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| Syria's Nightmarish Narrative, Consortiumnews.com |
I would like to
live in a simple world.
Simple. Safe.
With easy answers. Do-able solutions.
A world where
good guys smile and bad guys sneer and the difference is obvious and justice
comes riding long before the credits roll.
A world free of
persistent evil and crushing human pain.
I confess, I’ve
been trying hard not to pay attention to the news of Syria.
Even as my time this
summer in Finland and Sweden set me thinking about the hazards of small nations
caught in the path of desperate power, I’ve kept my gaze averted from the
swelling humanitarian crisis.
The ongoing
story of bombs, burned houses, rebels, refugees.
It’s over there,
wherever “there” is.
I’m here.
I have enough to
pray and wrestle with.
Right?
An on-line
conversation between two friends set me reeling earlier this week.
One friend, a
young mother of two, a dear sister in youth ministry, a conscientious, caring
soul, posted on Facebook:
I've
been crying today over the pictures of the Syrian child washed up on the beach
in Turkey. Every time I see him, I see my own children. We cannot afford to
believe that the immigrant and the refugee is other than us. They could be us.
That boy is my baby.
The second,
another sister in ministry, somewhat older mother of two, writer, thinker,
determined activist:
I'm
sorry to be such a skeptic, but I am not sure our sorrow, which is heartfelt,
will change anything unless we are willing to advocate for change...to be the
change. I say this not to discount your sorrow, or anybody else's, or my own,
but as someone who has been writing about Syria for years and finally hardened
my heart because our national indifference got to be too much to bear. Maybe
I'm wrong. I want to be wrong. And forgive me if I sound arrogant or impatient.
What shook me
was the sudden awareness of my own grave hardness of heart.
My own
determination to look the other way.
My unacknowledged,
almost crippling grief at our national indifference.
My deep sorrow
and not-well-processed anger that those most determined to speak as
“Christians” clap and cheer when presidential candidates use global unrest as
political fodder and brag about what they’d do to shut out the homeless,
tempest-tossed.
My doubt that
change is possible.
I repent.
Not for the anger,
although I may get there.
Not for the
sorrow – although it’s probably misplaced.
I repent the
hardness of heart, the determined disinterest, the doubt born of soul-deep
weariness at living in this not-yet world, where injustice seems to rule the
day and gentle civilians are trampled and torn by power-hungry bullies.
I’ve been
repenting all week.
Praying,
reading, wondering.
About causes,
solutions, boundaries, borders.
Let my
repentance go deeper: in my self-righteous impatience, I wondered why we, the
US, don’t take up arms and stop the nonsense driving so many innocent civilians
from their homes. Wouldn’t that be better than struggling to find homes for so
many who would obviously prefer to live in safety in their own country?
Let me be more
politically correct – I wondered why the UN Security Forces haven’t done what
they were created to do: intervene. Stop the slaughter. Make Syria safe so the
refugees can go home.
My first thought
– in this as in so much else - is to look for someone to blame:
Russia!
The UN.
Assad.
ISIS.
Oh, sure, President Obama.
Am I missing someone?
I am, on a fairly deep level,
a pacifist, yet I found myself tracking across the Internet, looking for
military solutions. Surely that’s possible?
Maybe not.
I won’t try to sketch out the
complexity of the issues in my targeted 1200 words.
The BBC offered a reasonable summary last March in “eight short chapters”.
And I won’t set out, here,
just war arguments, hesitations, cautions. Gerard Powers, Director of Catholic
Peacebuilding Studies at the Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International
Peace Studies , recently offered a quick overview of the just war discussion applied to Syria, and concluded:
There are no morally clear or clean answers to the moral conundrums the international community faces in Iraq and Syria.
The United States, in particular, faces a serious moral conundrum. U.S. policy has suffered a double moral failure: it was immoral to intervene in Iraq in 2003, and in the years since, its self-serving, misguided, incompetent and sometimes grossly negligent policies have failed the Iraqi people. The first moral failure made the second more likely. These many years, many deaths, many billions of dollars, and many missteps later, we are tempted to say that we have done all we can do and wash our hands of the problem, letting Iraq and Syria be torn apart by their “ancient hatreds.” But that would be shirking our moral obligations, for the United States has become –voluntarily! – very much a part of those hatreds.
The more serious temptation at this moment of crisis is to do what we did in 2003: pursue a quick-fix military solution justified by best-case scenarios about the good that would be achieved – peace, freedom, and democracy for Iraq and the region. But that approach lacks the realism essential to any ethic of military intervention. Because past U.S. interventions helped create the current crisis, we have a moral obligation to act. Limited military intervention might be necessary. But without a serious effort to address the larger political, economic, and cultural dynamics – to engage in nation building in two countries torn asunder, it will be no more successful than it has been until now.
Yesterday, tens of thousands marched through European city centers in solidarity with refugees who have been
fleeing Syria in what has been described as the biggest mass migration since
World War II. In Denmark, an estimated 30,000 chanted “Say
it loud and say it clear: Refugees are welcome here!”
Here in the US, a Facebook
group Open Homes, Open Hearts is looking for ways to offer support, inviting
families to post photos offering welcome.
International groups like Oxfam and Mercy Corps are working to provide for refugees, while smaller, more localized groups, like Migrant Offshore Aid Station and Hand in Hand for Syria focus on more specific concerns.
In my thinking and praying
this week, I came across a group, and video, that humbled me, challenged me,
and gave focus to my thought and prayer. The video was made in 2012 – so it’s
out of date. And long: 53 minutes. I almost said “too long”.
But the group promoting it,
Cultures of Resistance, intrigued me.
And the title, The Suffering Grasses, reminded me of the same reality I’d seen in Finland: “When the
elephants fight, the grass suffers.”
And in part for the way it
makes clear that lack of awareness, lack of interest, lack of global outcry,
has made it possible for the mayhem to continue.
It offers a hope for peaceful
solution: through creative resistance, digital documentation, reminder of the
long history of peaceful coexistence between different clans and religions.
Watching, I found myself
wondering at the courage of the video’s creators and those who filmed and spoke, where they are now, what they
would say. How many are dead? How many have left Syria/
In church this morning, our
sermon, first in a series on Acts, focused on Paul’s conversion. Bent on
violent persecution, he encountered the risen Christ on the road to Damascus
and was forever changed.
Damascus is the capital of Syria, oldest inhabited city on
earth, site of one of Christianity’s most famous conversions.
As I was reflecting on that,
our rector, Richard Morgan, mentioned almost in passing the experience of a
Muslim woman he knew, who encountered Christ in a dream, and found her life
forever changed. Pray for dreams, visions, miraculous intervention!
Our prayer leader cut through
my reverie once again with a strong, compassionate prayer for the people of
Syria: pray for comfort for those in distress, care for those in need, wisdom and
strength for those called to offer aide.
And then, the prayer of
confession, a prayer I needed, and continue to need:
Most merciful God, we confess
that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have
done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole
heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we
humbly repent ...
No neat solutions.
Yet I open
myself to learn more, to listen better, to pray more consistently.
To hold fast to the knowledge
that God can change hearts, minds, situations, nations.
Syria.
And my own.
