Write for God

The face on the Shroud of Turin

Either we go up together or we go down together. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

We are all busy during our workday and sometimes even a break or lunch eludes us, but we are always nestled in the hands of God and that He shows us His face in others. I had the blessing of experiencing that today.

A random post on a social networking group I joined recently led me to deep prayer for a stranger. A fellow communications professional asked for prayers for her nephew, who is in critical condition after a car accident that left him with a traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Since last September, our family has been dealing with our 13-year-old daughter’s TBI and its aftermath. I’ve posted entries about our ordeal here before but, in short: Our beautiful daughter was in a coma for five weeks and in rehab for another five weeks before she joined us at home. Young people with similar injuries are very special to me now because I know the hell that their families endure when they see their child with a TBI in intensive care.

When I read about the young man accident on my social networking group, I contacted the family and we’ve been in touch all day today sorting out this terrible event.  The young man is 17 and today he was due to be anointed with a glove that belonged to St. Pio of Pietrelcina, the beloved Padre Pio whose intercession we sought during our daughter’s worst days.  Please pray for Daniel Perrino today. He is in God’s hands today and our prayers are desperately needed for his healing.

As Dr. King put it, we can either rise or fall together. After a busy morning working and praying for Daniel, I finally made it to the bank to make two deposits for my employer. I was thinking of TBIs and beating the rain as I walked the block to the bank. Ahead of me, there was an old woman in shabby clothing. She had a tote bag hooked to her walker as she laboriously walked the few steps from the bank’s parking lot to the main entrance. Seeing the face of God in her, I hurried to open the two bank doors and she thanked me for my “beautiful heart.”

I walked to the line in the lobby, still thinking of how quickly I could leave before the rain began. As I waited, the same woman eventually stood behind me. I gave her my place in line so she wouldn’t have to wait longer than I and, again, she thanked me.

My deposits in, I walked out and the same woman was walking to the two bank doors to leave. It was as if God had put her in my path today for some good. Again, I helped her out.

On the sidewalk, she told me that she had come in for cash to pay for her handicapped tag. A state employee had been thoughtful enough to tell her that Florida is raising its fees on September 1. Paying for her tag early would save her a little cash instead of waiting to renew on her birthday, she said. I mentioned that I wanted to do the same thing with my tag because my birthday was coming up in October.

She stopped and looked at me: Her birthday was in October, too, and she asked which day. The 17th, I told her and, with a big smile, she told me that was her birthday, too. It turns out that she was exactly 30 years older than me. She told me that her name was Georgietta and I told her mine. We shared a moment and I told her to be safe as she drove across the street to the registration office to get her tag.

The odds of walking in and out with this stranger who shared my birthday are astronomical. Most of the times that I make a deposit at this bank, I walk in and out without talking to anyone except the teller. It seems that Georgietta needed someone to be kind to her today, and a stranger who shared her birthday and just wanted to beat the rain was God’s instrument to do that. 

I could be Georgietta in 30 years walking into a bank and hoping that someone I don’t know will care enough to hold a door for me or to chat for a minute. This afternoon, God showed his face to me as a disabled woman without much money but with the capacity to let me be kind.

Praying for a boy I don’t know or holding a door for an elderly woman who shares my birthday showed me that we are always in the hands of God, ready to love his people as He commands us to do, and that those he puts in our path bear His face.

The Berrigan brothers on the cover of TIME, 1/23/71

An Irish-born Norbertine monk spelled out the mission of the contemplative to me while we were having dinner at a Catholic retreat center some years ago. The young monk told me how he thought his vocation would take him out of the world to focus on prayer only, but the opposite happened.

People need salvation so much that his presence in public would draw people to him. They would ask him to pray for them or for a loved one. Others would be curious about his habit, his life in the monastery and its rituals. Even when he returned to the monastery, he would be drawn to praying for humanity and its problems. He had taken himself out of the world only to become a part of it in a more significant way, he said.

He discovered, as Thomas Merton did, that the contemplative life can’t help but draw you closer to the world. Long before the Internet and with very limited access to a telephone, Merton stayed in touch with the world. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Daniel and Philip Berrigan and Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn made the pilgrimage to this little house on the grounds of the Abbey of Gethsemani. Merton’s cinder-block house is a mile from the monastery which, in itself, is miles from the nearest small town. Merton could not love God without also being involved in the world God created.

Being in the world means caring about the least of our brothers and carrying out the mandate that Jesus gave us to love one another. That’s very different from being of the world, which means giving in to the sins and temptations presented to us every second. We are of the world when we get ours first at the expense of others, when we preserve our egos instead of humbling ourselves before others. As the poet William Wordsworth said, “The world is too much with us.”

Those of the world see easy solutions in judging others and in mocking God. This world is all there is, they will tell you, and we’re deluded fools for knowing that God is alive in us. Charles Darwin becomes their prophet because they claim evolution offers “proof” that God didn’t create the world. They will argue Darwin and atheism to such a degree that those become their gods. The distance from a chimp to their own well reasoned spoken argument becomes very short to them. We share some DNA with chimps, but we don’t share the divine spark of God that makes us fully human. Their decision to deny God comes from the free will He gives us.

St. Francis urged us to always preach the Gospel, and to use words when necessary. Our lives and our actions preach in a more realized way than our empty words if no actions back them up. How many politicians who say they support Christian values have found themselves enmeshed in scandals that showed their words were just lip service? If our lives aren’t truly a prayer, then we can’t call ourselves Christians. Unless true repentance for sins committed and forgiveness for the sinner are in the equation, then we are not acting as Jesus would have us do when he told us to love one another.

We know that Jesus ate with sinners and was criticized by the uber-religious for breaking bread with the less-than perfect. He knew that it’s the sick who need a physician, not those who are well. How many of those sinners did Jesus save just by dining with them? We know that a former tax collector became the Evangelist Matthew and that a woman tortured by demons became Mary Magdalene. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas made millions from movies that were incredibly raunchy and violent. In his latest work, Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith, he tells how Jesus brought him back to Himself and changed his life. If there’s hope for the writer of Basic Instinct and Showgirls, isn’t there hope for every sinner?

A holy little priest we knew from parish life some years ago once told a story during a Sunday homily about his experience with sinners. The previous night, he had received a call to minister to a sick parishioner. He drove to an unfamiliar part of town and got lost. It was late at night and the only open store was the Banana Boat, a bar known as a rowdy hangout. He went in to ask for directions and was overwhelmed by bar patrons who wanted him to pray for someone; some even wanted him to hear their confessions. After getting directions, he left the bar to visit the ill parishioner.

With an Irish twinkle in his eye, the priest told us, “Maybe I should minister at the Banana Boat every Saturday night!” We laughed, but perhaps it wasn’t accidental that he ended up there looking for directions. Maybe someone’s life was changed that Saturday night that he walked through those bar doors in his priestly garb.

We all have the opportunity each day to be in the world doing for others as best we can. Sometimes we are so poor or overwhelmed that the best we can do is to send prayers up like incense for someone. We may not have the means to feed someone at that moment or to stop armies from marching, but we can pray. When we are in the world and we are praying for the salvation of others, we are also saving ourselves.

Today, April 4, is the 41st anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis. Exactly a year before he was shot dead at the Lorraine Motel, Dr. King delivered a scathing speech titled Beyond Vietnam that outlined his opposition to that immoral war.

Read these words from his speech and substitute Iraqi for “Vietcong” and you’ll realize things haven’t changed much, except there was no moral leader of Dr. King’s standing to confront George W. Bush with these charges:

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

A year after indicting America for its presence in Vietnam, Dr. King was shot by an ex-con whom the King family doesn’t believe was fully responsible.  Opposing the empire’s wars can be a deadly choice.

When I was a kid in the late 1960s, there was an afternoon talk/variety show hosted by Mike Douglas, an affable entertainer that I usually confused with Merv Griffin, another singer/talk show host on the air.

In November 1967, Mike Douglas hosted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the height of the hysteria that led to the assassinations and mayhem of 1968. Instead of lobbing his usual softballs, Douglas tag-teamed with singer and conservative Tony Martin to grill Dr. King about his antiwar stance. (The interview is included in a documentary titled King: Man of Peace in a Time of War. Click here for a brief excerpt.)

When Douglas took a break from suggesting that Dr. King was urging troops to rebel or that his opposition to the war was hurting the civil rights movement, Martin took over as Dr. King sat sandwiched between them. Dr. King was asked if he was Communist and whether his opposition to the war wasn’t hurting the families of the “boys” fighting over there.

Dr. King sat cool, poised and confident as Douglas and Martin peppered him with questions that were obviously prepared. (How many times does a talk show guest get to interview another guest live?) Dr. King’s message of nonviolence never changed. He was asked whether he approved of riots as protest and what he thought of prominent African-Americans who approached the struggle for civil rights with other tactics. Didn’t his opposition to the war undermine his loyalty to the White House? Dr. King answered that he was loyal to the message and not to the person sitting in the White House.

The character of Dr. King, his tremendous adherence to the Gospel and to nonviolence and, yes, his poise are all evident in this TV interview. Watch it for a demonstration of moral force. Forty-one years after his death, Dr. King is still alive with us and yet we miss his powerful voice.

Two of our children have graduated from public schools in Florida and the two youngest will be entering high school in the fall. In all the years that our children have been enrolled in various schools, I’ve signed permission slips for everything from approvals to use their photos in promotional materials to okays to watch PG-13 movies in class.

Last week, our 13-year-old son wrote a cryptic note on his daily planner that read “Navy.” When we asked him what that meant, he told us that recruiters from the Navy and Marines had visited his eighth-grade class. Eighth grade. My son doesn’t shave, he won’t drive for several years and he’s more interested in rec-league basketball than in career choices right now. He was given a hard-sell pitch to join the military in the eighth grade.

Our son said that the message from the recruiters was that “they did fun things.” They brought a Junior ROTC candidate who had graduated from eighth grade the previous year to speak to his peers about all the fun he was having in the kiddie military.

Not one permission slip came home for our approval to have our son listen to propaganda about the hijinks he can expect  in the military. In our area of Florida, a group called Veterans for Peace has been protesting how the school system allows military recruiters free access to our kids while the nonviolent, anti-war message isn’t given the same platform or respect. Veterans for Peace would not tell my son that the military is fun and neither would we.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 gives the military the right to pursue our children. Technically, parents can “opt out” of having their children’s names and contact information given to the military. My husband and I sent notes to the principal at our oldest children’s high schools when the law went into effect, but we still received calls and direct-mail pitches from all branches of the service. The Do Not Call list does not apply to them. We didn’t expect them to start hounding our kids in the eighth grade.

I never served in the military, but my husband did. He enjoyed certain parts of his Navy service, especially being aboard a ship working as part of a crew that ran things smoothly. Now, he is a “waging peace” warrior who supports antiwar causes and issues. Since my husband was a young man pushing helicopters off the decks of Navy ships during the evacuation of Vietnam in 1975, he has seen soldiers used by hawks in government to do their bidding overseas. My husband is a staunch antiwar advocate who lives according to the principles of nonviolence learned from Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Franz Jagerstatter and countless other war resisters in history.

At home, we have plowshares, not swords. As it says in Isaiah 2:4:

And he shall judge between the nations, and shall reprove many peoples: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

The fiascos of Vietnam, Gulf War I, Iraq and Afghanistan have marked generations since the 1960s with blood that was shed for gain, ideology and politics. We’ve seen soldiers not cared for when they come back maimed. We’ve heard  lies being used to justify the deaths of their friends and the loss of their limbs.

As a friend of mine says, we’re good at building body armor that protects areas where soldiers might get killed instantly, but we’re not good at protecting the ones where you live maimed. Another friend told me that her brother, a Vietnam veteran, has still never spoken about his experiences there. He wants to forget what he saw and what he did.

An elderly Korean War vet told me a horrible story about how he buried his war memories by being a workaholic at a Fortune 500 company. After he retired, he turned on the TV one morning and saw the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. The sight of the panicked people covered in dust and screaming for help brought back scenes that reminded him of Korea. After much torment, he finally went to a counselor to help him deal with his war experiences he had tried for decades to forget.

A year to the day before he was assassinated, Dr. King delivered a powerful speech he titled Beyond Vietnam:

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

We are living through immoral wars created by those in the Bush administration who had power, but no compassion, and might without morality, as Dr. King observed about Vietnam. President Obama’s recent decision to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan will not mean fun and games for anyone in the military, their families back home or the people of that battered nation.

Our sons already know what “conscientious objector” means and how military spending is burying our nation in trillion-dollar debt. They’re been raised to know that there’s no fun in killing. Between a PG-13 film in class and a propaganda presentation that equates war with fun, I’d choose the film for my son. But, of course, the school system never gave me the option when they subjected him to military recruiters before he’s ever stepped foot in high school.

Veterans for Peace will have to start picketing at middle schools now. Let’s hope the military doesn’t begin grabbing our kids in elementary schools soon if the madness of war continues to require fresh recruits shedding fresh blood.

People of a certain age remember what they were doing when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. My husband recalls a classroom in New York where a boy cried out loud when he heard the news from the public-address system before everyone was sent home.

I was in Havana, Cuba and, having survived the dark days of the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, hearing the news that the President of the United States was dead was another in a series of calamities. I had just turned six, but we children in families that didn’t support the Revolution had to grow up quickly. We learned to resist the counsel in school to inform on the “anti-revolutionaries” who were usually our parents and we learned how to keep our mouths shut when talk turned to the glories of Fidel Castro.

I remember the shocked expression on my aunt’s face as we heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination on the old cathedral radio. There was a hush in the streets–even in Havana. (That being said, former CIA director George H.W. Bush claims he doesn’t remember where he was, although sources place him in Dallas on the day of JFK’s death. It’s not known if he was reading The Pet Goat at the time.)

JFK’s assassination is the subject of the magisterial JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. I read the book in August 2008 and, on February 8, my husband and I had the privilege of hearing Douglass speak on the subject in St. Petersburg, FL. As Douglass announced, his JFK book is the first in a trilogy that will also explore the assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in one volume and the death of Robert F. Kennedy in the final book. All of these shameless murders are related and can be traced to the “unspeakable,” monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton’s term for the evil loose in the world. (Here, you can watch Douglass lecture on the book.)

Through well documented research, Douglass pieces together what we’ve always known was the lie perpetrated on the public by the Warren Commission. His contention is that the powers within the military and CIA fiefdoms orchestrated JFK’s assassination after a series of “turnings” on the President’s part that made him a marked man. Please read this marvelous book to gather all the nuances in Douglass’ argument, but suffice it to say that a landmark speech that JKF made at American University on June 10, 1963 is one of those turnings. (When Caroline Kennedy and her uncle Ted Kennedy declared their support for President Barack Obama, they did so at American University as an obvious tribute to their father and brother’s stand for world peace at that same location.)

Douglass spells out the Chicago plot that was a virtual rehearsal for Dallas, including a carbon copy of Lee Harvey Oswald’s ex-military patsy in the form of a disturbed stooge named Thomas Vallee. The story I found most compelling in Douglass’ book is the pilloring of Abraham Bolden, the first African-American member of the Secret Service. In exchange for speaking out, this courageous man was slandered and punished. Bolden’s story and Douglass’ compelling case for JFK’s stand against the unspeakable are reasons enough to read this marvelous book.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” as George Santayana observed. It’s within us to remember the past and to continue to speak out against the unspeakable.