chief
sinners ... I am chief
In 79 years, nothing I have ever read is more true or more incisive than Barbara Crafton’s essay “The Civil War” that arrived overnight, opened in email this morning, link below and shared on my FB page. It brings countless memories and events to mind, chief at this predawn moment of this day of horror --
-- the 6 August evening I was duty officer at the U.S. Naval Base, Yokosuka, Japan. It must have been 1965, twenty years on. Stretching into the city’s streets beyond what the eye could take in or the mind grasp, a fearsome throng of angry, protesting, almost rioting Japanese, most wearing red headbands, chanting vehemently anti-American slogans, the mob a unity, a single being surging back and forth in massive human waves of vitriol as they pressed against the high steel main gate of the naval base, pushing and pressing, bending and bowing the gate inward, and back, inward and back, inward in waves of hatred -- memorializing their dead city, cities, two cities, tens or hundreds of thousands of vaporized dead -- oblivious of my returning hatred and defiant mental chant “Let’s remember Pearl Harbor” so out of mind and relevance to their images. Did they know they caused us to drop them? They neither remembered nor cared, they saw only their own incinerated corpses
I pray that some will view the panorama-of-hiroshima-after-the-bomb, view and circle at full screen.
I pray that some will view the panorama-of-hiroshima-after-the-bomb, view and circle at full screen.
Visiting Nagasaki in 1965 I was warned, ordered, not to go into the city in uniform.
In human time the horror of 9/11 that will fade has not yet. Feeding upon itself, hatred is nuclear fusion. As we will never understand their evil, they will never understand our vengeance. From “sinners, of whom I am chief,” they cannot possibly hate me as bitterly as they have taught me to hate them; and in that fact they have won the War and I have become what they are. Pious will say “no, it’s Love,” but no human emotion is as motivating as hatred, hate because of one’s dead.
In human time the horror of 9/11 that will fade has not yet. Feeding upon itself, hatred is nuclear fusion. As we will never understand their evil, they will never understand our vengeance. From “sinners, of whom I am chief,” they cannot possibly hate me as bitterly as they have taught me to hate them; and in that fact they have won the War and I have become what they are. Pious will say “no, it’s Love,” but no human emotion is as motivating as hatred, hate because of one’s dead.
And now me -- sinners, of whom I am chief -- why?
What can we do, what can I do. Beginning with me. I don’t know how to stop it, neither the fusion within me, nor certainly not them. I don’t know. I am certain of absolutely nothing. I just don’t know.
What can we do, what can I do. Beginning with me. I don’t know how to stop it, neither the fusion within me, nor certainly not them. I don’t know. I am certain of absolutely nothing. I just don’t know.
The gospel for the upcoming Sunday, and so our rector at our Wednesday eucharist last evening, about forgiveness. I must forgive. How could I ever possibly forgive me for being what I am? I cannot. I cannot, possibly or ever. If forgiveness is to be, another must do it. another, or an Other.
This is a true saying and worthy of all to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.
TW+