Generosity

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.

In rural Czechoslovakia one day in the last year of the war, Jerry Chlup brought home to his wife's care the emaciated and wounded Herman Feder.

Unknown to Anna, Jerry had been a member of a resistance group for three years. When the group blew up a bridge, they inadvertantly forced a German train full of prisoners bound for a death camp, to make an unscheduled halt of several days. Some of the prisoners seized the opportunity to escape, Herman Feder among them. Unstintingly sharing their modest resources, Anna and Jerry devoted themselves over the next three years to nursing Herman back to physical health. They provided a safe haven which helped to heal the deep psychological wounds resulting from Herman's five years of harrowing concentration camp experiences.

Read the words of Anna, Jerry, and Herman at www.humboldt.edu/~rescuers/book/Chlup/c.contents.html

When my husband and I and our two girls were in a small town in Latin America, we hired a taxi driver one day to take us to an aquarium that was outside of town.  On the way, we got to talking and he invited us to his house for dinner.  The taxi driver his wife and six-year-old daughter lived in three tiny cement rooms (front room, bedroom, and cooking space) with an open-air enclosure that held their laundry and water tank.   While we were there, the daughter pulled out from under the bed a shoebox that held her only toys.  She took out one of four or five items, a little wooden doll that was missing one leg-- and gave it to my girls.  It made me want to cry, and we have it still.