258 candles-day 81

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: The self-sacrifice one man makes for the forgotten beasts of Fukushima. 

the art of squatting

Although I read this last year, this section has stayed with me since then and I catch myself consciously thinking of its wisdom while I'm squatting somewhere, waiting. I've come no longer to use waiting time to check my FaceBook or email or even, as I used to do, to use the opportunity to catch up on some reading (although I do continue to carry a thick book in my car for such opportunities). Instead, I squat, watching, waiting, thinking a little. Being.

My workers come from many places in Mexico and live in small towns scattered throughout the valley. Del Rey, where many of them stay, is the nearest town to my farm. The estimated population is about 1,500, but during the summer harvest the town swells to twice that size. The workers live in rented rooms, small cramped boardinghouses, or hidden bungalows in converted garages and toolsheds.

I visit one of these apartments. The workers live in a small outbuildings behind my foreman's house. Some of the men are standing, others are crouching in a familiar squat.

My grandmother squatted that way, peasants I saw in South America squatted that way, old folks in rural Japanese villages did the same. It is a common-folk way of resting and a fine observation point from which to watch the world. It's the squat I use when I'm waiting, not for anything in particular but the waiting and resting that's part of farming.

Squatting evens out physical differences. Tall people and short ones become closer in height when squatting. You share with others a common point of view. Once you squat you have to think twice about getting up; you become conscious of choices and decisions. Squatting is a mark of country folk who have worked the land and whose legs are in excellent condition. You can't squat well if you are overweight, if your legs are used to sitting in chairs, or if you are lazy. I wonder if we've lost the art of squatting. In our fast-paced world today, we're too busy or think we're too good to squat.

--From Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm by David Mas Masumoto

the strawberry of memory

That's my friend Rich's voice on the soundtrack of this video.  He died earlier this week, a 37 year old victim of heart attack.  The story of the monk and the strawberry, while it has a lot of history behind it, particularly for Buddhists, also has tremendous import for me.  Decades ago, while still taking myself seriously as a bhikku in training, I determined I'd live my life by its lessons.  It held at least equal resonance for Rich.

This is a video he produced for an arts project at the seminary we attended together and I'd seen it twice, once as he prepared it and again in a class on Zen we took.  He is--was, I have to remind myself--an odd person even among the denizens of my congregations.  He had, even by my standards, an interesting life:  born (and, I think, baptized) a Mormon, converter to Unitarian Universalism, converter to fundamental Christianity, converter to Buddhism, graduate of Liberty University.  Volunteer in the military, veteran of the Bosnian Conflict and the First Iraq War.  Chaplain in training.  World traveler.  Learner of Japanese.  His first marriage ended very badly and bitterly and it was in chewing over the bitterness and learning to accept the hot taste of it that we bonded.  His second marriage to a Japanese woman five years his senior he met at a Buddhism conference.ended with his death. They were married a month.

In a week my seminary will hold a memorial for his memory.  We are very good at memorials, fitting for people whose primary purpose, no matter what we tell ourselves, is to comfort the dying and the surviving.  I am trying not to mourn Rich's death but merely, as I think he would express it, to accept it.  He was a good man who got on my nerves at times--he talked too much at times, pressed his presence on people at times, made too much of his Buddhism at times, refused to observe his own faults at times--but do we know anyone (besides ourselves) who don't get on our nerves at times?  That, as much as dying, is a part of life.

The story of the monk and his strawberry doesn't mention anyone acknowledging the monk's death.  But like the rest of us monks need a community; a monk may live a solitary life but one isn't a monk by oneself.   That's what distinguishes her from a hermit.  Someone notices the monk's absence.  Someone has a moment of silence or a brief word for his life and death. Someone recollects the monk's life.  This reflection may be the sweet part of someone's life, the strawberry plucked, not by the monk but by the monk's survivors, enjoyed in contemplation.

If I could play the guitar or sing I would play this for Rich.  But as I can't do either I'll go to the original.

the banality of enlightenment

One of the most profound bits of information to have an impact on the way I view the world was an article I read in the late 80s that reported that scientists had calculated that there was exactly as much matter present in the contemporary universe as there had been moments after the Big Bang.  This suggests that there is no destruction, finally, that everything continues in one form or another.  A kind of reincarnation, if nor exactly as the Hindus or the Buddhists have it.

This morning I started violently from a dream that was all Japanese characters and and symbols and requires I think a Japanese imagination to parse it, but I understood it all in my dream.  The upshot was that I was a harbinger of some sort, an icon who recognized in others their specialness and my touching them brought that specialness to fulfillment.  It was very comic book influenced and full of allusions to icons that I knew in my dream and that made sense there.  Ultimately, the icon I was at the beginning of this dream, a daughter killing her father, I became at the end, my daughter killing me.  I don't remember the personifications between those two but it doesn't matter.  I woke with a sense of both the impermanence of life and the permanence of--well, I don't know what to call it.  Existence?  Being?  Soul?

It all seems very banal now, drinking cold coffee and typing like a fiend, my head down and recalling my finger exercises from 10th grade's typewriter training in order to put this down.  Even minutes after waking, splashing water on my face and noticing the birds eating the seed I leave out for them, it didn't seem to matter.  That may be the thing about it, though.  We are always expecting epiphany to have life-altering consequences and a booming voice out of the clouds and it may be that it is the mirror image of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil":  call it the banality of enlightenment.  It comes, not with a mighty wind or a cracking like an inner egg opening and the chick of new information peeping out, but with cold water across the face and the familiar tired, unshaven face staring back, and the gentle words "of course."

"I have no pleasure in the death of anyone"

“I Have No Pleasure in the Death of Anyone”

Context: It is worth asking ourselves if disastrous events are Yahweh’s punishment. And if they are, are they fair or just punishments? This is not an academic or moot question. Only a few days ago Japan was subject to a magnitude 8.9 earthquake, the equivalent force of 240 megatons of exploding TNT, followed immediately by a nearly 25-foot tsunami, that left thousands of people dead and tens of thousands missing and injured. Aftershocks of the earthquake continued to register as magnitude 6 and above, volcanic activity has been reported, and every hour brings greater certainty of some disaster relating to the compromise of the nuclear power plants Japan’s energy depends on. If a plague of frogs can be said to be a punishment by Yahweh (Exodus 8:1-15), then surely if there is contemporary divine punishment, this would qualify.

Putting aside the argument what Japan might be punished for, could Ezekiel’s lament of chapter 18 be updated to answer the results of this modern disaster? As a college teacher focusing on the Bible as literature or as a minster leading a study group on faith texts that seek to justify the ways of gods to people, this is a patently legitimate question. The prophets of the Older Testament seek, if not justification for Yahweh’s actions, then to make clear why things have happened as they have. It is axiomatic in their world that there are no coincidences and that the wicked suffer for their behavior. Contemporary prophets, to remain true to this Biblical intent, should insist the same. If we take the words of Ezekiel and what he is trying to articulate seriously, then asking the same question of contemporary disasters that Sixth Century BCE Israelites did of their Babylonian exile is necessary and respectful. Would a contemporary Ezekiel locate the recent disaster in Japan as the fault of its people?

Exegesis: Ezekiel’s Yahweh (and we can call Yahweh “Ezekiel’s” here because there is evidence that this book, in contrast to the oral backgrounds of most Biblical prophecy books, was written, edited, expanded on and preserved, possibly during the prophet’s life and so is a literary construct) begins this chapter by chastising his people’s use of a proverb to explain the suffering of people as payment for their forebear’s misdeeds (:2). “Know that all lives are mine…it is only the person who sins that shall die” (:4).

Brueggemann (2003) argues that the text is not intended to set up a false dichotomy between individual and corporate morality. Paul Joyce (whom Brueggemann quotes) writes, “Ezekiel certainly rejects the idea that the present disaster is a punishment for the sins of previous generations [and] he is not concerned here with the moral independence of contemporary individuals. He takes for granted the general principle of ‘individual responsibility’…but the possibility of Yahweh judging individuals in isolation from their contemporaries is not considered…[The] question at issue is a different one, namely, ‘Why is this inevitably communal, national crisis happening?’”

Ezekiel’s Yahweh goes to great lengths to distinguish between three generations: the first is “a man [who] is righteous and does what is lawful and right” (:5); but “he has a son who is violent, a shedder of blood…” (:10); and if that “man has a son who sees all the sins that his father has done, considers, and does not do likewise…” (:14); each will have a different end. The first “shall surely live” (:9), the second “shall surely die” (:13b), and the third “shall not die for his father’s iniquity; he shall surely live” (:17). Unspoken but assumed is the idea that the sins of the second generation will also not be forgiven by the goodness of the first and third: “[Each one’s] blood shall be upon himself.” (:13c).

While Brueggemann uses this to forward his argument that, because “the destiny for and verdict upon each generation depends upon adherence to Torah in terms of (a) avoiding idolatry and serving only YHWH, (b) obedient sexuality, and (c) obedient economics” (206), he also explains that the generations are not theoretical but refer to Josiah, Jehoiakim, and Jehoiachin, on whom “the verdict is still out…Thus it is probable that…Ezekiel 18 concerns the destiny of and the theological verdict upon…the generation of exiles led by Jehoiachin” (206).

Locating the text in a specific era does not mean we shouldn’t draw from it to determine contemporary lessons, however; the disaster of the exile is the fault of the second, wicked generation and it is up to the third, exilic generation to expiate its predecessor’s guilt. Yahweh states that “if the wicked turn away from all their sins that they have committed and keep all my statutes and do what is lawful and right…[none] of the transgressions they have committed shall be remembered against them; for the righteousness that they have done they shall live” (:21-2). There is, of course, no way of knowing if the victims of Japan’s tsunami “lived” or “died” as Ezekiel means the words—that is, whether they lived forever (chayah) or perished (as a nation: muwth)—the reality is that their bodies died, some horribly, but Ezekiel would recognize their deaths as part of a corporate body. As individuals they are not important. While he “echoes Jeremiah’s emphasis on personal responsibility for one’s actions before God…Ezekiel’s work of bringing individuals to repentance and conversion…will begin to build the new community by preparing its individual members to take part in that rebuilding” (Ceresko: 254-5). In other words, individual fates do not sway Yahweh’s decisions about Yahweh’s people, but leaving “behind the pride and pretensions associated with a political state, this community will find a new identity as a people” (255).

“Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked…and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live?” exclaims Yahweh (:23). No one generation is all good or all evil (Michael Coogan’s textual note reads, sardonically, “Ezekiel’s audience is far from an innocent generation”). Individuals who take responsibility and turn from sin will be forgiven. But Ezekiel’s Yahweh recognizes peoples, not people, and for a moment, Ezekiel suggests that Yahweh’s mercy will overtake his judgment. “But when the righteous turn away from their righteousness and commit iniquity and do the same abominable things that the wicked do…None of the righteous deeds that they have done shall be remembered; for the treachery of which they are guilty and the sin they have committed, they shall die” (:24). There is no forgiveness for the wicked. (Presumably the sins one turns away from into righteousness are venial rather than mortal.) When the wicked protest Yahweh’s unfairness (takan, “unmeasured, unregulated, uneven,” suggesting commerce), Yahweh responds, “When the righteous turn away from their righteousness and commit iniquity, they shall die for it…Again, when the wicked turn away from the wickedness they have committed and do what is lawful and right, they shall save their life. Because they considered and turned away from all the transgressions that they had committed….they shall not die” (:26-8). Yahweh holds to Yahweh’s self the right of judgment and urges Yahweh’s people, “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O House of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone…Turn, then, and live” (:31-2).

Lesson Outline: Presenting this in a classroom setting would require a class or study group that has a good deal of previous experience with Biblical texts and with ethical considerations of them. I would assign Ezekiel 16-19 to place the reading in context and ask the question “Is Yahweh justified in bringing disaster on a people who broke covenant with him?” On the day for discussion, after a short discussion—the answer to which I’d expect everyone would agree is “yes”—I’d share background about the Babylonian Exile and a few Hebrew words and expand the question. “Ezekiel and his followers believed that Yahweh had control not only over Yahweh’s covenanted people but over the whole world. Is this true for contemporary Christians? If it is, would a contemporary Ezekiel say that Japan’s earthquake and tsunami were Yahweh’s punishment against the Japanese people for some transgression, perhaps known only to Yahweh?” My follow-up questions would include, paraphrasing Paul Joyce, “From a Biblical perspective, why is this national tragedy happening?”

WORKS CITED
• Brueggemann, Walter. (2003.) An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY.
• Ceresko, Anthony. (2005.) Introduction to the Old Testament: A Liberation Perspective. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY.
• Coogan, Michael, editor. (2007.) New Oxford Annotated Bible (NRSV). Oxford University Press.