Death and Life

Here we are, back for Blog # 2 on the Peace Making Conference!

The world, it turns out, is a difficult, horrible deathly place. Throughout the conference, the theme of which was ending War at Home and Abroad-- connecting structural violence and injustice in the US to unjust actions and battles being perpetrated abroad -- kept bring me back to El Salvador and the US in the 1980's. I heard, many times, that there are 35 wars are being fought around the war right now. 1 in 8 Americans are on food stamps. The Obama administration has done more for nukes than any President since Reagan (this especially brings me chills as Reagan was responsible for much of the US foreign policy in El Salvador in the '80s). There is a proposal to freeze all government spending except social security, Medicare, and military -- and the military has essentially a blank check. I learned

there is a glaring omission in Obama’s security strategy, namely, no recognition of how the pursuit of wars in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan impacts, undermines and compromises his goals of educational and health care access, especially for those who have none. There is no connection drawn between the size of our deficit and the pursuit of war. There is no realization (at least, none articulated) that economic innovation, access to educational opportunity, and the availability of quality health care are strangled by unchecked and unbridled military spending. --Bryan Massingale, 8 **

I was reminded, once again, that we live in a society of consumerism and as we accumulate more and more "stuff," we come to feel more and more entitled and we feel more and more jealous and certain that not only does everyone else (in the world) want to take our stuff from us, but that we need more and only through having more can we ever find happy. So we clutch our fists and our stuff tighter to our chests, and we use our guile to hide and to take, to attack and to protect. I was reminded that in the wake of 9/11 that after a few days of solidarity, of grieving and mourning that were all too necessary, we were instructed "to shop." And don't even get me started on Blackwater -- I'll post the speech transcript here as soon as Pax Christi gets it up.

Meagan McKenna, one of the key note speakers and wonderful story teller, commented that this was what she struggled with "Nonviolence Conferences" : they start with violence. The litany of death rang in my ears. One speech maker commented that usually his speeches don't send people searching for razor blades, but this one sure did. Me and nearly everyone at my table found ourselves gasping when it was done. What do we do when violence and death are all we can see? Violence and death that can cause us to get stuck in the mire, to lose all hope. Hope, I felt, was what was missing from several of the talks at Pax Christi, so I returned to the retreat with John Dear to find my balance: Christ brings Life from Death

It is only with this hope -- this innocent and perhaps naive belief (or is it naive and innocent? does it perhaps take the strongest faith and courage?) that Jesus can bring life from death -- It is only with this hope that there is truly life, that I can get out of bed in the morning. It is only within the context of Christ, within the context of God's love and omnipotence, that I can proclaim my being and the being of the world. That I can look to God for the next step, turn over to Him the big picture and give Him to hold my despair, my doubt, my tendency towards domination. It is to Him I run, and on His shoulder I shed my tears for the hurt and pain of this world. And in giving my tears to Him, and not holding them as chains to myself, that I am freed, that I can be a part of LIFE. Then I can live as though I am, and you are, and each person created on this earth is, BELOVED.