“There is No Cherai Beach” - Reflections on the “Global South”

(Written Dec. 26)

More and more I find myself remarking, probably to Dave and Saumya’s (slight?) irritation, how things here remind me of Panama, or how things here are like how things are in Panama. I try to limit it because I’ve noticed it and have become self-conscious about it. I don’t want to be the Panamanian equivalent of “This one time, at band camp….”

But there are a lot of similarities I’ve noticed, so I’ve kept a list. Here’s the current one, which has both the abstract and the mundane:

• Trash. There is no municipal trash pick up (as far as I can tell). Instead, trash is thrown into the street or collected and burned. The toxic fumes released by the burning plastic have a distinctly acrid odor. In the evening, or whenever several families are burning their trash simultaneously can get particularly suffocating. The air burns with pollution you can feel.
• Regulation and Rules. There is a conspicuous lack of oversight, rules, regulations, etc. A lot of the ones I’ve noticed are related to health and safety. There are always seat belts, but the short end to fasten it is often shoved back into the seat cushions, irretrievable except to the most fastidious adherent to safety. Men ride on top of trucks with enormous shifting loads, holding on by a rope or a rail. Three teenage boys ride on a motorcycle. Food is sold in the street, literally, in baskets or in tarps that are lying on the ground. I doubt there is much food inspection, etc. The chemicals that are allowed here I am sure are present at more toxic levels than are allowed in the US. Posters and ads cover every available surface of buildings, both residential and commercial. Traffic is a free-for-all (cops are mostly ignored). Bribery and corruption exist on many levels and is often complained about (even though I’ve not experienced any directly).
• “Cold Weather.” It’s maybe 65 degrees here in Patna, Bihar. The high is probably 73 or so. In the early morning it may get to the high 50s. People dress here like they are about to ascend Everest, though. It reminded me of Panamanians bundling up in 60 degree weather, with hats and scarfs and winter gloves.
• Broken Glass on Top of Walls. People embed intimidating shards of broken glass into the tops of the walls around their homes and businesses. Cheap security, these green, blue and clear teeth look ready to relieve a potential burglar of a quart of blood.
• The Answer is Always Yes. We get this a lot, especially when the language barrier is more pronounced. A variation on this is The Ambiguous Response. For example, we asked for directions to a local beach at the front desk of our hotel. The exchange:
  • Us: “Do you know where Cherai Beach is?”
    Hotel employee: “Cherai Beach.” (Not a question. A flatly-delivered repetition).
  • Us: “Yes, Cherai Beach. Do you know where it is?”
  • Employee: “There is no Cherai Beach.”
  • Us: “But our guidebook says it’s nearby, though. You don’t know where it is?”
  • Employee: “It is here.” (Points to map, indicating the entire local coastline).
  • Us: “But our book says it should be up here.”
  • Employee: “It is right here” (Leans over, squints dramatically and tries to find something with the tip of his pen in the downtown area. Determines a very specific spot to answer us).
  • Us: “Our guidebook says we have to take a ferry to get there, and that is just off the main road. We have to go one island over and drive for thirty kilometers.”
  • Employee: “There is no Cherai Beach there.” (Turns to maintenance guy leaning on counter, there is a lively exchange in Tamil)
  • Employee: “Oh, that Cherai Beach. Yes, it’s up there, about thirty kilometers” (what our guidebook originally said – no new information gained in a wasted ten minute exchange).
• Beating Clothes On A Rock. Women will stand in the river and thwack their clothes against a rock. Or they will smack them with a broad wooden paddle. They rub detergent into the clothes before doing this. Think about this the next time you use the laundry machine.
• Stray animals. Hideous, starved dogs were a constant fixture in Panama. Here they seem less physically abused and maybe even (well?) fed. Here of course, cows and water buffalo do roam the streets freely. I can’t imagine how these city cows carry on conversations with country cows, though. I also don’t know what they eat: there is very little grass here that hasn’t been trampled by constant cricket games. Driving to a church on Christmas Day in a failed attempt to find an English-language services, we were barred from entrance to the church by a bellowing and quite angry water buffalo. Our driver leaned on the horn and the beast irritably lumbered off to the side.
• “The Tienda.” I don’t know what the Hindi word is for these, but they are like little general stores you can find anywhere. No corporations or CVS’s though, chains here are something you buy, not where you buy things. You can get everything from cookies to machetes to school uniforms here. In India they are remarkably small: some I’ve seen are not much bigger than 10x10, 10x20, etc.
• Single Serving Everything. You can buy things in single servings. A single pen, a single cookie, a single band-aid, a single diaper. Pretty convenient, actually.
• School Uniforms. Kids out of school in their white and blue or white and brown uniforms. I guess uniforms never really caught on at public schools in the US.
• Mosquito Coils. I guess these exist in the US too. Quite useful. Probably carcinogenic.
• Excessiveness of Advertising. Everything is covered in ads. Ads for toothpaste and luxury silks to ads for your local politician or cellular service provider. The Political Poster With Awkwardly Photographed Local (Often Unsmiling) Representative seems to be a developing-world meme. Ads hang from awnings, are plastered on sandwich boards in the street or against concrete walls in a long duplicative series, in massive billboards against the front or side of buildings, or are hung up in stores.
• Grandma Has Elbows and Knows How to Use Them. In Panama if you weren’t careful, the tiny indigenous old ladies would push you out of the way to get on the bus ahead of you. I’ve had lots of people cut me off in lines here. You have to push and shove to get what you want. I was in line to get tickets to a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a man cut directly in front of me and stood maybe four inches behind the next person. I unfortunately made the rookie error of giving the person in front of me TWO FEET of breathing room. I won’t make that mistake again. In India this aggressive, pushy (to Americans) me-first attitude makes more sense, given the massive population and the limited space. In Panama, with a population density roughly of South Carolina, it makes much less sense to me.
• Little Regard For Those Who Are Sleeping. I noticed this this morning. There were four of us sleeping on cots in a hallway and around 6 am people started moving around, talking to each other, opening and closing doors, making the tea, etc. This was a distinct feature in Panama as well: in an open, busy house with multiple generations and few substantial walls, when the first person woke up in the house (at 4:30 AM), there was little regard for the sleeping. You can’t have a “library voice” if you’ve never been to a library.

More to come on what is really distinctly Indian…

Sidewalks Optional, Cheating Death Not

(Written Dec. 23)

India is somewhat infamous for its crowded streets, chaotic traffic patterns and hell-bent, survivalist drivers. So I expected some thrill, some danger, some chaos.

I had no idea.

In traffic here things are perfect chaos. I think that is the right term. It is perfect, in a sense. The mad harmony of constant merging and passing and honking and cutting each other off. The drunken ballet of near-death experiences.

The roads are the city’s arteries and veins and they are truly alive with a bristling variety of wheeled (and unwheeled) things. Pedestrians cut off bicyclists and pedaled rickshaws while enormous dump trucks barrel past cabs and the miniature three wheeled “autos” (auto-rickshaw). The bicycles seem to all be custom jobs, the biodiversity so high that not one of them is the same in this thriving Darwinian transportation jungle. Some are long with racks on the back, while others lead with an enormous flat bed for carrying goods; many have four or five propane tanks slung across the back wheel, pedaling through this dance of death like some kind of two wheeled kamikaze. Their potential combustibility does not seem to deter aggression against them - clearly their evolutionary advantage is only slight in this survival-of-the-fittest cage-match. I’ve noticed the “pedicab” model does seem standard here, though, with two forward-facing seats (or rather room for two or three or seven on a forward-facing bench) with a  second bench in the back facing whatever is tailgating the pedicab (a ulcer-causing point of view, I’d imagine). There is a single bar across the back bench, I suppose to limit the inconvenience of people sliding off the back bench and into someone’s windshield.

No one seems very in control of this insanity, either. Traffic lights are installed in some major intersections, but often are not working, ignored entirely by drivers, or superseded by brown-uniformed police officers who direct traffic flow. Blow through red lights, force your way in, regardless if they are letting you in (or not, as if often the case). These traffic lights and formal, striped lanes are ghosts: neither believed in nor in any way able to affect the actual functioning of the real world. They are the hollow, meek “thou shalt”s of a feeble state trying to tame a restless beast.

The road is a space. It is not a series of parallel, equally sized lanes that can contain one vehicle at the time. The road is a space. Or really, the road is space. It is a kind of cosmic vastness without boundary or border, where all vectors of travel are simultaneously possible. The rule of thumb: if you can fit, you will fit. There is no void, no openness in this space, however. It is packed, dense. Heavy particles, these massive dump-truck protons, lumber slowly through it, while speedier and more restless electron bicycles, motorcycles and “autos” buzz and spin and whirl around everyone all the time, seeking some gap in the denseness to rush ahead. The bicycles and motorcycles pass the autos, who pass the cars, who pass the trucks, who pass the buses. This is the liquid hierarchy of traffic flow in India.

There is a kind of miraculous joy to this traffic, and even a kind of efficiency. The miraculous joy in that (so far) we have not been in or seen any traffic accidents of any kind. I am sure I’m drifting into the wildly anecdotal here, and I am sure if I googled India traffic statistics, I’d be appalled (thank you lack of internet connection). But no one seems to get hit or hurt. Most traffic backups are caused by seven vehicles trying to fit down a space for three or by a mechanical failure. Speed does temper the lunacy and probably helps prevent the fatal accidents we have in the US. In this turgid flow of people and machines, you can’t get much about twenty or thirty miles an hour. Once, out of town and free of congestion, I think we may have hit 40. Maybe not.

Americans’ sense of space is vast. The plains stretch on endlessly in their flat monoculture until the mountains rise up and then crash into the ocean. Our history is one of settlement and expansion and the seemingly limitless availability of yet further westward land. We drive with much the same feeling of space. We need fifteen to thirty feet in front of us and behind us, or you’re tailgating or being tailgated. At least five to six feet is required on the left and right sides of the car or someone is cutting you off. In India, all of those dimensions have been shrunk vastly. If you can fit, you will fit. It is as if everyone drives with a two-inch force field around all sides of their vehicle, be it bicycle or cab or truck or bus: no one gets past those two inches, but also anyone can get right up against those two inches.

The perverse kind of efficiency comes from every single square inch of the space being filled by someone on/in something. If you had a country that contained 20% of the world’s population and that needed to get places occasionally, you’d probably want your roads as full as possible as well.

The other thing is the honking. The horn here is not an emergencies-only signal that you’re stopping quickly or that someone did something really stupid. It’s a way to say hello. “Hi, I’m over here behind you!” “Hi, I’m still over here behind you!” “Oh, look now, I’m on your right – Hello!” “I’m passing you now to go some place faster – see you later!” Each sentence is a honk. Multiply by one billion.

Hinduism is an extremely open and pluralistic religion; it accepts and welcomes most perspectives and the wisdom of other religious traditions. Mohammed and Jesus are honored as prophets and sages. If I lived here and had to drive (or walk or bike for that matter), I’d be praying to whoever in the heavens was working the late-night hotline shift as well.

Tiger Prawns, Ben Hur on Steroids, and the Smell of Carcinogens in the Morning: Initial Impressions of India

(Written Dec. 22)

I don’t know how it got to be this way, but it’s already Day Five of my trip to India with Saumya and Dave, good friends and former neighbors. Well, it’s gotten to be Day Five because we’ve been busy running from place to place, fending off jet lag with a  quiet desperation (and many power naps and cups of coffee), etc. Also, a silence due to a lack of internet connection. I should start typing things out offline and then posting them in a mad rush when I can get wi-fi access. Expect: silence, silence, silence – TORRENT.

India! It’s still hard to believe I’m in India. There is a lot to write about. Too much. I’ll try to send out periodic updates and keep my posts to a measurable and sane size. No promises though.

Initial impressions, maybe? Start there? I could walk you through Days One Through Five, but the narrative slog seems a bit daunting right now. Maybe I can close with Highlights of The Trip Thus Far.

Initial Impressions. Wow. I was not ready for this. Well, in a sense I sort of was. Two years living in Panama with Peace Corps got me ready for a lot of this “developing world” stuff. And I see a lot of similarities between the two countries. I’m making a list of some of those things (future post - yes, sure, I’ll promise it). But India is also clearly its own thing.

The first thing I noticed about India after leaving baggage claim in Delhi was the air. Walking out of the terminal, we could see the cloudy, murky fog. Or smog. It was hard to tell which. I was told both. The air had a kind of thickness and mass to it; it would cling. What did TS Eliot say about the fog in Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, as a cat rubbing its back against a window-pane? The air burned with a smoky acridity. It smelled like smoldering campfire. And indeed, as we drove out of the airport with bags loaded on top of the car, I saw several small fires with heavy black plumes of smoke. The memory of the smell came back, from Panama. Burning plastic. Dioxin. Oh how I love the smell of carcinogens in the morning!

Traffic. My God. I will have to do an entire post on this. But imagine the chariot race scene from Ben Hur with a billion people on mopeds honking all the time. I think this is the one-sentence way to get you there to what this is like. I’ve never experienced anything like this driving. Please-Don’t-Watch-These-Mom videos coming soon…

Food. Wondrous. Everywhere everything all the time wondrous. There is some terribly tragic irony that the culture with some of the best food in the world had to submit for many decades to the culture with some of the worst food in the world. You would think with all the buckets of money the Brits were hauling out of India through the spice trade they would have at least actually used some of the spices in their food. Oh well. But I digress. We have eaten like kings and queens. I expect this trend to continue onward ever upward. Once we go to Patna, Saumya’s home town, I am told to expect an endless train of food that will leave me horribly, horribly inept at returning to the US and my routine of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch everyday.

People. Millions. Literally. Tons of people. Everywhere. For a sense of scale: take everyone in the United States. Multiply them by four. Now put them in a space about the size of the land east of the Mississippi. That’s India. Crowded. Loud. Honking. My God, the honking (see traffic, above).

Not as “developed” as I thought it would be. I had expectations that since India is part of the BRIC bloc of developing nations (along with Brazil, Russia and China) that there would be a sense of sophistication and ease that you’d anticipate with a middle-income country. Clearly India is way down the road to getting there, but is not there yet. No one talks about Panama, since it’s so off the radar and they simply don’t have tens of millions of people to raise out of poverty. But the rich-poor, development-index scale in my head was skewed toward “India wealthier than Panama” so far has not panned out in an appreciable way. I am sure that if I had seen India ten years ago, before they were clocking a 9% GDP growth rate for a decade, I would be floored by the improvement. And surely there is a very strong and strengthening middle class here that will be a strong civic foundation for the world’s largest democracy.

Highlights, thus far. Definitely yesterday and last night, which we spent on a houseboat lazily drifting through the “backwaters” of the state of Kerala, in southern India. Clear blue skies, warm weather, the gentle smacking of the water against the side of the boat, the rustle of the coconut palms, epic feasting on fresh seafood, including several tiger prawn, which are the Shaquille O’Neals of shrimp, at about a pound each and the length of your forearm. Another, odd highlight may be the fourteen hour overnight train ride to Alleppey, for our houseboat experience. Probably deserves its own post. A fascinating travel experience. In addition, a long, long list of little details that have been accumulating that may be of some interest. I’ll try to get those down in a semi-thorough way.

I think I’ve just promised about a half dozen posts. I better get on this.

Airborne, Looking Down at Constellations

I recently flew home for Thanksgiving, down to Charleston from DC. I do try to enjoy the miracle of flight. Walk into a room and sit down. They close the door. Two hours pass. You stand up and they open the door. You're in a new city, a new country. Sit down for seventeen hours and Chicago becomes Delhi. Remarkable. Caracas becomes Miami, becomes  Lucerne. Journeys that would have taken months, years, fly by (sorry) in a matter of hours. We went from feet to hooves to carriages to trains to cars to planes. What will the next breakthrough be? Our last step cut an eight hour car ride into a hour-plus flight. Will the next step proportionally reduce an hour-long flight into a seven and a half minute trip?

Numbed by our Blackberrys and the safety pantomime before takeoff, I think we've lost our sense of wonder at air travel, that we are in this metal tube blasting along in the ether at hundreds of miles an hour. I think about the math going on, the physics going on in the moment of takeoff. I wish I could see it. I wish I could look out the window and see the formulas and fractions flying by. Air pressure, wind velocity, thrust, gravity on the hull, friction on the tires, the weight of the passengers and their tubes of toothpaste in their carry-on luggage, the wind resistance and the aerodynamics. The tympani roll of the plane slowly gathering speed, the rumbling over the runway, the moment where the nose lifts, the pressure forces you down into your seat, and then the mystic moment when the back wheels no longer touch the earth. Upward thrust under the wings has exceeded the force of gravity. We are airborne.

I flew back to DC at night, over the Eastern seaboard, across South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. I had a window seat.

As we fly over our planet, I look down at the flecks of illumination in the inky sea of darkness below, the bright dabs and swirls, the luminescent dots and lines, these spiraling galaxies of white and orange and pale green lights in the blackness. The landscape below is bristling with light, sometimes lethargically, sometimes enthusiastically. The densely packed light in the distance weakens as it spreads out from its core, the steaming orange fallout from the light pollution atom bomb of a town.

I wonder what we are passing over: what is the name of this town? Is this the Walmart? The Moore's house? The Jiffy Lube? New Bethlehem Baptist Church? The Krogers? My generality at this distance above is countered by the real specificity of what is below.

It's basically uninterrupted. Shopping malls, roads, clusters of subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, parking lots and warehouses. It is not as bare and primeval as you would think it would be. Has sprawl consumed the whole world? Where are the back woods, the mountain cottages for our Thoreaus and shramanas (if there are any left)? I remember that amazing view of the Earth from space, the image of "the world at night" where it's so clear how everything east of the Mississippi is a broad and spidery web of stars, linked together by fine filaments and strands, some of the lights glowing hot and bright and white, these little incendiary stars, our cities laid out in constellations on the Earth's surface.

Are we copying the heavens? Are we laying on the Earth's surface our image of ourselves? Are we mocking the old constellations of crab and twins and bull? Praising them? What are the constellations we are making, in these lines between Tuscon and Birmingham and Charlotte and New Orleans? The Grande Latte? The Failed Marriage? The iPad 2? The Traffic Jam?

The ancients looked up at the heavens and counted the stars in awe, marking lines between them and seeing in the cosmos familiar forms from our planet. We moderns have done the opposite - we have looked down at our planet and painted it with lines of light and stars of our own invention. We have made constellations. We have created our own cosmos.

Grandmother

Walking across 16th Street this perfect fall afternoon, I noticed an elderly couple in the front seat of a wide, gray Lincoln parked at the light. The woman, small and fragile in that unmistakably grandmother way, with her white hair done in that characteristically beauty parlor perm, with the big black sunglasses wrapped around her regular glasses, dressed still in what seemed to be church attire, being driven south, for whatever reason, down 16th street this Sunday afternoon. Her husband, driving, in his white Members Only jacket, that seems clearly to me a thing of the mid 1990s, his hair thinning and jaw slightly open, giving him a look of confusion or boredom. But the woman was the one that fascinated me.

Old woman. Old grandmother.

She reminded me of my late grandmother, “Nana” to us. Whose patience and love were oceanic and eternal. Her little mannerisms, her expressions, her fragility and the lightness of her when you pressed up against her to “give her some love,” the bones that seemed like a bird’s, weightless and airy. The way she dressed, in that prim, controlled, proper style. Her biweekly trips to the beauty parlor to get her perm. The big gray Lincoln she drove, that battleship of a car that would cross lanes with a slow, wide drift. The car everyone of her generation seemed to drive.

And I thought: these people. These grandmothers of ours. They are going away, their lightness and beauty and love blown away like these dry, colorful leaves. The women who dressed like that, who were raised like that, who talked in that way in that time that was the 1930s in South Carolina. Or Anywhere, America. The little pleasures of her life, the candy of her childhood, the firm discipline of her mothering, the warm drawling love of her grandmotherhood. Her church dinners and county fairs and school dances. Her courtship and her marriage, her living and her loving.

And her dying. That unexpected last journey we all take. Death is the unexpected trip. It leaves behind human things: the dirty dishes in the sink, the food in the fridge, the clothes needing a wash. The gas tank of the car in the “carport” (a term I’ve only heard used by Nana and Grandad) still there registering some level of empty. The rolls of paper towel in the closet that will never be used. The towels she cleaned but never would dirty. Like she walked away from everything, took a trip. And never came home.

And the leaves of their lives are blowing away, this whole generation. Whose hands soldered bolts onto battleships and repaired the aircraft and built the guns when the whole world had gone wild with war. People whose childhoods were formed in the Great Depression, who heard Roosevelt’s fireside chats, who fought and won the war and thrived in the idyllic golden years of the 1950s, with their Ford motorcars and automatic washers and driers and mixers, all made wondrous and magical with electricity at prices they could afford. Then their hesitation and fear during the 60s, the protests and sex and race riots and drugs that turned everything they knew was sacred on its head.

These ones are fading fast and there are few women of my Nana’s generation left. Their places will be filled by those who grew up during or after the war. They will dress differently, talk differently, act differently. The Baby Boomers, my parents, will become the new grandparents. Even these Columbia Heights hipsters, with their tight jeans, asymmetric haircuts and elaborate tattoos will become grandmothers to generations yet unborn.

And we will all be blown along, floating in the air, dry and beautiful and fragile, until we at last also find our resting spot amid those who arrived before.

With Grace in Your Heart and Flowers in Your Hair: Christian Imagery in Mumford and Sons

I’ve recently become obsessed with a new album: Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More. It’s a rocking, singable, exuberant and deeply visceral album. I’m no music critic, so I cannot comment in detail on the musical nuances of the album. I do know, however, that I really enjoy the banjo plucking, guitar strumming, double bass thumping, the beautifully blended four-part harmonies and the driving, boot-stomping rhythm. This is one of those albums, much like The National’s High Violet that makes me just want to sing along the whole time.

I cannot remember now exactly how I came to them, or they to me. I know my pastor, Wendy Moen, mentioned them to me once and I made a note to look into them. I did, but I did not become deeply seeped in their music until I saw the video for “Winter Winds.”

One of the most striking moments I remember from that video was Marcus Mumford dragging a chair and a guitar through a field of high grass under a cloudy sky, with the haunting lyrics of “the shame that sent me off from the God that I once loved was the same that sent me into your arms…” I found that very moving, very emotional. The “God I once loved?” Why is this mainstream band talking about God? And the more I listened to their music, the more I found deep Christian imagery (the first two words of the album are “Serve God”). I’ve looked into some of what they have said about this imagery, and about the kind of “church revival” feel of some of their concerts. They say that those themes and images come up, but it’s more a concern about spirituality instead of about dedication to institutional Christianity, and that they have each had different spiritual journeys.

Regardless, the imagery is very developed and pronounced throughout the album. The song “Roll Away Your Stone” (the title image clearly one of the resurrection – “the angel of the Lord … rolled away the stone” (Matthew 28:2); “[the women] were discussing who would roll the stone away from the entrance to the tomb … but when they arrived they saw that the stone … had already been rolled aside” (Mark 16:3)) When the singer (“speaker?”) says that all of his bridges have been burnt he is reminded “that is exactly how this grace thing works.” (A direct mention of grace reappears later in the album, in “After the Storm” – “Get over your hill and see, what you find there with grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.”) The mention of grace is fortified in the next phrase with an image of repentance and reconciliation: “It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, but the welcome I receive with the restart.” These lines, if any do, certainly seem to refer to the story of the prodigal son and when the shamefulness of his return is transformed into exuberant celebration by a merciful father.

Penance and purification dominate in “White Blank Page” where the singer asks if you can “kneel before the king and say I’m clean, I’m clean…” The later reference to “loving you with my whole heart” can be interpreted as a secular reference to a lover, but the final use of this phrase widens it to a more theological plane: “So tell me now where was my fault in loving you with my whole heart / Lead me to the truth and I will follow you with my whole life.” This is almost lifted from the Psalms: “Show me the path where I should walk, O Lord… Lead me by your truth and teach me, for you are the God who saves me…” (Ps 25: 4-5). Or Jesus’ “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Plus “disciples” were simply “those who followed.” Following someone with your entire life seems a spiritual level of devotion.

A smattering of biblical imagery emerges in “Timshel.” The mother of a “baby child” is told that this man’s choices will “make man great, his ladder to the stars.” Ladder to the stars sounds like Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven. And the final line “I can’t move the mountains for you” references Jesus’ “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed and you said to this mountain ‘Get up and move’ it would move...”

“Thistle and Weeds,” while not overtly quoting scripture, does have strong suggestions of biblical language. “I’m on my knees and your faith in shreds it seems … Corrupted by the simple sniff of riches blown I know you have felt much more love than you’ve shown. I’m on my knees and water creeps to my chest.” This sounds almost baptismal. And the corrupting influence of the excessive love of money. The refrain of “plant your hope with good seeds, don’t cover yourself with thistle and weeds” echoes of the “Parable of the Sower” who went out to sow and some seeds fell on good soil, and some among weeds, and some among the rocks. The line “There’s more than flesh and bones, let the dead bury their dead, they will come out in droves” is almost lifted directly from Jesus in Matthew 8:22 – “Let the dead bury their dead.”

The lyrics of “Awake my Soul” (at least an overtly spiritual title) have a line of “where you invest your love, you invest your life.” This is very similar to Jesus (Matthew 6:21 and Luke 12:34) “where you treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Later in the song we hear “you were made to meet your maker,” a maker we’ve heard of before in “The Cave,” where we are told “you can understand dependence when you know the maker’s hand.”

The more apocalyptic imagery is reserved for “Dust Bowl Dance” where we hear the narrator say “there will come a time when I’ll look in your eye / You will pray to the God that you always denied / Then I’ll go back out and I’ll get my gun / I’ll say you haven’t met me, I am the only son.” This seems to reference “Not everyone who cries out ‘Lord Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21) and/or the parable of the ten bridesmaids where the unprepared bridesmaids knock on the door begging entrance but are told by the groom “I don’t know you.” (Matthew 25:12). And of course the “only son” phrase summons images of Christ, who, it is said in the Nicene Creed is “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father…”

All of this is to say that Mumford and Sons is not a Christian band in the strictest sense, but that their bold (and sometimes subtle) use of both scripture and references to spiritual themes will make them even more relevant to a society seemingly always in search of its soul.

Ten Years of War, An Imagined Forgiveness Unbound and a Truly Radical Response to 9.11.01

Ten years. It's remarkable. With all the hype of this last week I am hesitant to add even more to the 9-11 remembrance frenzy. But I have been thinking about this event and wanted to put down some thoughts.

We were attacked that day. As a nation it seems, we were struck. Almost three thousand people lost their lives. It was a horrible, jaw-dropping tragedy of tremendous proportions. Everyone walked around like they had knives in their hearts. I remember going, instinctively, to St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, my church in Charleston, and sitting at a wooden pew, amid the calm and colorful stained glass, the vaguely indifferent Christs with their hands weakly raised in blessing (why isn't he ever smiling?). Rhett was there too, wandering among the stained glass. And I sat alone and wept. The people outside walked around like they were in a daze or actual shock. The dead eyes. The distant looks. The slow walk. The noticeable absence of laughter and smiling.

At church this Sunday we had a remembrance service at the National Law Enforcement Memorial. Prayers for peace. For healing, for restoration. For love. For forgiveness.

The lessons I read that morning were all about forgiveness. Joseph forgives his brothers who threw him in a well and left him to die but thought better of it and instead sold him to an Egyptian slavers. Years later when Joseph becomes powerful and his brothers are the epitome of the powerless, dusty and starving and begging for his forgiveness, he pardons them. In the Gospel we hear Jesus' parable about the slave who was forgiven a 10,000 talent debt (an unimaginable sum) who refuses to pardon the 100 talent debt of his peer.

Pastor Tom noted in his sermon the unplanned but significantly important occurrence of these texts on this day. Forgiveness. Are we to forgive? How? Who are we to forgive? Those who wrong us? Al Qaeda? Terrorists? Peter asks Jesus how many times he is to forgive a brother who wrongs him. Jesus says if you are counting you’re missing the point.

And yet what did we do? Did we turn the cheek as a nation? Or did we cry out for revenge? Three thousand Americans lost their lives that day. An eye for an eye mentality (to many not a very “Christian” response) would have said we should have killed three thousand terrorists in return. But we did not take an eye for an eye. For our eye we took an eye and a tooth and a tongue and an ear and both legs and an arm. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of them civilians: children, women and the elderly. Killed in the night in terrifying aerial attacks, some not even delivered by fighter pilots but by armed and silent drones in the sky. Were we going to win the “war on terrorism” by ourselves using the tools of terror? Night time raids, terrifying drone strikes from the sky, holding prisoners without cause or reason almost indefinitely? This is who we are?

What else could we have done? It seems now that there was only one response. This was an act of war. And so: “they will have war.” I think history will remember this first war of the 21st century as a 20th century reaction to a 21st century problem. We thought to solve a transnational problem of international scope like terrorism we would invade a nation. That a plot that unfolded across the globe in wide variety of countries (including Germany!) would suddenly be seen as rooted in just one state? It was a state reaction to a non-state actor. (Such a funny phrase, “non-state actor” – I imagine freelance Soviet theater bums; fired by the state, they have become “non-state” actors.)

The technological execution of combat however, would be highly 21st century, though. An analyst in Langley, VA, types in some coordinates in a computer. An armed, unmanned drone in the sky above Afghanistan drops a hundred pound bomb at those coordinates. The explosion is mostly unseen from an American point of view, the consequences even more so. What does a hundred pound bomb hitting the ground look like? What does it do to buildings? To people? To lives? We are totally removed from it. War and human suffering made even more distant, made even more detached, trivialized. Made into a video game.

In a sort of sense, this was the non-war. The nobody’s war. (With of course the notable exception of those executing it). This was the war that really seemed to be so far removed from the general populace’s consciousness that it wasn’t even happening. This was a war that the media only covered extensively when things were really bad, and I guess there is not much you can blame them for, given that it was a decade long. We had prosecuted this war, with its duration and scope, with fewer men and women than any previous war, so very few of us know the sons and daughters who have gone off to fight in it. It hasn’t scarred our consciousness the way Vietnam did. No one even had to pay for it. We weren’t asked to give a patriotic contribution or a “war tax.” The war would be free! We had a surplus! (Remember those days and the “problem” of what to do with it?).

What else could we have done in the face of this attack? We could have said: no more. Three thousand people have died this morning. We will mourn those people. We will support those families. But we will also be more vigilant. We will defend ourselves, so that no future blood will be spilled. That shall be our prime goal. We will launch a “war” to save lives and prevent bloodshed. We will build up our security at ports and harbors and airports and train tunnels. We will spend as much as it takes. We will work with international partners to beef up our understanding of this group, this non-state actor known as Al Qaeda and we will bring them to justice. We know the world is chaotic – it was on September 10, 11 and 12. And it will continue to be. We will not try to dupe you into thinking that the chaos and the danger of the world can be driven back completely. But as long as we are not afraid, they have lost. We will respond to their radicalism of hatred with a radicalism of love. Our forgiveness, foolish as it may seem or be, will, in its quiet, soft way, break their hatred and their fear. As Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching, “The soft overcomes the hard… the gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.”

What would the consequences of this kind of radicalism be?

We cannot know. What is done is done. And in this sense this is all just idle imagining. The unbinding of an irresponsibly loving forgiveness. I can’t see that response ever coming from any president.

And this is where we hit on the real fact that this is not an American response to an American tragedy. This is a human response to a human tragedy. I remember looking at the TV with those smoking towers and thinking, “Send me to war.” That seems unbelievable now. But that was my first reaction, a human reaction, and the reaction of millions. Immediate vengeance. You did this to us, and we will do this to you. This is simply human. Who could forgive in that moment?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how (could?) the same scriptures I read on Sunday could be used not for forgiveness but for vengeance. How a more conservative reading of the Bible would find “evildoers” and praise the wars as patriotic defense of our nation, despite the hundreds of thousands of casualties. How do you “read around” forgiveness? How does a language of forgiveness and peace get converted into one of retribution and war?

Ten years later, can we forgive? If we can, what would that mean? And if we can’t?

Always We Begin Again

It seems odd or at least unexpected to restart this blog after such a long break. It was designed to be a travel blog, a record of my thoughts and experiences while on the road in Guatemala and Mexico. And I guess I liked the idea of it and the name of it, the sense of it, enough to decide to write on it again.

I wonder why now. Today seems like such a significant date. But it's really the physical new start to an idea I've been toying around with for some months now.

Why blog? Why write? Why say anything? Aren't there already too many people saying things? Aren't we already drowning in the shouting idiocy of our political class, the media and the writhing mass of the Internet, with its accusations, recriminations and outbursts? Why add another voice? Wouldn't a voice of silence, in some sense, be appreciated? One not talking, the silent one amid the chanting crowd? There is also a sense of "look at me" millenial type navel-gazing involved with writing about yourself.

I've thought seriously about these questions. And yet I've decided to come back to it. I guess I just like writing and I have been told by some they enjoy reading my writing. So why not keep writing? And maybe someone will read it. Maybe someone will respond to it. Maybe it will resonate with someone. Maybe a conversation could get started.

I don't know what will happen here or what I'll write about. Probably about the things that interest me. Politics. The environment. Religion and spirituality. History. Economics. Society. Art, theater or film. Maybe some of all of that.

The last post was from November of 2007. This blog is four years old?

There is a sense of risk here, too. Writing. Putting out on the Internet the wandering, rambling thinkings of this 28 year old version of myself. I'll probably look back on much of this with the awkwardness and slight embarrassment I get from reading things from my past that I once thought were so great, so well written. My senior thesis. That essay I wrote in high school AP English. Really? This? But hopefully I can keep a bemused sense of detachment from it. To think, Ahh, yes, this - I remember this.

This was meant to be a travel blog. I was on an interesting and different road. Central America! Spanish! Bringing your own roll of toilet paper with you! The stream of interesting and engaging things was seemingly without limit. Now it's "Just here." I'm "just here" in DC. And yet, I'm only here for a while. Unless I die here. I'm really just passing through. Oh, those were my eleven years, my three years, my forty one years in DC. Now this is the new period of my life, in London, in Mobile, in New York, in Arrequipa. How funny. The illusion of permanence. I'm here forever! Simply because I'm here now. There is no sense of end or terminus because this is "home." But in the long term, who knows how long this home will be my home. Until I have to pull up the stakes, pack up the tent and move on.

So a renewed sense of wonder. Of engagement. My life as a 28 year old unmarried man in Washington DC, the nation's capital, in these the years just after the end of the twenty first century's first decade. A brief moment. A window in time. A statically irrelevant blip on a geological timeline the expansiveness of which is beyond my comprehension...

And yet. (Always, "and yet") Here I am, writing in a park on a brand new and very tiny Toshiba laptop computer, seated on a bench in Kalorama Park in DC, wearing shorts, flip flops and a T-shirt, with my legs crossed, on this warm and humid September day that really is just the final waning (one expects? hopes?) experience of summer. Before the chill, the leaves, the darkness of fall...


(The post title comes from the Rule of Benedict; it's a phrase I find particularly lovely, a way of forgiving yourself and beginning anew.)