Crowd (that) became the risk-averse technicians and professionals of a post-crisis era in which conformity seemed to be a sure ticket to success.” The least racially and culturally diverse of all the cohorts, “[a]s America’s newest and most affluent-ever seniors (no longer “senior citizens”), they wonder why just “following the rules” no longer works for their children and grandchildren.” They are also the most religiously observant and self-reported theologically conservative cohort (47%).

They are also the cohort which will be much less a major factor in American politics within the next decade with the vanguard of their cohort already beginning to die. In many ways, Tuesday’s election was as much a swan song as a shocker.

It’s not hard to see how an election dominated by this group would have produced the Red Tide last Tuesday. The Congress elected is largely conservative and many are religious fundamentalists. They largely support the continued reverse Robin Hood policies that serve to transfer wealth from the bottom to the top and enrich the already wealthy at the expense of the working poor. When comfort is a primary consideration and the status quo ensures your comfort regardless of its impact on others, it’s not hard to imagine why you’d fight for its preservation.

Toxic Paralysis  

In nature Red Tides tend to be enormously destructive. Caused by a profuse blooming of red marine algae often spurred by man-made increases in nutrients in ocean waters, the algae produce a toxin that paralyzes and ultimately suffocates nearly every form of marine life in sight. Reddish brown waters off the coast give way to odoriferous tides of dead and rotting fish on the shores.

The fear-driven multi-billion dollar negative campaign just concluded has helped elect people to state and national office who are largely reactionary, lacking in any kind of long-term vision. If anything, their conservative vision is oriented to the past and expresses itself in largely uncritical constructions of the same.

The national government is guaranteed of paralysis for at least the next two years. And our state is now completely in the toxic grip of corporate, wealthy interests. The chances that the current leadership of Florida and our Congress will prove capable of meeting the enormous challenges facing our state and our nation are very slim indeed.

But these challenges are not going away. If anything, actively ignoring them, constructing them in ideological terms and failing to act will simply exacerbate those problems. Like the Red Tide, toxic political contexts prove politically paralyzing and suffocating. Indeed, they can ultimately prove quite deadly.  

How this will play out is hard to tell. 

It’s hard to know currently the long-term impact the poorly concealed concerted effort to suppress voting - particularly among people of color, lower income and young voters - will have. It’s hard to know whether America will continue to acquiesce to the devolution of elections into blatant auctions to the highest bidders. It is hard to predict our ultimate tolerance level for the biennial assaults of negative attack ads that now serve to caricaturize candidates, reduce complex issues to simplistic sound bites, actively disinform voters (there is no law that requires commercials to be truthful) and thus depress participation. And it’s hard to know the ultimate impact of corporate influence on the court system in cutting off the last avenue of redress for those effectively shut out of the political process.

So what is the tipping point? Perhaps more importantly, what is the boiling point?

Into the Maelstrom

The answer to those questions will likely determine the response from people we once called our fellow citizens to the seemingly inevitable failure of our government to meet the challenges facing us. When enough people feel they are disenfranchised by a system that no longer holds out hope for change, the system loses legitimacy and the loyalty of those former citizens. When people feel they have no real investment in or expectations from a government, such governments have predictably short shelf lives. And when despair grows large enough in that context, as my seventh grade social studies teacher used to say, “Katie, bar the door.”

Perhaps that is what the militarizing law enforcement of our cities and campuses are already sensing as they line up to receive the weaponry of war and combat training.

I am hopeful enough to believe that America can right itself, that we can once again become the nation our potential suggests we can be and our history demonstrates we once were. America has met incredibly difficult crises before. Indeed, according to generational analysts Strauss and Howe,  the last two periods of crisis in American history in which we were as economically and ideologically polarized as we are today occurred just before the Great Depression and WWII and just before the Civil War prior to that.

America came through both of those tribulations intact but hardly unscathed. There was major turmoil, devastation and loss of life. The question we faced then as today is whether we still want to be a people. Thus far, the answer has been affirmative.

I am increasingly inclined to believe it will take a major shakeup of some kind to awaken the American people and convince us that we must act to meet the challenges that currently threaten to consume us. I sense that minimal reforms that leave profound structural problems intact will not suffice this time. The deck chairs on the Titanic can only be rearranged so many times before the ship goes down. I fear that the coming period of transformation might well be painful, frightening and bloody.  I do not pretend to know the outcome. And I truly hope I am wrong.

Even so, I remain hopeful, even in the face of a Red Tide.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Asst. Lecturer: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Osceola Campus, Kissimmee

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Over The Precipice

As yesterday’s election approached, I found myself thinking about the final scenes from a book I read while an undergraduate student.  It involved a truck, a group of kids, a cliff, and, well, you know the rest.

In the 1970 novel by Glendon Swarthout entitled Bless the Beasts and the Children, a group of outcast teenaged boys revolts against a brutal summer camp which promised to “make a cowboy out of the boy.” The group conspired to liberate a nearby herd of domesticated bison held captive to supply a canned hunting operation. Chased by angry would-be hunters, the boys escape in a hot-wired truck but quickly realize their only escape route leads directly to a canyon rim. At the last minute the boys leap from the truck but their doomed leader still at the wheel plunges off the cliff to his death.

It was a troubling novel which was quickly made into a mediocre movie starring Billy Mumy of Lost in Space fame. The irenic theme song from the film recorded by the Carpenters provided little clue of the angst and despair the novel and the film portrayed. “Bless the beasts and the children, for in this world they have no choice. They have no voice…”

Images of that plunge over the precipice have dominated my dreams the last few weeks as the elections approached. I’ve watched in breath taking horror at what proved to be an inexorable result.

Trading in Citizenship for Consumerism

A Republican Senate will ensure that the best ideological Supreme Court corporate money could buy will remain in place for another decade at least. It will mean more mediocre minds like Alito and less brilliant minds like Ginsberg. It will also mean that the Senate will devolve into the same kind of ideological morass and intellectual wasteland that the House has been the last six years.

More importantly, it means that any real attentiveness to the crying needs of the country will be placed on permanent hold to accommodate the coming circus inside the Beltway. Like the residents of a dying Roman empire packed into coliseums, at least we’ll be entertained.

In years past, I would have been chagrined that the American electorate would deliberately choose to shoot itself in the foot once again, electing governments that do not serve the common good. I would have asked how anyone could rationally vote for candidates who do not represent their own interests – working poor voters who elect Congresses willing to bail out Wall Street but cut off unemployment compensation or raise minimum wage; middle class voters who bemoan higher tuition for their children but vote in state legislatures and governors who steadily defund universities and public schools while demanding more and more from them.

Of course, that presumes that the American electorate is rational and makes decisions based upon reason and evidence. The re-election of George Bush and the resulting train wreck that managed to plunge the nation into a depression and the world into war removed any hopes that reason has much to do with American voting patterns. As the crusty old curmudgeon H.L. Mencken often observed, “No one in this world, so far as I know…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Thomas Jefferson envisioned an ever expanding electorate which was educated, informed itself and sought to serve the common good through engaging the democratic process. The signal that his dream was nearing an end came in the 1980 election in which the presidential race boiled down to a single question by then-candidate Ronald Reagan: “Are YOU better off than you were four years ago?” No reason involved, no consideration for the common good, just self-interest, pure and simple.

The  American people gladly took the bait and ran with it. It was the apotheosis of the egocentric electorate and the death knells of any real concern for the common good.

In the process we have traded being citizens with obligations to society, the system which governs us and to each other, for being consumers, waiting for a limited set of arbitrary, pre-packaged choices to be presented us and then complaining about the choices we get. We don’t inform ourselves, we simply wait for the campaign ads to tell us why the other guy is a bigger loser than the one the ad – whose sponsors we never know – supports. We ingest the sound bites and talking points we are fed to rationalize our “choices” and become highly defensive when asked to explain why we are voting as we are because, in truth, we generally don’t know.

With the decision in Citizens United and the subsequent decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, the barrage of carefully constructed propaganda that has supplanted any kind of meaningful campaign advertising will only get larger and louder. Campaigns have become yet another public good privatized to insure profit-making at the expense of the American public. Any semblance of meaningful political discourse in America, if we ever really had any, is largely a thing of the past.

Crises to Be Ignored

That’s why the vehicle hurtling toward the precipice has dominated my dreams these past few weeks. In truth, I’m quite clear that a Republican Party now captive to its fundamentalist religious and free market bases and beholden to the corporate money that insures its compliance is incapable of leading the country. But I’ve also lost hope that a timorous and tepid Democratic Party offers much of an alternative. Had the Democrats prevailed Tuesday and preserved the status quo, another two years of spiteful polarization and political paralysis would still have awaited us.

It’s cliché to say that our political system is broken. I think the diagnosis is much graver. As I see it, the unlimited spending of corporate and 1% moneys to construct the understandings we consume combined with the complete abdication of an electorate which has chosen to be consumers rather than citizens insures that our corrupted system will not be replaced anytime soon. It is, in the description of sociologist Erich Fromm, a rather classic Escape from Freedom. And with the inevitable success of corporate funded candidates in elections, their ability to restrict participation in elections to those likely to support the 1% agenda drives the last nail in democracy’s coffin.

Jefferson was right – democracy cannot work in a society which is not educated, informed and committed to the common good. Yet, at a very basic level, we seem unable to tear ourselves from the sidelines, frozen in place as we watch in horror as our nation, like the truck full of misfit teenaged boys who now constitute our Congress, inexorably plunges into the abyss.

But the very real problems America faces will not simply go away because we have chosen to hide our heads in the sand. Like cancers on the body politic, they fester and threaten to devour us from inside out. Among those crises are the following:

·         The impending collapse of the nation’s infrastructure.

·         The desperate need to secure new, sustainable energy sources

·         The growing economic inequality in America that threatens the very social fabric of our nation.

·         The increasing militarization of cities and campuses and the resulting increase in police volatility, unpredictability and brutality.

·         The completely irresponsible gun policy that has turned our campuses, movie theaters and shopping centers into slaughterhouses

·         The lobotomizing of education from test-driven public schools to corporatized factory process universities.

·         The inability to come to terms with a changing world and the failure of outdated, costly and futile “wars” on terrorism and drugs

·         A changing workforce in which an army of Baby Boomers head toward uncertain retirements and an army of college educated and indebted Millennials head toward unfulfilling minimum wage jobs 

All of these smaller crises ride on the backs of two much larger existential crises: the degeneration of the American electoral system and the threats of climate change. The failure to deal with the former will insure the devolution of America into a corporate oligarchy in which largely meaningless elections are used to ratify the foregone conclusions serving thinly veiled vested interests. The failure to deal with the latter will mean that all the preceding concerns will be moot as waves of climate refugees flee flooded coastal cities and encroaching deserts to overwhelm remaining food and water supplies.

Without a vision, the people perish.

In the face of these very real crises, a Republican Congress pledged to do little more than oppose anything proposed by a Democratic President who in turn is largely relegated to wielding the veto pen does not bode well. But it is the bed we Americans have made for ourselves and now we must lie in it.

The Coming Chaos

If misery likes company, I am slightly consoled knowing I am hardly alone in these concerns. David DeGraw, one of the major movers within the Occupy movement, lays out his concerns in an essay entitled The Coming Revolution: Evolutionary Leap or Descent Into Chaos and Violence? at his website Economics of Revolution:

For all the problems we are confronted by, there are existing viable solutions. There is much to feel positive about. A decentralized global uprising is undermining systems of centralized and consolidated power. A new world is being born.

However, as exciting as the evolution presently occurring is, after extensive research I am forced to confront the fact that I do not see how emerging solutions will reach a critical mass and create the needed change before the effects of inequality, poverty and the overall deterioration of society will lead to widespread chaos and violence. As much as I wish this wasn’t the case, as much as I want to just disengage from the status quo and focus on the implementation of local solutions, we cannot ignore the urgent need for significant systemic change on a mass scale now.

DeGraw is braver than I am. He actually dares to look over the edge of the precipice to see what looms beyond the plunge.  It is not a pretty picture.

I pray he is wrong but intuitively sense he is right. Last weekend a worried friend in DC reminded me what this might mean: “The last time we were faced with this crisis we chose Roosevelt. The Germans chose Hitler. This time we might not be so lucky.”

Indeed.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Asst. Lecturer: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Osceola Regional Campus, Kissimmee

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Remembering All the Departed

“We come from God and we return to God…” St. Thomas Aquinas

Today is All Saints Day, the day which follows the Celtic feast of Samhain which the church sought to Christianize as All Hallows E’en. The result is an odd mixture of Dionysian excess on Halloween followed by two days of solemn observance of the departed.

On Samhain, the fall harvest festival, the veil between the realms of the living and the dead was thought to be particularly thin and it was possible to encounter the presence of the departed as they temporarily came back to this side of the veil. A way of honoring the dead was to provide them with food and beverage, a precursor to today’s trick or treating. But if one didn’t want to encounter a particular deceased person with whom one might have unfinished business, it was best to disguise oneself, hence the beginning of the wearing of masks and later of full costumes.

The awareness of those who have died has always played a major role in this commemoration. The feast day which All Hallowed Eve (E’en) preceded was All Saints Day (Nov. 1), a day to remember the many saints of the church. But, by the 10^th CE, the practice of remembering the ordinary saints, our own loved ones who had departed, began to be celebrated in a second day of commemoration called alternatively All Souls Day or the Day of the Faithful Departed, (Nov. 2). Many Mexicans will spend the night in cemeteries remembering their departed loved ones (top photo) on this Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

All the Departed

I have never found the restricting of our remembrance of the departed to those we deem to have been “faithful” terribly compelling. At some level, that is little more than self-affirmation at work – we pray for you only if you agreed with us. How silly and ultimately how petty!

Recalling those persons who have played major roles in our lives often creates a profound sense of loss. It is fitting to recognize that loss and to remember them regardless of our judgments about the state of their spiritual lives. Truth be told, if that really is one of G_d’s concerns (which, frankly, I doubt) then G_d is in a much better place to make such judgments than any of us. Indeed, in our Prayers of the People we Episcopalians routinely pray for “those who faith is known to God alone.”

It’s also no accident that our intentional remembering of the departed takes place in the context of a harvest festival. Samhain was a time of gratitude for the blessings of the harvest and the end of a successful growing season and the completion of yet another cycle of life. Every person who has played a role in our lives, whether productive, challenging, joyful or painful, has helped write a portion of the book that is our life. For that we should be grateful. And for their role in that writing, they merit our commemoration of and thanksgiving for their lives. 

Who would you remember?

On this day in which all the saints are celebrated and on the eve of the day all the souls of the departed will be remembered, I ask you to think of those in your own lives who have died but before doing so wrote pages, perhaps chapters, in the book that is your life. I ask you to remember them both aloud and in the silence of your hearts. Perhaps you might light a candle to remember them and say a prayer for them. And, if you feel so compelled, feel free to remember them in this space as you see fit.

 

Remembering Saint Marge, my beloved Mother 

I close with a prayer adapted from the Burial Service of the Book of Common Prayer:  

O God of unending compassion, we remember before you this day our brothers and sisters who no longer are present in this life. We thank you for creating them and giving them to us to know and to love as companions on our earthly pilgrimage. In your boundless compassion, be present with us and console us who mourn their loss. Give us hope to see in death the gate of eternal life, so that in quiet confidence we may continue our course on earth, until, by your call, we return to your presence with all who have gone before us.

May the souls of all the departed rest in peace.  Amen.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Asst. Lecturer: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Osceola Campus, Kissimmee

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++