U Tun Aung "Ko Tu" September 16, 1937 - March 11, 2019

 U Tun Aung "Ko Tu"

 September 16, 1937 - March 11, 2019

h 11, 2019

A remembrance

Rev. Douglas Olds

My mother met Tun Aung at a Christmas party given by her boss in 1973. Tun was staying there. I was 15 at the time, my brothers Todd, 12-1/2 and Mike, 10-1/2 had moved from Michigan to Bethesda Maryland in September 1973 so that my mother could work at a firm there. My father spent only a couple of weekends a month in Maryland for several months because he was selling his business.

At the party, Tun spoke about his previous life in Burma, his wife and two daughters still there, his escape from personal harm through the jungle to Thailand, his present work, his tennis prowess, his Buddhist religion. We were struck by this very special man. He was sensitive, smart, courageous, and fearless. When he told her he had to find a place to live, my mother asked if he would like to live with us. We had a spare room and a family who would love him. He immediately agreed to the offer. He had a full-time job but would clean and even cook for us at times. We loved the soul and generosity of this very special man.

I remember Tun Aung as a man given easily to laughter. He giggled so easily!  I thought it was a cultural thing, but when I visited Burma for the first time in 1984—when Ko Tu’s sister Cho Cho, mother, and brother-in-law Win Kyi took care of me and my girlfriend “Miss Nancy”—when I visited, I learned that Ko Tu’s laughter was particular to him. He was a genuinely delighted fellow, kind of like his Buddhist brother, the Dalai Lama.  Both laugh easily, even when there is so much tragedy.  They won’t give up on the comedy that is life, a perspective which I also endorse as a Christian.

Tun Aung moved into the bedroom across the hall from mine back in 1974. We both had bedrooms in the “servants’ quarters” of a big house that allowed each of to have our own separate bathrooms and showers.  I joked with my high school classmates that my alarm clock was “nasal.”  Tun would rise in the morning before me and proceed to cook spicy sausages doused in fish sauce in the basement kitchenette down the hall.  The pungent smell would wake me.

Tun could not get a job in the U.S. in his trained profession of lawyer, so he first took a job in a Tennis Shop owned by the Sports Agent Donald Dell. In that capacity, he would mingle with tennis stars.  He told me that during the summer of 1975, when our family was away in Michigan, that the tennis ace Roscoe Tanner slept in my bed after being brought back to our house by Tun.  I was thrilled.

Tun drove an ecru VW Beetle during those years.  I practiced driving some in that car after getting my driver’s license in 1974.  It was hard to put into reverse, I recall.  But Tun Aung moved forward and backward with ease, his body supple and trained by expertise on the tennis courts. He regularly teamed in doubles with Maxwell Taylor, the U.S. military’s Chief of Staff during JFK’s administration.  Taylor liked playing with Tun, as did I, though his skills on the court were so beyond my own.

Tun Aung's father had been police chief of Rangoon after WWII. It was a prominent and dangerous position.  Tun Aung chose to pursue jurisprudence as a defense lawyer, but the American bar would not accept his training or experience upon his escape to this country.  But Tun Aung embodied the wisdom borne from a life lived at risk for the betterment of his countrymen.

An African Proverb holds, “When an elder dies, it is the same as if a library has burned to the ground.”  The library of my wisdom is enhanced by knowing Tun Aung. Ko Tu: here’s to your infectious generosity and grace, your spiritual deftness, and may you rest with your ancestors in glory!

Read his obituary, here.

Failing Nature’s Trust

December 30, 2018

First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo

Rev. Douglas Olds (all rights reserved)

Readings: 1 Samuel 2.22-26

Psalm 148

The Church at the Crossroads of Climate Catastrophe: A Pastoral Approach for Presentations of Despair

The Church at the Crossroads of
Climate Catastrophe: A Pastoral Approach for 

Presentations of Despair

9 February 2019

Rev. Douglas Olds

In 2017, the Union of Concerned Scientists profiled the Church signaling a petition for it to take on an increasing role in leading against Global Warming and Climate Injustice.  I began this work of ministry in 2008 and have intensified my efforts in my current Doctoral project of developing a "decarbonizing ecclesiology."

Cropping up in my recent research of adapting ministry toward Atmospheric Care and trusteeship of nature is a split between the faithful who believe that the Church needs to develop a pastoral program of "hospice for a dying planet" versus those who call for the invigoration of congregational praxis of lifestyle virtues and collective action. Ought the Church lead towards an acceptance of the inevitability of ecological collapse and extinction--comforting all who are soon to die--or does it move to inspire people to awaken to the issue and practice carbon thrift, the privileged to practice asceticism when they otherwise could afford a high-carbon-footprint lifestyle, and our elites to institute loyalty to place and planet as the just transition toward a decarbonized and renewable economic system?

While ministering to those grieving over the destruction of earth's ecosystems is appropriate and makes space for hearing, uttering, and responding to lament for what is being extinguished, I am choosing to focus my project on pastoral praxis that promotes individual responsibility and commitment rather than pastoral hospice. The Bible has repeated messages not to despair at calamity (Jeremiah 29.4-6; Psalm 23.4) or hypothesize a timetable for the end of the world (Matthew 24.36). I am choosing to minister for and from my active faith that, though the facts of climate science are dire, insists that God has powers over hearts and minds that can awaken humanity from its slumber, denial, and paralyzed indecision regarding Global Warming.  God has historically acted by implanting innovative consciousness and inspiration of the human heart by the actions of the Holy Spirit.  If we can continue to recognize that the Holy Spirit is intimately involved with atmospheric integrity--and that we can cooperate with the Holy Spirit in remedying and healing ecological imbalances--we can act as God's partners and trustees that might move God to endorse our repentance on this issue and  intervene through God's incumbent and caring powers.

If, however, privileged humanity continues its hardness of heart, practicing business as usual and makes no effort to demonstrate that our living values include a respect for and trusteeship of nature, I see no reason why God would intervene for our benefit other than pure grace, which humanity may not presume. Yet even in the case of God turning away from privileged humanity, I acknowledge that God could and would bring about the just recompense of the vulnerable and those oppressed from Climate Injustice.

Because we have a final judgment to anticipate, I entreat all to intensify their efforts on the issue of combating profligacy in their hydrocarbon-producing lifestyle choices and to work politically and collectively to rein in the systemic greed, intransigence, and denial of dirty-industry elites.  To that latter end, it matters if your preferred candidates for elective office take fossil-fuel industry money.  To the former end, it matters in God's judgment whether our consumer choices deconstruct nature and the flourishing of the vulnerable of humanity including of future generations and of other species.  If our values predominantly involve computer screens and human technological diversions like rocketry and Bitcoin at the expense of natural integrity and balance, I suspect our destiny will not include companionship with nature as part of its ambiance and/or reward.  In such a case, I fear that my eternal destiny could involve no more than adumbrations of human ingenuity without the input of God's ongoing dynamism inside natural beauty. My destiny in such a case might involve the profanity of technology rather than the holiness of trees because my values and choices in this life promoted the former and extinguished the latter.

Previously, I proposed Isaiah 44.9-20 as a theological resource for evaluating run-away hydrocarbon combustion and linked it with the material economy devoted to luxury production condemned in Rev. 18 as Babylon's "adultery" (=idolatry).  I note that in the Reform Judaism cycle of yearly readings of Torah and haftarot, this passage from Isaiah is regularly, but not always, included in the week prior to the Torah's presentation of the theme of the Approach of the Day of Judgment.  I think this sequence of idolatry followed by judgment is illustrative of the Jewish tradition of proclaiming against idolatry as a fundamental responsibility of religious humanity to God, and that such idolatry (and systemic participation in the luxury economy) may be a first-order determinant in God's final judgment of us as individuals.

This essay has been intended to outline a favored pastoral alternative for the contemporary Church involved inside a society of systemic Climate injustice and ongoing ecological catastrophe.  I have argued that the Church functions pastorally in such a society by refocusing its faithful on the Ever-Approaching of our individual Final Judgments from God rather than on acceptance of the inevitability of ecological or civilizational collapse.  I do not propose this as a psychological denial or defiance mechanism, but rather from my faith that faith requires continuing trust in the miracle-working God as well as the necessity to continually prepare for a Final Judgment which will take into account our values and our commitments in this life.  That Judgment by God will deliver us into an unchangeable destiny in the life to come.  I believe that recalling us to the warning (and the Good News) of the Final Judgment is pastorally more responsible even if the planet is inevitably dying.  Our values, commitments, and actions even in a lost cause will provide (part of) the basis of our destiny in the life to come, more than any pastoral hospice program that encourages quietism and acceptance of inevitable extinction.

Continuing to practice virtue in the prospect of looming catastrophe is keeping faith.  It demonstrates to oneself and to others an appreciation of God's continuing presence and potential for miracle. By all means, the Church should allow for expressions of grief and lament.  But I believe our experiences and expressions of those may only be assuaged and potentially healed by an active trust in God in which we involve God in our prayers and continue in our virtues that keep faith with God. As our virtues demonstrate our trustworthiness, God may keep faith with (trust in) us.  There may be no escape from suffering in this life, but repentance and trust in God is the foundation of virtue which demonstrates to God that we take God's presence and power with utmost existential seriousness.  We need to remain practicing the virtues of thrift, asceticism, and loyalty, cultivating the habits that will serve us in eternity even if we currently live in a temporally-limited and -concluding natural world.

As I write these words at 3:30pm on a rainy Saturday in Northern California, I look out my window to see the partial but thick arc of a rainbow.  Its thickness indicates proximity. I recall God's covenant with Noah and hope this appearance reconfirms for us that God will not again extinguish the totality of humanity from the earth.  This is where I move from hope to faith. Not faith in a doctrinal sense.  My hope doesn't allow for the recovery of the pristine nature of my youthful explorations in the woods in Northern Michigan.  The facts of ecological catastrophe and Climate Injustice are too pessimistic in aggregate.  But faith over hope suggests another message: an optimistic one.  Faith trusts God even when hope is fleeting and despair looms.  I know there's a God--one who can and does love humanity and who can and does work miracle for its benefit.  Keeping faith with God is an active requirement that requires the additional virtue of recollection--our practices of recalling when hope was extinguished, but then our dawning awareness comes of renewal.  With recollection, there seems no precedent that sin and systemic evil have the last word.  God and God's word is the beginning AND the end (Revelation 21.6).  Our faithful actions are intermediary--a bridge between freedom and destiny.  God, and God alone, will determine our conclusion.

PREACHING CLIMATE CALAMITY

Rev. Douglas Olds (all rights reserved)

20 December 2018

https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/the-study-on-collapse-they-thought-you-should-not-read-yet/

I've read this unpublished manuscript.  The author would probably not like my upcoming sermon because I conclude with a spiritual hope for Christians in light of this climate catastrophe.  The author labels spiritual hope "psychological denial."

Bendell's article may be questioned as to both process and its radical conclusion in light of Climate Change: "Currently, I have chosen to interpret the information as indicating inevitable [civilizational] collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction." 

This does not read like a scientific statement to me.

I would like to make a point that is recurring as these doomsday articles appear: these are not necessarily scientific facts that are being presented.

I received the Bachelor of Science.  I was taught that science operates by consensus and replicable experimentation.  When an experimental finding is observed, it is required in the scientific enterprise for those findings to be replicated inside the scientific community.  Only when the findings are replicated and confirmed by consensus (majority, not totality) are they elevated to the status of fact.  Replication is to my understanding the sine qua non of verifying hypotheses based on experiments and/or observations. Findings support hypotheses, but these are not elevated to established theory until replicated. Whether this process happens experimentally or “comparatively” through observation, individual “findings” do not necessarily make for factual claims until confirmed by some consensus of peers. While establishing fact by consensus is probably more difficult to attain in observational science than in experimental science, it follows that policy must adapt when catastrophe is likely, even if not fully established by consensus science. At the same time, I don’t believe non-specialists can process the noise of all the findings that are publicized. Remember, there are also a number of rosy scenario “findings” that come across my computer feed.  If my temperament were different, I could promote those as many technological optimists are doing. So it seems to me that, absent a scientific philosophy, rosy and doomsday findings may cancel each other out for someone who is respectful of normative process in science.

In October, the New York Times reported that the ocean had absorbed more heat than previously found by science, so that the news was bad[1].  But the NYT reported the author of the study admitted that it was based on a new methodology that needed confirmation by other researchers before it was accepted as a scientific fact. And indeed, the article posted on the web has been updated to note that the finding has been changed due to updating an error in the original methodology.  If the news item had been reported as its original title stated, and as a fact rather than a subject-to-change finding, many would have been misled as to its negative claims. 

The link above reports an inductive analysis of the negative scientific findings the author focuses on and concludes that civilizational collapse is certain.  That's his meta-finding.  However, he could not get any of his peer reviewers to agree that it was a publishable finding, so that the science is not yet advanced by his meta-analysis.  This doesn't mean that Cassandra was wrong, but it does mean to me that it is not responsible to present to a congregation that it is reasonably established that civilizational collapse under the strain of climate disruption is certain.  That claim is preliminary and not-yet scientifically established, according to my training in science and policy.

Does a finding need to be certain before we talk about it? Or to ask if it is possible? Or maybe even make provisional plans? These questions are at the crux of the issue.  Is the accumulation of enough dire findings sufficient to discuss them in policy forums? Certainly, I agree that it is.  There is a profound risk of doing nothing because the consensus science is not yet agreed as to the doomsday scenario. I just do not think Bendell’s study presents the quality and quantity of credible evidence to support its radical conclusion, and the fact that he mishandled peer review  supports my sense that his conclusion is far too preliminary and unsupported by the scientific community.

I also believe that we need to be thinking more about risk, along with the severity of consequences of certain developments. For example, the risk of an airplane crashing may be one in a hundred, but the consequence is death. Do you take the risk of taking the flight? If we apply that thought process to our climate situation, our thinking about the future becomes different and the way we go about our lives becomes different. If the possibility of an event is small and it has not been established as certain scientifically, but the consequences of the event are huge, it makes sense that that possibility not be ignored. 

However, I find that the time and space necessary to responsibly process these nuanced points in a four-page sermon may often be prohibitive.  That is part of the reason why I believe preachers should apply the Ockham’s Razor of the IPCC process--to cut down on the noise and nuancing of the myriad but preliminary findings that are flooding the media, both rosy and doomsday. Is the church an appropriate venue for this kind of tentative truth-seeking just under the threshold of fact?  Perhaps in order to be responsible both to the science AND to the limited attention spans of our publics, we may assert that IPCC facts are the most concise and reputable, yet other, more dire scenarios are possible, the explication and reporting of which require investments in time, effort, and education beyond the ordinary and expected.  Those qualifications could serve to present scenarios that are “possible” but necessary to take into account because of their out-sized risks.  

I won't be presenting the meta-finding of certain civilizational collapse in my sermon on Dec. 30.  It is for this reason of scientific consensus that I believe the most reasonable and responsible approach for policymakers and non-scientists to take is to rely on the consensus reports of the 1100 climate scientists who make up International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Reporting of individual scientist's findings is useful for the scientific community to process, but it takes a number of peer-reviewed scientists to test those findings for confirmation, and publish them in a reputable journal.

In addition to the B.S., I have a Master's Degree in Environmental Policy and have taught the science of global warming to graduate students. Yet, I do not consider myself qualified to argue from the pulpit anything but the established science of the IPCC presentations. Neither I nor any other preacher I know can be relied upon to responsibly and reliably test doomsday or pollyanna findings that swarm the vast media web.  I personally would distrust any preaching that presented doomsday (or pollyanna) findings not confirmed by scientific consensus unless that preacher was also a currently employed credentialed climate scientist--or unless he or she claimed the vatic possession by the Holy Spirit and explicitly expressed their expectation to be stoned if their prophecy turned out wrong. I would deem a preacher theologically unqualified, not to mention scientifically, if he presented a finding as a fact. Especially one from a meta-analytical exercise.

Yet, is this too safe a perch to take in the pulpit? What if some form of societal collapse is possible? How does that change our lives?  

Social collapse has always been possible in the Christian tradition of eschatology, but the mainline doesn’t usually focus on it as a certainty like Bendell and the dispensationalists do. So is social collapse possible ? (yes), certain? (perhaps). Nuclear war is to my sense a more certain destroyer of the planet and all of planetary life, yet we’ve learned to live with out-sized risk beyond the possible into the probable without obsessing on its doomsday. Might not despair and preoccupation with climate catastrophe (which I do believe is occurring and will worsen) be the equivalent of the early-Reagan administration’s nuclear arms rattling and the borderline hysteria over nuclear war in this country in the early 1980s?  I think it's a reasonable analogy, but while the nuclear threat seemed to quiet for a while, will the climate catastrophes also relent for a season?  And if so, what will be the effect on social urgency to address the problem of Climate Injustice?  Neither I nor any other preacher I know can be relied upon to test doomsday or pollyanna findings that swarm in the vast media web. 

Royce Truex writes,  "I also don't see anything wrong with a preacher presenting his/her own opinion if it is presented as such along with an explanation of the way it was reached." Yet, I personally am limited in my time in the pulpit, both on any given Sunday and over the course of the Church year.  The issues involved in Global Warming and Climate Injustice are vast! 

I'd be pleased to receive rebuttal to these perspectives. It's an important debate, and since I am researching how to impel the Church to lead on the issue of Global Warming/Climate Injustice, I' wonder if the case can be made that socially hastens the scientific enterprise in a way that grounds despair into action-making fear and changes the basis for our future hopes into a program of sustainable economics.  Spurring the Church to combat Climate Change and Injustice is an existential priority. It is a pressing and urgent challenge for all to act individually and socially to change our lifestyles and our economic structures, to immediately and drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions. 

The problem indeed may be that the science is progressing slower than the buildup of greenhouse gases, but that's a speculation, not a claim of fact.

Doug, I’ve added a few responses. As you can tell, I don’t have the expertise to “debate” many of these issues. I do want to note, though, that you seem to have been looking through the lens of what’s acceptable or possible in a sermon, which is very appropriate as a part of your DMin project. My focus is more to find information that informs how I live my life. May the two focuses meet!

I agree with the desire to harmonize our focus. But this statement of yours moves the debate from science to faith.  I was originally arguing about the responsible use of science in preaching, but your statement indicates that you are searching for an existential message for your faith that is more convinced of pessimistic ecological outcomes than mine. My faith is that a scientific finding-claim or anecdotal consensus are NOT extrapolatable to doomsday.  God is active. WWII seemed to many to lead inexorably to the end of the world, based on extrapolation.  Many have told me they thought American civilization was doomed to collapse during the 1960s unrest as they extrapolated the shootings at Kent State into ta dystopian future. In the early 1980s, there was a hysteria (that I shared) about doomsday when Reagan rattled nuclear weapons.  In none of these cases, when the faith of the pessimistic tended toward doomsday (and scientifically, when the Nuclear Clock moved to 5 minutes to Doomsday and Nuclear Winter), did the end come in the time frame predicted.

Your receptivity to climate pessimism is to my mind thus analogous to these: they extrapolated current conditions and trends toward the world's end, with a questionable precision into timetables.  Because you focus on scientific findings that either are or as yet not scientifically endorsed by consensus, you are extrapolating that focus toward a "certainty" that the end is scientifically established.  Yet it seems to me you perform that extrapolation of current findings and trends from what I believe is your faith, not your command of the science. The fact that many others are also extrapolating does not vitiate my criticism.  My faith temperament, though, avoids grand extrapolation: I believe that these extrapolations failed in the previous instances noted. I also have a faith in the goodness and the power of God.  That power includes the power to influence the minds and hearts of individuals and collectives by the work of the Holy Spirit.  Revival is always possible. Because of my faith, I do not believe grand extrapolation is an epistemologically warranted operation of rationality. It leaves out the power of God to intervene in hearts and minds. My rationality includes both faith and science.  As I've said, I share your intuition that the current climate/GW findings support a catastrophic or pessimistic outcome, but I cannot proclaim the certainty of extrapolation from that intuition.  I believe in the urgency to turn aside what I believe is God's anger at the current misuse of the earth, yet the Bible demonstrates that God can turn aside from wrath. It is also relevant to note that God's anger is portrayed in the Bible as "heat."  Whether God turns aside from allowing human extinction at this point, to my faith, relies very probably on our species learning to live faithfully, in trusteeship of nature that I've been advocating.  But in either case, I cannot claim certainty for any outcome other than my own impending death.

So our argument is really not about scientific epistemology: I don't believe that extrapolation of findings is a scientific operation. But we are arguing the multiplicity of faiths that either extrapolate or not, and faiths that recognize, or not, the potential for the Holy Spirit to change hearts and minds on a grander scale than apparent to individuals.  My faith allows for the "realism" of potential extinction, but also the "realism" that is provisional. Extrapolation fosters a rationality guided by temperament, theology, Bendell's "choice" to conclude certitude, and other non-scientifically established metaphysics.

My intention is not to cop out on pessimism because I've got to preach to congregations that demand hope. It's because hope is an authentic Christian virtue that has been validated repeatedly though not universally in history (absent of course in the deaths of children and the Holocaust).  Virtue requires the practice be undertaken whether we are walking in deepest gloom or in luxury and joy.  The extrapolation of doomsday findings, even if considered factual or realistic, have been negated repeatedly in history. In my judgment, extrapolation of anecdotal journalism supported by individual observations of climatologists is not necessarily scientific. Instead, it is based on a specific type of faith--one where the vector of God's concern with Creation's goodness is absent.  I submit that there is no virtue in hopelessness, and it is that claim that needs more work in our process.  This is why I am focusing on virtue as the existential praxis for living with unbearable feelings of doom. Hope, being a virtue, requires practice and cultivation, even if one's realism denies it. That's what makes it a virtue.

Feel free to rejoin.  This is an important discussion for me. I hope it may lead you closer to my focus as yours have mine.

---

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/climate/ocean-temperatures-hotter.html accessed 12/20/18. 

See also another finding retracted upon attempts at replication: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/sea-level-rise-may-not-become-catastrophic-until-after-2100/579478/?utm_source=fbb accessed 5 January 2019

AT A LOSS FOR WORDS

At A Loss for Words

Rev. Douglas Olds (all rights reserved)

Advent 2018

 Isaiah 6:1-8 (NRSV)

1In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3And one called to another and said:

     “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;

     the whole earth is full of his glory.”

4The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. 5And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”

6Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. 7The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” 8Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

Luke 1:8–25 (NRSV)

⁸ Once when he was serving as priest before God and his section was on duty, ⁹ he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer incense. ¹⁰ Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. ¹¹ Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. ¹² When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. ¹³ But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. ¹⁴ You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, ¹⁵ for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. ¹⁶ He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. ¹⁷ With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” ¹⁸ Zechariah said to the angel, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” ¹⁹ The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. ²⁰ But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”

²¹ Meanwhile the people were waiting for Zechariah, and wondered at his delay in the sanctuary. ²² When he did come out, he could not speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary. He kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak. ²³ When his time of service was ended, he went to his home.

²⁴ After those days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she remained in seclusion. She said, ²⁵ “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.”  

---

I met Jan Karski in the early 1980s.

He was a neighbor of mine, an old-world, courtly figure who taught history at Georgetown University.

In middle age, he had married the renowned modern dancer Pola Niresnka, a Polish Jew who had escaped the Holocaust yet whose entire family disappeared in the prison camps.

Now an older man, Jan told me of his and Pola’s past.

In…1940 Karski[, a Pole], began [as] a courier … [between] … the Polish underground [and] the Polish Government in Exile …

During one such mission in July 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo in Slovakia [and s]everely tortured. He managed to escape.

In 1942 Karski was…twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto for the purpose of directly observing what was happening to Polish Jews.

Also, disguised as an Estonian camp guard, he visited a sorting and transit point for the Bełżec death camp.

Karski then met with Polish politicians in exile and the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, giving a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec.

In 1943 he traveled to the United States, meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Oval Office, telling him about the situation in Poland and becoming the first eyewitness to tell him about the Jewish Holocaust.

He also described the Holocaust to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Frankfurter, [a Jew himself, sat politely through] Karski's report. [1]

Recollecting, Karski told me that Frankfurter told him, "I cannot believe you of what’s happening to the Jews in Poland. I do not say that you are lying, I am saying that I CAN NOT believe you.”[2]

If FDR had acted immediately to stem the atrocity by bombing the gas and incineration complexes in the death camps, perhaps 2 Million Jews could have been saved from destruction. 

By the time Allies did act against the camps, Karski’s efforts were estimated to have saved ¼ million Jews, making Karski the most effective savior of European Jewry during the war.

Yet Karski lived with the knowledge that perhaps 10 times more could have been saved, IF ONLY. If only FDR had acted immediately.

While he acknowledged that perhaps deeper levels of military strategy may have prevailed upon FDR, Karski told me that he regretted that he had failed to find the right words in his efforts to convince FDR and the other Allied leaders of the necessity to act. Karski, who had trained for the diplomatic corps, strained every diplomatic muscle he had in trying to persuade the Brits and Americans. In his appeal, he even extravagantly addressed FDR as, “Lord of Humanity.”

Karski also struggled with words around the prisoners: their condition almost rendered him silent. He recognized he was in the midst of the struggle of good and evil.  In that struggle, there were moments of irrepressible holiness by the prisoners straining every sinew of their being to help each other stay alive.

Karski recognized these were stories of struggle, stories of fierce love inside inexpressible trauma and horror.

         Later, Karski volunteered to sneak into the darkness of the Warsaw ghetto and Bełżec death camp to bring the news of Allied efforts to the prisoners.

He brought hope. He was an example of the volunteering saint, representing Isaiah's "send me" attitude.  Karski felt the call of his Christian upbringing to make a prophetic difference to people who were enslaved, oppressed, and daily murdered.

I place this man’s episodic struggle to find compelling and suitable words into the context of Zechariah's being struck dumb by the angel's announcement of the impending birth of his son who would become John the Baptist. Sometimes, the irrepressible call of God works by the suppression and reconstruction of voice such as we discern in the calls of the prophets--Jeremiah (1.6-9) as well as Isaiah. We see this in the call of Moses, who develops a stutter and bashfulness when confronted with God’s call—and in the New Testament, with the progressive muting of Nicodemus by Jesus when he tries to interrogate the latter on his messianic bona fides (John 3:1-17).

.

The Old Testament examples of call narratives of Prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Moses report that the silencing of the called prophet presupposes a kind of human unworthiness in the face of approaching holiness. Their silences are like an involuntary imposition of Sabbath.

It is as if the human need and gift for communication is suspended because of the necessity to observe and honor the holy inbreaking of God’s activity.  From the vocal nothingness of silence, a kind of death of a uniquely human capacity, the person’s human ability to speak may be created anew by God’s Holy Spirit.  A voice may be reborn for a holy service. 

          In 1985, the French Film Director Claude Lanzmann released a 9-1/2 hour documentary series Shoah which documented the living witnesses of the Holocaust.  I committed 4 afternoons of a winter week in early 1986 to seeing Shoah at the Key Theater in Georgetown of Washington, DC. During the second installment, Jan Karski appeared on screen discussing the conditions he had found of the Jews confined in the Warsaw Ghetto, and he wept. Then I was moved to tears in the dark and flickering theater by his descriptions of what he saw and what he experienced in the conditions at Bełżec.  

I left the theater that gloomy Tuesday emotionally spent and got on the bus. It was raining. I sat down and focused internally on my memories of the moving witness to the Holocaust in the documentary. I then became aware of a disturbance at the front of the bus.

It was my friend Jan Karski, whom I had just seen on screen, off from his shift as professor at Georgetown University. He was having difficulty putting away his umbrella while trying, in flustered English, to secure his senior citizen bus discount. The bus passengers were surly at the delay and, hearing his accent, cast their anger frontward at him:

some shouted, “Down in Front!” and “Go Back to where you came from!”

Carried by instinct, I got up from my seat and went to the front and embraced Karski,giving him my arm for support as I almost carried him to a seat. At our seat, I told him of my emotion at having just then seeing him in Shoah.

 “Yes,” he said, “Lanzmann has made an important document of the time. Pola can’t watch it, it’s too painful for her.” 

Since that bus ride, I’ve often wondered if I should have addressed the surly passengers on the bus—shamed them, perhaps with the words, “this is a great man, people!” 

But in the presence of holiness I was silenced. 

I sat a mostly silent vigil with Karski during the bus ride back to the Maryland suburbs. I had nothing profound to say, and the moment seem to require something moving and deep and profound that I couldn’t utter.

For me, like Zechariah, Nicodemus, and  the prophet Isaiah, there is the season of speaking out—a time of moral revival and assertion. 

For us in the church confronted with the ugliness of depression, oppression, and violence in our fellows, there may come a season when we can find no words. In those times, connection isn’t in the thundering eloquence of the pulpit or in the rebukes of the crowd we offer, but in the soft companionship of standing firm next to someone until they are ready to go their own way.

There may be in our recollections times when we were silenced—when our common human inheritance for communication was brought up short.  These times should be approached with great tenderness and discernment of recollection, because I believe our souls have at those times been confronted with something intended and sent from God. Something of holiness. 

Practicing the virtue of recollection, we might gather a spiritual truth from these times when our voices failed.

For at the risk of his life Karski took forth into history’s deepest darkness a message of hope, compassion, and concern. Risk is the price for the companionship with the Holy and the vigil with the Divine that we all crave.

My silence on that bus, I later recollected, inadvertently had discovered that holiness—that common, unobtrusive love-- is not found in rebuking the mob, but rather in companionship and chaplaincy with an elderly and struggling man on a rainy evening as he struggled with his umbrella.

Sometimes, we are not called for the glamour positions—

the shiny speaking positions, the apostleships and prophecies—

but rather to fulfill our role companionably in the local milieu in which we are called—to a witness of presence—

a witness of presence for rightness and compassion through silent accompaniment.

We may often experience ourselves as bursting with expression which threatens to overwhelm others’ capacity for listening.  Especially when events and personalities make a mockery of our deepest, shared morality. At those times, being given to silent companionship can provide the ailing and the onlookers a sign of our trust in goodness when the world is hostile and collapsing. 

Ours is to companion and bring stories of enduring wonder with the mystery of God and the enigma of faith, speaking and living life to the fullest.  In this, we risk that even our words and stories will for a season fail.  Holiness—God’s humble love--demands it. 

         Yet God can bring even out of our silence—our communicative nothingness--a new narrative, a new history, a new world, a new virtue, and a new collective commitment to goodness that sweeps over God’s eternal world like the tide.  Our acts of love live eternally in God’s cosmos, even if we can’t see their immediate impact. Our task as disciples is to fearlessly model authentic humanity as a sign and invitation to others. That is evangelism without words, a song of the heart visible in actions. It is holy, and it pleases God.

As we develop the appropriate individual virtues and practices, the holy, whirling air known to the ancient Israelites as ruach will howl politically to blow apart the “closed-loop discourse” that human society interminably engages on its solipsistic issues. The economic ash heaps and airless discourse of humanity need the fresh and dazzling sunlight cascading through God’s Holy Spirit atmosphere. The Holy Spirit can and will renew our voice.

Go forth from here, with the militancy of the Holy Spirit—with the intention to resist dehumanization in the world—

in Gaza, in Sudan, in Central Los Angeles and in the police districts of St. Louis and fracking fields of North Dakota—go forth evangelizing by your actions the goodness of God’s intended humanity, risking that your words may fail for a season, but that God does not. If your voice falters, sit with it for a season, then recover it for justice. Your silence prepares you for tending God's Kingdom justice. Your silence prepares you for Christmas--its glorious, inbreaking incarnation of humanity's model for holiness who brings God's definitive message of the triumph of love and life.

May your voice be for God’s kingdom in all of its peace, humanity, and justice. May it be so for you and me. AMEN.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Karski accessed on 6 August 2015.

[2] Pers. Comm.

White Idolatry in Oscar Wilde’s Salome and the North Dakota Oil Patch

 White Idolatry in Oscar Wilde’s Salome and the North Dakota Oil Patch

Rev. Douglas Olds (all rights reserved)

17 December 2018

In the finale to Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera Salome, the librettist Oscar Wilde has the title character caress the severed head of John the Baptist that has been presented to her on a silver platter by her step-father Herod Antipas.  The composer Strauss then has her voice a lavish aria: Ah! Du wolltest mich nicht deinen Mund küssen lassen, Jochanaan!  In this final scene, one of the greatest works of expressivit art of the 20th Century, she sings the short melody with symbolic meaning—a leitmotif-- that we’ve heard associated with her character earlier in the opera. Salome sings the leitmotif, “Nothing in the world was so white as thy body!”[1]  She follows that line with, “nothing in the world was so black as thine hair. In the whole world, there was nothing so red as thy mouth.”  Later in the scene, she plants a mad and passionate kiss on John’s disembodied lips.

We the operagoers are meant to be repulsed by Salome’s exultation at the murder and sexual violation of the remains of the Baptist, yet the music is so achingly lyric and beautiful that for a moment we are confused by Strauss’s intention for the dramatic scene.  Then, in a climactic coda, Strauss recapitulates the aria’s instrumental line, continuing in large orchestral force its rhapsodic power until it reaches the previous vocal leitmotif, “Nothing in the world is so white as thy body.” On the extended note where “white” was earlier sung, Strauss adds a blast of dissonance,[2] so that the orchestra almost squawks.   By this dissonance, Strauss is musically commenting on Salome’s moral nihilism and erotic insanity—her mistaking love of physical whiteness of skin to the neglect and denial of the Baptist’s moral goodness: his advocacy for God’s justice and his resolute character.  Salome has monstrously demonstrated instead her admiring erotic obsession with John the Baptist’s mutilated body's whiteness made stark by contrast with its hair’s blackness.

Richard Strauss gets it: the fatal flaw of the civilization he is commenting on in his opera. He is commenting musically not so much on the court of Herod during the time of Jesus, but on his Viennese contemporaries bound up in a squalid exhibition of social Darwinist values that proposed an Aryan, white, master race. What Nietzsche two decades earlier had called the “Blond Beast.”  It is that same idolatry that has led generations of Christians to depict both Jesus—and more scandalously, God—as white-skinned.

This cultural preoccupation with and valorization of whiteness of skin has led generations of Europeans and North American colonists to pursue a destiny of manifest injustice based on a flawed ideology of racial hierarchy and gross exploitation of nature.

Fracking is the staggering epitome of this exploitive economy preoccupied with the gushing forth of the Kingdom of Oil. Fracking pulverizes landforms containing petroleum and natural gas, often bound in shale, injecting large amounts of water at high pressure to separate the methane and oil from the fractured rubble, then sequestering the now-poisonous water runoff underground or in surface ditches. Hilda Koster links the impetus for this violence against nature to the epidemic of sex trafficking and rape that is engaged by the fracking field workers of North Dakota.[3]  A deformed human agency intended by God for loving relationships pervertedly carries off Native American young women into sexual servitude. Correspondingly, the human soul’s agency intended by God for trusteeship of nature is deformed by the mania of ruinous extraction and destruction of natural landforms, leaving behind a desert of poisoned aquifers, sooty air, methane emissions, and compacted and nutrient-depleted soils.  In the North Dakota oil patch as elsewhere in the White Man’s extractive economy, these deformations of moral agency violate the image of God in vulnerable, non-white women and the image of the non-Euro God in nature’s life-sustaining features. These linked violations of sexual and ecological integrity are human sinfulness run amok, a geography of racist violence, a domination feedback loop that raises social temper and global temperature.[4]  The fossil fuel industry’s environmental and social pathologies exemplify the systemic evil of white idolatry. 

Fracking is a brutal mashup in Satan’s opera of "de-creation."  As is racism and sex trafficking.  Shall we continue to look on with passive fascination, allowing our lifestyles to tacitly proclaim, "Bravo!"?

---

[1] At 5’48 of Nina Stimme’s brilliant version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHV5VRl1I1c

[2] At 15’14 of ibid.
--[Earlier] "when Salome finally kisses Jokanann's mouth, we hear superimposed chords of c-sharp (representing her desire) and f-sharp (eroticism), yielding a bitter dissonance that underlines the plot's consequence of this fulfillment. Goodall cites it as 'the most dissonant chord that had ever been heard' and contends that it is 'hard to find a more aggressively uncomfortable combination of notes.'" http://www.classicalnotes.net/opera/salome.html  Strauss added an additional element of dissonance in the aria motif discussed.

[3] Koster, Hilda P. “Trafficked Lands: Sexual Violence, Oil, and Structural Evil in the Dakotas.” In Planetary Solidarity: Global Women’s Voices on Christian Doctrine and Climate Justice, edited by Kim, Grace Ji-Sun and Koster, Hilda P., 155–178. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017.

[4] A Global temperature rise of just 2 degrees Celsius could increase intergroup conflicts (such as civil wars) by over 50 percent. See https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/01/climate-change-and-violence_n_3692023.html?

ir=Green&utm_campaign=080213&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Alert-green&utm_content=Title#slide=2364899