In church, just days ago, we sang a Christmas Carol hymn: "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear."
It has in it this line: "Oh hush the noise of battle strife, and hear the angels sing!"
Do you believe in angels? Literally, or figuratively?
"It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" started out as a poem.
Here is a poem. I think of it as an angel's song.
If I Must Die
By Refaat Alareer, beloved Palestinian writer, poet, teacher, and translator.
Refaat was murdered on December 7th by an Israeli airstrike.
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above,
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love.
If I must die
let it bring hope,
let it be a tale.
Refaat Alareer taught Shakespeare.
In Palestine the voices of so many are being target for silencing. Journalists are being targeted. Doctors and medical worker are being targeted. The message of such targeting is delivered with awful clarity when their families are targeted and killed as well.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
Bethlehem is in Palestine.
This year the celebration of Christmas is being cancelled in Bethlehem and in Palestine.
In Bethlehem in a landmark Lutheran church the there is a creche, a nativity scene with the baby Jesus in a keffiyeh, surrounded by rubble. The Palestinian Lutheran minister there, Reverend Isaac Munther, addressed his congregation in front of it.
He said:
If Christ were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble. I invite you to see the image of Jesus in every child killed and pulled from under the rubble, in every child struggling for life in destroyed hospitals, in every child in incubators. Christmas celebrations are canceled this year, but Christmas itself is not and will not be canceled, for our hope cannot be canceled.
The lyrics of "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" were written by a Unitarian minister, pastor Edmund Sears. He wrote it, it's reported, in a time of "personal melancholy" with the the news of revolution in Europe and the United States' war with Mexico fresh in his mind.
According to Ken Sawyer writing in UU World in 2002: the "song is remarkable for its focus not on Bethlehem, but on his own time, and on the ever-contemporary issue of war and peace."
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| "Oh hush the noise of battle strife, and hear the angels sing!" |
In 2019, as part of my seasonal reflection, I wrote beseeching the minister of our Unitarian Universalist congregation for a sermon about peace. Such a sermon has never been delivered.
Since then, the "peace" sign you see in the picture that I provided below has been removed from the church worship space. It's been placed with the church's historical artifacts.
Here, once again, is my 2019 December letter to our minister praying for a sermon on peace, praying, if you will, for peace. Best and blessings to you all this season.
December 19, 2019
Re: An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace
Dear Reverend Ana,
Last
spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s
fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a
sermon you would give. We didn’t win. Had we won, we would have
challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject,
speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit
of empire. Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you
with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a
simple concept: Peace. If, these days, conversations about peace are
avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a
sermon?
Giving it some consideration, I think that
making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the
prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as
investing in fund raising lottery tickets. Therefore I will try.
Is
peace a spiritual thing? Is talk about our common humanity, our common
bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our
relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms? I
acknowledge I’m being obvious here. What I just referred to is supposed
to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.
I grew
up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people
taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were
wrong. These days we, as country, are more military extended than
ever. My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old. We
had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January. The war
in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially
for the entirety of her life. All of our wars are long now. As
formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later
beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.
These days the United States has been bombing
nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S.
participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being:
Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other
countries. With practically no comment or attention from us, President
Obama opened new military bases across Africa.
A peace
symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s
sanctuary where our sermons are given. We begin every Sunday service
singing the words: “let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.”
Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is
customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace.”
In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have
discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the
sanctuary that is known as the “Peace Chapel” to that cause. In our list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .
.
. . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace
or the need to end the perpetual wars for which our country is now
responsible. Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject
of peace? I can’t recall one.
I was not at the
Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I
talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program. I
was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of
peace. Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war,
although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are
inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
Our
congregation through its leaders including members of the social
justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city
and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on
the issues important to all of us. The importance of peace activism
has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is
integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being
discussed of common interest. Has the subject of peace somehow been
tagged as off-limits? Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by
and among religious communities?
Other social issues
have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the
subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among
them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency.
The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity. When
the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate
focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade
Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone
else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so
fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every
other issue that’s important. There are other issues like that; issues
that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.
Our
American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that
stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very
much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels. Moreover, overall
our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our
planet, exterminating its ecosystems. Further, the US military is one
of the largest polluters in history, “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption”
since 2001. The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and
emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries,
polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the
United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws,
insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.
It
is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use
probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the
initial manufacture of weapons. Consider also that replacement, or
nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must
entail substantial additional environmental costs.
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went largely unreported
was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the
world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US
chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with
which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium,
petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and
lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings,
birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization
survey tells us
that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect
between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in
miscarriage in the two years after 2004.
Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing “othering”
of people who we are made to think are different from us. Frequently
now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown.
Often that “othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that
may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer
most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed. We may
also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of
populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance,
with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the
military coup that replaced the government there.
Also
basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and
wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence.
These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced
ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to
eliminate. Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to
speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing
mankind is to get rid of war. Before he did so, he carefully weighed
cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so,
that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his
coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together. But
King concluded that the issues were tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.
When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,”
delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4,
1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the
poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.
War is profitable business. It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets
than we, as the public, will ever learn. But that profit drains the
resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much
else. The Pentagon and military budget is about 57% of the nation’s discretionary budget. If all of the unknowable
black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance
Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher. We
spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or
seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much
more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after
that. Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we
supply making the world dangerous.
We may not fully
know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in
these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had
killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that,
as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.” Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.
Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion). Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion).
Our
fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth
Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left
wing progressive, voted in 2017
to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54
billion increase requested by President Trump. 60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.
Perhaps
most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our
souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its
horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly
unexamined. The public flailed and many among us continue in their
confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States
or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we
unilaterally and "preemptively" launched to invade that country. Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `incubator babies’:
That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam.
Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did not
attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country
because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be
followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and
turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.
The
foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost
all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi
Arabia. Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive
amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military
spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved
perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.
In the Vietnam
War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that,
not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.
Perhaps
hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people
striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual
manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and
Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective distinguishing between “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims. “Worthy”
victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and
are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward
war. “Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without
attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children
who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi
Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S.. Often, as with Palestinians
removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own
victimhood.
Additional layers of pretext pile up when
we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers
of war crimes. We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there
is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes. Often the
perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who
illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and likely false “confessions.” Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called “civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.
Wikileaks,
Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing
to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly
embarrassing to the U.S. military. Wikileaks has never published
anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is
disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That
establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize
Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published
documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of “Collateral Murder,”
of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea
Manning. The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to
Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other
evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Anyone
who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’
persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal,
abuse of inordinate power against Assange should watch or listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”-
Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church). The
attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of
character assassination. They have progressed to things far worse.
Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after
seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are
now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they
have been convicted. I think we have to agree with the criticism of
this as psychological torture. The continued torture of Manning is an
effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to
lie.
The United States wants Assange extradited to the
Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that
was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the
highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although
Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the
laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled
Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or
argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits
the public. It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a
show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.
When
Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used
as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show
trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks
in a high security prison for “bail jumping”; that’s just
fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the
obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were
withdrawn, negating the original bail terms as a result. A normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.
Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for “bail jumping”
and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition
to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government
that was evidently CIA assisted,
and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country.
Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously
stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
The
persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other
journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being
intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning
America’s militarily asserted empire. Other providers of news simply
lay low not reporting things. As neither the New York Times nor the
Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent scary SWAT style arrest
of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he
reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela
Juan Guaidó coup team. Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado
for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.
With
silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our
military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of
doing? In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without
that. Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against
Iran, Russia, North Korea.
Journalists who still show courage, are subject to
exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to
alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be
less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad just announced
that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been
suppressing a story of his. His story was about the whistleblower
revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical
attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was fairly obviously
a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the
U.S. to bomb Syria. Remember our bombings of Syria? The was another in
2017. It was for such bombings of Syria the press declared that Trump was finally `presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of being “guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.
The
strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt
official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link
to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the
suppression of the voices that oppose war. In his sermon against war at
Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed,
Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that, “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”
King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the “conformist thought” of the surrounding world. Indeed, with the complicity of a much more conglomerately owned
corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a
secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not
supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid. We subscribe
with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American
exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world. It feels, as if
in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say
something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you
know, “Star Wars”). Or is our silence, merely something less
profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an
exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or
holiday diner?
Dr. King
correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have
to pay for speaking out against our country’s war. He concluded that he
had to do so, that he had to `break the silence,’ despite the
prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only
thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.
Ana,
I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you
spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war. I also acknowledge
that there are prices our congregation could face. Relatively recently
the FBI has raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists who have long, distinguished careers in public service. (And the FBI has also been investigating nonviolent climate activists and Black Lives Matters activists.)
But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the
right thing to do. Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our
sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps, if you would give a sermon
like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a
good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers
of other congregations who would follow suit.
Maybe,
as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when
people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s,
temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace
and an end to our wars.
Have I made the subject of
peace sound as if it is complicated? If so, I am sorry. That can be a
problem in itself. At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple? Peace,
supporting peace, speaking out for peace. . Something very simple.
Last night I had the strangest dream
I never dreamed before.
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war.*
* From “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
a precursor of sorts to “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971
Sincerely,
Michael D. D. White
* * *
Here are links to the prior Noticing New York ventures into seasonal
reflection:
• Thursday, December 24, 2009, A Christmas Eve Story of Alternative Realities: The Fight Not To Go To Pottersville (Or Ratnerville),
• Friday, December 24, 2010, Revisiting a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville,
• Saturday, December 24, 2011, Traditional Christmas Eve Revisit of a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville, the Real Life Incarnation of the Abhorred Pottersville,
• Monday, December 24, 2012, While I Tell of Yuletide Treasure,
• Tuesday, December 24, 2013, A Seasonal Reflection: Assessing Aspirations Toward Alternate Realities- 'Tis A Tale of Two Alternate Cities?.,
Wednesday, December 24, 2014, Seasonal Reflections: No Matter How Fortunate or Not, We Are All Equal, Sharing a Common Journey
• Thursday, December 24, 2015, Seasonal Reflection: Mayor de Blasio, His Heart Squeezed Grinch-Small, Starts Gifting Stolen Libraries To Developers For The Holidays
• Saturday, December 24, 2016, Noticing New York's Annual Seasonal Reflection
• Sunday, December 24, 2017, This Year’s Seasonal Reflection: Yes We Are Now Living In Ratnerville, Locally and Nationally, And Yet We Hope And Work Towards Something Different
• Monday, December 24, 2018, This Year’s Annual Seasonal Reflection: It Rhymes (But Not With "Reason" or "Season")
• Tuesday, December 24, 2019 An Open Letter To Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons of The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn Requesting A Sermon About Peace
• Thursday, December 24, 2020 Noticing New York 2020 Seasonal Reflection
• Friday, December 24, 2021 Noticing New York 2021 Seasonal Reflection
• Saturday, December 24, 2022 Noticing New York 2022 Seasonal Reflection
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