just war

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

-- Christopher McQuarrie, The Usual Suspects

It's obvious to me there is evil in the world. There are things at work --  or a beast at work with many heads -- that won't be contained in a catalogue of mistaken ideas, or misunderstandings, or errors of judgment. Srebrenica was not a colorful experiment in alternative politics, Wounded Knee was not a misspeaking, and Amritsar and Sharpeville were not good ideas badly executed. I am coming to believe that this beautiful world cannot be effectively described without the words evil and sin.

Because it is obvious to me there is evil, I cannot be a pacifist. Because violence is contagious, one must respond to evil with the least possible violence; and yet, because of evil’s nature, least possible may mean a considerable amount. Evil presents us with a menu of options that reek to heaven. Such a menu is before the president today, concerning a fabricated nation called Syria. Whatever his decision, innocent people will die because of it. Doing nothing is one of those choices, but is not categorically more pure than the others. It’s just one of the bloody alternatives.

In recent times we have seen sin forced to retreat without physical violence. The victories of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and of the Indian National Congress, are among those signal human achievements. Because of such victories we can make out in history’s long arc the silhouette of moral progress. The people who won those victories are prophets. The places where they put their lives in hock to mayhem and forced cruel gods to forgive the debt are holy.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Non-violent resistance takes its place on the continuum of warfare. We can measure its force in the enragement and accelerated violence of oppressors, relieved only by the intervention of greater powers. Innocent witness sometimes disarms a tyrant, but only after casualties, and much depends on the nature of the tyrant. King and Gandhi were shrewd warriors, betting their cause on fine appraisal of the oppressor’s character and its contradictions. They wagered many lives and their sacred honor on that analysis. There was something in British Imperial culture that, when forced to choose, would not condone (though it could not definitively condemn) a deliberate slaughter of innocents. There was something in the Constitution of America that, when forced in a theatrical moment to choose, could not place a seal of approval on abuse of children who asked (so politely) to go to school. The force of empire in one case, and of federal government in the other, was brought to bear at a specific moment for justice.

In both cases, tyrants of a simpler character would have responded very differently. The way of Assyrian emperors and Syrian presidents, European Fuehrers and Asian Great Leaders, tribal chiefs and bloody-minded barons, is to scorch those plots of earth where their power is disputed. The ancient function of armies, though not the last and best, is to terrorize the people. The general way of history is not to stop at dogs and fire-hoses. The great majority of tyrants, like Mao or Herod or Bashar al-Assad, are willing to kill until there is no one left to protest, or even to remember what was protested. They will keep it up until they have achieved their false version of peace; or until a greater and we hope more gracious power intervenes.

If an army arrives on the scene therefore, as in Little Rock in 1957, not to slaughter the innocents but to escort them into the schoolhouse, they commit a sacred aberration of history, a hiccup in the remorseless waltz of power. The infrastructure of justice is hard-won, recent and fragile, and every thug knows how to break it; and so we must memorialize such aberrations for future generations lest they forget.

There are just wars, but they are always tragic, because if we have to go to war it means that the peace has been lost and evil has, at least for a time, already triumphed. How many generations are we willing to condemn, in order to keep our own hands clean? We all want peace, but those who cry peace, peace when there is no peace are the false prophets.* Evil then compels us to do terrible things in the name of a better future.

Among the requirements of just war are: that it be waged to prevent a demonstrable evil, and by a governmental authority that allows for judgments about right and wrong; that there is a reasonable chance of success, and the struggle will stop when the objective has been attained; that violence will not be deliberately inflicted on the innocent.

Among the just wars waged by the government of the United States are the American Civil War and World War II. This is not to say we waged them innocently, for there is no innocence in warfare. This is not to say that they achieved their whole objective, for both left new regimes of injustice in place. This is not to say that they were morally safe, for in both cases our people sinned enormously, in an exponential coarsening of character that should make us grateful that neither conflict continued a day longer. There’s no telling, if we had fought for another few months, what we would have been willing to do in the name of peace. Nevertheless, but by a close margin, these were just wars that ended mighty regimes of violence.

The Civil Rights Movement and the Indian Liberation Struggle take their places in the catalogue of just warfare.  They are wars of liberation, and just ones. They achieved victories by unusual means, asking the troops to march into mortal danger without inflicting such danger on their enemies. These victories are modern events, possible because because humanity has created, here and there and not always in the United States, forces and institutions that expose and then restrain the natural rapacity and bloodlust of politicians. The British Empire was not the Assyrian Empire. The United States is not North Korea. The purpose of each engagement was to expose the violence inherent in the system. Words and images of that violence went out to the wider world, calling on higher and larger powers to countermand local corruptions. The grand strategy of peaceful protest is for scrutiny to domesticate, and armies when necessary to restrain, the feral instincts of politicians.

Real soldiers, having gone to war, do not wish to go again, and a moral nation goes to war, if it must do so, reluctantly. A civilized nation has capacity to distinguish, though it may fail to do so, between just and unjust wars; because in every war the soul of the nation is at risk, the danger growing with every day that passes. Colin Powell insisted that American troops never be committed without an exit strategy.** Caspar Weinberger insisted that, if the nation goes to war, it has a moral duty to win as quickly as possible.*** The campaign must have what wargamers call “victory conditions,” marking the completion and end of war. The generals must plan to bring the soldiers home, because the purpose of just war is peace -- a peace that, unlike false peace, can be lived with. An open-ended war is never a just war, and a war against a nebulous entity like “Terror” is a recipe for depravity.

It seems now that our Civil War never ended. Racism and its ally ignorance are raising regimental banners throughout the country, and particularly in states of the Confederacy. Our liberal anti-racist discourse, focussing on institutional as opposed to personal racism, has been caught off-guard; for the spectre we see now, rising from benches of Congress and from houses of state government, is personally and transparently hateful. A new aggression has been launched, and the voting rights of Americans are under attack. We must defend ourselves, our neighbors and our children. It is a just campaign. In the traditions of Powell and Weinberger, we must commit the forces necessary to win, and soon -- and then resume the peace.

The most powerful weapons we can bring to the field of contest are the ones we too often surrender to the enemy: the Christian Gospel, the Jewish Scripture and the founding documents of the United States. There are other works of literature, philosophy and spirituality, documents full of insight and inspiration. Each of us has the right to pick their personal favorite. But the Tea Party does not quail before the Bhagavad Gita or the Analects. They fear Matthew 25.

A proper campaign needs victory conditions and an exit strategy. We are here, like warriors of the previous Civil Rights Movement, to challenge and destroy corrupt laws, and to shame those in power who created and now defend them. Racism is however an amorphous term, changing its definition with time and place. Like Terror, Racism cannot be erased from the catalogue of human sinfulness, and our campaign, like all wars even just ones, will leave some things undone. If our objective is to end sin, we will never enjoy peace; but we can hope, like the warriors before us, to produce a peace that can be lived with. The veterans of fifty years ago know that, though the world is far from perfect, they were victorious.

We want to judge and be judged by our character. If white people sometimes “forget” that Oprah is black, isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t a lot of young black men, entering a store, hope that the detective forgets to say “There’s a black punk"? The one hope is already realized; the other lies still in the plan of march. To forget this purpose is to lose our way, as our nation lost its way struggling to protect the people from terrorism.  

There will come a day when Americans fear something else more than they fear Islamic suicide bombers, and there might come another day when a young black man has more pressing worries than whether some fool has prejudged him as a criminal. I have seen the daughter of a murdered civil rights worker,**** who never met her father, say that she has no hatred in her heart. I marvel that she has found peace, and I know that warriors of the present day must want peace if they are to win the war. We will have to define some big objectives, win some big victories, and then be prepared to stop. That’s what peace means.

*Jeremiah 6:14: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (NIV)

**Point 5 of eight in the “Powell Doctrine.”

***Point 2 of 6 in the “Weinberger Doctrine.”

****Angela Lewis, daughter of James Chaney

not guilty

We the jury find George Zimmerman not guilty.

-- Sanford, Florida, July 13 2013

All men are created equal.

-- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 4 1776

My heart is broken. I haven't been so sick in my soul since the massacres of May, 1970, at Kent State University and Jackson State College, when America killed its children and cheered. We're still killing our kids, and particularly when they're black we cheer about it.

It's dangerous to be black in America. Particularly if you're a black man, the country is ready to beat you or kill you, and then give sanctuary to your attackers. There are plenty of out and out racists who will make sure the law protects the killers -- racists not in the institutional but in the good old fashioned biblical, personal and individual sense, their logic so warped by nasty folklore and cultivated hatred that they can't imagine what it's like to be hunted in your own neighborhood when you've done nothing out of the ordinary.

There are stories about getting a traffic ticket for the crime of Driving While Black. In New York our police officers have beaten or killed a series of innocent black men. In Florida they killed a young man for the crime of being Alive While Black.

It's been three weeks now and I can't get over it. I don't know what to say to a black parent. Van Jones wonders if his son has to wear a tuxedo to the store so that he won't be found suspicious; but I think a black man in a tuxedo in a convenience store might be taken as uppity, and many a black man has been killed in America for being uppity. Overdressing is not the answer.  

How can you live in a country that counts you as suspicious wherever you go, whatever you wear, whatever you do or don't do? that sends gunslingers to watch your neighborhood, hoodlums who pick fights but who don't know how to fight without deadly force? How can I tell my neighbors to be peaceable, when the law is at war with them? I have no standing to give such advice. There are many millions of racists in America, and they look like me. How can I live with such a country?

This should be the new and strangely simple test of our public officials, our lawyers, our pastors, teachers, our friends, our judges and our jurors. Anyone who thinks there is equivalence here, some subtle balance between the boy who was killed and the man who pursued him with a gun in order to use the gun against him -- any such persons stand in a long tradition of complicity. Such people are the heirs of Bull Connor and Orval Faubus and Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam and Byron De La Beckwith.

The judgment of reason is clear. The boy was where he had a right to be. He was unarmed. He is dead.  There is no justification for his death. No evidence was presented that he was doing anything wrong. He was pursued by an unidentified man with a gun. Perhaps he stood his ground, and was shot dead for doing so. This was not an unfortunate accident. It was not a tragedy. It was a malicious act of violence with racial motivation. Acquitting the killer completes a lynching.

Emmett Till (1941 - 1955)

Trayvon Martin (1995 - 2012)

So how indeed do people of my social location live with such a country? These days I do not know.

Many years ago, when television stations would sign off at night after the late late show, a network affiliate in the city where I lived closed its programming with images not of aircraft carriers and warplanes, but of mountains and rivers, forests and skylines. The music was not the national anthem but the song that ought to be the national anthem, and the singer was a black man. "Oh beautiful," Ray sang, "for heroes proved/in liberating strife,/who more than self their country loved/and mercy more than life." Later I learned that he made this recording with the death of heroes in mind -- of Martin and Malcolm, of Evers and Till and Chaney and Goodman and Schwerner and Liuzzo and Jackson and of my own church's James Reeb. "America, America! God shed his grace on thee." It occurred to me that the singer felt these deaths had mattered, had somehow made America beautiful, bringing good out of evil. "And crown thy good/with brotherhood!"

And nowadays I think that if Ray Charles loved the country so much that he found a way to sing about it, then perhaps I lack standing to abandon her. I don't fully understand his love. Or the love of those eight hundred men of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry who made the Civil War a moral struggle against slavery. Or the love of those nine children in Little Rock in 1957 whose courage and moral dignity were so much more than we deserved. Or the love of those millions around me who live honorably in a nation that dishonors them, teaching responsibility to their children though the nation declares those children expendable. No, I don't understand such gifts.

But I'm old enough to know that I don't have to understand everything. We are blessed, and can't do a thing about it. The sun shines on the wicked and the righteous, and on the rest of us muddled in between.

great man

When I know what I think, I couldn’t care less.  It’s when I don’t know what I think, when I’m utterly baffled, . . . that's when I have to keep thinking.

-- Herbert Blau* (1926 - 2013)

He made me feel ignorant. He thought I was smart.

Thirty years ago I spent crucial parts of a summer in his company. There were eight of us,** and we sat in a seminar room with him twice a week for four hours, while each of us worked on our project -- some kind of a thought-project -- that had something to do with the theatre. Or with issues that were at stake in the theatre. Or in media. Or in fashion. Or in literature. Or in mimesis of any kind. Or in semiology. Or in epistemology.

And he talked. Not in circles but in spirals. Round and not quite round he'd go, leaning off his center in a direction we struggled to divine.

He was a historic man of the theatre. And he was done with it, but was still working it through, in his mind, his gut, his gutty mind. And he had read everything. Not just plays, but all of literature it seemed. And music. And philosophy. And history. And he didn't really understand how anybody could do theatre without having such learning. He thought that anybody who set out just to "do" theatre should be ashamed of themselves; and he had said so, in prominent places and to prominent people.

Perhaps that was why, when he came to New York in 1968 with Julius Irving his collaborator from San Francisco, to head the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, it went badly for him in a way that he never stopped churning about. It was the thoughtlessness of American theatre and culture, its lack of concern for what it might be trying to do or for what others might be doing through it, and how those purposes open or covert affect the means of doing theatre, that made him nauseous. And when he talked at his higher level, when he confused the complacent categories of showbiz in his spiraling, he may have just left the public behind, or at least the smaller public of Manhattan criticism.

And I was a fundamentalist. I had seen too many professors who couldn't as we used to say "direct their way out of a paper bag," but could explain how you were wrong if you named their failure -- that you hadn't understood their "concept," and if you had read some more books you'd understand how brilliant it was. So all I cared about in the theatre was how to do it right, and I didn't want to hear about  how many books you'd read if you couldn't play the notes of the theatre, or even locate the keyboard. Insecure and immature, I was desperate to get my hands on the keyboard, and to practice the scales and arpeggios of an art that seemed to give clear answers without appeal. If no one laughs, the comedian sucks. If they tug at their collars while you intone the immortal soliloquy, you deserve a tomato in the face. Don't complicate it, I thought. Complication is just a cover-up. Entertain me or die.

But the Thinking Artist was an act that, unlike most of those who attempt it, Herb actually brought off. He was just too restless for brie and chablis. He would take us through the great texts of Beckett, word by word, not commenting but exhibiting how those words still shook him up. He took us through the Shakespeare sonnets that had already forced out of him a work of theatre. He exposed us to the avant-garde of the previous decade, who had presented performances that were perhaps not performances, but then what was a performance? and for whom? and why? and to what effect?  All this not to justify his work but to show that it was still working on him. I could never really get to goodness or badness, success or failure; what he respected was the "inarguable," the thing that won't be criticized except on its own terms; the thing that can't be different than it is without becoming something else.

So now I started to understand that I was in the presence of someone who had done historic work, but that it wasn't a special knowledge of the theatre that made it so. He wasn't playing to the house but to history. The theatre was something he had learned so that he could do something with it; and by the time I knew him he had left it behind and was learning other things. In his ethic, means cannot be justified without the ends. You can succeed or fail at anything, but you'd better know what you're trying to do, which always means knowing the thousand things you're not trying to do.  I heard him say, "I only argue with what I respect," and if you wanted to do work that Herb would argue with it would take a lot more than knowledge of showbiz.

He made me feel ignorant. I went on a crash course of reading that would last me fourteen years, a course in all things I had to know about before I could know what I was doing: history, philosophy, music, painting and sculpture, and eventually scripture. And after that, a kind of return to the performance of counseling: the listening, the naming, the blessing and the journey toward what is Inarguable, and won't be explained away.

He was a great man and he did some great things; and I have done perhaps some good things in small places. I've made a living in the theatre but not much good work there; I've done my best work in other arenas. Like Herb, I went elsewhere than show business to do what needed to be done, and in that sense I followed him. He keeps me thinking.


*interviewed by Nancy Joseph in University of Washington Perspectives (September, 2011)

**Summer Fellows in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar.

young rabbi

Let there be no compulsion in religion.

-- Quran 2:256 (trans. Yusuf Ali)

I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one cometh unto the Father, but by me.

-- John 14:6 (KJV)

For a long time he sat with the man, whose mind was slowly decomposing, who was forgetting his English and reverting to Spanish, an old Catholic man from Puerto Rico who loved the Bible.  So the young rabbi took up the Spanish Bible that lay on the night table and read from it phonetically.  He read psalms, those songs shared by two faiths, and when he was done the old man looked up at him and said, "You touched my heart."

Something had taken its course.

"You didn't read him anything about Jesus," said the aide.

She'd been listening.  Not for what was there, but for what was not there.  And then began an argument that the rabbi did not want.

It doesn't take two to make a fight: if they're throwing punches at you, you're in a fight whether you like it or not, and the only question is how you will conduct it.  You can conciliate and compromise and negotiate if you wish, or you can leave the field, but there's no sharing with those whose purpose is to deprive you of place, and if you don't defend your turf you encourage the bullies.

You don't want to use a nuclear option.  You don't want to escalate the conflict.  So the question is, how to defend your square foot of ground, and your right to stand in it, without enlarging the skirmish into war.

"Jesus is his savior.  And yours."

The rabbi tried to explain that Jesus, the Jewish prophet, was not his personal savior, but that there was much to share, including the scripture known to Jesus, with those who believe he is their savior.  But the aide wasn't interested in sharing.

I've heard and read scholars and pastors of such erudition and courage, integrity and passion, such rigor in facing the historicity of scripture and yet recovering its sacredness, that they make me feel that I could call myself a Christian; but the deeply seated exclusiveness of the Christian claim stands in my way.  If you believe, I say, that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus, then how can I sit down with you?  You've just told me there is no such place at the table.  I want to sit with you, but you'll have to provide the place -- you'll have to deny the offending verse or stuff it back in the closet.

I can usually avoid theological hand-to-hand.  People in trouble mostly don't care what color your collar is or if you're wearing one: they can use the help.  They say "All our prayers go to the same place."  They say "We play different positions but we're on the same team."

But now and then there is an interrogator in the family, who wants to know whether I think rightly about Jesus and enjoy the proper relationship with him.  For such a person I am wrong from the start.  Yeshua himself was a  young rabbi,* and I can't imagine he cares much whether I get his name right.  He cared much more about whether I would feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted, and many of those admitted to the reign of God don't even know his name.  Though I don't want to fling Scripture-bombs, I have scriptural authority for my position.**  There's no point in arguing, but the young rabbi's patient was grateful for what had been given him, and the aide had no authority, no standing to dispute it.  He could be kind about it, but he could not win her assent.

In my own church I have encountered a different militancy, from those who used to dominate the movement and are losing their outsized power -- the people who think that if you never say the word "God" you can commit no sin.  The number of killings in the name of the "people" during the previous century's industrial-scale slaughters surely exceeds the last thousand years' sum of murders in the name of God.  (There were fewer people to kill in the old days, and less efficient ways of finding and dismembering them.)  And if we intend to be solid with the oppressed, we must respect their trope of liberation, their identification with the chosen people whom, according to scripture, God and a prophet moved out of Egypt through exile and eventually into a Land of Promise.  Dr. King came to the Lincoln Memorial fifty years ago not as a social worker but as a preacher; instead of reading demographic tables, he testified to the rolling of God's justice like mighty waters, speaking the very words of biblical prophecy.  I do not please atheist militants by pointing out the importance of prophetic language.

No argument will defuse militancy.  But one must keep one's dignity.  There is no testimony to faith so commanding as the beauty of one's life.

*Jn 1:37-38: "When the two disciples heard what he said, they followed Jesus. .  . . They said, 'Rabbi,' (which means 'Teacher') where are you staying?'"

**Mt 25:37: "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you, or thirsty and gave you drink?"

new jersey

. . . a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

-- Macbeth V. v.

When I came to see her again she was sitting as before in the armchair by her window, looking across the river at New Jersey's bluffs.

She was glad to see me, but she was discouraged.  She didn't see the point of going on.  "What kind of a life is this?"

The are others worse off, I could have said.  She was sitting upright.  She was alert and sharp.  Not in pain at the moment.  No tubes running out of her body.  But if she had been worse off she wouldn't have known her grief, couldn't have described the difference between the live body and the wasting soul, couldn't have brought her crisis into focus.  This is where she was.  You meet them where they are.

"I never wanted to be a burden to others."  Proud and autonomous she was.  The time still to be lived seemed a mockery of everything precious.

We looked across the river together.

I named it.  "You're grieving," I said, "for who you were."

We think grief is for those left behind, but the ones who are leaving grieve as well.  They anticipate the end of loves, the disappearance of possibilities, the finish of tunes whose cadences they will not hear.  The mask won't stick to the face, the body won't perform the old theatrical tricks, and they don't know who they are.  They can't take care of things, and they watch themselves become a thing to be taken care of.  We can assure them it's not like that, but that's how they see it.

The social worker came in to say it was all arranged, the patient was leaving the hospital.  She would go this evening to one of our residences.  "We call it the penthouse.  You can order a filet mignon if you want."  (Clinical irony there, which we usually keep to ourselves, but this client was one of those who crave it.)  She was quite literally going to a better place, with nurses round the clock but with amenities and decor more human than those of the hospital.  And better food.

"Any day you leave a hospital," I said, "is a beautiful day."

"I don't want my money spent," she said, "just to keep me alive."

It was a beautiful day on the bluffs of New Jersey, across the Hudson River.

Here's the hard thing, the thing you have to keep learning.  You can't bring the good news with you.  Not in a book, or in a prayer, or in an exhortation to faith.  You can't bring the good news unless it has already arrived.  You can only, with grace and skill and good fortune, sometimes reveal it.

You want to make things better.  Of course you do.  Anybody would.  Friends and relatives often try.  You say, cheer up, it's not so bad.  You say, have faith.  You say, God doesn't send you more than you can bear.  You can't stand to see them suffer, so you argue.  That's your role, you think -- to vanquish their suffering.  If they don't cheer up, you feel offended and futile.  And your militant cheer defends you from infection.

And this is the simple thing we keep learning, over and over again.  If you're gong to help, you have to enter their world and walk the road with them.  That's where the good news is to be found, somewhere on their path of fear and grief and regret.

"That money was for my niece.  I love that girl more than . . . "

She couldn't finish the sentence, so I ventured.  "Perhaps she already has a gift from you.  Perhaps she wants to give you something in return."

As clouds shifted shape over New Jersey, I thought, I've put my foot in it now.  How could I so lose my nerve? Why commit myself, so soon? Why was I arguing with her?

She didn't know how to own the life that remained to her.  And I couldn't tell her.

That's the rule.  That's what we're supposed to know, and must learn again every day.  It's not a sermon.  It's a revelation, a discovery, an apocalypse.  She says the life ahead of her has no meaning, that it signifies nothing.  But it's not as if there is a something, a significance that should be brought to her.  She doesn't need something; what she needs is negation of the nothing.  If she knew what there was to do, what the next step might be . . . 

"You haven't given up yet.  You love that young woman.  You want to make her life better."

She thought about this.

"We call it generativity -- that as a person nears the end of life, they take care of the youth.  You care about the world that you're leaving.  You're pouring your love into the future."

From a picture window on the ninth floor of a Manhattan hospital, you can see the sun set over New Jersey.

"You've helped me," she said.

I was stunned.

"I feel better than I did when you came.  You didn't argue with me.  You let me live in my sadness.  You didn't try to talk me out of it.  And I feel better."

Can I believe this? it's too good, I thought.  I've talked too much, and been too smart, and now she's seen my vanity, praising me in the tropes of our textbooks, seducing me; -- or else she's saying the things that will get me out of the room.

"We both have places to go," I said.  "You have a new place to live, and I have to go home."

"Be sure you wash your hands on the way out.  Mustn't take any unexpected gifts home from the hospital."

I turned to her.  "You're taking care of me.  You haven't given up."

Sitting up in her chair, she was grinning at me.  I never saw her in a bed.  The record says that an hour after I left, they moved her to the new residence.  An hour after that she died.

familiar shape

O quam tristis et afflicta

Fuit illa benedicta.

-- Stabat Mater

There was something familiar about the picture.  The mother, holding the child at knees and shoulders, in what would be her lap if the child were smaller.  And the child a zigzag from dangling feet up to her knees and down to hips and up again to shoulders, the head falling back.  "Mami," she said.  "Mami aqui," said the mother.  Mami.  Aqui.

This went on.  "I'm here, silly girl.  Don't you know I'm here?"  Then with an eye toward me: "I don't think she knows what's happening."

That's the hardest thing, to be there for someone who doesn't know you're there.

"Do you get any sleep?" I asked.

"Not much.  She wakes up at two or three, and I'm the one she asks for."

The next day I remembered the thing I could not place, the familiar form of the picture.  This was a Pietà.

Congratulations to those who mourn, for they may be comforted.

Where is her comfort?

She said that members of her prayer group tell her to accept the will of God.  They say she should not complain, but be of good cheer and grateful.  They say there's some purpose in this, and she must pray for it to be revealed to her.

They are like Job's friends, those archetypes of bad counsel, who come to tell him there must be some good reason, you must deserve it somehow, God won't tolerate your anger -- or worst of all but true to the book, it's a test of your character, an ethical teaching.

"I don't see it," she said.  There's a Mary on the stage now in New York,* who refuses her testament to those who request it because she knows "what they want me to say."  This Mary bore the child and watched him die, and now she sees what others wish to make of it.  She doubts it was worth it.

This mother before me -- her name is not Maria, but she is a mater dolorosa, and her pose a Pietà.  Shocking in their actuality, not mere ideas or images, songs or sculptures, but an incarnation.  She holds the child, who calls for her and does not know she is there.  She speaks short sentences to the child and longer ones to me.  She says, I don't see any purpose in this.  I'm a good mother.  I stopped working so I could take care of this baby.  I have money problems.  Her father is nowhere.  I'm tired.

She doesn't have to mention the injustice to the child, or the despair of watching this part of her body suffer.  She says she knows women who gave up their children so they could be with a man.  She knows women who have sent their children to relatives, women who leave their children alone at night.  I'm not one of them she says.  I'm here for her in the morning, here in the middle of the night.

All this time she caresses the child, rocks her, cajoles her, tells little jokes in her ear.  

I am not here to correct her mood, to say suck it up and be of good cheer.  I am not here to say that this burden is fair, or that it's part of a divine plan.  If this were part of a plan, I would vote no confidence in the planner.  Unlike Abraham, if the plan requires the death of my child I'm not signing on.  It's one thing to sacrifice oneself, quite another to sacrifice the innocent for faith.

No meaning adheres to these events, no meaning at least that I would bet life on.  If it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger, they say; but there's nothing good to say about what fails to kill you.  The thing that doesn't kill you is the enemy.  You get through it as you can, and you remember.  Perhaps you remember how you got through it, that you did the best you could, and it made a difference for those who went through it with you, which means that it changes your life as well.  Perhaps it occurs to you that you were the one to do these things, that you were needed there and then.  And so you come to own your past pain, knowing it is unalienable because it makes your present life possible.  In this way, retrospectively, reaching back into history, we make the meaning of our suffering.  But the meaning is not there until we make it.  There's nothing good to say about suffering, but good things can happen in the face of it.  Some day this will be over, and Mami will go on to other tasks, other loves, other stories.  When she looks back on this time, I hope she remembers that she stood fast.

So this is what I told her.  I've never had such experience thank god, and I hope I never will; neither I nor anyone else should tell you how to feel about it.  This is a hard thing that has fallen on you, the worst of curses.  You and your child don't deserve it.  There is no lesson to learn.  But you are the one who gets up at two and three in the morning, you are the one who holds the child who does not know you are there.  Your patience, compassion and humor do not run out.  The light that shines in this darkness is you.

*Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary, dir. Deborah Warner, performed by Fiona Shaw

hard music

. . . And the night shall be filled with music.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The  Day Is Done"

It's hard to sing while you're weeping.  And yet singing is akin to weeping.  That's why so many of our favorite songs are sad ones, so many of our favorite plays are tragedies, and so many of our favorite stories are tales of loss.

I couldn't get through a certain part of the song* without breaking down.  I wasn't the only one.  At the pub afterward, I learned that my daughter and several others had also been blubbering their chords.

Art-works that refer to themselves (the canvas about painting, the play about acting, the song about singing) attack the bodies of artists intimately.  And in this case when the poet, who has begged his loved one to give her voice to verse, reports that the night is now filled with music, while the basses drop by a fifth to low D flat, then those who make music together, agreeing on a chord that sets the room to shudder, feel their fundamental glue dissolve.  It's black magic, or sinister science.  But we have to get over it.  We're artists.  We're paid to sing (or in the case of our chorus,** who do other things for their supper than sing, we reward ourselves by singing); we're not paid, or rewarded, to weep.  The singing uses the same muscles as weeping, but stops the weeping; or more precisely, it proves that weeping has stopped.  It pulls together what has been dissolved.  And that's why the old sad songs that every generation writes again, you know the ones, the songs that say your love is lost or your child is dead or you'll never see Innsbruck again, or Paris or Vienna or San Francisco, or your friends from the good old days, or the old country -- that's why those songs make us so damn happy.  And that's why our happy songs can in a moment bring us to tears.

Singing resembles the spontaneous utterances of the body: the scream of pain, the grunt of labor, the fart of laughter, the cry of fear, the ululation of grief.  It's as difficult as these utterances but it isn't any of them; it's the body's report on them.  And in reporting, the body sends a message.  I am still alive, it says.  Alive and striking back.  Alive and still in control, if not of the world, at least of myself.  Whatever it is I have suffered, I am still here to see it, and to make you know that I was here seeing it.  And for as long as some of you are hearing my song, I am still here, rising above the unfortunate accident of my mortal pain.  O grave, where is they victory?

It's after midnight in Paris, and this evening I go to one of the great churches and join with fifty others in singing one of the saddest songs ever written, the Stabat Mater.  In thirteenth-century Latin it tells of Mary standing at the foot of the cross where her child had died a ghastly death, "morientem desolatum."  We sing this song in the setting of Francis Poulenc, about whom there is much fuss now in France because he died fifty years ago.  Among the things one should know are the meanings of the text; one should know exactly what the poet is saying as you sing it.  And yet it's dangerous to know such things, for the black magic of verse and sound can undo us.  It's hard to sing when you're weeping.  Somehow Poulenc and the unknown poet of eight centuries ago pull a rabbit out of the hat: from our grief comes the hope of a triumph.  Not the least of triumphs are Poulenc's snappy rhythms, his chords chock with blue notes, his tunes that take the singer from church to the cabaret and then to outer space.

It's hard music.  Shall I be worthy?  I must pull it together.  I must sing this.

In Les Mis they say that to love another person is to see the face of God, but I think there's at least one other way.  The spheres are said to have a music of their own.  When you stand in a room with dozens of others as the ten notes of a chord click in, the room sings back to you and you give up your body to the sound.  Then the veil may pull back a little so God can look in.  Though the dress code requires black shoes, I think I should remove my sandals before entering such holy ground.  For this time there shall be no doubt; we shall know what to do and when to do it.  We poor mortals whose bodies threaten to dissolve are pulled together, reformed and improved by the song.

So it doesn't matter what the song reports.  Not in comparison to the act of reporting -- of putting pain in a bracket and setting it on the side, so we can rise from it.

A song is a prayer.


*Stephen Paulus's choral setting of the poem (adapted).

**New York City Master Chorale, cond. Thea Kano http://www.nycmasterchorale.org