Imagine

The following is a presentation that was given for a faculty panel on the war with Iraq. Later, I presented the same essay at a Peace Rally in the "town square." It was just like the 70s, man. I spoke about peace.

When I was a little younger than most of the students present this evening and first heard John Lennon’s Imagine, the song terrified me. I was raised as a Roman Catholic and was taught that the Church alone possessed truth.  As a descendent of French-Canadians whose family took pride in their continued use of the French language, and as an American from New England whose father, a Veteran of WWII, could not see the American flag without removing his hat and placing it on his heart, the idea of a world where there is no religion, no nationality, no country was UNimaginable and frightening, for these are the elements through which we form our identities; our loyalties; our place in the world.

Tonight, it is to the mystic and the visionary and the social activist that I turn for a vision of a world that seems very much like John Lennon’s vision.

 

Many of us have been introduced to the idea of dualism, the understanding and presentation of reality that places “truth,” or reality in terms that reflect polar opposition. We are familiar with the critique of constructing the entities of our lives in categories of black/white; good/evil; male/female; heaven/earth; spirit/body; Us/Them, with no room in between for subtle shadings of difference. We walk around and speak about “gray areas,” and moral relativism, and patriarchal deconstruction when analyzing specific issues, but seldom realize that our very worldview has been profoundly shaped by a pervasive assumption of dualism, as ancient perhaps as the Neolithic Period of human history. This tendency to understand the world in dualistic terms is so familiar to us that we are hard-pressed to imagine any other way of constructing reality, in perhaps, say, cyclical and wholistic images.

 

Unfortunately, as well as living within a context of dualism we also live within what Darrell Fasching of the University of South Florida has called a “war mythology;” an archetype, if you will, of the “story” in which we find ourselves. He writes,

 

                   Stories of war are stories of wrestling with the stranger that have been

                   infected by a sacred dualism…Perhaps no other type of story has a more

                   disturbing impact on human behavior than that of war. For stories of

                   war invert normal ethical orientations. While in most cultures people

                   would normally say that killing is evil and not killing is good, in times

                   of war these admonitions are inverted. Within a story of war, killing is

                   considered good and not killing is considered evil. Indeed, notkilling

                   will be considered cowardly and unpatriotic…The implications of this

                   inversion are profound…In times of war the very activities that would

                   normally horrify our ethical sensibilities come to be seen as our high-

                   est ethical obligation. [1]

 

         The consequence of living within both a dualistic form of reality AND a war mythology engenders the conditions in which we find ourselves separating ourselves further and further away from other human beings as beings. The enemy becomes the “Other;” the one not like us; the one who is different, and ultimately the evil one. There is a tendency then to de-humanize and demonize them so that the inversion of ethics which allows for the killing can be more easily achieved. Our reality, our world becomes sacred; theirs profane. We become good; they, evil. And as the noble upholders of truth and justice it becomes noble, ethical to rid the world of this perceived evil.

 

The mystic, the visionary, the social activist of every major religious tradition in the world today illustrate and exemplify fundamental ethical principles which all of these religious traditions claim as ethical truth. These include a fundamental affirmation of the Oneness of all Being. In Hinduism, from the Rg Veda, the oldest sacred text in the world (c. 3000BCE) himsa or, in which violence is described as including the following:

 

                  *Treating oneself as different from others

                   * Failing to realize the fundamental unity of all beings

                   * Causing pain to others

                   * Hurting or injuring others by speech, mind and body

                   * Killing or separating the life force from the body of others

                   * Exhibiting hatred towards others

                   * Injuring other harmless beings for the sake of one’s own pleasure

                

to Mohandas Gandhi for whom violence was the very measure of truth. When one has judged that the necessary response to a situation or event is violence, Gandhi charged, the response is already a lie.

        In Buddhism, from the Buddha’s teaching of “no-self” and the interdependence of all things, to Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, whose sense of omnipartiality goes beyond the attempt to simply be impartial or without self-interest but to move into a place where one becomes ethically informed by a mindful awareness of the perspective and well-being of all.  In Judaism, from the Patriarch Abraham’s hospitality to the stranger in the desert to Hasidic Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who declared that idolatry is “any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you,” and, “whenever one man is hurt, we are all injured.” In Christianity, from the story of Jesus of Nazareth, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.” Jesus, who affirmed the Jewish ethical imperative of hospitality to the Other, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” and the Oneness of all Being, “Truly I tell you just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me,” to Martin Luther King, Jr., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”  In Islam, from Muhammad, who in his time put an end to female infanticide declaring it an abominable practice, to Malcolm X whose second conversion in Mecca led him to declare, as a Muslim and as an American, “I could see from this, that perhaps if white America could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the oneness of Man.”

        The ultimate irony of course, is that despite the fundamental affirmation of all religious ethical traditions to welcome the stranger, of hospitality to the Other, and of the Oneness of All Being, in each of their histories, these remain the ultimate challenge as well. Perhaps that is why there is an obstinate insistence that these traditions do uphold their ethics while at the very same time they betray them. Perhaps then also, the ultimate battle against evil may be against the dualistic construction of an idea of evil itself; and the war we should be waging is a war against war itself and to refuse to live within a mythology which makes killing good and not killing evil.

 

The vision of John Lennon, which I once feared, has become my hope.

So much so, that on the evening of September 11, 2001, I wrote the following poem:

 

I pray to no God today.

I am neither Christian, nor Muslim, nor Jew.

The spirit of the earth is my strength.

I claim no country today.

I am neither American, nor Israeli, nor Palestinian,

nor Irish, nor African.

I am a citizen of the universe.

I claim no race, nor color, nor creed.

I am not white, nor black,

not Indian, nor Asian, nor Hispanic.

I am living creature.

I grieve for those who hate,

and for the victims of hatred.

I mourn those who kill,

and those who have lost their lives.

I hold ever before me,

the vision of a world where

there are no strangers.

Where nothing is sacred,

but all is holy.

When the earth will no longer groan.  And the only tears will be gentle rain.

[1] Fasching, Darrell, Comparative Religious Ethics, Blackwell, 2000