Truth-seeking

From my grandfather, Dr. John R. Rice, I learned about story-telling, poetry, and the importance of expressing love, grief, and joy. He was an old-fashioned, fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstone, country Baptist preacher from Texas, and he was the son, himself, of generations of preachers. My grandfather’s religion was no academic religion, no intellectual exercise in theology or disputation—though he was a theologian who engaged in many polemics about dogma, faith, and belief. His was a religion of the heart and the soul, a religion of the poor and the humble, the brokenhearted and the lost. And he was a preacher because he loved his fellow humans.

As I was growing up, I heard my grandfather preach hundreds of sermons, and each of them was a string of stories—one story or parable or illustration after another. As he preached, he recited poetry, recited long passages of scripture, sang scraps of hymns, and talked to people alive and dead, from his wife sitting in the front pew to his own long-gone mother looking down on him from heaven. In every sermon, he broke into tears a half dozen times as he spoke of his passion for winning lost souls to Jesus.  

For my grandfather, his religion, his faith and the core of his motivation as a pastor, teacher, counselor and evangelist were all about telling stories and hearing stories and exchanging stories. What I learned from him was that we all make meaning out of the heartache and struggles of our lives, and we do so by constructing a narrative that can contain the sense of what we have seen and experienced. We convey our grief and suffering through storytelling, we communicate our happiness and rejoicing through storytelling, and we teach some of what we have learned from our lives and from each other through storytelling.

But I also learned from my grandfather an absolute, black-and-white morality. He believed that all of us are sinners and doomed to an eternal hell, literally a lake of fire in which we will experience the torments and agony of the damned forever unless we have accepted Jesus into our hearts. For the living, my grandfather had a very strict set of moral categories. Either you were an agent of God and living for the Lord, or you were an agent of the Devil and living for yourself. As humans, we could do evil, or we could do good, but there was little in between. And his own very literal interpretation of the Bible determined to which category you belonged.

This has a particular relevance to the subject of war and to the human response to war. Violent conflict is perhaps the most extreme and intense collective human activity. As many veterans of combat have said, it is hard to go back to an ordinary life, working in an ordinary job and living in an ordinary house behind a white picket fence and a patch of green lawn when you’ve lived at the very edge of human existence in the course of a war, under conditions of duress and danger, terror and exhilaration, and in the company of comrades who have shared that experience with you. Combat provides a peculiar and deadly thrill, even as it rewires the brain and unleashes the nightmares.

As a young man and a civilian during the most tragic and terrible years of the Vietnam War, I understood little or nothing about the experience of the combat veteran. I was deeply opposed to the war and horrified by what I saw on the television evening news and the daily newspaper. I hated the politicians who launched the war and the generals who led the war and the officers and soldiers who participated in the war.  And I hated my grandfather who justified the war in the name of God, and who was enraged by those who opposed the war. He thought of them as hippies, communists, apostates and agents of the Devil. When I joined the ranks of the peaceniks, I was tarred with their brush. And I proclaimed my own absolute and self-righteous opposition to the pro-war politics of my grandfather.

I would have made any sacrifice during the Vietnam War if I thought it would help to end that war, and I devoted myself completely to the peace movement. I gave up college, forgot about a career and an ordinary life, was arrested several times, and devoted myself to being an activist against the war and then an activist for civil rights and social justice generally in the years that followed the war.

It is interesting to me now to look back on those days and understand that I shared my grandfather’s absolute morality and his sense of self righteousness. I believed that US soldiers were engaged in an immoral enterprise—the war in Vietnam—and thus were available for my condemnation. I had little compassion for the suffering of the soldiers themselves, and I failed to understand that they were themselves victims of the war. I refused to look at their motivations, and resisted looking at their sufferings and sorrows, because I thought they had made moral choices that were worthy of my own sanctified disapproval.

I have a history as a fool, and an arrogant one. My foolishness was not to oppose the war, but to oppose the warrior. My arrogance was to imagine that I had a lock on truth, justice, and morality, and that my motives were clean and pure, while those of my opponents were racist, violent and morally contaminated.

I have learned lessons in the making of the film Voices in Wartime. Compassion for the warrior, even as we search for alternatives to the practice of war itself. Regard for the long-term costs borne by the civilian victims of war, and their need for healing, support, and opportunity. Respect and gratitude for the soldier who volunteers to give his life for the health and safety of his community, even as we might decry the policies that thrust him into danger. Love and support for the families of those soldiers, who suffer from their absence and pray for their safe return. Finally, an appreciation for the role of art in general and storytelling in particular in healing the wounds of war and rebuilding the community.

In the end, all we have are the human bonds of love and care that connect us. Those bonds are forged through the telling of our common tale, across the gaps of history, culture and language, through the poems, stories, images and chaos of our common dilemma – how to listen to each other and work for healing when every instinct tells us to hoard our suspicions and launch preemptive strikes on our enemies.

In the end, the memory of my grandfather that lingers is the one that reveals him most as my kindred soul. In one of his sermons, he told the story of the death of his mother, Sarah LaPrade Rice, when he was a little boy of five:

“I remember the November day when we lay her body away. My father knelt beside the open grave. There was no white muslin to hide the raw dirt of the grave – like a wound in the earth. No fake, manmade carpet of grass was thrown over the clods. My father put one arm around his two little orphan girls and one around his two little boys, and watched as they lowered the precious body in its dark casket into the bosom of Mother Earth. The rain beat down upon us, and a friendly neighbor held an umbrella over our heads.”

In that paragraph is the core of the grief that remained with him throughout his life, and that fueled his passion to win souls to Jesus. It was an impulse toward redemption, sacrifice, and love, and what he thought of as Heaven itself, in the most literal sense.
In the grief of my grandfather, and in his love and sense of loss, is the seed of compassion that we will all need to heal this damaged world. From Baghdad to Baltimore, from Fallujah to Birmingham, from Jerusalem to Seattle, we connect with each other through what is missing from our lives. We evolve by means of the stories we pass from one to the other, around the circle, close to the fire.

Under a well-lit streetlit, the beloved eighth-centruy saint Rabi'a was engrossed in looking for a lost key.  Soon her neighbors joined in the search, but without success.  "Where did you drop it?"  they asked, hoping to focus on that area.  "Oh, I did not lose my key here, but over there in my house," replied Rabi'a.  Surprised and bemused, they respectfully asked why she did not look for the lost key in the house.  "That is because my house is dimly lit, but out here it is so much brighter under the streetlight," she explained.

The neighbors could not help laughing; they shook their heads in disbelief.  This was Rabi'a's opportunity to impart a teaching.  She addressed them:  "Friends, it is clear that you're intelligent.  Then why is it that when you lose your peace of mind or happiness, perhpas because of a failed relationship or job, you look for what was lost out there and not in here?"  Rabi'a pointed to her chest.  "Did you lose your joy out there or in here?  Do you avoid looking inside you because the light is dimmer, and therefore, more inconvenient?"  This insight struck a deep chord in her neighbors.

See more profiles like this one at Every Human Has Rights.

Burning sunrise browned my father's skin

Pusan river cooled my mother's face

Evening glow of my older sister
smiling home inside mom

While my younger brother's eyes
wave a perfect circumference
in the water pool

And I hang by my tears
afraid my younger sister
will never walk again

But they don't see my fears
or my younger sister



_____



The fourth of my parent's children was born with a
bone and muscle disease, but my parents were so focused
on making a living and their own personal limitations,
that they had no hope or determination to find advanced
medical help or therapy for her condition.

The story above was written in 1973.  My younger sister died
in 1998 never having walked again since her first broken
bone in second grade.

Both my parents grew up poor and oppressed.
My Chickasaw father, in the impoverished communities of the southeast.
My mother, in the Korean hills first ravaged by Japanese Imperialism
and then the U.S. Korean War.   

As child I knew their life stories and I understood their heightened priority 
to provide for their family.   As the family became more and more affluent,
that urgent priority never diminished or allowed much else in.  It was
their stability -their peace with the world.

What I could not understand in the beginning and especially through the
years, was their complete acceptance of their limited options regarding
their children.  I wanted to blame them but I could not because I was
so awed by my own renegade awareness.

I saw, at an early age, how the circumstances of one generation
can profoundly effect the fate of another -for better or worse,
and I learned that it is amazingly possible to see ones self and life
circumstances with detached, discerning, and compassionate eyes.

This is an excerpt from a longer essay.  To read more at my website click here.

I knew it was my view on life and would eventually learn more about it.  What I did not know was that I would learn that my cultural background is Christianity and my worldview is Humanism.

 

When I turned nineteen, I left home and joined the Episcopal Church so I could at least say to my family that I was attending church.  To my surprise, the services were peaceful and soothing with the illuminating candles, serene icons, and calming organ music.  Sometimes I would experience those same feelings I felt with my pets and in nature, but it was more than that.  The priests, who were both men and women, spoke of love, not guilt and fear-ridden damnation, and people were equal to each other.  There, God was love and love was God, an experience I had all my life.

 

Then there was the wonderful Bishop John Shelby Spong who preached everything I always thought life should be.  He taught we should live life fully, love wastefully, and strive to be all we can be as human beings.  Here was my fourth taste of Humanism, only this was Christian Humanism.  Both Bishop Spong and I experience God, not describe it.  I was enamoured by this man, who taught me that God was a human concept and gave me a broader understanding of it.  Later I met a few other Religious Humanists within the Episcopal Church, such as Robert Price, and fell in sync with them, as well as learned a lot from them too.

 

While reading one of Spong's books I noticed he said something that sounded very much like Humanism and I asked him about it. He replied, "Mriana, Humanism is not anti-Christian or anti-God.  It is through the human that we experience the Holy the Other.  The divine is the ultimate depth of the human."  It was very encouraging to me as a Humanist and I smiled with joy because I knew exactly what he was saying.  He obviously was not rejecting me either because I considered myself a Humanist and just as my atheist great uncle exuded warmth, love, and compassion, so did Bishop Spong through his correspondence to me.

 

Within this time, my first son was born.  As I held him in my arms and we gazed into each other's eyes for the first time, I felt transcending love.  His beautiful blue-tinted brown eyes were captivating as he studied my face for the first time.  It was like a time-paradox as I welcomed him into the world, because we knew each other, but never met until that moment.  This was untainted numinous love between mother and child.

 

Sadly, my grandfather was suffering from psychotic depression.  He refused help because he believed people in the psychiatric field were of the devil and would steal his soul.  To my astonishment, he even said the doctors were playing God and keeping him alive longer than God wanted.  Then this highly intelligent man, who knew better, quit taking his heart medications and died three days later from heart failure, never to meet his great grandson.  His death tore my grandmother emotionally, so much that she denied me the right to say goodbye to my grandfather.  Supposedly, her excuse for denying me of being at his funeral was that she did not want "a Black boy and Black baby at her husband's funeral".  Such hypocrisy of my early years was a big turn off to me.  Was not this sort of emotion and behaviour they displayed a sin according to them?

 

This was not love and I made my mother promise me that when my grandmother dies that she would not do me as my grandmother did after my grandfather died.  Thanks to Bishop Spong's advice to me in a letter, "Love them.  They are acting out of the higher they have.  What they need is more love," I received more than I asked when my grandmother died eighteen years later.  She turned ninety-four and we finally made peace with each other.  A few days afterwards, my mother called to say that my grandmother laid down for a nap never to wake up again.  She died peacefully, just as her mother did years before her and my mother asked my first-born son, now a Buddhist, to be a pallbearer.  I received the chance to hug and kiss my grandmother good-bye and for one brief moment, no one's differences mattered.

 

As tears slowly rolled from my face, I heard distant memories of her beautiful piano playing and her sweet voice repeating some of her last words to me days before her death, "You were a good granddaughter, Mriana".  Through bittersweet sorrow, I felt the warm love I experienced from her as a very young child.  The matriarch was gone, but she gave love to others and felt sorry when she did not, but she did not die with regrets.  What was four generations were now three, yet all four generations were present the day of her funeral.  The religious, Humanist, Buddhist, and non-religious in one family were all present and the funeral was as it should be... for the living.

Our experiences in life shape our philosophies, beliefs, concepts, and values.  The interactions we have with others, in our youth and as adults, shape our worldview in ways that may or may not be the same as our family's.  As we grow older, we develop our own ideas about life through the influences of others, both directly and indirectly, while discarding those that do not fit with how we view life and we learn from others as we discover who we are both culturally and spiritually.