Obama | CURIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Without words, faces can tell you a lot. This week I was struck by the faces of a few individuals. The recent photograph of the young man who entered a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and viciously shot innocent worshippers, is frankly frightening. Someone might say he is emotionally disturbed—that seems obvious enough—but what he himself is now saying in court is that he very much chose to undertake the actions that he did. He is unrepentant, unashamed of his actions. And his face tells if not quite the whole story, certainly a large part of it. When interviewed by the police, he was unrepentant, casually describing his horrific act and explaining the bizarre motive, borne out of racial hatred, for it.

charleston-shooter — **The Charleston shooter, whose name is not worth mentioning.** Mugshot taken by the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office, June 18, 2015

And that might have been enough sadness for one blog and a sufficiently egregious example of racism for an entire a decade, even if it is admittedly simply emblematic of a wider societal characteristic, but I saw what nearly everyone else saw this week, the sad story of four young people in Chicago, two male, two female, who held a mentally handicapped person hostage, posting images of the ordeal on social media even as they tortured him, also motivated by hatred sprung from racial prejudice. The faces seen in their mug shots told a similar story: defiance.

We cannot see the face of the disabled teenager, who fortunately escaped when the torturers went down a flight of stairs allegedly to kick in the door of a neighbor who complained about the noise that they were making as they brutalized the young man. It is hard to fathom this, hard to make any sense of the degrading of humanity caused by such hatred. Again, it is defiance. Add to that shamelessness. The complete obviation of right and wrong. Going beyond good and evil in a most Nietzschean sense, with emphasis on going beyond evil. Diabolical in the truest sense of that word. Not simply übermenschlich (but still, if in a diluted sense, menschlich). Rather, lacking any sense of humanity. Inhumane. Inhuman.

chicago-killers — **The names of these folks from Chicago do not merit mentioning. Their faces speak volumes** (photo of screenshot).

Both of these terrible events are simply emblematic of the worst that we can find in our ranks. The fact that their faces reflect not simply soulless people but people whose soul is dedicated to evil might leave us with a sense of hopelessness. President Obama assessed the state of affairs nowadays, brush stroking the situation in Chicago itself:

“’In part because we see visuals of racial tensions, violence, and so forth; because of smart phones and the Internet. … What we have seen as surfacing, I think, are a lot of problems that have been there a long time. ‘Whether it’s tensions between police and communities, hate crimes of the despicable sort that has just now recently surfaced on Facebook, … I take these things very seriously. The good news is that the next generation that’s coming behind us … have smarter, better, more thoughtful attitudes about race. I think the overall trajectory of race relations in this country is actually very positive. It doesn’t mean that all racial problems have gone away. It means that we have the capacity to get better.’”[1]

Mr. Obama sounds to me a bit detached, as he seems to view the particular example that he cites, the very one we are considering here, at only a great distance. His assessment of the event in Chicago comes across a bit glib, a bit Pollyanna, with a kind of rosy-cheeked optimism that might be a bit more difficult to muster should one have one’s boots firmly planted on the ground, should one have been able to stand next to the police officer who discovered the young man just after he escaped. And if he should look hard into the faces of the perpetrators, if he and we all could have seen the face of the victim as he was being tortured, perhaps our own view of the situation would be more engaged, as well.

But even if Mr. Obama’s evaluation of the state of race relations in our country does not quite inspire you with an abundance of hope, it is surely more hopeful than the stark faces of the alleged perpetrators of the Charleston shooter. In any case, sometimes you don’t need to see a face to envision hope. A picture sums up the opposite attitude, not man’s inhumanity but one person’s humane care for a fellow human being.

wounded-soldier — **A soldier carrying a fallen comrade. Sometimes it is the face you cannot see that tells the story.** Photo credit: amnondafni

The photograph above shows no face—it needs none. You can’t tell if the person being rescued is black or white or any other color; you can’t discern the race, religion, even gender of the rescuer. But you can discern that hero’s personal philosophy: it is to go back for the lost and fallen, to rescue, deliver, bring hope in the face of hopelessness; it is, simply put, to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Perhaps that’s all you need to know.

Sometimes seeing the face of the hero is helpful, too. Sargent Jerrod Fields is a world-class sprinter, despite losing a limb in the service of his country. His face is that of a hero both in battle and in competition.

sargeant-fields — **Sgt. Fields’ face tells the story: he was a hero and role model serving America abroad and remains one at home.** Photo by Tim Hipps, FMWRC Public Affairs

Joseph Tomasella, a specialist from the New Jersey Air National Guard, serves at the Coast Guard Air Station, here pictured as he participates in an exercise. His face tells the story: he is unafraid, he is a hero.

And the list could go on. One such firefighter, Mike Hughes of Wenatchee, Washington, recently returned to see the graduation of a young woman whom he rescued when she was but an infant.

“It’s a miracle that I did come out of that,” the young woman who was saved as an infant said. “I feel like I owe him so much. It’s just amazing that I have got to meet the guy who saved my life. I just can’t thank him enough. There are way too many words to describe how much I could thank him.”[2]

When, in the classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life, the angel Clarence speaks to the patriarch Joseph, of George Bailey, “He has a good face. I like that face!” maybe he has a point. One might debate about whether there are angels like Clarence moving amongst us unseen. But one would be silly to debate whether there are heroes doing so, albeit for the most part they are as unseen as angels.[3] Perhaps you know one. Perhaps you are one and don’t yet know it. Look in the mirror: your face may tell the whole story.

[1] Quotes of President Obama taken from http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/01/05/obama-calls-facebook-torture-video-despicable-but-optimistic-about-race-relations-in-u-s/.

[2] http://www.today.com/news/firefighter-who-saves-baby-attends-her-graduation-17-years-later-t25586

[3] Take Smoky, for example, who is said to have been the first known therapy dog: http://www.greatbigstory.com/stories/this-tiny-yorkie-is-a-world-war-two-hero/?xrs=CNNHP

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… Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy:
when I fall, I shall arise;
when I sit in darkness,
the Lord shall be a light unto me.
—Micah 7:8

This week’s blog was to be about gratefulness and thanksgiving for seeing an old friend in Rome and making a new one in Paris. But that will have to wait. Now Paris has come under attack, and those of us who care, which I hope are most of us, are caught in a swirl of thoughts and emotions about a city that most have never visited.

Nevertheless, I have a feeling that somehow we know Paris, even if we have never had an occasion to be there. Those of us old enough to have grown up after World War II recall pictures, mostly black and white (e.g., in Look magazine), when we were kids, as Paris, like London and other cities that sought to recover from the Second World War, was being rebuilt and restructured. We think of the liberation of Paris in late August of 1944, when the Germans surrendered the city and retreated.

If we should happen to be a bit younger, we might know Paris through film. Perhaps we’ve watched Singing in the Rain or been to a production of “An American in Paris” (or seen the movie) and can easily recognize Gershwin’s familiar tune. Paris is, and for most of us always has been, a place that represents something much more important than most big cities. It symbolizes and brings together style, frivolity, the power of art, history, romance, and beauty—in essence, all of Europe’s splendor and charm—in a single place. It is the place that by its very nature betokens a free society, where art and literature can flourish, where stamp collectors can wander through vendor booths along the banks of the Seine, where the name of a gothic cathedral can serve as a declaration not only for the most important female figure in Christendom, but also for the city, serving as a maternal figure for its country and perhaps the world: Notre Dame, Our Lady.

I took the picture you see here just a week ago when I was in Paris. I was there to meet a friend of a friend who was to help me with a large project I was working on in French. Maria and I struck up an immediate friendship, one that I hope and imagine will last for some years to come. And that is why I wrote to her immediately when I saw the news about Paris yesterday. My heart went out to her and to all Parisians for their immediate dire circumstance. I am glad to say that Maria was unharmed and is safely out of Paris now. But the fact remains, she could have been killed, and I, perhaps the most recent of her friends, would have been heartbroken; if I, how much more her parents and longer-term friends, teachers, colleagues?

And our heart goes out to all those whom we have not known, too, and it must. For the lives affected there are real lives. Real families are devastated. Even as I write this, in Paris some mother is lying on her bed sobbing (or a father on his knees crying out to God) because her only child was killed in a theater or a restaurant, simply because he or she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And if we have a child, we can feel with that person, we can sympathize and we pray that our heartfelt sympathy will pneumatically comfort that mother or father across the miles, by some miracle of the wind blowing wherever it pleases. May it please that Wind to bring comfort now to those in need.

Someone might say the decadence of the West has brought this upon itself. And they would be wrong. I am not here saying that the West does not have its fair share of decadence. But no one in that restaurant was especially decadent. They were just people eating dinner. The problem with any argument that blames the victims is that it is patently facile. I can recall in the early 1980s certain Christians, some of them friends of mine, saying that the AIDS epidemic was God’s punishment upon those who engaged in dangerous sexual liaisons. But little hemophiliac children who needed blood transfusions were also dying of AIDS. The only way such an argument could work is to say that God is inaccurate in doling out his punishment; He cares less about collateral damage than might a general in the armed forces. But generals do care very much about collateral damage, and if a human being cares, how much more the Divine.

Rather than blame the West for its excess, I propose that we look for a moment at the human heart and ask ourselves a more relevant question: why do we hate anyone? By “we” I don’t mean we in the general detached sense of “mankind” but in the particular sense of you and me. I mean, in fact, why do I hate anyone. So I will start with me, and I will put the blame on the Paris attacks where it really belongs, on me as a human being, not necessarily me alone.

What is it about me that makes me hate my neighbor? I have spent the last 35 or so years trying very hard not to hate. Anyone who happens to have read the Curious Autobiography knows why. If you’ve read Augustine’s Confessions, you know what happens to Augustine in the eighth book. If you’ve read the Curious Autobiography, you can find in the tenth chapter an account of something similar. With all due respect to Daniel Burke, I believe—rather I know—that there can come a point in some people’s lives where they (decide to?) turn in another direction. Or perhaps they are turned, but I leave that subject aside; I can only say that, after chapter 10, I now want to try not to hate any longer.

Yet I admit that I have not been entirely successful. It is difficult to look in the face of evil on September 11, 2001 or November 13, 2015 or October 26, 2015 (if that is the correct date), or countless other dates these days, when innocents die in any number. We live in a cruel world, becoming crueler by the second. Fewer and fewer folks are going to church, though world religions in general are not shrinking. In the east and now in much of the west, religion is thriving, but it is not Christianity. To quote a recent article, “Muslims … in the second half of this century, will likely surpass Christians as the world’s largest religious group.”[1] While that article attributes the principal reason for Islam’s expected growth to “simple demographics” (i.e., Muslims will have significantly more children than other folks), it seems to me that there may be another reason, one derived from doctrine, that might speak to the growth of that religion: that, in Islam, works count toward salvation. But, though that can explain a lot and even give us, perhaps, some insight into the motivations of the suicide bombers in Paris, I leave that aside.

And I do so because we need to look into our own hearts, not those of others, to come to grips with what has happened in Paris. If we are capable of hating—even retributively—we must realize that others are, as well. We must understand that the blame for what happened in Paris falls on us all. It certainly falls on me. I have indulged in hatred, for whatever reason, many times since chapter 10. I am therefore as much a part of the problem as anyone else, including the terrorist himself.

Yet just because we are all to blame, does not imply that the response to injustice should be tepid. On this earth, people have been establishing justice through due process in the West since well before 458 BC, when Aeschylus’ Oresteia dramatizes the beauty of civic justice; in the East, 356 BC, under Duke Xiao of Qin. France’s president, François Hollande, has stated that the response will be severe . President Obama has said that America stands shoulder to shoulder with the French.

I close with this thought, one for myself, but perhaps for us all. I shall not hate the terrorists. Yet that does not imply a lack of resolve. I shall not indulge in execration. Rather, I shall pity them in my thoughts and lavish mercy on them in my prayers. Will that make a difference? Will it make God any “happier” with me? To the former, I hope yes; to the latter, I can only say that I think Milton is right when he says, “God doth not need man’s work or his own gifts.”[2] As for me, I hope to hold mercy in my heart even as I pray for stark justice in this world. That is my hope, my recipe for this week: Seek justice, love mercy.[3] Bon courage, mes amis à Paris. Be safe, Maria …

Love Paris? click here

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Recipe for 13 November 2015: Hope for Paris, and us all

Ingredients (serves one [at a time]):

One part mercy, one part justice, and a cup water from the well alluded to below. Mix with a Welsh love spoon thoroughly, and live. Failure to blend ingredients will produce less than desirable results. Failure to care about your neighbor at all will produce death; probably has already. As with another recipe, bake at 365 days a year; eat while still warm, and walk humbly.

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

—Micah 6:7-8

[1] http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/#beyond-the-year-2050.

[2] “On His Blindness.”

[3] Micah 6:8.