NO KINGS 2

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I say this in the final post of my “In the Spirit …” series, which came to a close a couple of months ago:

I have felt a kinship with Coleridge’s [Ancient Mariner] ever since I first read that great poem about 60 years ago, my sharing his bi-polar on/off switch in my intellectual and emotional life, bursts of intense activity and production that feel involuntary to me, more a matter of obsession, even possession, than planned projects, followed by fallow periods, a cycle of work and recovery that, in the end, keeps me balanced and happy. Coleridge once characterized himself in a letter to a friend as “indolence capable of energies.” That’s a much less dramatic way of saying pretty much the same thing. Ever since my wife Carol died a decade ago my creative cycle has been surprisingly rhythmic, three months on, three months off, rinse and repeat . . .

I was hoping to extend my “indolence” a few more weeks, get my full three months “off” (and maybe I will after I post this), but sometimes history intrudes on autobiography. What flipped my switch “on” is tomorrow’s NO KINGS protests. As is the case with my first NO KINGS post (June 15), I open with a bit of the current political theater, turn to a personal story, and then offer a critique of the faux-Christian veneer that is used to gussy up pretty much any awful thing the political right sets its mind to these days.

…

Chicago is poised to be invaded by the Texas National Guard (pending litigation). I was going to put invaded inside quotation marks but I decided against it. I would have done that if the troops were coming from Illinois, Michigan or Wisconsin, say. The choice of the Texas Guard was not accidental. It is symbolic. I have said for years that we are in the midst of a slow-motion civil war in this country, one that is dissolving the foundational framework of the American experiment from the inside out in home-brewed vitriol. This move seems to me to be expressly designed to accelerate the “motion” of that war considerably. MAGA minions and their leader—who, given his scarily impaired physical and mental health is less like a spearhead for their movement and more like the proverbial blunt instrument they can wield to pummel their “enemies” into submission—seem to be hankering for a cultural reset not just back to what Robert Lowell called “the tranquilized Fifties,” McCarthyism and the Cold War manosphere all the rage, but to the Gilded Age, rife with robber barons and Jim Crow, wealth and white privilege on steroids, this time with billionaire tech-bros overlording legions of “wage slaves” to keep their yachts afloat. That’s what I believe they actually mean by making America great again, even if (or maybe especially if) it takes dismantling the Federal government to get there. Renaming Army bases for Confederate generals is one thing. Gerrymandering Red State voting districts to disempower Black voters is orders of magnitude more damaging. Using federal troops to randomly round up Black and Brown bodies for deportation (as ICE is doing right now, often quite violently), whether they have violated laws or not, is even more egregious. There are MAGA leaders calling expressly now for a national “divorce.” Sending military personnel from Texas to Illinois—because they can—is a good step in that direction. In his testimony before Congress, retired Army Major General William Enyart warned that we are “one trigger pull away from another [Kent State-type] tragedy.” I was around back then. If you think that’s a good look, you have lost your way. He said it took a generation for the National Guard to redeem its public image. He was wrong. That image has never been redeemed and never will be, one of the reasons I believe the current deployments will end just as badly. Which gets me to the main theme I want to explore today: killing.

For a recent family Zoom we were asked to talk about the primary “work” of our retirement. Among other things, I said I aspired to “keep a peaceful heart,” no mean task in the toxic haze of chaos, hatred and fear that saturates the current zeitgeist in America. My main strategy for doing that, I explained, was a very basic “anger management” program I started about 70 years ago, in an after-school Catholic catechism class, specifically on the day we were being instructed on how to “examine our consciences” in preparation for our first communion. The nun in charge basically led us through the 10 commandments (the Catholic version), with guidance about how to interpret and apply each of them at our relatively “innocent” level. I remember absolutely nothing of what she said pertinent to the first 4. When she got to number 5, which back then was translated as “Thou shalt not kill” (more about this translation later) I breathed a sigh of relief. I was pretty sure I hadn’t killed anyone so could skip this one. Not so fast, Paul! She went on to document a variety of more normal human experiences and states of mind that were at least preparatory for, and in some respects analogous to, killing. One of them was anger. I was stunned. I was as intense when I was 7 as I am now, so I was quite often angry. It didn’t take me long to put two and two together to see how anger, if held close for a long time, leads to hatred; and how hatred, if held close for a long time, leads to violence; and how violence, when it is founded in an entrenched sense of “righteousness” leads inevitably to killing. I say inevitably because even if, by some gift of good fortune, it doesn’t end with bodies in the streets, it will kill the spirits of those it seeks to dominate and oppress. And, as consequentially, it will kill the spirit of the one who never resolved that anger in the first place. This was a most sobering insight.

So, anger became the top item on my first-confessional inventory and stayed there pretty much forever after that. I haven’t been to confession in decades, but if I went today it would still be number one on my list. I can hear you saying: What good is all that work, then? You’ve gotten nowhere, still taking a step down the path toward killing pretty much every day. Yes, that’s true. But I have known for 70 years now how important it is not to take the second step, and I have also learned in the meantime how to reverse that first step. My wife Carol knew all of this, too, and worked hard to heal herself from that inclination. Toward that end, she pinned up on our kitchen wall this famous expression: “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person do die,” a bit of wisdom attributed variously, most often to the Buddha. Note that it doesn’t say feeling anger or even expressing it. Anger is a foundational and useful human emotion. Look at how Jesus casts the money changers out of the Temple. He doesn’t say “Hey, guys, would you please tone it down a bit?” He literally demolishes their stands and throws them and their animals out into the streets. With prejudice, as they say in legal circles. The quote says “holding on” so I work hard on “letting go.” And when I do, I recover a peaceful heart.

The next quantum leap I made in my anger-management program was 50 years ago, watching “The Ascent of Man” series on PBS narrated by Jacob Bronowski. In the last episode (if my memory serves), about the 20^th century, horrifically violent, killing on an unimaginable scale, he concluded by saying that the antidote to this evil was an ethic founded on “tolerance.” I was taken aback: How could something so vague and mild-sounding counter these torrents of death and destruction? To explain, he turned, surprisingly, to Heisenberg’s “uncertainly principle” from quantum mechanics, which basically says that at the foundational level of our universe you can never know with absolute certainty what something is or is doing without becoming absolutely ignorant about its complementary facet. Bronowski proposed renaming it “the principle of tolerance” and extending it to all human affairs. Then he showed a montage of images from Auschwitz. He didn’t lay out all the steps connecting his concept with those stunning images. The logic of their juxtaposition was impeccable and convincing. The presumption of absolute certainty always leads to killing, whether it’s a holocaust in Europe in the 1940s, genocide in Palestine in the 2020s, or a civil war in the streets of Chicago next week or next month. And yes, the antidote is still tolerance. What Heisenberg insinuated into the mechanics of our universe was a degree of non-negotiable “give” in every tiny bit of stuff out there, like adding a little Lycra to denim so it is “forgiving,” both concepts that also have potentially significant ethical implications. These three values—giving, forgiveness, tolerance—mimic pretty closely the ones the thunder announces in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which T.S. Eliot indexes in “The Waste Land:” giving, compassion, and self-control. That’s how ancient and deep their roots are in human civilization. And if you extrapolate them into everyday affairs, you will do far less killing, if any at all. (If you’re new to my page, I offer a detailed program for translating the principles of quantum mechanics into a practical personal ethic: posts dated June 19, June 30, July 16 and July 26.)

So how might this apply to what’s happening right now? I’ll start with a little dustup Pope Leo created in a recent interview. The new pope has been a thorn in the side of Donald Trump and the many MAGA Catholics he has recruited into his administration. Their most recent irritation derives from a comment he made about what it means to be “pro-life:”

Someone who says, “I am against abortion but I am in favour of the death penalty” is not really pro-life. Someone who says, “I am against abortion but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,” I do not know if that is pro-life.

Here, he calls out the hypocrisy of Christians who vehemently oppose abortion (sometimes by actually killing those who seek or perform them, though Leo is too nice a guy to go there, and I’m not) yet not only endorse but cheer on capital punishment and the inhuman treatment of immigrants. And will do likewise, I’m sure, if the Texas National Guard guns down any “radical leftists” or forcibly detains and deports “criminal” immigrants of color in “war torn” Chicago, both of which, according to my calculus above, are forms of killing, literally or spiritually. The blowback from “good” MAGA Christians, including some clerics in the Church hierarchy, was immediate and harsh, all of them basically saying it’s an apples/oranges type thing, that lots of kinds of killing are both justifiable and good. Here, for example, is a link to one of those arguments, an article called “Pope Leo Got It Wrong,” published in the October 8^thissue of The Catholic Herald, which differentiates between these two kinds of killing in stereotypically Christian ways:

https://thecatholicherald.com/article/pope-leo-got-it-wrong-catholicism-permits-the-death-penalty.

As is almost always the case in matters of this sort, the primary supporting doctrinal warrants are drawn from Paul (quoted directly), whose version of Christianity is so different from Jesus’ that they simply can’t be reconciled, especially on matters of this sort. The only warrant for vengeance- or justice-killing the author attributes to Jesus is a summarization, rather than a direct quote, of a passage from Matthew 18:

And the Saviour’s own language can be stark; when He says of one who causes a little one to sin that it would be better to have a millstone hanged about his neck and be drowned (Matthew 18:6), He is not indulging cruelty but insisting upon the gravity of certain offences.

There’s a good reason this passage was summarized rather than quoted. Like almost all such attempts by Christians to justify killing with a blessing from Jesus, this one depends on very careful cherry-picking. Here is the actual Biblical text, with some of its preliminary context:

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come! If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.”

Jesus is not talking solely, or even specifically, about the corruption of actual children. The phrase “little ones,” heavily freighted in this article, actually applies to Jesus’ true followers, “those who believe in me.” Jesus calls the child forth as a model for the adults present, to become “like.” To “change” themselves. He offers a very specific regimen for making that transition in both the synoptic and lost gospels. Takes a lot of work for an adult to get there. Jesus has done that work, so he knows. The point he’s making here to the adults present is to get on with that work so they will be welcoming not only to actual children (which I’m sure he believes goes without saying) but especially to all those who have become “like” children, including Jesus himself, thereby qualifying them for “the kingdom of heaven.” If you don’t do that, punishment is warranted, but most of the methods Jesus catalogs are self-inflicted amputations to prevent a repeat of your own offenses, not some State- or Church-enforced execution.

And that’s just for openers. If you read further, you find almost immediately Jesus’ famous exchange with Peter about forgiveness:

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times. (Some translations say “seven times seventy.”)

The theme of this chapter, for anyone willing to take the time to read it all, is forgiveness not vengeance, the preservation of life not killing. It closes with a long parable about debt-forgiveness, the debtor who, having had his debt forgiven, then refuses to do likewise for those in his debt. This is exactly, I mean exactly, the mode of hypocrisy that Pope Leo seems to me to be calling out. The parable concludes this way:

“Then the master called the servant in. “You wicked servant,” he said, “I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

It is for a failure of forgiveness—not just in a formulaic way but “from your heart”—that the “heavenly Father” (NOT the State or the Church “fathers”) metes out punishment. Jesus often says that his parables will make sense only for those with “ears to hear,” and he seems pretty sure most of his listeners most of the time, including often his own apostles, don’t have them. A good first step for tuning your ears to hear what Jesus is getting at is to actually read all of what he says, not cherry-pick the one little thing your own ears prefer to hear for your own selfish reasons and then turn it into words that are yours not his. That’s what Paul did with Jesus’ words, which is why their visions are so incontrovertibly at odds with one another. The Catholic Herald is a conservative voice in Christian conversations and Niwa Limbu, the article’s author, is a regular contributor on a wide range of issues. The ears they hear with are clearly not mine. Or, last week, Pope Leo’s. I’m going with Leo on this one.

Let me be clear, I am by no means an apologist for Catholic Popes. I have read at least a bit of history about every single Pope’s reign since Peter. You would be hard pressed to find a resume of leadership more prone to greed, nepotism, infighting, power-mongering, and, in keeping with my theme here, killing, often on an industrial scale, than this one. If you don’t believe me, look into the traumatic and trenchant formation of the Roman (i.e, imperial) Catholic (i.e., universal) Church in the fourth and fifth centuries, the long “war”—with lots of excommunications, book-burnings, and, yes, killing—between Augustinian and Pelagian versions of the faith, as many diverse Christian communities and canons were collapsed into an orthodoxy based on Augustine’s reading of Paul (who had a lot of experience with killing) not Pelagius’ reading of Jesus (who didn’t.) Or look into the Medieval Inquisition that exterminated the Cathars in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, tens of thousands of people killed because their notion of goodness wasn’t properly orthodox. Or the Spanish Inquisition in the 15^th and 16^th centuries targeting, among others, Jews whose conversion to Catholicism was deemed, well, both not quite and too “kosher.” And that’s just for starters. Pick pretty much any “heresy” you can think of, and you’ll find a lot of Church-sanctioned killing designed expressly to excise it. Sometimes I think how fortunate Jesus was to raise himself from the dead so he wouldn’t have to wear himself to the bone rolling over in his grave.

So, what makes all of this killing not only something you don’t have to “confess” but something to be proud of? That gets me to that matter of translation I mentioned above. The “alternative facts” version of the 5^th commandment is based on a translation of the key term not as “kill” but “murder.” That is, in fact, a more accurate translation of the original text (the 6^th commandment in Exodus 20.) Western culture has for millennia designated many, many different kinds of state-sanctioned killing as not-murder, and in the context of law and custom they are all quite easy to justify, even praise. Just like capital punishment. “The Father” (the one Jesus is proffering as an alternative to the Old Testament God who seemed quite comfortable with killing) has nothing to do with it. Nor, more crucially, does the son, if you bother to read what he actually said.

Donald Trump has taken lately to saying that he wants to go to heaven. One of the nice things about Jesus’ message is it’s never too late to save your soul. Even the vineyard workers who arrive just before the shift ends get credit for a full day’s work. But you actually have to show up and pick a few grapes to qualify. A military invasion of one of your own cities to relitigate a Civil War whose primary purpose was to restore to full humanhood all the Black or Brown bodies who could be righteously “owned” and, if need be, tortured and killed with God’s blessing, is morally heinous. One of its intended effects is to turn the descendants of those Black or Brown bodies back into chattel you can chain up, throw in a cage, and dump anywhere in the world you want, preferably someplace that will mistreat, imprison and, yes, even kill them. All without ever having to examine your conscience even once to acknowledge the anger-infused hatred that leavens your project. What a sweet deal. My advice to Donald Trump: How about reading Matthew 18, not to justify building a made-in-America millstone factory so you always have enough supplies on hand to drown anyone who crosses you, but to become like a child, humble, merciful, forgiving, at least once before the shift-ending whistle blows.

And, by the way, if you covet a Nobel Peace Prize, invading your own cities, against their wishes, for no reason except you want revenge on your enemies, is not necessarily the best look. Want to bring peace to the streets of Chicago, or anywhere else? Start with your own heart.