We, the comfortable and safe

Last evening, as we drove home to Rochester from Chicago in a snowstorm, our conversation touched on where we each were at the moment the tragedy of 9/11 began unfolding. We each remembered, of course. We each remembered the horror of watching the Towers collapse, a scene on television that seemed unbelievable for having been imagined so often as a special effect in TV dramas. Even in a snowstorm, watching out for slippery stretches of highway and the mini-whiteouts created by semis and snowplows, we were comfortable in our heated car. It has heated seats, to help ensure the comfort. It took us a bit longer than usual to make the trip, but our safety was never seriously in doubt.

Try as I might, it is difficult for me to imagine what it is like to live in a place where comfort is impossible and where terror, fear, violence, and death so haunt daily life that safety is at best momentary and temporary. Yet some live in such a place.

In his New York Times’ column yesterday, “The World Capital of Killing,” (which you can read here), Nicholas Kristoff reports from one such place: the Congo.

It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.

But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.

What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14—perhaps they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up—so she moved in with her uncle.

Kristoff goes on to tell Jeanne’s story, to date, a story of watching relatives be mutilated, herself kidnapped, and repeatedly gang raped. Left for dead by her abductors, she was taken to a hospital where surgeons pieced together her torn body. Three days after being released, soldiers from one of the rampaging militias in the countryside abducted her again. Once again she endured gang rape, and once again she somehow found her way to the hospital. The surgeons think there is too intact tissue left to effect full repairs.

Kristoff ends his piece not with a conclusion, but with questions—questions that must be answered by those of us who are comfortable and safe.

Unless we see some leadership here, the fighting in Congo—fueled by profits from mineral exports—will continue indefinitely. So if we don’t act now, when will we? When the toll reaches 10 million deaths? When Jeanne is kidnapped and raped for a third time?

I realize the United States cannot be the world’s police. I understand the rest of the world also bears responsibility. I know that American young men and women stand in harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I am aware that we have our own concerns for safety, especially in light of threats made by people and organizations that have struck before.

My question is this: Is it possible that our own concerns for safety can make us hesitate to act when horror unfolds in a part of the world where we have no national interest? That’s what happened as the Holocaust unfolded. May we be a people so committed to justice that we not allow it to happen again.

Beauty in architecture, old and new

Usually, when I think of beauty in large urban buildings, the word “old” or “ancient” immediately comes to mind. It is scenes like these that I am usually thinking of:

From Bratislava, Slovakia:

From Budapest, Hungary:

 And from Prague, the Czech Republic:

It isn’t that a building must be old to be beautiful, but I would argue that some modern architecture is not only ugly but, and I realize I am an amateur here, downright silly. Like the I. M. Pei glass pyramid he plopped down on the grounds among the stately buildings of the Louvre in Paris:

(Now I’ve probably insulted any Parisians or architects reading this—please straighten me out in your comments.)

In contrast is a new skyscraper in Chicago that I want very much to see.

Paul Goldberger introduces us to the building and the architect in a fine piece (which you can read here) in The New Yorker:

Aqua—a new, eighty-two-story apartment tower in the center of Chicago—is made of the same tough, brawny materials as most skyscrapers: metal, concrete, and lots of glass. But the architect, Jeanne Gang, a forty-five year-old Chicagoan, has figured out a way to give it soft, silky lines, like draped fabric. She started with a fairly conventional rectangular glass slab, then transformed it by wrapping it on all four sides with wafer-thin, curving concrete balconies, describing a different shape on each floor. Gang turned the facade into an undulating landscape of bending, flowing concrete, as if the wind were blowing ripples across the surface of the building. You know this tower is huge and solid, but it feels malleable, its exterior pulsing with a gentle rhythm.

Three close ups of the lovely terraces Gang wove into the exterior of the design:

And the architect on one balcony during construction:

Marvelous beauty, amazing imagination, a design for a building that is a deeply moving expression of creativity by someone made in God's image.

Regret and the process of living

I have never had much problem feeling guilty—not because I do little wrong, mind you, but because forgiveness has always been something I’ve pretty much been able to accept. The guilty feelings tend to diminish when forgiveness is promised or granted, and though I find the need for and act of confession fully unpleasant and deplorable, I’m always pleased the guilt feelings don’t tend to lurk around in the background of my consciousness.

Regret based on shame, on the other hand, now that’s a different story altogether. That lurks interminably and rarely quietly. Moments of deep shame remain carved so deeply into my consciousness that the memory of them can feel more real than whatever is happening at the moment. The cure for shame and guilt, as witnessed by the Christian Story, are related but different. But as we all know, grace is free, but costly to embrace.

Like some feelings of guilt, some shame is simply invalid. Knowing that doesn’t bring instant relief I realize, since the mechanisms we have to trigger both guilt and shame are usually too deeply embedded from the past to be changed easily. Reshaping our conscience and heart to live more fully before God’s face is a process that takes time. Still, learning our regret is invalid can be a helpful first step.

I thought about this when I happened upon a statement in Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch. He mentions how often couples say, “I wish we had done this earlier,” expressing regret for having missed the truth of things for long. If I had known this sooner so much pain would have been averted, so many choices could have been made differently. But Schnarch’s response is wise:

What makes you think you could have? It’s taken every bit of development you’ve got to do what you did last night… It takes a long time for a human being to mature. [p. 37]

It’s so easy to forget we are on a pilgrimage, not leaping off a cliff. Growing in knowing and doing is a process, so wishing we could go back and do things over is silly. Not just because time flows in a way that doesn’t allow us access to the past, but because even if I had known then what I know now I most likely could not have processed it adequately to take advantage of it.

The point is not some sort of fatalism, but contentment. Christ, my elder brother is not ashamed of me (talk about a cure for shame! See Hebrews 2:11) and is the One graciously ordering my pilgrimage (see Hebrews 2:11 again).

Contentment and patience, as we are reminded by John Newton:

I have been thirty years forming my own views; and in the course of this time, some of my hills have sunk, and some of my valleys have risen: but, how unreasonable within me to expect all this should take place in another person; and that, in the course of a year or two. [p. 60-61]

A refreshed malign weariness

I am reading, with two friends, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a novel set in New York City in the years immediately following the World Trade Center attacks. I haven’t gotten very far—only about thirty pages, actually—so this more like a report along the way than a review. I’m already hooked, which is always a good sign, drawn into the lives of Hans and Rachel van den Broek, and their son, Jake, and Hans’ friend, Chuck Ramkissoon whom he met while playing cricket in a city park.

Hans and his wife had recently moved to New York from London, and then were forced to move into a hotel room when the Trade Towers collapsed. Their apartment is shrouded in dust, and though their jobs are secure, life, their relationship, their sense of belonging in New York are all now shrouded with uncertainty. Rachel tells Hans she is returning to London with Jake.

I felt my wife sit up. It would only be for a while, she said in a low voice. Just to get some perspective on things. She would move in with her parents and give Jake some attention. He needed it. Living like this, in a crappy hotel, in a city gone mad, was doing him no good: had I noticed how clinging he’d become? I could fly over every fortnight; and there was always the phone. She lit a cigarette. She’d started smoking again, after an interlude of three years. She said, “It might even do us some good.”

It is Hans’ voice we hear in Netherland as the narration unfolds. But it was the next paragraph that caught my attention. In it Hans lifts the veil, as it were, so we can see more deeply into their lives. And as he provides a glimpse into this tiny slice of the reality in which they live, he also allows us greater clarity about the world in which we all move and have our being day by day:

There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight. Evenings, after Jake had been put to bed, we quietly ate watercress and translucent noodles that neither of us could find the strength to remove from their cartons; took turns to doze in the bathtub; and failed to stay awake for the duration of a TV show. Rachel was tired and I was tired. A banal state of affairs, yes—but our problems were banal, the stuff of women's magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.

[Excerpted from Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (New York, NY: Vintage Books; 2008) pp. 22-23.]

Word choice matters

In a world where our neighbors, friends and co-workers may have world views very different from our own, how we speak about what we believe matters. (Actually, it matters even if we live in a world which is not so diverse, but that’s a different issue—it becomes especially important within a pluralistic culture if we desire to be understood properly.)

I was reflecting on that when I read this brief quote by John Stott. What he says is worth thinking about:

Submission and obedience

In my view the 1662 Prayer Book marriage service was wrong to include the word 'obey' in the bride's vows. The concept of a husband who issues commands and of a wife who gives him obedience is simply not found in the New Testament. The nearest approximation to it is the cited example of Sarah who “obeyed Abraham, calling him lord.” But even in that passage the apostle Peter’s actual instructions to wives is the same as Paul’s, namely, “Be submissive to your husbands” (1 Pet. 3:1-6). And ... a wife’s submission is something quite different from obedience. It is a voluntary self-giving to a lover whose responsibility is defined in terms of constructive care; it is love’s response to love.

[excerpted from The Message of Ephesians (The Bible Speaks Today series: London: IVP, 1979), p. 238.]

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Tiger Woods, Christianity v Buddhism

Ross Douthat, Op-ed columnist for the New York Times, takes another look at the brouhaha that resulted when a journalist suggested Tiger Woods should consider Christianity since being revealed as an unfaithful husband. Brit Hume, on Fox News many people noted with displeasure, had made the gaffe, showing both the moral bankruptcy of Fox as a news source and the danger of religious people being allowed to proselytize in the public square.

Douthat asks us to ignore the hissing in the background and be more thoughtful about what took place:

Liberal democracy offers religious believers a bargain. Accept, as a price of citizenship, that you may never impose your convictions on your neighbor, or use state power to compel belief. In return, you will be free to practice your own faith as you see fit — and free, as well, to compete with other believers (and nonbelievers) in the marketplace of ideas.

That’s the theory. In practice, the admirable principle that nobody should be persecuted for their beliefs often blurs into the more illiberal idea that nobody should ever publicly criticize another religion. Or champion one’s own faith as an alternative. Or say anything whatsoever about religion, outside the privacy of church, synagogue or home.

A week ago, Brit Hume broke all three rules at once. Asked on a Fox News panel what advice he’d give to the embattled Tiger Woods, Hume suggested that the golfer consider converting to Christianity. “He’s said to be a Buddhist,” Hume noted. “I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. ”

A great many people immediately declared that this comment was the most outrageous thing they’d ever heard.

Douthat suggest that the outcry misses what might in fact be the most essential issue. “Theology has consequences,” he argues. “It shapes lives, families, nations, cultures, wars; it can change people, save them from themselves, and sometimes warp or even destroy them. If we tiptoe politely around this reality, then we betray every teacher, guru and philosopher—including Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha both—who ever sought to resolve the most human of all problems: How then should we live?”

You can read Douthat’s interesting piece, “Let’s Talk About Faith,” here. I recommend it to you.

Learning from the Christmas bomber

Thomas H. Kean and John Farmer Jr., the co-chairman and senior counsel of the 9/11 commission bring some sane reflection on what the Christmas bomb attempt implies for what the U.S. must do to enhance security.

There are procedural fixes worth undertaking, of course, like mandating enhanced screening, or installing body scanning technology, or coordinating the software used by intelligence agencies, or instructing State Department personnel to query the visa status of any person reported to be suspicious. Reforming the no-fly list procedures, as President Obama has proposed, is certainly overdue. But in our view the problem runs deeper, and requires a searching look at the structure of government itself.

Despite the best efforts of the 9/11 commission and other intelligence reformers, budgetary authority over intelligence remains unaligned with substantive responsibility. Turf battles persist among intelligence agencies. Power is sought while responsibility is deflected. The drift toward inertia continues.

Government agencies are most likely to succeed when structure matches mission. With its many jurisdictional boundaries and its persistent bureaucratic fault lines, our current system, although greatly improved since 9/11, affords too many opportunities to let information slip, too many occasions for human frailty to assert itself.

Their piece, “How 12/25 Was Like 9/11,” published as in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times (January 5, 2010) can be read here.