A Review: by Mathew Swora

“Seeing your face is as seeing the face of God” (Genesis 33:10), said Jacob to his estranged and offended brother, Esau, upon their reunion. This was long after Jacob had betrayed and despoiled his brother of his birthright and his blessing, and long after his brother had threatened to kill him for that. More than a mere exclamation of relief, these words serve notice that the invisible God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is to be seen in relationships, especially in stages and moments of healing and reconciliation, in effect, through love. For “God is love” (I John 4:8). What began with Cain and Abel, God can and will stop and heal, through such things as what Jacob learned and did. Ours is “The God of Jacob.”

In Jacob and Esau’s story we find all the elements of trauma: betrayal, estrangement, fear, violence, even murder, even fratricide (or at least the threat thereof). Some of these elements may also be found after natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, when our previous assumptions about our place and relationship with the world are shattered, sometimes literally out of the blue. All of them can be found in human-generated disasters, such as war, genocide, crime, murder, and civil strife. Just read Lamentations for a catalog of trauma.

Although long-term, unrelieved stress can generate physical and emotional symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress, the normal, unavoidable stress of every day lives and our built-in role conflicts are not to be confused with trauma. Trauma differs from stress similar to the way in which a tornado differs from prevailing winds. In Belgium and in Kansas, I have seen how mature trees lean in the direction of prevailing winds, having constantly been stressed to survive in that shape. But they’re still quite strong, maybe stronger for the pressure. Tornadoes, however, can uproot and shatter trees. When a human or natural disaster strikes so suddenly, powerfully and irreversibly as to threaten our lives and our very sense of being and meaning, as though it were a betrayal of the very covenant we had made with God, life and the world, that is trauma.

In response to trauma, our bodies want to shake, weep, cry out, move, even run, the fight or flight response. There is deep, God-given wisdom to such responses; they discharge adrenaline and other God-given hormones that enable us to react to threat and hopefully even survive. But often we are forced—or feel forced—to stuff and stifle these responses for a later time, or indefinitely. Children who were abused in any way quickly learn not to react, lest they “invite” more abuse. Or people in the midst of falling bombs or rising waters have to shut down their shaking and quaking in order to get to safety. They may never let it come back on, so busy are they with coping and putting the pieces of life back together.

Yet the body remembers, and years later, for reasons we may not understand, they may come out in destructive ways, such as “acting in.” That is, by drug and alcohol abuse, risky sexual behavior, or other destructive addictions. Or we may “act out,” by abusing other people, stirring up conflict or in organized mob violence, as with gangs or in war. While such actions may provide momentary feelings of relief, they also widen the scope of trauma victims and add another kind of trauma to that of the victims: participant-induced trauma, the trauma of guilt, shame and spiritual deadening on the part of the offender. Often people carry both kinds of trauma, because, as is often said in therapeutic circles, “hurt people hurt people.” Violence and trauma become, in effect, a spiritual virus passing from one host to another, through families, communities and even nations in a vicious, self-perpetuating circle. The curse of Cain did not stop with him.

Just as we should never underestimate the power and effects of trauma, so we should never underestimate the power and possibilities of healing. In the STAR training (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) that I took over the weekend of June 23-27, I learned much about the causes, effects and treatment of trauma. Though hosted by Augsburg College, in Minneapolis, MN, it is part of Eastern Mennonite University’s Institute for Peacebuilding. Mennonite peace and reconciliation workers have discovered that no one can deal with conflict for very long before realizing that it is often driven and complicated by very deep, emotional and historic pain, in effect, trauma. Rarely can the conflicts be resolved and peace made until the underlying pain and fear are addressed and healed to some degree.

The words “healing” and “treatment” makes it sound like it was a course for licensed therapists and psychologists, but only some of the attendees were of that professional status. The rest of us were students, school teachers, community activists and organizers, seminary students, and one pastor—myself. I would recommend STAR for anyone. The information was accessible and applicable for anyone of almost any educational background and level.

Central to STAR’s model of trauma awareness and response is “the snail model.” Think of the inner, overlapping circles as descriptors of the cycle of trauma/abuse, acting in and/or acting out and re-traumatization, of self and others. This cycle, sadly, is the plot line of many stories, epics and movies, from the ancient Babylonian creation epic, to Homer’s Illiad, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the spaghetti westerns of Clint Eastwood, to today’s shoot-em-up video games, and the revenge fantasy novels of Dean Koontz. Often, the unwilling participants in this cycle bear a tragic nobility, suffering inevitably as both victims and avengers.

If that is not to continue forever and destroy both victim and perpetrator and create many more, at some point one must break free and create a new, self-reinforcing cycle, or story, or identity, by transcending the cycle of violation and vengeance. Because it breaks out from the tight circle of pain and retribution and moves off in another arc, a diagram of this redemptive movement has been called, “the snail model.” Also because it goes slowly and can be messy, as snails are.

The trajectory of the new cycle begins with truth-telling: exploring and memorializing the story of the injury but with a difference from the constant feedback loop of victimhood and the need to avenge. In the new story, the old plot leads to new ones, in which the victim rises above the status of victim, and the offender is considered separately from the offense. Prime examples of this would be the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., or the courageous and careful restoration of Warsaw, Poland, brick by brick, after it was completely leveled in 1944. There’s no excusing or minimizing the offense, of course. But the offender has to be re-considered as a hurt human being (because “hurt people hurt people”), no longer diminishing him or her to a sub-human status, as when the Hutus of Rwanda labeled the Tutsis “cockroaches.” That gave permission to stamp them out. But just as often, the offended must take the offender down from the status of a super-human monster, bigger than life, and therefore, above and beyond the reach of conscience, love or healing. This happened in Nazi-occupied Poland, when the war started to turn against the Nazis. Hearing news of German defeats, and seeing wounded Germans in passing hospital trains, gave many Polish Jews and Gentiles courage to start standing up to the occupiers in both overt and covert ways. They were only human, after all.

From there the trauma victim moves toward a new story and identity, one of survivor, overcomer, forgiver and peacemaker. Forgiveness is not to be confused with reconciliation, which requires just as much responsibility on the part of the offender as on the victim. The victim’s own healing cannot be held hostage to the offender’s willingness—or not–to admit his or her wrong-doing and ask for pardon. The offender may not even be available or alive any more. Forgiveness is not about excusing or minimizing the injury. It is about releasing oneself from a felt need to avenge, and therefore re-traumatize oneself and others.

An important way-station in the journey of trauma healing is the willingness to seek reconciliation with the offender. In one of the most touching parts of the seminar, that is what we saw a mother and her granddaughter do, in a documentary film, with the man who had raped and murdered the granddaughter’s mother years before. With the help of a volunteer who worked with Victim-Offender mediation, they were able to meet with the murderer in his prison and hear the answers to many of their questions about the murder. This was possible because of good preparation for this event, which included working with the murderer to help him get to the point where he owned up to what he did, and to all its meaning and ramifications. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not to be confused with condoning what needs to be forgiven. By honestly facing what he had done, and how it had affected them, both the offender and the victim’s survivors experienced some relief from the symptoms of trauma, how it that had long depressed, deadened and imprisoned them. The brutal crime had already forced into fact a relationship between the murderer and the victim’s loved ones. But after their initial meetings, that relationship was on a constructive, life-affirming path for all of them. But the murderer remains in prison.

This cycle of release and healing is the grand, mythic story that must come to inspire, instruct, and re-construct us, as an alternative to the myth of redemptive violence and the cycle of vengeance that has enchanted us for millenia.

All this I have described so far in psychological and therapeutic language. But it is also, I noted, the language and movement of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The break from the self-perpetuating cycle of violence and vengeance into a new self-perpetuating cycle of healing is one that Jesus made even as he was being nailed to the cross, when he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” On the third day after his crucifixion, he appeared to the very disciples who had abandoned and denied him in his hour of need, an act in their culture that was nearly every bit as bad as his betrayal by Judas and his murder, and said to them, “Peace be with you.” Then he went on, through his disciples, to reach out, incorporate and reconcile people of the very tribes and nations that had abandoned and murdered him (Gentile and Jewish), and to reconcile them to each other. This “ministry of reconciliation,” in the apocalyptic language of John’s Revelation, is “the war of the lamb” (Rev. 17:14).” It is every bit as heroic, mythic and cosmic, and requires just as much courage, discipline and dedication, and then some, as does war. But in this war, bodies, souls and relationships are re-united and healed.

And it is not just for the survivors of war, murder and natural disasters, although one can argue that we are all such survivors, even if only by a few degrees removed. To live and be human is to have to work through offenses, injuries and insults to our selves and our sense of well-being, even if they are self-inflicted or secondary, that is, by hearing the stories of other people’s traumas and helping them through them. Trauma healing is also for social workers, aid workers, medical personnel, pastors and any others who help carry other people’s burdens and may themselves suffer secondary trauma and compassion fatigue.

Much of what we, as helpers, can do for those recovering from trauma, is to listen with patience, attention, care and empathy. In so doing we help them tell their story and thus validate their pain and injury. We cannot reinterpret their story for them, but we can listen for and encourage those steps and twists in the story-telling through which they can begin to move from a cycle of victimhood to one of victory over the symptoms of trauma. Because, by the grace of God, life, hope and healing are ever seeking to enter and re-direct the inward, downward spiral of victimhood. At times, though, we may have to recognize and challenge the temptation to use the story to reinforce a sense of victimhood, rather than to seek a way out of it.

Even if our lives have been incredibly sheltered (like mine, comparatively speaking), in this city (Minneapolis) and in this time, one need only sit somewhere a while before trauma stories and trauma victims come looking for us. Trauma of some sort has driven most of the immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers to our neighborhoods. The Native peoples, whose ancestors received the first Scandinavians and Germans to this community, carry a trauma wound that is re-opening on the occasion of Minnesota’s 150^th anniversary. Federal law still says that the Dakota are not supposed to live in this state, under pain of death. I sense that the recent Arizona law requiring the validation of citizenship whenever there is any reason to doubt it, and the recent proposal of such a law in the Minnesota state legislature, has heightened the level of fear in the local Spanish-speaking community, documented and otherwise.

Trauma can feed back to the present from the future, in the one universal trauma we all face: that of death and dying. And so we deny and negate the reality of death in ways similar to the common denial of traumas in our past. But hope and healing can also filter back from the future to the present. On the last day of STAR, our assignment was to bring in some symbol of hope for ourselves. One person brought a cross. A Somali woman quoted a verse from the Q’uran in Arabic. Another brought some of her photography. I brought two matching halves of a freshwater clam shell that I had found alongside the Maumee River, upstream of Toledo, Ohio. It is a sign of healing and hope, I said, because the river, at its headwaters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, begins nearly as a dead zone, so badly is it polluted with silt, sewage and industrial waste. By the time it reaches Defiance, Ohio, however, the river is much cleaner and brimming with life. Freshwater clams are especially sensitive to pollution, but from Defiance on down they thrive in the river nearly all the way to its mouth, near Toledo, so powerful and effective are the powers of healing, renewal and cleansing in this world. That reminded me, I said, of another picture of healing and restoration to come, in John’s Revelation, chapter 22: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse.”

And from the previous chapter, verse 4: “God will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’”

Another casualty of the Vietnam war was hope. With major Civil Rights legislation and Great Society programs signed into law by President Johnson, the 1960′s were a heady time of hope for progress toward social justice, equality and opportunity for all. But the hope soon faded, like the last note of a bugle playing taps.  The war, like a cowbird in a robin’s nest, was eating up more and more of our nation’s energies and resources. In his address to the New York chapter of Clergy and Laity Concerned, at the famous Riverside Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., drew this parallel between Vietnam and the abortive War on Poverty: “A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” (Read the text of the entire speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html).

In the late ’60′s and early ’70′s, what social investments military budgets did not de-fund, politics and war-driven inflation killed off. Common wisdom says that we tried lifting people out of poverty and poverty, and the poor, proved incorrigible. But its more evident to me that our short-lived social investments died in the fields and forests of Vietnam long before they could bear any fruit. Whenever a nation sends soldiers off to war, it is unavoidably warring against its own citizens, directly, by putting them in harm’s way, and indirectly, by beating our much-needed plowshares into swords and the people’s pruning hooks into spears. Another monument is needed on which to list the names of all the Great Society programs that died in infancy, and all the people who were condemned to remain in, or fall into, poverty by the war. It should be within sight of the Vietnam War Memorial.

The social, spiritual and personal effects of this death of hope could be seen in the 1970′s, aptly called, “The Me Decade.” With trust and idealism dying agonizing deaths under war and the Watergate scandal, with poverty and inflation increasing, what was left but to tend one’s own garden, pursue pleasure, and “tune in, turn on and drop out?”

It was in this setting (1973), while trading in my dying youthful idealism for the mindless pleasures of the Me decade, that I was stopped in my tracks by the Prince of Peace. He affirmed my anti-war and pro-Civil Rights beliefs and even intensified them, putting them on an entirely new footing, other than a secular humanism. My waning idealism he replaced with a loyalty and commitment to the visions of Israel’s prophets. I enlisted in the anti-violent War of the Lamb. That was in the course of “The Jesus Movement,” which rescued many of my generation from either burning out on hedonism, or selling out to “The System.”

Through Christ I entered that “Revolution of Values” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., urged on us toward the close of his speech on the Vietnam War. Read the following words and consider their import to today: “A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Just to the south of the wall with the names of all the war dead is a statue to the women who served in Vietnam. It too is powerful and touching. The woman who had seen me crying, and the youth group she was chaperoning, got to it just ahead of me. By the time I arrived to contemplate it, with tears still fresh on my cheeks, some of these youth were climbing over the statue and joking about it. I may well have done the same at their age. But their chaperone chewed them out, telling them, “Its not that kind of statue [for climbing on], and besides, there are people here grieving the deaths of their family members and friends.” She also apologized to Becky for their conduct.

Technically, I was not grieving the loss of any “family members and friends.” I can’t claim to have known a single person whose name is on that wall. But a walk through the memorial reminded me that the world is such that no one is untouched by, or immune to, the effects of love or hate, life or death, war or peace, anywhere in this world. Bearing the names of all the war dead, each one representing an inter-connected web of still-grieving family members and friends, that long dark scar of a monument reminds us that we are all members of the same human household, with much left yet to mourn, to learn, to do, and to heal.

“Are you all right, Sir?” the woman asked, as she saw me crying. She had more than half a dozen middle-school youth with her in tow.

“I’m okay. Thank you,” I replied.

Becky and I were about half way through the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., one day this week, when tears began streaming down my face. Becky remarked how the long, scar-like depression in the earth that is the monument was deepest at the point where it recorded the most names, in the middle and high point of America’s engagement in that conflict. Like the American death toll itself, the monument starts out shallow and narrow, and deepens before it turns and narrows again, to the tiny end point, where someone indeed had to be the last American to die for a tragic mistake. Something about the shape and color of that dark marble scar in the earth mirrors the wound that the war left in ourselves and our country.

Why was I crying? I wondered. I had never served there. Though I got my regulation Selective Service card, like all my peers (that was before I even knew about Mennonites and conscientious objection), I missed the draft for Vietnam by two years. Nor did I know anyone personally who had served and died there. I have since met veterans of the war, but obviously their names will never be on that monument. War stories are written and recounted by survivors. Yet there came back to me memories of the times that some childhood peer had told me that their brother or their father had died there. I either quickly changed the subject or found someone else to play with. The news was too monstrous for a child to face, let alone respond to adequately. Forty-five years later, I do not remember their names. Maybe it was for persons un-known or forgotten, deliberately perhaps, that the tears came. That also shows how, even with a draft, the war did not touch all of society equally. Then, as now, my scholarly, white collar middle class family and friends had options unavailable to poorer, blue collar folks and people of color. That’s worth lamenting, too.

Though I missed the draft, if anyone had told me, at the ripe age of eight or ten, that I would likely be sent to war in Viet Nam, I may well have believed them. From the nightly news and magazines like Time and Life, we got to know the names of Vietnamese cities like Quang Tri, Danang and Hue because our boys were always defeating the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese there. We were assured that we were winning, that there was “a light at the end of the tunnel,” because the body counts of their dead and missing were always higher than ours. Now we know that those figures were often invented and imaginary. But after so many years of defeating the VC and the North Vietnamese in Quang Tri, Danang and Hue, again and again, practically every other week, you couldn’t help wondering how many more years of victory this war would require, how many more years of victory we could take, and whether you’d survive when it became your turn to also go fight and win there. Had Congress not begun de-funding the war on Nixon’s watch, and had Nixon not begun his process of “Vietnamisation,” (turning the war over to the South Vietnamese, with American weapons and training—basically how the war stated twelve years earlier), I would be much more surprised today that I, too, had not gone to Viet Nam and become a name on that wall. Or someone who came to put those flowers and that card that I saw, in memory of a beloved comrade in arms, just below his name. Maybe it was the lifelong burden of his or her grief, more than forty years later, that started the tears flowing.

My third grade teacher, Mrs. Renkin, told me to expect as much. “Many boys like those in this class have grown up to serve their country, to fight and to die for our freedom,” she told us one day, “like boys I went to school with, who died in places like Anzio, Normandy, or Guadalcanal.” She added, “And when it comes your chance, all you boys should be proud and willing to do the same, like our boys now dying to defend our lives and liberty in Viet Nam.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Mam,” I thought to myself. I knew better to say it out loud though, because I was already convinced that she had it in for boys, and gave girls preferential treatment. I’m not sure that my conduct in her class gave her much reason to change her preferences. But that got me to wondering when and why the willingness to kill and die became the price for life as a male. So who decided, and when, that I was born to be expendable? More than forty years later, I wonder if there was some burden of grief she carried from World War II or Korea.

Now I embrace the expendability of this life for the kingdom of God, and even find freedom in that, but with the promise that, in losing this life, I get an even greater one. And I am much more assured of the worth of God’s kingdom, than I am of the cause we were supposed to be defending in Vietnam. We now know that all three presidents who prosecuted the war (Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon), plus at least one of their Secretaries of Defense (Robert McNamara) knew that the war could not be won. They simply did not want to be the first American president to lose a war, nor did they want their party to be accused of being soft on Communism and “losing Vietnam” the way the Democrats  had been accused of “losing” China in the late 1940′s. As though any other country were ours to lose. So they kept sending in the soldiers, either escalating or de-escalating the deadly assembly line, to stay in power and to postpone the day of reckoning until the next administration came into office. In effect, so many of the names on that dark scar of a wall were there for protecting someone’s political hide.

As that suspicion turned to realization, my generation lost the faith that the previous generation had: that our leaders always leveled with us, like FDR with his fireside chats; that our country always wore the white hat and rode to war only to rescue the innocent and to restore justice; and that, being so virtuous and powerful, we would always prevail over the evil other. That narrative seemed to have fit the previous wars of living memory, according to all the movies starring John Wayne and Audie Murphy. And many of the teachers, Scout masters, sports coaches  and even some pastors and priests from that generation kept reminding us of it. But many of us were beginning to think otherwise, and to feel betrayed. And afraid. You couldn’t tell all your peers or your coaches or teachers about the loss of your faith in the iron-clad innocence and virtue of your country and its leaders, without risking some serious consequences, the least of which was being called “coward” or “traitor.” Families and friendships broke up, jobs were lost, even (we later found) phone lines were tapped, mail was opened and taxes were audited during the Johnson and Nixon administration, if you were prominent, vocal and active enough against the war. Maybe it was that loss of faith and innocence that came back to me in the form of tears.

April 23,

Mathew Swora

Mark 15: 16The soldiers led Jesus away into the palace (that is, the Praetorium) and called together the whole company of soldiers. 17They put a purple robe on him, then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on him. 18And they began to call out to him, "Hail, king of the Jews!" 19Again and again they struck him on the head with a staff and spit on him. Falling on their knees, they paid homage to him. 20And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.

Holy Week and this year’s season of Lent are a time when Scripture and current events overlap, especially in the matter of torture. Whatever we may say about the theological and salvific nature of Christ’s death on the cross, we must also acknowledge that what He suffered, from the moment of His arrest, was torture. Christ died for our sins. And He died by state-sanctioned torture. The passion narratives make up major chunks of the Gospels even if the events only took up a few days in Christ’s thirty-year life among us. One reason for that is that the first generations of Christians would read or hear them knowing that they very well could face much the same trials, and would be called to stand faithfully by their confession as did Jesus.

Its pretty much an open secret that torture is now a weapon in the arsenal of our country’s "War on Terror." But now its called, "Enhaced Interrogation Techniques." I am not in any position to evaluate the efficacy of "enhanced interrogation techniques," although the rationales and scenarios used to justify it strike me as a very long logical stretch. As a human being however, I can and must say something about the moral depravity of torture as an action or a policy, and about its terrible physical, emotional and spiritual effects for the victims. Survivors of torture describe life afterward as a process of "trying to put the soul back into the body."

And as a pastor and a Christian, I can and must say something about the moral and spiritual effects of torture upon all of us, even of its presence and permission, whether we should ever find ourselves being tortured (slim chance, I hope) or not. As a character in George Orwell’s 1984 admitted, "The object of torture is torture." In other words, gathering vital information by the only means (allegedly) possible is not just a rationale or objective for torture; it serves as permission, a cover, a fig leaf for the brutality in people that finds expression in, among other things, torture. The ends and effects of torture are: 1) the sense of power derived from cruelty and domination over others; 2) the intimidation into obedience of both enemies and citizens through the overt and implied threat of torture; 3) the cheapening of public values and morals, so that independent and responsible citizens become obedient subjects, enured to the sufferings of others, and willing to carry out any policy of their government, however reprehensible and illegal. Torture thus becomes a powerful assertion of the state’s or the leader’s ultimate sense of absolute worth, above and beyond the law and the people it is supposed to serve. I can’t think of any other rationales for excusing or engaging in torture.The morally and spiritually contagious effects of torture on the wider society are evident in the growing popularity of "torture porn," the depiction and deployment of torture as a plot device, and for entertainment, in movies, books and television.

On one hand, we might say that the decision of so many governments to take up the power to destroy life as we know it through nuclear weapons makes the decision to justify and employ torture small potatoes. But recent developments around torture, in America at least, represent a political, moral and spiritual sea change. Now there is a claim to the right to act above and beyond the law (military, federal, state and local) and against the constitutional guarantee against "cruel and unusual punishment" by persons and agencies within the government. How can that not risk cheapening everyone’s respect for the rule of law? Maybe this isn’t all that new, either. Except for the degree of openness and the claims of rightness about it.

As Christians we must resist, as did Jesus, the actions and the effects of torture–or at least the threat thereof–upon all of us. We must not let ourselves be infected by the attitude that inflicting pain is real power, that might makes right and that the end justifies the means. Christ’s life and teachings permit no divorce of ends from means. We must not let the official support of violence and cruelty cheapen our values and corrupt our moral sensitivity. We must not let the implied fear of torture, which, though aimed at enemies, can’t help but frighten citizens, render us silent, passive and discouraged.

On one hand, I am very much surprised that I now live in a country that reserves the right to torture, without ever having emigrated. Especially one whose founding documents so eloquently enshrine the rule of law and human dignity. On the other hand, I should not be surprised at what human nature cooks up and justifies. But every day, when I pray, "Create in me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me (Ps. 51)," I trust that I am reinforcing the spiritual fire wall between my spiritual and moral center, and the thickening clouds of moral confusion in the world around us. But keeping ourselves pure from the spiritually and morally contagious effects of torture is only a start. One way I have pushed back actively is by contributing to Center for Victims of Torture http://www.cvt.org/main.php. I consider the little bit I can give to them an act of atonement for the use of torture in my name, by my country. I wish I could do more.

What do you think?

Mathew Swora, pastor

Emmanuel Mennonite Church

MALENESS, MASCULINITY AND VIOLENCE

It hit me so fast my knees almost buckled. As it was, I had to find somewhere safe, alone, to sit down, trembling, wanting to cry. Hearing her statement, it was as though a rock fell from my head down to my feet, taking my heart with it. She (not my wife) said it in all innocence, not knowing how it would hit me, as she looked up from the newspaper account about the latest outbreak of gun violence at a major university, in which victims were shot at random before the perpetrator turned his gun upon himself. "This trend gives us one more thing to worry about," she said. "And what they all have in common is the male gender."

Precisely the thought which I had been fighting to hold at bay. Not just because of the latest killings at Northern Illinois State University, but at Virginia Tech, in other schools, and through a sordid world history of warfare, genocide and ethnic cleansing. Its hard to argue with the sheer weight of numbers. We men grow up with great expectations about being able to protect our loved ones. But deep down, doesn’t it ever bother us that we’re almost always supposed to be protecting them from other men?

Hearing someone else verbalize this broke the last thin line of my defenses against the monstrous logic lurking in my unconscious mind: that since physical violence is overwhelmingly (yes, not exclusively) done by males, violence must therefore be inherently a male trait; I am male; therefore, I am violent, even guilty of violence perpetrated (mostly) by other males, by reason of our shared maleness. Every such assault is not just an assault against women (though it often is); it is an assault against all human beings, including men, especially those of us guys who don’t like being feared for the simple fact of our maleness.

Good thing I took a logic class in college. Now that I have recovered from that momentary wave of despair over my maleness, I can peel open that statement and pick it apart the way I would a tamale (my favorite food). I started to feel better when I also realized that the woman who had made that blanket observation about men and violence obviously felt safe enough around me–a guy– to verbalize it.

But it took me a while to get my head and heart back on straight. Should men despair over their maleness? That’s probably where a lot of male violence comes from in the first place. And it would only lead to more violence. But I don’t know how I wouldn’t despair, except for the fact that Jesus was male. And he wasn’t violent. He was powerful, forceful, assertive and authoritative, as when he threw over the money-changers’ tables and drove the sacrificial animals out of the temple. But never was he coercive nor violent toward other people. Not that maleness is closer to, or more reflective of, God. It isn’t. Both sexes are necessary to each other and to reflect the image of God (Genesis 1: 27), especially through their mutuality and harmony. But if I didn’t believe that, how would I avoid either affirming the (statistical) male propensity to violence, or despairing over ever changing it?

I also find it helpful to draw a distinction between biological maleness, which is a God-given gift (like femaleness) and the many different social and spiritual constructions of masculinity, many of which make violence central and important. I define masculinity as what we and others tell us our maleness is about.

Violence is not a disease of maleness. Prostate cancer is, but not violence. Violence is a disease of fallen human nature, whose most overt and physical aspects have found their expression more often in socially-constructed masculinity than in femininity, ever since the Fall into sin and the resulting estrangement between the complimentary parts of God’s image in the flesh: men and women. Not long after Adam had hidden himself from God and blamed everything on God and Eve, we read that his male descendants, like Lamech, were taking multiple wives and boasting of their homicidal prowess (Genesis 4: 19-24). The gulf of estrangement between men and women that sin brought into the world runs through our very selves, estranging men from the traits and experiences we typically define as female or feminine. I am hardly in any position to say how this estrangement affects women, not being one myself.

While Christians are rightfully struggling over their theological, pastoral and missional responses to homosexuality, we have been relatively blind to the biggest and most destructive issue of sexuality, what I call the unholy trinity of mainstream masculinity:

• misogyny, the fear and contempt of women and all things female, including those things we typically consider feminine within our selves as guys, like tenderness, connection, receptivity and nurture

• machismo, the act of basing our value as persons upon our ability to attract, command, control and dominate women, and

• militarism, our tendency to project our fears and insecurities onto others, and to try to resolve them by means of destructive and dominating power and technology. Militarism is not only a response to enemies; it requires enemies, and will seek them, find them, make them and try to destroy them, even where none might otherwise be found.

This unholy trinity of misogyny, machismo and militarism is such a feature of so many social constructs of masculinity (not of God-given maleness), that it is almost invisible, especially to us guys, as water is to a fish. We men have hard work untangling our sense of ourselves, and the gifts of our maleness, from the thicket of mainstream masculinity in which we live.

So, I’ve started wearing a white ribbon around town. A few people have asked me about it. I got the idea from The White Ribbon Campaign, a men’s movement, based in Canada, which advocates against violence toward women, by men. And if you’ll listen to me long enough, I ‘ll tell you about the church to which I belong, which supports me in my commitment to nonviolence. I wear it as a way of publicly declaring my nonviolence toward all people, as a way of saying that I am unarmed and not dangerous. Just maybe a little scary, with the occasional spastic outburst of ideas like the one you just read, which may be taken as a challenge to so much of what we’re taught about the value and reason for being guys. But what a relief it is to learn that the gifts of being male are about loving, just sometimes in different ways from those in which women love.

What do you think?

Mathew Swora, pastor

Emmanuel Mennonite Church