Sikh Delegation meets Rabbi Froman

December 12, 2005

The religious peacemaker Eliyahu McLean let me know he was hosting a Sikh tour of the Holy Land, and he invited me to join them throughout their travels. I joined them when they visited Rabbi Froman in Tekoa. Sikhism is one of the world's newest religions, and Judaism one of the oldest. One is from the Punjab in India and the other Jerusalem. Both have about twenty million followers each, and both have experienced more persecution than they have the intoxicating glories of political and territorial rule. While the orthodox followers of one like to wear loose white clothes and the orthodox followers of the other like to dress in formal black suits, they both admire long flowing beards very much. It promised to be an interesting afternoon and evening.

The delegation of Sikhs numbered about twenty. They were all Orthodox: they faithfully followed their tradition of kesh (keeping their hair uncut) and wearing a kara (steel bracelet). One of them assured me they also wore the kangah (wooden comb) and the kirpan (ceremonial dagger), albeit a small version “so as not to cause problems with security.” They take this tradition very seriously, wearing their dagger even when they sleep. However they were not wearing what would strictly be considered kachha (short pants). I imagine this was a concession to modesty than for any profound religious reason.

Upon boarding a small bus to visit Tekoa I found the Sikhs sitting contentedly, their tall trim bodies filling the small seats. All but two were men. Some were already in a trancelike state, an impressive undertaking given the formal prayers had not yet started. Eliyahu later confided they had been up all night travelling and were probably just exhausted.

The Muslim peacemaker Ibrahim was there sitting at the back of the bus with his usual big smile and traditional Arab garb. Last time Ibrahim and I were on a bus he would take every opportunity to tell the young Israeli soldiers stationed at numerous checkpoints that they looked like one of his ten children and that they were beautiful. The soldiers invariably broke into a big smile themselves when he told them that, their tension spontaneously transformed into genuine joy.

The settlement of Tekoa is reputed to be the land of Prophet Amos. It is close to the Palestinian village Tekua. Mt. Herod sits silently nearby. Tekoa is in an arid part of the West Bank, beside a series of spectacular valleys heading down to the Dead Sea. What few trees survive without be watered by people are undoubtedly old and hardy.

We arrived in Tekoa to find an Israeli soldier guarding the entrance. Rabbi Froman is a man of peace but his village still relies on the military for protection.

Froman joined us on the bus with greetings of “shalom salaam”. He said in Jewish and Islamic traditions, shalom and salaam respectively mean both peace and “the very name of God.” Thus the land of peace is the land of God, according to both faiths.

We were guided to the edge of the settlement, overlooking the inspiring hills and valleys. Jordanian hills could be seen in the distance. A dry riverbed (known as a wadi) wound its way through the valley floor below.


Gulleys beside Tekoa

Off in the distance an isolated settlement sat, its distinctive red roofs signifying it was Jewish. Although it looked peaceful, the existence of settlements like this are perceived by many Palestinians, Israelis and international observers as one of the three major causes of conflict between Palestinians and Jews, along with Palestinian refugees demanding they be able to return to their villages they left during wars during the 1948 war, and the status of Jerusalem as a capital city claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians.


Jewish settlement

Amidst laughter and joy the Sikhs' leader and Froman began to swap religious insights and stories, using the geography of the land and their respective religious culture for guidance. Ibrahim looked on as the Jew and the Sikh conversed.


Swapping religious stories

But before this interreligious dialogue Rabbi Froman thanked the Sikhs for their remarkable hospitality at the 2004 World Parliament of Religions in Barcelona, where they fed the 8,000 participants free meals. Froman said Jews have strict dietary requirements, and confessed with a happy smile that the enormous Sikh tent was the only place in all of Barcelona they could eat. He apologized for not preparing a tent for the Sikhs. The Sikh leader said that on the contrary, the land itself was a big tent, where they shared the love of God. Froman said “yes, yes, the love of God.” The Sikh leader said they had come simply to pray, to love each other and seek peace. He added that we become wise by serving God and serving his people.


Swapping religious stories

When Froman tried to articulate a spiritual dimension of hospitality, his budding command of English led him to confuse the word with hostility, bringing not only more laughter but an observation from the Sikh that language is tricky and cannot satisfactorily describe God. Froman added that despite his limited command of not only English but also Arabic, he has close friends who are Arab. He said it did not matter because “the language of the heart is less tricky than the language of humans.”

A young Sikh alone surveyed the land quietly as the sun hovered behind him, a land described by Froman as currently being in a “miserable” state because of the conflict between Jews and Palestinians, one of the few political references shared between them.


Contemplation

Jewish tradition holds that the wadi that runs from Jerusalem (a point of life) to the Dead Sea (a point of death) is special, for at what Froman referred to as “the end of days” the Dead Sea will receive the water from Jerusalem and become a sea of life instead of death. Froman also outlined a story from Chronicles, near the end of the Hebrew Bible where enemies are defeated not by power and force but by love, humility, and by singing to God and praising him (God was always referred to in the masculine sense by both Froman and the Sikhs). The Sikh leader then recounted a Sikh story which had a similar perspective on the need to praise God.

These observations reminded me of the complex nature of religious thought. While praising the God present in all people as being higher than one's limited self is a fine thing—or put it in non-religious terms, to live for the good of others and not just yourself is wonderful—to live responsibly does not mean abdicating reason to a vain hope for what Karen Armstrong calls “miraculous intervention”. She points out the danger of “a form of religiosity that reduces spirituality to magic.” Religious stories will always need wise interpreters, it seems.

After the two religious leaders shared spiritual insights, emphasizing a universal spiritual identity above that of their identities as faith leaders, the Sikhs lead a session of prolonged prayerful singing.


Prayerful singing


Prayerful singing

The Sikh leader and Froman sat side by side, emphasizing their unity and perhaps even their status as leaders in their respective communities.


Prayers

Two thirds of the way through the sun began to set, and Froman excused himself to perform traditional sunset prayers while the Sikhs continued to sing. Their different voices of prayer came together, the unity in diversity clearly apparent to everyone present.


Sunset prayers


He then joined them once more, this time in a particularly enthusiastic round of singing the praises of a wonderful God, his body swaying back and forth.


Prayers

As they all sang together the religious intensity became greater and greater, the men's voices rising in volume and quickening in pace.

After the devotional singing the men and woman talked among themselves. I conversed with a Sikh born in 1941, a humble man with a sharp mind. Many of the Sikhs in the delegation appeared to have roots in Kenya. There are something close to 500,000 Sikhs living in England, according to my interlocutor Sikh, who is leader of a Gurdwara (Sikh religious temple) in England. When I asked if it made sense to ask an Orthodox Sikh if they had a favorite Guru among the thirteen who founded Sikhism, he said it did not, as they regarded all of them as one. In response to a question of mine, he said the idea of Khalistan (an independent homeland between India and Pakistan for Sikhs) was one formed by the “propaganda machine” of India, and that his party was religious and not political, having nothing to do with the Khalistan movement. However he was familiar with a political figure associated with that movement, Singh Mann. He did not know of the Indian independence leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, being much more familiar with figures like Jomo Kenyatta, having instead grown up in Kenya and experiencing its freedom struggle.

On the way out we visited a Yeshiva (school of religious learning) in the settlement. There were an impressive number of students and many of them were studying in small groups. They were all very enthusiastic to meet the Sikhs and talk with them.


In the Yeshiva

One thing about the beards, flowing garments and turbans of the Sikhs is that they immediately make them stand out from the crowd, even in a place rich with religious symbolism like Israel Palestine.


In the Yeshiva

When back on the bus I felt a sense of great peace and calm among these religious Sikhs. Their very presence conveyed peace in our often hurried and turbulent world. The next day I heard a well-known Israeli peacemaker who is non-religious describe an experience where Froman was in the back of his car, presumably lost in prayer, completely oblivious to the vigorous political discussion taking place around him. Whether one admires religious peacemaking efforts like this, or finds it archaic, naïve or worse, it is undeniable that the religious figures see themselves playing a valuable role in bring peace to this land. It might be that the mere fact a variety of Palestinians and Israelis witnessing such figures may be an experience that stays with them for some time to come, perhaps even influencing their thinking. Perhaps sessions of prayers and singing gives them legitimacy in the eyes of the religious. Whether it not the actual act of prayer and singing contributes to a culture of peace is a research question where gaining evidence is not easy.


In the Yeshiva

It has been said by some that “denial is not just a river in Egypt”—and this was powerfully illustrated on the bus ride to and from Tekoa. The Israeli man acting as tour-guide pointing out the sights on the way from Tantur to Tekoa began pointing out places where “Palestinian terrorists” had been shooting and murdering innocent Jews. He referred to Israeli settlements not as settlements but as towns. Just six weeks before his son's girlfriend was one four young people murdered by unidentified Palestinian gunmen not far from the road where we turned off to go to Tekoa, an tragedy that generated a lot of news coverage and led to the closure of the West Bank by Israeli authorities for some days. On the way back, the Israeli man again at some length talked about Palestinian terrorism, pointing out places where the Israeli State had placed protective barriers to minimize the effects of sniper fire from Palestinian villages neighboring the road. Not once did he talk about Israeli violence against Palestinians. In private I asked him why he believed the killings were taking place. He replied by saying the Palestinians had a culture of violence. Behind his back, Eliyahu just rolled his eyes and smiled. When I pointed out to the Israeli man that three times as many Palestinians had died compared to Israelis since the start of the second Intifada, he said that was because Palestinians were killing each other in intra-group violence. He said that Palestinians like to fire guns at weddings and funerals. In short his message was: Palestinians are violent and Israelis are innocent of any wrongdoing. Eliyahu mentioned quietly to me that the Sikhs would be visiting Bethlehem later in the week, where they will hear Palestinian perspectives.

The tour-guide when not talking about Palestinian terrorists did usefully point out that some of terraced fields we were passing by in the minibus had been dated as being between 3-4,000 years old by archaeologists, with ancient olive trees also present.

I must confess I was surprised that one of the Sikhs present was a professor at the University of London, who said he was a friend of the late Edward Said and of Noam Chomsky. He said he edits the journal Social Identity and is a specialist in post colonial theory, including sub-altern studies.


Comment from a friend on this article, January 1 2006:

“It is my view that the important thing for people like you, and even to some extent myself though I have been here so long, is to be a neutral as we can. This struggle is not a football match—and no good purpose is served by taking sides as so many outsiders of evident goodwill seem to do. The Israeli who described the attacks by Palestinians was telling the truth as he saw it, and indeed he seems to have had a personal reason for painting them all black. You will find the same absolute black and white views among Palestinians. Those who believe in peace have to slowly reduce the number of people holding these views, based on pure ignorance and inablity to see any point of view except your own, so that those who hold them are reduced to an impotent minorty. But it is slow work.“

Radiance, pessimism, and hope

Only recently have I come to better appreciate the wisdom of the late Charles West Churchman, formerly a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He once said:

"The design of my philosophical life is based on an examination of the following question: is it possible to secure improvement in the human condition by means of the human intellect? The verb 'to secure' is (for me) terribly important, because problem solving often appears to produce improvement, but the so-called 'solution' often makes matters worse in the larger system (e.g., the many food programs of the last quarter century may well have made world-wide starvation even worse than no food programs would have done.) The verb 'to secure' means that in the larger system over time the improvement persists."

Source: Churchman, C. West. Thought and Wisdom. Intersystems Publications, Seaside, Calif., 1982, p. 19f.

Churchman also offered an insight on hope and radiance, which I have come to recognize as being of seminal importance:

'It is tempting to define hope psychologically, as strong belief in and desire for a future without any perceivable evidence for its occurrence.... But something crucial is missing, because a man could engage in a risky gamble or adventure on the grounds that his gain, if he is successful, would be very great.

The word I want is "radiance." The Latin word claritas can be translated into "clearness," meaning "precise," as in Descartes or later in symbolic logic. But it can also mean "light" or "brilliance." Thus, one way to talk about aesthetics is to say that it is the variety of expressions of radiance, including the dark. But it is not merely "black and white," for radiance includes the colours, and sounds, and aromas, and touches.

Back to "hope." It means belief in the desirable without perceived evidence, but it also means radiant belief. I don't know what this means, but I can imagine it easily enough. When I say, "I hope that humanity will succeed in using its intellect to improve the human condition," and someone says, "How can you hope anything of the kind, given the way humans exploit humans?"—then there is no argument: he is trying to destroy the radiance, to put out the light, and I must do my best to preserve the radiance despite his cynicism.

And, of course, radiance includes humour, because hope is a motley, which includes its own absurdity. Hope is always both serious and ridiculous. Only there is no lesson to be learned, no rational conclusion to be drawn, from saying, "Hope is absurd." The rational mind wants to say, "Hope is ridiculous and therefore..." It's like someone saying, "What's the point of Hamlet after all?"'

Source: Churchman, C. West. The Systems Approach and its Enemies. New York: Basic Books, 1979, pp. 191-192.

To me personally, this means that even as we develop and articulate a deep awareness of the profound injustice and violence found in our world, we must at the same time embody a positive vision for the present and the future, and recognize the many positives in our pasts. We need to be radiant. This is not always easy, but it is often highly important.

Consider the act of criticism, for instance. When people are being critics of something—a film, or the actions of another person—they are often making observations on the character, conduct and perhaps consciousness of other people, or perhaps their works of art or commerce or activism. Sometimes people are overwhelmingly negative in their criticisms. There are some genuinely bad things in life, of course, but oftentimes there is good and bad mixed together. None of us are perfect—we all make mistakes, big and small. Yet when criticizing others, some people tend to focus only on the negative, forgetting the positive aspects of people and their efforts.

This is not a call for merely being "balanced"; rather, it is to draw attention to the interwoven roles of pessimism and hopefulness. In his remarkable book "The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace", John Paul Lederach refers to the "gift of pessimism". Lederach asks "What do people who live in settings that are moving from war to peace teach us about the challenge of understanding the nature of genuine constructive social change?" He says:

"First, in deep-rooted conflict, people locate themselves and change and gauge authenticity with an expansive view of time and an intuitive sense of complexity. These create a cautious approach to promises that constructive social change will happen in a short period of time, independent of the historical context in which the violence has evolved. In short, there is a prevailing ethos of pessimism. This does not mean that desired changes are not hoped for or possible, even in the short term. But pessimism provides a point of departure for understanding the nature of change. Very simply it says this: Gauging whether the change process is genuine requires serious engagement with the complexity of the situation and a long-term view. If simple answers are reached as if complexity did not exist, then just as Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests, they are not worth a fig."

Source: Lederach, John Paul. 2005. The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace: Oxford University Press, USA.

This has a sound philosophical basis, as witnessed by a couple of thousand years of Indian philosophical pondering:

"The attitude of mind which looks at the dark side of things is known as pessimism. Indian philosophy has often been characterized as pessimistic and, therefore, pernicious in its influence on practical life. . . . Indian philosophy is pessimistic in the sense that it works under a sense of discomfort and disquiet at the existing order of things. It discovers and strongly asserts that life, as it has been thoughtlessly led, is a mere sport of blind impulses and unquenchable desires; it inevitably ends in and prolongs misery. But no Indian system stops with this picture of life as a tragedy. It perhaps possesses more than a significance that even an ancient Indian drama rarely ends as a tragedy. If Indian philosophy points relentlessly to the miseries that we suffer through short-sightedness, it also discovers a message of hope. The essence of the Buddha's enlightenment—the four noble truths—sums up and voices the real view of every Indian school in this respect; namely: There is suffering.—There is a cause of suffering.—There is cessation of suffering.—There is a way to attain it. Pessimism in the Indian systems is only initial and not final."

Source: Chatterjee, Satischandra, and Dhirendra Mohan Datta. 1984. An introduction to Indian philosophy. 8th ed. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, pp. 13-14.

In these points, there is much crossover in the philosophy of Churchman, Lederach and India's philosophical traditions. For instance, Churchman abhors short-term solutions that ignore the complexity of the systems in which problems are embedded, a point also made by Lederach.

Yet finally, in the midst of complexity and an awareness of suffering, radiance is an indispensable condition for long-term well-being.

Reflections on conflict and peace

The search for perfection, the longing for freedom, truth and pure peace has been humanity's earliest preoccupation in its awakened mind (Ghose, 1971). Humanity dreams of a state of being which is in flagrant contradiction with reality. Sages like Aurobindo suggest that life might well be a series of “transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering”, but like generations before us we still long to “build peace and a self-existent bliss”.

Consider these two children. They both live beside railway tracks in Karachi, their makeshift homes standing on the stones that surround railway tracks all over the world, squeezed in between a road and the tracks.



This boy looks unhealthy and perhaps even malnourished. His skin is diseased.



This girl, on the other hand, expresses a tremendous inner beauty. She is physically beautiful, but the radiance and joy she conveys is totally at odds with her surroundings.

It is in the midst of such radiance that the highest dreams dwell.

Despite the immense diversity of cultures that people our planet, and their varying experiences of violence and peace, there are universal shared experiences familiar to all of us, among them fear, discrimination, separation, empathy, artistry, hope, love, and solidarity.


Military Occupation

Let us see what we can learn from Israel Palestine. Perhaps there is something about life under military occupation and the threat of terrorism that opens a window into these universal themes.

We can start by taking a look at the Palestinian village of Bilin on a typical Friday afternoon.



Bilin is a symbol of resistance for many Palestinians. The immense separation barrier Israel has built separates the villagers from their land.

This land has effectively been stolen and given to Orthodox Jewish settlers occupying newly built settlements nearby.

It is an absolute disgrace, and a tremendous violation of the ethical and spiritual principles of Judaism. Rabbi Michael Lerner tells us that ‘The most frequently repeated injunction in Torah are variations of the following command: “Do not oppress the stranger (the 'other'). Remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”’

It is therefore no surprise that Israeli and international activists have joined Palestinians in weekly protests against the barrier, from before it was built to the present day.

The protests are largely nonviolent, but sometimes the villagers throw rocks, as the sound slides demonstrate. Such occasional violence unfortunately provides a convenient alibi for the Israeli military to undertake extreme actions. These actions are frightening. They scared me at the time and they scare me now.

After two years of continuous resistance, 11 Palestinians have been killed. Many Palestinian, Israeli and foreign activists have been injured, sometimes very seriously, including brain damage after being shot in the head at close range.

What have these sacrifices achieved? The fence was built without difficulties. Distinguished peace activist and Israeli parliamentarian Naomi Chazan is critical of the activists for putting so much effort into an unsuccessful undertaking, missing the opportunity to do something more productive for peace.

While she has a point, she under-appreciates the tremendous symbolic value for Palestinians of witnessing idealistic Israelis struggling courageously at their side. Such solidarity transcends typical notions of group identity, allowing at least some Palestinians and Israelis to regard each other as more fully human. The activists have also succeeded in making the conflict more visible.

One remarkable aspect of the Bilin protests is their orchestrated, almost ritualistic character. The basic structure of the ritual is pretty simple.

The nonviolent activists attempt to march to the barrier.

The soldiers confront them at some point, maybe in the village, or maybe at the barrier or along the way. They warn the activists to leave. The activists do not leave. The soldiers fire at them with tear gas, sound grenades, rubber bullets, and on occasion live ammunition.

The activists shout back moral slogans, appealing to the conscience of the soldiers. The soldiers say very little in return.

In short, there is a lot of mutual posturing going on, punctuated by occasional episodes of significant violence resulting in injury and death.

Posturing is used to project fear and strength onto opponents by demonstrating how dangerous and frightening an adversary one can be. Opponents can fight, flee, submit or posture themselves.

Posturing is exceptionally easy to see in child soldiers who have not had rigorous military training, such as with the young boys and men who fought in Liberia a few years ago. Video footage shows them firing their weapons with apparent abandon, shooting from the hip, dancing as they celebrated their manliness. They were much more concerned with posturing in front of their buddies and the enemy than they were in trying to actually kill people on the other side.

Posturing has always been a huge part of war, embodied in ritual and myth. Modern methods of military training channel the spirit behind such posturing into more efficient methods for killing, but nevertheless posturing is still commonplace (Grossman, 1996).

Separation and intimacy

One of humanity's central dilemmas is separation. The Buddha identified separation from what one loves as one of the “six moments when life's dislocation becomes glaringly apparent”(Smith, 1991, p. 102). It often plays an extremely important role in conflict.

I wrote about separation in this blog entry.

In a relationship if two people separate their intimacy is either stopped completely, or at the very least severely curtailed. One of the most bizarre aspects of military occupation is that this is not the case. Peoples are separated alright, but then they are pulled together in the most intimate of manners. Salam Fayyad, former Finance Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, explains this paradox.

He says: 'Examining the past 6 years of this conflict, I would characterize the Israeli-Palestinian relations over this period as having been too intimate—too intimate for the Palestinians and too intimate for the Israelis. You may be stunned by this characterization, for many have characterized it as the opposite. But the nature of relations today between Israelis and Palestinians has reached levels of micromanagement, where Israel is involved in the minute details of the lives of Palestinians. It is important to remember that the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is ruled by military orders—not by politics, logic, or reason—but by military orders with “security” dictating the rules of the game.'

If anything, Fayyad was being diplomatic. These “military orders” can make Palestinian's lives hell, with women unable to make it on time to hospital to give birth and cancer patients dying at the checkpoint because soldiers refused to let them pass through by vehicle, to cite but two very recent examples.

Tamar Meshulam

Artists and designers often have fascinating insights into life’s moments of separation, intimacy, awareness and identity.

Tamar Meshulam is a Jewish woman hailing from Jerusalem, who designed a peace game called Master Peace that won the first prize at the most recent UNESCO Design contest, a contest held every five years encouraging young designers to make a positive contribution to society. She says “Every game stands for something, Monopoly stands for capitalism; chess stands for war. I wanted to create something that stands for cooperation.”



Palestinians and Israelis have played the game together, and the game has generated interest in the Middle East, Europe, and the US. It has been described as “a communication project which uses the medium of a game to trigger off group dynamic processes among the players which contribute to an understanding of the ethnic groups and cultures in Israel.”

That’s one way of thinking about it. I spent some time interviewing Tamar, but frankly we are better off reading an account from the magazine Egypt Today. I have modified slightly an article of theirs, and reproduced it:

To play the game, the players are asked to work on a collective story in order to complete a “self-journey” from a place called home, outwards, and then back to home. This is a journey where identity is nurtured; people feel safe and recognize themselves.

The magazine poses the question that these are nice ideas, but how is it possible for Palestinians and Israelis to agree on a constructive story when they cannot yet agree on their past?

Tamar responds by saying “during the game there isn’t one past to agree on, because the story is composed of pieces of everybody’s interpretation of reality. The others are asked to try to comprehend the player’s point of view, and learn to accept it, though not necessarily to fully understand it.” The group’s agreements through their dialogue are made for present actions.

For Tamar cultural exchange is a vital part of the peace process. She says “Israelis and Palestinians experience their common history each in their own way of perceiving life. Getting to know each other’s mental perspective is beneficial for the future construction of our relations.”

“To accept the other’s experience and having the other accept yours is a major step in any relationship, if it ever happens. In the political sense, the situation between Palestine and Israel was a strategic ‘war game’. Now it aims for ‘no game,’ which is a long distance from ‘cooperative game’ [such as Master Peace].”

Tamar says “the use of abstraction in the game, acts as a method for opening new ways of expression instead of repetitive clichés. It definitely does not mean forgetting pasts. This whole game is based on the identities people gather throughout their collective and personal pasts.”

Ancestry

When we talk our collective pasts, of course, we talk of our ancestors. Wherever we go, we bring our ancestors with us. We bring them in our bodies. Our bodies are a living workshop of previous generations' embodied experiences. We bring our ancestors in our minds too. Our expectations, values, knowledge, experiences, hopes, fears and desires reflect what our ancestors thought. Whatever innovations we as individuals bring forth into the world always occur within the design patterns our ancestors have given us.

The ancestors I bring with me on my travels hail from the youthful country Aotearoa New Zealand, and before that from Britain and Greece. I had never personally been to the continent of Africa before visiting there last year. Returning to the United States after spending time in Uganda and South Africa gave me a new understanding of African Americans.

This was not a gradual realization. Rather, it struck me with tremendous force one day in Washington, DC as I saw an African-American man walk ahead of me. I realized that this man had likely descended from slaves forcibly brought to the United States from somewhere in the vast continent of Africa.

It was not an intellectual realization. Since being a small boy I have known that slavery had existed in the United States. Instead, it was an emotional reaction at a gut level. For a few moments, I was observing not an African-American walking down a street in what may well have been his home town. I was seeing a former slave. This man symbolized slavery. His ancestors were not only with him—they were him.

This powerful feeling was made possible only because of my time spent in South Africa and Uganda. Cape Town felt to me like a white town with black people on the periphery. Kampala, on the other hand, felt like a black person’s country, rippling with a multitude of black cultures and subcultures living alongside one another.

Without me being necessarily consciously aware of it, Kampala came to symbolize a truly African home. When I saw the man who had become a slave in Washington, DC, Kampala provided me with the mental imagery to imaginatively recreate the home he had been ripped away from, ending up in a city that symbolized the overwhelming power of the white Western world.

None of this is to suggest that an African-American leads a life any less authentic than a Ugandan, or that a white South African is somehow less African than a black South African.

All lives and all identities are authentic. To suggest one part of the African continent is truly African while another part is not, is not to comment on the authenticity of those who live there, but on the visible intensity of the presence of the place's ancestors.

It is worth noting that in describing his experience playing Idi Amin in the film “The Last King of Scotland”, Forest Whitakker very recently said “I'm African-American, I'm not African. It is my ancestors that come from there, so I had to understand a different rhythm, a different way of looking at the world.”

“Because I was dealing with a lot of people just as friends,” he says, “I got to understand that part of myself that is already deeply rooted in my ancestors in Africa in the way I behave, and that became stronger and stronger as I went along.”

Favela Morro da Pereira

On the day I arrived in Rio de Janeiro, on December 28 2006, violence left 18 dead.

The worst attack was on a bus. About 10 assailants surrounded the bus on a major highway and tossed gasoline-filled bottles inside. The attackers set the bus on fire and prevented the 28 passengers from getting off. Seven people burned to death.

Imagine you were one of the 28 people on that bus. Can you see the men surrounding you, trapping you, hemming you in? Can you see the flames leap and dance? Can you feel the heat burning your skin? Can you hear the screams of your relatives and friends, wounded and dying? Can you smell the burning gasoline, the burning seats, the burning hair, and the burning flesh?

It is safe to assume almost everybody in Rio believes the attackers came from the favelas, which are the sprawling slums perched on steep hills and other marginal places which are a legacy of slavery. Favelas are controlled by powerful gangs who deal in drugs and organized crime. Rio de Janeiro has one of the highest murder rates of any city in the world, and street crime is a major problem. In short, favelas have a notorious reputation.

Morro da Pereira is a favela in Rio de Janeiro. Neucirlan Oliveira lives there. He likes the sense of community and solidarity found in the favelas. Neucirlan is a peacebuilder, literally—he built a model of his favela on the hill outside his family home.



He started when he was 14 and of the boys that helped him, only one took up a life of violence by becoming a gang member. His name was Max, and he was shot dead by the police. I asked him why people join gangs. He said such young people lack information on the reality of what they are about to participate in. “They don't realise they can change the world” he says.

His peacebuilding work could do with some improvement—he banned girls from building the mini favela, justifying this with what are obviously feeble reasons. Perhaps he did so because it might lead to conflict among the boys themselves, disrupting their solidarity.

Despite his gender discrimination, his mini-favela has contributed to peace. But how are we to understand his artistic endeavor as a peacebuilding phenomena?

Since Aristotle is one of my ancestors, I feel it entirely appropriate to leave the last word to him. Paraphrasing Thomas Cahill (Cahill, 2003), we can draw upon Aristotle’s timeless observations of the Greek play, Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos, and apply them to Neucirlan’s efforts:

This is not life but a mimicking of life. We have been playing with imitation humans that can be put back in their homes made of bricks. We leave the mini favela warned by what we have witnessed but purged of negative emotions. We are pleasantly exhausted now; as if we had recently expelled a poison from our body. We are at peace, exalted by our encounter with this pageant of truth. We are restored by this vicarious brush with destruction and death. We didn't die. We are still alive—and can face tomorrow with a certain placid wisdom.

Aristotle's brilliant analysis has never been improved upon.


References

Cahill, T. (2003). Sailing the Wine-Dark sea: Why the Greeks Matter (1st ed.). New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.

Ghose, A. (1971). The Future Evolution of Man: The Divine Life Upon Earth (2d ed.). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

Grossman, D. (1996). On killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1st pbk. ed.). Boston: Little, Brown.

Smith, H. (1991). The World's Religions. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

The death of the moon

This past Sunday I called my classmate Moon in Jerusalem from the top of the Pyramid of the Moon, Teotihuacán, Mexico.


Moon, Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem

Two ancient holy cities were thus connected by modern technology.


Pyramid of the Moon, Teotihuacán, Mexico

From the Pyramid of the Moon, a couple looks down on the Avenue of the Dead. No technology can stop anyone making their own walk down the avenue of the dead -- one reason we have holy sites, I suppose.


Couple viewing Avenue of the Dead, Teotihuacán

While the moon shines without blocking the light of the stars behind it (as Moon is fond of pointing out), it shines because of the sun, a star like those it shares the sky with. When the sun dies, the moon will remain, but it may not ever be seen again by any conscious being. With no one to see it, will it also be dead? No, a reader protests, it still exists. It is not dead. It simply cannot be seen. Likewise, when our body dies, do we still exist, merely unseen? Or to put the question another way: in the depths of consciousness, do we outlive even the stars?

***

Last Friday an old Mexican woman working behind a stall in Chicago airport asked me if I drank. She was happy when I said no. She left her husband in Mexico, she says, because he beat her and because he drank. She works long hours and everyday prays for her son. On the plane to Mexico City a Mexican man told me enthusiastically how he was going to visit some strip bars in a town near Cuernavaca, drink a lot of liquor, and sample the local women. All for much cheaper than is possible in Chicago. As he loudly told me of his plans, a woman sitting in front of him with her children asked him to shut up. He went on to recount a time when he was caught driving when utterly drunk by the police near Cuernavaca. A healthy bribe meant he avoided costly legal proceedings. He said you can murder someone in Mexico and a big enough bribe will set you free. If he was aware of how his willingness to bribe contributes to a culture of corruption, lawlessness and hence murder, he did not say.

"As a person acts, so he becomes in life. Those who do good become good; those who do harm become bad. Good deeds make one pure; bad deeds make one impure. So we are said to be what our desire is. As our desire is, so is our will. As our will is, so are our acts. As we act, so we become." - Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

"When you keep thinking about sense objects, attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire, the lust of possession that burns to anger. Anger clouds the judgement; you can no longer learn from past mistakes. Lost is the power to choose between what is wise and what is unwise, and your life is utter waste. But when you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the Self." - Bhagavad Gita

The death of two fathers

Someone asked me recently if what I write in this blog is true. Of course it is. I will share a tale with you which you can choose to disbelieve if you like. But I assure you, it is true.

My mother and father separated when I was four years old. I took the loss of my father badly. I missed having a father very much. I remember when he came back to visit our house with a new wife and a small boy wrapped in a white sheet, my half-brother. I felt abandoned.

When I met my step-father for the first time, he was not yet my step-father. He was my neighbor. I told him that I used to have a father, but he went away, and I did not have one anymore. Imagine a five year old boy saying that to a grown man. He remembered it. Later he and my mother got together. I remember the day my mother telling me I could call the man who had become my step-father "Dad". I remember him hugging me for the first time, when we were alone one evening. I felt safe.

I don't remember much from my youth, but I remember these things, for they were of seminal importance to me.

My step-father died of lung cancer in 1996. I was living in Manila at the time. He called me on the telephone on the day he died. I did not know he was going to die that day. I asked him if he was going to enjoy the cricket season that was coming up. He said, with a particular tone of voice, "no I don't think so." Later that day he coughed and coughed, coughing up blood and parts of his lungs into a bucket. He turned a different color and drowned in his blood as my step-sister held him. I attended his funeral in Upper Hutt, New Zealand. When I came back to Manila a week after he died, I went back to my internship on a Monday and there was a letter from him. He had sent it the day he died.

I was at work in 1998, still in Manila, when my mother called on the telephone to tell me some bad news. There was that tone of voice again. I thought immediately "my grandmother has died", but my mother had called to tell me my biological father had been hit by a train and killed instantly. Here is the the part that cannot be true, but is. I had written him an e-mail shortly before my mother had called, but I had not sent it. It was to be my first communication with him in a year or so. I even signed off with "Love" which was not something I did with him in those days. By the time my mother called me, he would have been dead for quite some hours, as the police had a difficult time locating his wife so they could notify her of the tragedy.

My biological father and I were not close. He rarely communicated with my brother and I when we were small boys, and as we got older things did not really improve much.

What I have to say next has no scientific basis that I am aware of. But I will say it anyway. Imagine if I had sent the e-mail to my biological father the day before he died, and he had read it. That would have been nice. But did we deserve that? Maybe it was our own stupid fault for not keeping in contact with one another. Instead, for some reason I had a strong urge to write it after he had been killed, even though I had no way of knowing he had died. Maybe he communicated with me after his death. Maybe in writing the e-mail that was never sent, he somehow read it. Who knows.

One thing is certain: for me the deaths of my two fathers were entirely different in character, but they tell a story that is fair and just. With my step-father our communication on the day of his death reflected our life together, and with my biological father it reflected the life we did not have together.

Loyal Daughters of Notre Dame

It was sometime in 1998, Manila. I was lying on a bed. Some men and maybe a woman were holding me down. I don't remember exactly, as I was not totally aware of all that was happening around me. I was wearing no underwear. A foreign object had been inserted into my anus, up past my rectum and into my colon. It hurt. It really hurt. My screams could be heard from the hallway. My girlfriend at the time, Buena, was debating with herself whether to charge into the room and put an end to things, but she did not. I could hear a female voice--the voice of authority and control in the room--saying again and again, "just a little bit further". I begged her to stop, but she did not. She continued looking at the television screen. The pain was unbearable. At last it stopped, and I passed out.

The foreign object in my intestines was a video camera. The woman who put it there was a doctor. The people holding me down were nurses. A person was missing: the anesthetist, who was supposed to make me unconscious before things got underway. He or she had not shown up. I had given my consent to the doctor to proceed with the procedure with a much reduced level of anaesthetic that she herself administered.

Rape is an event that occurs without the victim's consent. I have never been raped. I do not know what it is like to experience rape. But I do know for years after that traumatic experience in the hospital, there was no way anyone was going to put any kind of object anywhere near my anus. I may not ever give consent to it.

Sexual violence attacks the integrity of body, mind and spirit. This is what gives it its power. If it merely attacked the body, its effects lasting as long a common cold, then it wouldn't matter so much (ignoring of course the transmission of disease). Instead, its violation is profound, penetrating not only the body but emotions deep within the mind, emotions we cannot fully understand let alone control.

The raw sensitivity and brutal intensity of these emotions is perhaps known fully only to those who experience it, or immerse themselves in empathy with those who have. I would never have known the sense of violation of being "felt up" unless it happened to me. Of the range of sexual assaults, this is extremely minor. Yet I can never forget the time in San Francisco more than thirteen years ago when I was felt up. For the first time in my adult life I was wearing a dress. It was Halloween, and my costume for one of Castro's famous street parties was tame compared to many others. While leaving a bar with two of my friends, an Australian named Slim and an Austrian named Helma, someone, who I could not identify, placed a hand up the inside of my legs and headed toward my genitals. I tried to turn and around and see who it was, but people were packed in so tightly I could not do so. It was truly a creepy, awful and absolutely unwelcome feeling, leaving me with a sense of violation far more powerful than I would have ever imagined before experiencing it.

When I hear my female friends talk of their fear of being raped, I listen with all my heart and soul. I can ask them to describe how they felt, to hear how their body and mind responded to the fear. But I know that I cannot really know unless I experience that fear myself. My body and mind does not have the memory of rape, only the imagination of it.

This lack of experiential memory, paradoxically, is one reason among many why it is so crucial that initiatives like that of University of Notre Dame senior Emily Weisbecker's play Loyal Daughters are widely seen and discussed. The play, whose theme is sexuality and sexual assault as told by Notre Dame students, gave voice to actual student victims of sexual violence on and off campus. They included a woman raped in a library toilet by a member of the university's famous college football team, another woman raped by two men one after the other, and the attempted rape of one man by another. Their stories were at times graphic, and always real.

Loyal Daughters was performed this week at Notre Dame amidst some controversy, as the President of Notre Dame, Father Jenkins, withdrew his complete support for the play on the grounds that it 'at times takes a "neutral stance" toward consensual sex outside of marriage.' However according to student newspaper the Observor, Weisbecker said 'the goal of the play was not to explain Catholic teaching to audiences or preach right from wrong but rather to give "a glimpse of what's really going on [so they can] make [their] own decisions."'

In his inaugural address as President, Father Jenkins said "We will strive to build a community generous to those in need and responsive to the demands of justice – strengthened by grace and guided by the command to love God and neighbor. . . . Catholic social teaching insists that we embrace the whole human family, especially those in greatest need."

Women and men who have been sexually violated as students, faculty and workers are among those in greatest need of help on our campus. While I fully respect that one Father Jenkin's many responsibilities is to represent the teachings of the Catholic Church authentically, wisely and insightfully, I cannot help but wonder if his withdrawal of full support for the play undermined his support for ending sexual violence at Notre Dame. Would it have been possible for the women and men to tell their stories of sexual violence through the play without representing the reality of the environment in which these acts take place? Had this environment been stripped out of the play, would the audience have been able to relate their own everyday norms and attitudes on topics such as sex and alcohol to the dreadful acts the play reported? It is not enough to know that sexual violence occurs within the Notre Dame community. The play was responsible not only because of what it reported but also because it implicated attitudes many students hold, including those who would not dream of actually committing sexual violence.

As Father Jenkins himself said in his inaugural address, the "first principle" of a Catholic University is that "Knowledge is good in itself and should be pursued for its own sake." The second principle: "There is a deep harmony between faith and reason." Genuine social change requires not only faith in God, it requires faith in people: in their ability to think critically, examining their values and behaviours so that they can change them. With his deep knowledege of and respect for human nature, Father Jenkins knows this as well as anyone. By withdrawing his full support, whether he wanted to or not he weakened our community's ability to discuss openly our problems and make responsible changes in our lives. He weakened our ability to carry on the kind of conversations "in the dormitories, the dining halls, on the quads, and on long walks around the lakes" that he welcomes. We did not need to be preached to in the play. We needed to see ourselves and know more than ever that we need to make the promise of positive social change a reality.

Two phone calls with my mother

One of my most precious memories of my mother is one, strangely enough, where we were thousands of kilometers apart. We did not even get to exchange conversation. Yet all the same, I felt a powerful connection to her as we shared a special moment in time. It was the evening of December 31, 1999. I was in a large room functioning as the sleeping quarters, kitchen and general living area for two monks. It led into a temple in the Songzanlin Monastery, nestled at the foot of hills overlooking Zhongdian, Yunnan, China. Having just arrived an hour or two before, my hosts were as curious about me as I was about them. They stood looking at me in their robes with attentive smiles as I called my mother to greet her on the new millennium using a cellphone. I looked back at them joyously as I left a message enthusiastically telling her where I was and who I was with.


My mother, Jennifer Lynch

The two monks could not understand the details of much, if anything, of what I was saying. One of them spoke a little English, enough to say "come, sit down" and to welcome me to stay the night with them. In the next few days I discovered he had learned English while walking for three months from Nepal to Dharamsala in India. He would have caught the bus but he had run out of money after catching a bus from Yunnan into Tibet, and then from Tibet into Nepal.


Temple, Songzanlin Monastery

A few days later I received a happy email from my mother telling me about her new millennium experience on a beach in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the surprise and delight she felt surge through her when she listened to the unexpected phone message.

I put in hours and hours of meditation in the ten days I spent at the monastery. I remember going onto the roof of the temple building and gazing up into the stars in the dark of night, thinking that in our deepest consciousness we can outlive even the stars. I remember my host explaining the Chinese occupation of Tibet with simple yet remarkably vivid language: "China sit in Tibet, very bad". I remember him not letting me sweep clean the months and perhaps years of accumulated dirt in the room above the temple. I remember the room we slept in being so cold at night that water would freeze. Then there was the yak butter tea that tasted nothing like tea, but rather just as you would expect a mix of regular butter and hot water to taste. But most of all I remember leaving my mother a happy and hopeful message on the night I arrived.

A few years later my mother became a Buddhist in the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Her new practice and faith was a great help to her as she struggled first with cancer, and then with her impending death. Within fifteen minutes of her passing away in the Mary Potter hospice in Wellington New Zealand on March 29 2006, I made another phone call. This time it was to Lama Karma Samten Gyatso, a Tibetan monk staying in Dharamsala. He performed an "ejection of consciousness" ritual by chanting over the telephone. When the ritual was completed he asked me to locate the crown of her head. When I had done so, he then asked me to grip some of her hair and pull it out. I remember thinking "but it will hurt!" before realizing that it no longer made a difference. Lama Samten informed me that the hair was to be used in a fire ritual to be held later that year in Dharamsala.


Ejection of consciousness ritual

Two phone calls across the world thus connected three Tibetan monks and a mother and son in the great mystery we know as life. There was a connection between those calls. They were not isolated events. They circle both my mother's life and my own.