Resurrection and Iraq
Category: Unitarian Universalism - General
This Easter morning, I heard a sermon about resurrection on the individual level, about moments when each us has been helped by a friend, family member or minister to recover from a personal loss.
But my thoughts turned from the personal to the collective. I’ve had Iraq on my mind this week like so many all over the world, as we pass the fifth anniversary of the start of the war.
I remember the start of the war well. President Bush made the announcement that we would invade Iraq on the same day that I received my acceptance to Harvard Divinity School: March 17, 2003. That morning I had been elated to receive my acceptance in my mailbox, and I ran out the door to class feeling overwhelmed with joy. It was a gorgeous sunny day, and unusually warm for March.
Later that night, two close friends and I ate dinner at a restaurant in Harvard Square. It was supposed to be a celebratory meal, but there were televisions throughout the restaurant, and we knew what was coming in Bush’s speech that evening. My joy at a new chapter of life was dampened by a sense of sorrow at the collective suffering ahead.
I had been very active in the student anti-war movement at Harvard since shortly after 9/11, organizing demonstrations and representing our student group to the media. I’m not sure at any point that I fully believed that our efforts, and those of like-minded people around the world, would actually stop the bombing of Afghanistan, or later the war in Iraq. But I know that part of me was crushed when the war in Iraq began.
Although I’ve been active in politics since then (mostly on domestic children’s issues), I haven’t said or done much related to the war (except donating to president candidates and voting). I left the anti-war group behind. I haven’t know what to advocate; withdrawal seems to pose a high-risk of increased Iraqi deaths, and staying in the war causes incredible pain to the families of American servicepeople.
A million people have been killed in the war in Iraq. A million people, many of whom were probably alive on that spring day in 2003. A million people who might still be here on this spring day five years later, if only a few hundred people had made different choices.
I cry when I read about the American military wives, husbands, children and parents who are terrified to answer the door or the phone. And I cry when I read about the Iraqi children killed and wounded, and the Iraqi wives, husbands, children and parents who have lost the most important people in their lives.
It’s hard to find hope.
And yet, I’ve been feeling recently that it’s stingy not to look for hope. How can I go to church and think “oh yes, resurrection is a great metaphor for all the times in life when we recover from personal losses” and not be searching for a hope to share with all of my brothers and sisters?
We will never in this life experience a full resurrection of those whose lives have been lost in this war. We will never have those million people, with their million smiles, million voices and million stories walking with us again, fully alive in this life.
But we do have their memories, the memories of loved ones that people all over the world are struggling to hold on to while the war wages on. Those memories should remind us to keep seeking peace.
With the U.S. election coming up soon, “hope” has on everyone’s lips. After years of feeling that nothing we do (in politics or otherwise) seems to bring us closer to peace in Iraq, there’s a sense of a stone now being rolled away from our path. I feel that I have waking slowly to the possibility — not the assurance, but the possibility — of peace. On this Easter I’m trying to open my heart again to a dream of peace, and to ask God what I can contribute to making that peace happen.
March 23rd, 2008 16:37
There is a cycle in life that requires winter before spring. That recognizes, as Ron White notes that “you cannot fix stupid” but over time, the world moves on. Hope is justified, not by faith but by experience and reason. I see no hope for near term “peace” in Iraq but I see long term hope for peace in Iraq as Religion fades as a major factor in Middle East culture. Long term it this case means several hundred years.
March 23rd, 2008 16:48
What a powerful statement, Shelby, thanks.
March 24th, 2008 10:29
Hi Terry and Ms. Kitty, Thanks for stopping by. Terry, I am hoping that Iraq can experience peace sooner than several hundred years from now. The situation looks bleak, for sure. But there are countries that have moved from civil war to peace in shorter periods of time, so let’s hope that such an opening for peace presents itself in Iraq (and that our leaders act wisely when there is an opportunity to make peace).
March 24th, 2008 16:39
Thank you for this post. As a lifelong pacifist (and a Peace & Justice Studies minor in college), I have struggled with my own response to this war as well…I lost a childhood friend in Iraq, and have had cousins over there, as well…advocacy for ‘bring the troops home’ has seemed an insufficient response to the root causes of violence. Particularly as this is a “lose-lose” situation. (I have also been unure of what to advocate…)I’ve been struggling on how to articulate my response to the war this past week too… hope is one response, and I do have hope. I have to. But this war has more than anything caused me to look internally, and to explore what it means to live nonviolently, to take on the practice of peace in my own life….when the world at large feels so complex and its riddle so unsolvable, it is in struggling with others in this that I find hope.
March 24th, 2008 17:44
Thanks for this post, Shelby. I think it highlights this important tension between hope - of stones rolled away and resurrection, and acknowledging the thousands of lives and situations where miracles didn’t happen - where on the third day, the body was there, the stone untouched. It is so hard to balance between those two places - somehow holding them both up as real and present. I was so so sad the other day on the fifth ann. walking through Harvard Yard and there was a small contingent with banners and megaphones (I thought of you, five years ago as an undergraduate) and just feeling how inadequate their response, and my own, has been to this war - to the world - in the face of injustice. Not inadequate in a moral sense, but in a practical sense - for those million plus who have died. But I suppose, as you point out, what other choice to we have but to hope for the possibility that chance can happen, might happen. Sometimes the stone is rolled away and the body is gone. I just hope it starts happening a little more often.
March 26th, 2008 10:29
Terri and Elizabeth, Thank you for sharing these reflections. It’s comforting to hear from you that I’m not alone in the sense of being deeply committed to peace, yet unsure about what the best strategy is for responding to the war in Iraq.
Elizabeth, “Sometimes the stone is rolled away and the body is gone. I just hope it starts happening a little more often.” — me too. As I was reading what you wrote, I thought also of Bill Schultz’s speech at General Assembly several years ago in which he talked about the challenge of having a theology that deals with torture (and other experiences on that level of evil).
Terri, I’m sorry about your childhood friend.
“But this war has more than anything caused me to look internally, and to explore what it means to live nonviolently, to take on the practice of peace in my own life….when the world at large feels so complex and its riddle so unsolvable, it is in struggling with others in this that I find hope.” That’s very beautiful. It reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh and some of his ideas about cultivating internal peace as a way of starting to make peace in the world.
March 27th, 2008 11:39
This post hit pretty close to home.
I used to believe the most effective way to have peace is to prepare for war. I was in the Marines at the time.
I remember hearing in late 2001 about a Marine helicopter that went down in Afghanistan. It made me sick to my stomach because just a year early I had been part of the command that recruited one of those young men who died in that crash. I didn’t know him personally but I helped get him in through my advertising efforts.
I have hope for peace but I struggle like you said, with what is the best way to respond to the war in Iraq. It is so difficult to know what would maintain or resolve to peace in that region.
It’s difficult to respond internally and find peace within myself.
March 27th, 2008 13:43
Hi Jules,
Thank you for serving our country as a member of the Marines, and for sharing part of your experience here. I’m finding some hope in hearing that so many of us are heartsick at the loss of life and longing for an end. We’re all struggling together to discern the path to peace, and to be a part of making that peace real, and it’s not easy.