Cactus Juice

Of Grace: Invited, Accepted, and Spurned

Mt. Calvary Monastery from Santa Barbara Sacred Spaces.

After reading The Prior's Column for the last few months, I feel more acutely the pain of his community upon the loss of their Mt. Calvary Monastery.  The sudden disruption of the prior's was similar to the shock of suddenly reading the words of Chuck's wife Carren after having read his nearly-daily posts.  Chuck had been badly injured in Iraq.  It's the personal that is personal.

Last week, The Story aired a show (link to audio of the show and photos of the individuals) about a heart transplant.  The father of the young woman who died was a surgeon himself, and it was he that laid his brain-dead daughter on the operating table to have her heart removed.  As the transplant surgeon recounted his observation of the father's final act, I immediately burst out sobbing.  Not tears, sobbing.  Tears now, remembering the story again.  The girl who received the transplant (and her sister- both had a heart disease that required them to obtain transplants) are active for transplants and blood donation.  For them it is very, very personal.

Ah so, the Bill Ayers interview on Fresh Air.  I didn't know anything about him, except that somehow he got himself from terrorist to intelligentsia without hardly a moment of shame.  The absence of shame was primary to the interview.  Ayers is quite slick.  He enrages people with his slickness, and he enraged me with his misdirection of contingency.  When challenged to admit that he made a poor choice, perhaps even an evil choice, in terrorizing his own nation, he turns it back on the questioner and the listener in the format of "He that is without sin among you..." But that is what Jesus said (John 8:7), and Jesus said it precisely because he was perfect.  Contingency is not nihilism.

Ayers either has to justify himself, or he does not.  That is for him to decide, and my argument for his sake is that he should choose the latter.  But to dabble in the rhetoric of justification only to tell your audience that they are unworthy to judge both insults the audience and takes something precious away from yourself.  Demanding that the audience humble themselves to the level of your own debasement reduces everyone.  Asking the audience for mercy both calls them to mercy (something they cannot give without humility, as it happens) and provides you the opportunity to obtain mercy.  It transforms sneaking around in the night sowing destruction into an experience of grace.

Ayers' choice not to give himself this experience is surely a more complex psychology than can be heard in one radio interview, but in the interview one way that he did break the personal link between the listener and himself is to reiterate over and over again that he did not kill.  This is the point upon which he removes himself from communion, from community, with his listener.  Unfortunately it is surely not even true:  Ayers' over-sized home kills, the rest of his bloated Hyde Park lifestyle kills, and when Bill Ayers' bomb knocked out air support communication in Vietnam for a day it is possible that not only that did Ayers kill but that you can find exactly the names of who he killed on a big black wall in Washington, D.C.

After Ayers tells me that he is nothing like me, that to form community with me is to reduce himself to association with people less than himself, people who are murderers, he calls me to repentance.  Ayers spoke of the irony of a police officer driving past his home and holding up his book about his former underground life.  He didn't seem to note the irony of the officer seeking his approval from the street for reading his book while Ayers himself stood enthroned in his mansion.  A mansion that exists in the American community.  A community that I am a part of.  Malcolm X is one of history's greatest examples of the power of repentance.  Jesus is history's greatest example of communion, where God forms community with many.  In these acts, they acquire a moral authority that Ayers does not have.  They also acquire an ethical justification, a true peace, which Ayers denies himself.

One of the first posts I read in The Prior's Column was about a cruise ship and a certain kind of pleasure in trotting out his white habit for a dressy meal.  I don't understand monks on cruises, but I do understand the pleasure of the unexpected and of being the unexpected yourself.  Br. Mudge tells the story in his own joy; he is sharing, giving.  Chuck, at the moment, expresses himself with an edge.  His blog used to be subtitled "life and observations from the pointy end of the spear" and now he's amended to "not-so-pointy end."  The experience of being a reader has been the reverse, but in the present roughness he continues to put himself out there to interact with the world as he might find it.  And in doing so he also creates his own kind of grace.*

On The Story, host Dick Gordon asked heart transplant recipient Liz Carpenter directly whether she felt any guilt for being alive.  Implicit in the question is whether she needs our forgiveness, as listeners, for being alive.  She hadn't asked for it, because she does not need it.  She said that she has never felt guilt and she attributes this to the special relationship she has with the donor family.  She has mercy from the people that matter; her story that started with a young woman near death and the bodily destruction of another on a dark highway has also ended in grace.

The Mt. Calvary Monetary website currently opens to a scene of flames and the following verse:

My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4)

Endurance not only by ourselves, but as these Benedictines surely know, endurance that in community truly has the ability to overcome all things and to lack nothing.

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*And gives you a chance to as well: Part of Chuck's injuries involved damage to his hands.  He has become active with Project Valour-IT, a charity that provides laptops to injured soldiers, and voice-controlled laptops to soldiers with hand injuries.  Donate here.

A Nation and a Culture Without Shame.

America doesn't do shame.  Our continual desire to hammer the Germans over Nazi atrocities juxtaposes badly with our inability to face the slave-holding roots of our own nation.  Presently, national righteousness over Burma stands in embarrassing juxtaposition to our recent bout with Hurricane Katrina.  American sheriffs refused to allow people to leave New Orleans, thereby violating the American constitution.  And yet they have neither been hanged for treason or (more realistically) jailed for civil rights violations.  The failures in Burma are not any different from what is expected out of that government.  America failed to be America, and therefore the shame should be that much greater.  I find Laura Bush's interest in Burma embarrassing in its shamelessness.  A First Lady should have political hobbies, but one of the core hobbies of First Lady is meant to be compassion upon the people of her own nation, and nothing much interesting has happened there.

What do I mean by "shame"?  Dictionary definitions tend to start with "dishonor."  And our repulsion with shame starts there as well.  In our culture, we see ourselves as ethical free agents.  You may have done something dishonorable, but you will never be a dishonorable person.  Brownie failed to manage the response to Katrina and caused untold suffering and death, but he's off managing horses again or something like that and he's whatever he is today.  His actions are things that happened at a point in time, but his essence is not made of those actions.  It's all about "what have you done lately."  Today there is more of a psychologized definition of shame which then creates it's own particular Christian response.  An in depth review of these pscyhologized definitions can be found here.  Since we don't believe that a person can have any action stick with them, "shame" becomes some rootless negativity in the emotionality.  Christians turn it into a psychologicalization of Original Sin and make Jesus the Christ the answer.

I tend to think of shame as a gap between guilt and reaction.  As the gap, it is somewhere between useless and destructive and almost always should be destroyed.  I have learned that shame feeds addiction.  One thing that was absolutely required in bring my eating problem under control was ending my shame about overeating.  There are doctors and various foolish people who think that can belittle or shame a person into losing weight, and it is an absolutely false concept.  Obesity is a painful and horrible condition.  It is medieval in the experience of punishment that it inflicts.  A person who deserves punishment could find little better than the discomforts of obesity.  I like to say, "No one ever hated themselves to health."

And yet, at the same time that I am rooting shame out of my own life, I do see a place for it.  Consider the following story:  a woman loans a digital camera to a friend.  The camera is about five years old and only takes 2 mega-pixel pictures.  You can't even get a 2 mega-pixel camera anymore, but she's happy with it and hasn't seen a need to buy one of the new 6 or higher mega-pixel cameras.  The friend falls in a lake while carrying the camera.  At first it seems that the camera is fine, and she returns it.  But as the camera dries out it ends up being ruined.  The memory card, which had never been backed up, is also ruined.  The friend is horrified and offers to replace the camera.  The owner of the camera looks up the price on a midrange camera and emails the price to the friend.

The friend is living off savings while she puts herself through college and still puts food on the plate for her two children.  She calls the owner of the camera and says that she'll make payments to make it right, but she should only pay for the replacement value of the camera.  What about half the price of the cheapest camera available?  At this point the owner of the camera is really starting to morn the pictures she lost on the memory card, and she feels insulted that her loss is being undervalued.  She insists that her friend isn't making things right, that she should pay for a midrange camera, since that was what she had bought to start with all those years ago.

I've heard various versions of this story many a time.  Just turn on Judge Judy and you can see it over and over again.  One person insisting on "ma rights," no matter what the hardship imposed upon the other person and no matter how reasonable an accident may have occurred.  I find this recourse to a legalistic form of morality brutish.  The fact is that if you have a camera for a long time, something is going to happen to it.  You might fall in a lake, you might leave it in a restaurant.  It is inevitable.  When you bought the camera, you knew that would happen.  It was probably part of the reason you didn't buy a more expensive camera.  It was also probably part of the reason you didn't trade up earlier: you were waiting for the inevitable day when you would be forced to buy a new one.  When you chose to let someone else use your toy, you passed along the possible risks to the other person.  Perhaps the person was more careless than you would have been, except your level of care included the risk of selecting that particular person.  So you are exactly equal in your level of care.  To think otherwise is absurdly self-righteous.

On that last point, you may decide that what I am actually talking about is humility.  In 12-step, humility is defined as placing yourself equally with others, neither above nor below them.  Laura Bush could possibly, with humility, comment on Burma.  Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles could have, with humility, chosen their re-marriage to each other.  With shame, Laura Bush must be silent on Burma.  The marriage of Charles and Camilla was accepted partly because of their shame in publicly stating their humility.  And the owner of the camera could use a little shame to step back from what in all legality she perhaps deserves.

When I make this argument, I am at this point told, "Well, what about personal responsibility?"  The point is that the hapless friend should take responsibility for her accident.  And yet, look at the responsibility of this camera owner that I have already outlined, including her economic choices in when and what to buy.  And, let's get real for a moment, do you really want to live in a world where you are going to be held "responsible" for everything you do?  Personal responsibility is a very popular concept... just so long as it's someone else's responsibility.

The addict has to renounce shame because it is about hopelessness.  Shame for the addict is moving into the gap between guilt and reaction permanently.  "Just for today" (a 12-step mantra) pulls him out of the gap and firmly onto the reaction of right here, right now.  And yet, conversely, shame can be a particular holder of hope.  The wisdom of millenia that grappled with Original Sin isn't something to lightly push aside.  The fact of shame and the fact of redemption says that we expect that we will get more than we deserve.  And with that hope, perhaps we can give more than others deserve.

Earlier this week, the CNN headline "Woman opens heart to man who slaughtered her family" captured my attention.  Through a process that involved public confession, a Rwandian Tutsi accepted the confession of a Hutu man who participated in the slaughter of her family.  She does business with his wife.  She told the CNN reporter that despite this man's confession and the importance of the confession process that "reconciliation would not have happened unless she had decided to open her heart and accept his pleas.  She said, "I am a Christian, and I pray a lot."  I cannot even begin to imagine how much prayer such a choice takes.  Because of her choice and the choices of others who have as much hope as she does, Rwanda is becoming an African success story.

It was her choice.  Forgiveness was entirely hers to give.  No human being had the right to demand it of her, only her Christ who shares in her suffering could ask such a thing.  A person, often a misguided Christian, who requires the forgiveness of others is making an evil and self-centered statement and is in danger of putting his own self as idol in the place of God.  I am completely in agreement with commentators such as Ayn Rand on this point: ethically, you do not have to give anything.  The only reason to demand someone give what they do not have to give is to be self-serving, and anyone who makes such demands is to be considered as a serpent.

But her choice certainly has brought me to reconsider the choices I have been making.  How many resentments do I cling to?  One is over a matter of about $200 that a close relative backed me into a corner on when I was destitute.  A "bait and switch" kind of a situation.  As I was forced to spend the money, with various family members peering over my shoulder, I didn't even know if the credit card would go through.  There was no cash, and I was on the last of my credit.  This incident is a decade old.  What makes the resent even more absurd is that the relative has matured in the meantime and would certainly never do such a thing today.  I have even received an apology of sorts.  I don't have to forgive, but a little more shame in realizing that I know I get more than I deserve might help me realize that about now is time to give more than someone else deserves.  I definitely know I don't want to get exactly what I deserve.

He Gave Up America for Hope, on Thanksgiving Day

On Thanksgiving Day, a recent widow crashed her car in the remote Arizona desert.  She died shortly thereafter leaving a 9-year-old son, now an orphan.  The boy would have been alone, defenseless, lost in more ways than is imaginable, were it not for a passing illegal immigrant walking in from Mexico.  Imagine the moment of that decision, safely across the border, safely anonymous in the desert, no one to see or to judge.  Indeed, the man had nothing in particular to offer- the widow was still alive when he arrived, he could not save her.  The son was alone in the desert, he could not call for help.  The son was surely devastated and perhaps he could not even offer words of comfort, unable to speak the same language.  Someone else would have come along, indeed, the next morning someone did.

But this man, Jesus Manuel Cordova, stayed with the boy.  Eventual border control responded, rescuing the American boy and arresting the Mexican man.  Surely first this is a heroic of a charitable heart, of love.  But it is love informed by hope- that taking action matters, that the sacrifice is worth something.

Coming soon, a post about the failures of love without hope.