Received in an e-mail yesterday . . .



"A Letter To Veterans"

There is a certain bond between those who have served in the military.
Veterans come in all sizes, shapes and persuasions and don't
necessarily always agree, but we cover each other's backs. Especially
among those who have trained for or seen the horrors of war directly
and are now committed to a peaceful world. When we hear a veteran speak
about combat it does something to us. Even among non-combat vets there
is empathy for the suffering we know will be expressed. There is guilt
about what more we could have done. Surviving veterans know each
other's pain.

Combat vets served during the very hardest of times. Vietnam and Iraq
are the nadir of empire, and we have seen the bloody entrails when
bullets and bombs go wrong and a country turns its back. Like the Light
Brigade, we were sent on missions we couldn't have won, and shouldn't
have won if we could. We ended up killing and being killed for the
wrong reasons or for no reason at all. These wars were fool's errands
that made the few rich and left the many with too much pain to
remember. As the war of occupation in Iraq nears completion of five
bloody years with 4,000 Americans and over a million Iraqi deaths,
Americans, especially veterans, have an increased awareness of how
occupation destroys the occupier as well as the occupied.

But who is there to tell? The people back home, misled by the Bush
administration and the media? The media waved flags and cheered the war
on, blinding America to the coming burdens, sufferings and deaths of
our own soldiers and of the Iraqi people as their country and lives
were destroyed. There are deep wounds, both of the body and spirit that
our veterans bring back home, if they come back at all, to the country
they served, not always proudly but with love.

Many now are sick of the so-called glory, sick of the lame excuses
that send young men and women to fight in a war for oil and empire to
make the few wealthy, gorged with their own power, while hundreds of
thousands are reduced to desperate, haunted lives because of lies.

That is why from March 13-March 16, U.S. veterans who served in Iraq
and Afghanistan will testify to what is really happening day in and day
out, on the ground in these occupations. It is called Winter Soldier
and is organized by IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War).

Iraq Veterans Against the War intends, by telling their stories, that
they begin to heal not only themselves but also our country. This is
the second version of Winter Soldier, the first being the testimony
given by Vietnam veterans in 1971, consequently made into a full-length
documentary of the same name.

But the name goes back even further to another time in history, a
period when Americans were the ones being occupied by a foreign power.
Tom Paine, then a foot soldier at Valley Forge in 1776 wrote, "These
are the times that try men's souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis,
shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now,
deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

Following Winter Soldier on Wednesday, March 19, and marking five
years of occupation in Iraq, national and local peace groups are
calling for a day of non violent civil resistance and direct action in
Washington D.C.

Veterans For Peace, a national organization of vets dedicated to
raising public awareness of the true costs and consequences of
militarism and war is inviting all veterans to join in a massive
Veterans March for Peace throughout the Capital on March 19.

Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Vietnam Veterans
Against the War and other veterans groups dedicated to peace do not
intend to desert the country in its time of need. Service men and women
take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution (and the country)
against all enemies foreign and domestic. These days it is clear that
the real enemies are our own so called leaders. As veterans we look
forward to another chance to serve, this time, as citizens to free
America from the evils that imperil us and the world: an administration
spun out of control, wreaking our economy, polluting the earth, waging
preemptive wars of aggression and killing millions in our name. These
are the times that try men's (and women's) souls. Please join us.

To find out more about Winter Soldier and March 19 google Veterans for
Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War and/or 5 Years too Many. Actual
web sites are: http://www.veteransforpeace.org/;
http://www.5yearstoomany.org/; http://ivaw.org/

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The video below includes brief interviews with some Iraq Veterans Against the War as well as combat re-enactments staged during demonstrations in New York.

 

                                               

BY BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

There are many ways to tell the story of what happened on Good Friday. According to John, it involved a collusion between religion and politics. While Pilate and the chief priests conspired to solve their mutual problem while managing to remain enemies, Jesus stood at the center of the stage like a mirror in which all those around him saw themselves clearly for who they were. One way we Christians have avoided seeing our own reflections in the mirror is to pretend that this is a story about Romans and Jews. As long as they remain the villains, then we are off the hook -- or so we think. Unfortunately, this is not a story that happened a long time ago in a land far away.

Sons and daughters of God are killed in every generation. They have been killed in holy wars and inquisitions, concentration camps and prison cells. They have been killed in Cape Town, Memphis, El Salvador and Alabama. The charges against them have run the gamut, but treason and blasphemy have headed the list, just as they did for Jesus. He upset those in charge at the courthouse and the temple. He suggested they were not doing their jobs. He offered himself as a mirror they could see themselves in, and they were so appalled by what they saw that they smashed it. They smashed him every way they could.

One of the many things this story tells us is that Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God's will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff's office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar.

This is a story that can happen anywhere at any time, and we are as likely to be the perpetrators as the victims. I doubt that many of us will end up playing Annas, Caiaphas or Pilate, however. They may have been the ones who gave Jesus the death sentence, but a large part of him had already died before they ever got to him -- the part Judas killed off, then Peter, the all those who fled. Those are the roles with our names on them -- not the enemies but the friends.

Whenever someone famous gets into trouble, that is one of the first things the press focuses on. What do his friends do? Do they support him or do they tell reporters that, unfortunately, they had seen trouble coming for some time? One of the worst things a friend can say is what Peter said. We weren't friends, exactly. Acquaintances might be a better word. Actually, we just worked together. For the same company, I mean. Not together, just near each other. My desk was near his. I didn't really know him at all.

No one knows what Judas said. In John's Gospel he does not say a word, but where he stands says it all. After he has led some 200 Roman soldiers and the temple police to the secret garden where Jesus is praying, Judas stands with the militia. Even when Jesus comes forward to identify himself, Judas does not budge. He is on the side with the weapons and the handcuffs, and he intends to stay there.

Or maybe it was not his own safety that motivated him. Maybe he just fell out of love with Jesus. That happens sometimes. One day you think someone is wonderful and the next day he says or does something that makes you think twice. He reminds you of the difference between the two of you and you start hating him for that -- for the difference -- enough to begin thinking of some way to hurt hm back.

I remember being at a retreat once where the leader asked us to think of someone who represented Christ in our lives. When it came time to share our answers, one woman stood up and said, "I had to think hard about that one. I kept thinking, Who is it who told me the truth about myself so clearly that I wanted to kill him for it?" According to John, Jesus died because he told the truth to everyone he met. He was the truth, a perfect mirror in which people saw themselves in God's own light.

What happened then goes on happening now. In the presence of his integrity, our own pretense is exposed. In the presence of his constancy, our cowardice is brought to light. In the presence of his fierce love for God and for us, our own hardness of heart is revealed. Take him out of the room and all those things become relative. I am not that much worse than you are nor you than I, but leave him out of the room and there is no room to hide. He is the light of the world. In his presence, people either fall down to worship him or do everything they can to extinguish his light.

A cross and nails are not always necessary. There are a thousand ways to kill him, some of them as obvious as choosing where you will stand when the showdown between the weak and the strong comes along, others of them as subtle as keeping your mouth shut when someone asks you if you know him.

Today, while he dies, to not turn away. Make yourself look in the mirror. Today no one gets away without being shamed by his beauty. Today no one flees without being laid bare by his light.

--Barbara Brown Taylor, from the anthology Bread and Wine

the empty tomb

Received in an e-mail from the Network of Spiritual Progressives, by Walter Wink:

Considering the weight the early church attached to the resurrection, it is curious that, subsequent to the empty-tomb stories, no two resurrection accounts in the four Gospels are alike. All of these narratives seem to be very late additions to the tradition. They answer a host of questions raised by the gospel of the resurrection. At the core of all these accounts is the simple testimony: we experienced Jesus as alive.

A later generation that did not witness a living Jesus needed more; for them the resurrection narratives answered that need. But what had those early disciples experienced? What does it mean to say that they experienced Jesus alive? The resurrection appearances did not, after all, take place in the temple before thousands of worshipers, but in the privacy of homes or cemeteries. They did not occur before religious authorities, but to the disciples hiding from those authorities. The resurrection was not a worldwide historic event that could have been filmed, but a privileged revelation reserved for the few.

Nevertheless, something "objective" did happen to God, to Jesus, and to the disciples. What happened was every bit as real as any other event, only it was not historically observable. It was an event in the history of the psyche. The ascension was the entry of Jesus into the archetypal realm. Though skeptics might interpret what the disciples experienced as a mass hallucination, the experience itself cannot be denied.

This is what may have happened: the very image of God was altered by the sheer force of Jesus being. God would never be the same. Jesus had indelibly imprinted the divine; God had everlastingly entered the human. In Jesus, God took on humanity, furthering the evolution revealed in Ezekiel's vision of Yahweh on the throne in "the likeness, as it were, of a human form" (Ezek. 1:26). Jesus, it seemed to his followers, had infiltrated the Godhead.

The ascension marks, on the divine side, the entry of Jesus into the son-of-the-man archetype; from then on Jesus' followers would experience God through the filter of Jesus. Incarnation means that not only is Jesus like God, but that God is now like Jesus. It is a prejudice of modern thought that events happen only in the outer world. What Christians regard as the most significant event in human history happened, according to the Gospels, in the psychic realm, and it altered external history irrevocably. Ascension was an "objective" event, if you will, but it took place in the imaginal realm, at the substratum of human existence, where the most fundamental changes in consciousness take place.

Something also happened to the disciples. They experienced the most essential aspect of Jesus as remaining with them after his death. They had seen him heal, preach, and cast out demons, but had localized these powers in him. Though the powers had always been in them as well, while Jesus was alive they tended to project these latent, God-given powers onto him. They had only known those powers in him. So it was natural, after his resurrection, to interpret the unleashing of those powers in themselves, as if Jesus himself had taken residence in their hearts. And it was true: the God at the center of their beings was now indistinguishable from the Jesus who had entered the Godhead. Jesus, in many of the post-Easter son-of-the-man sayings, seems to speak of the Human Being (the "son of man") as other than himself. Was Jesus stepping aside, as he seems to do in the Gospels, to let the Human Being become the inner entelechy (the regulating and directing force) of their souls?

The disciples also saw that the spirit that had worked within Jesus continued to work in and through them. In their preaching they extended his critique of domination. They continued his life by advancing his mission. They persisted in proclaiming the domination-free order of God inaugurated by Jesus.

The ascension was a "fact" on the imaginal plane, not just an assertion of faith. It irreversibly altered the nature of the disciples' consciousness. They would never again be able to think of God apart from Jesus. They sensed themselves accompanied by Jesus (Luke 24:13-35). They found in themselves a New Being that they had hitherto only experienced in Jesus. They knew themselves endowed with a spirit-power they had known only occasionally, such as when Jesus had sent them out to perform healings (Mark:7-13). In their struggles with the powers that be, they knew that whatever their doubts, losses, or sufferings, the final victory was God's, because Jesus had conquered death and the fear of death and led them out of captivity.

Jesus the man, the sage, the itinerant teacher, the prophet, even the lowly Human Being, while unique and profound, was not able to turn the world upside down. His attempt to do so was a decided failure. Rather, it was his ascension, his metamorphosis into the archetype of humanness that did so for his disciples. The Human Being constituted a remaking of the values that had undergirded the domination system for some 3,000 years before Jesus. The critique of domination continued to build on the Exodus and the prophets of Israel, to be sure. But Jesus' ascension to the right hand of the Power of God was a supernova in the archetypal sky. As the image of the truly Human One, Jesus became an exemplar of the utmost possibilities for living.

Could the son-of-the-man material have been lore that grew up to induce visions of the Human Being? Could it have been a way to activate altered states of consciousness based on meditation on the ascended Human Being enthroned upon the heart? It was not enough simply to know about the mystical path. One needed to take it.

The ascension was real. Something happened to God, to Jesus, and to the disciples. I am not suggesting that the ascension is nonhistorical, but rather that the historical is the wrong category for understanding ascension. The ascension is not a historical fact to be believed, but an imaginal experience to be undergone. It is not at datum of public record, but divine transformative power overcoming the powers of death. The religious task for us today is not to cling to dogma but to seek a personal experience of the living God in whatever mode is meaningful.

Walter Wink is professor emeritus of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and author of 16 books. He is best known for his trilogy on "The Powers" and his fascinating interpretation of Jesus' teachings on nonviolence.