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News of American torture prompts fresh opposition

EDITOR’s NOTE: Since our publishing house was founded in 2007, many of our authors and columnists have written about their commitments toward world peace. The first author we published is international peace trainer Daniel Buttry, whose books include Blessed Are the Peacemakers. As a community of writers, we have pursued these themes for 14 years. Flash forward to 2021, and we have just published David Edwards’ What Belongs to God: Reflections on Peacemaking by a Conscientious Objector and Bill Tammeus’ Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. For many years, Bill also has been one of the leading American journalists covering religion, and writing commentaries about the complex interrelationship between faith and culture. When news broke in the case of detainee Majid Kahn this week, Bill reported the following column for our readers.

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Beyond Moral Outrage, Torture Is Counterproductive

By BILL TAMMEUS
Contributing Columnist

It’s not as if we Americans are just discovering that some agencies of our government have tortured people physically, mentally and emotionally.

After all, we read about it in sickening detail when it happened at the Abu Ghraib prison at the start of the war in Iraq. And we’ve heard about torture (euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques”) used on captured planners of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and others. (Here’s a recent report from Human Rights Watch.) There’s a description of all that in a 2014 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The full report runs more than 6,700 pages with enough sordid details to make you vomit.

That report said that its “major lesson” was “that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the Intelligence Community’s actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards. It is precisely at these times of national crisis that our government must be guided by the lessons of our history and subject decisions to internal and external review. Instead, CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.”

All of this and more is why such organizations as the National Religious Campaign Against Torture exist. Somebody, after all, has to say no to these outrages.

Despite knowing all that and more, I still found the recent testimony given—finally—by a Guantanamo Bay prisoner (who has confessed to his crimes and expressed remorse) appalling in its detailed account of suffering. As the Associated Press reported, “Majid Khan, a former resident of the Baltimore suburbs who became an al-Qaida courier, told jurors considering his sentence for war crimes how he was subjected to days of painful abuse in the clandestine CIA facilities known as ‘black sites,’ as interrogators pressed him for information.”

Khan’s summary of his experience: “I thought I was going to die.”

The AP described the man’s testimony this way: “Khan spoke of being suspended naked from a ceiling beam for long periods, doused repeatedly with ice water to keep him awake for days. He described having his head held under water to the point of near drowning, only to have water poured into his nose and mouth when the interrogators let him up. He was beaten, given forced enemas, sexually assaulted and starved in overseas prisons whose locations were not disclosed.”

What all of this proved again is what we already should have known—countering extremism with extremism not only doesn’t work, it also morally compromises the people who use ugly, brutal force to get answers. Such people dehumanize themselves.

More than that, torture gives live ammunition to people who seek evidence that justifies their loathing of the United States.

Seven of the eight jurors who heard Khan’s testimony almost immediately signed a handwritten letter demanding clemency for him because of the abominable treatment he received.

They wrote this: “Mr. Khan was subjected to physical and psychological abuse well beyond approved enhanced interrogation techniques, instead being closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history. This abuse was of no practical value in terms of intelligence, or any other tangible benefit to U.S. interests. Instead, it is a stain on the moral fiber of America; the treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.”

I am not naïve. I know there are bad actors who wish to do me and others harm.

Some of them did exactly that to me and my family on 9/11 when they murdered my nephew, Karleton Fyfe, a passenger on the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center.

But I also know that the way to unplug extremism is not by using more of it. We must find other means, whether we’re talking about individuals, groups, political parties or governments. Sometimes, indeed, it’s individuals who can teach governments how to behave morally.

So as a first step toward that end, I devoted the last chapter of my new book, Love, Loss and Endurance, to offering suggestions for how to counter radicalism, whether it’s rooted in religion, geopolitics, white supremacy or something else.

My list is not the final word on this. Rather, it’s simply one person’s hopeful start at the task of defusing fanatical rhetoric and actions. My guess is that each of you could add more ideas to help, and I hope you will.

Of the eight ideas included in my book, I will highlight just three here:

• Engage in interfaith dialogue and cooperation. The idea isn’t to work for the mashing together of different religions into one broad syncretistic mess of a religion. Rather, the idea is for people of different faith traditions to know and to be known. It’s to understand the many different approaches to religion that people of goodwill adopt, an understanding that should lead to a bit of humility about whether our own choices are also God’s direction for everyone else.
• Deepen your knowledge of both American and world history. A fair amount of global terrorism is tied to the shockwaves that have radiated across the nation and around the globe from historical events about which many people, especially Americans, seem to know little or nothing. That’s particularly true about geopolitical and religious history in developing nations, including parts of the Middle East.
• Spend time with people who have experienced profound grief. This is the emotional equivalent of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. It can open our eyes to the countless ways that death — particularly unexpected, violent death — can affect almost every aspect of the lives of survivors. You may not know personally anyone who has lost family members on 9/11 or in terrorist attacks on other dates around the globe, but there are lots of surviving family members of those who died in attacks in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Poway, Charleston, Kansas City and on and on. If there’s an opportunity, meet some of them. Talk with them, if they’re willing to do that, but only if they’re willing. Let them tell you their story.

American officials have violated a long list of moral standards in their treatment of people rounded up after 9/11. By doing that, they created more excuses for people to want to harm our nation and its citizens.

We must say clearly and loudly that what those officials did was wrong and that their actions don’t represent core American values. Sometimes the most patriotic thing we citizens can do is to criticize our own country.

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Care to Read More?

IN JANUARY, Bill also wrote the following for USA Today:

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Bill Tammeus, a former award-winning columnist for The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website and columns for The Presbyterian Outlook and formerly for The National Catholic Reporter. His latest book is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. Email him at [email protected].

 

By KEN WHITT
Contributing Columnist

Of late, not too late I hope, I have been listening to many Indigenous stories: podcasts, books and articles all bearing witness to what we must learn from native peoples if we are to stand any chance of living well within the earth community. Often the speakers open their presentations by sharing sacred words about the particular place on this earth where they are with their audience at that moment. They identify the people who walked here for centuries, even millennia, before Europeans arrived in the Americas. Words may be spoken in a native language and communities may be identified with both ancient and more common westernized names.

Without knowing that this practice of “land acknowledgment” had a name, I often have identified the First Nations peoples, Adena, Hopewell, Shawnee, Iroquis, Delaware, who lived on and cared for this land, trees, water, air, animals, as if they were members of their families.

For my spiritual formation newsletter, I create weekly videos for children and families. Their purpose is to teach children how to care for the creation. The collection can be found on YouTube.

Years ago, I met and Fred Shaw, who often tells Native American stories. I spoke with Fred recently of this practice called “land acknowledgment.” He suggested that I—as I present to groups including children—could begin like this:

Children, we are not the first people to walk on this land. There have been various human beings here for thousands of years. Scientists, called archeologists, have given them names, like Adena and Hopewell—but these are not what they called themselves. Where we are today was the home of Algonquin-speaking peoples, including the Shawnee, Miami and Delaware, and  Iroquoian-speaking people, including the Seneca. We give thanks to these people for taking good care of the land, air, water, trees and animals, as members of a family.  May we learn from them to take care of all our family members in this beautiful creation.

 Then Fred began to tell me a story about hope and transformation:

 

First, meet the co-authors of these remarkable letters

JUDITH VALENTE is a long-time friend of ReadTheSpirit magazine and her work has been featured dozens of times in our pages since our founding in 2007—including this column she wrote for us about her earlier, related book How to Live. She is one of the nation’s top journalists writing about religion for media venues that have ranged from major newspapers to the PBS network to public radio.

BROTHER PAUL QUENON is best known as a poet. He entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani, part of the Cistercian order, in Kentucky in 1958 when Thomas Merton was the novice master. Later, Merton served as Brother Paul’s spiritual director and encouraged him to publish his writings. Among Brother Paul’s earlier books is The Art of Pausing, which he co-authored with Judith. You may have seen him in documentaries or media reports over the years.

IN THIS SHORT YouTube CLIP, they talk about their letter writing, which forms the basis of this new book.

Then, Enjoy this Foreword to the book by Kathleen Norris

KATHLEEN NORRIS is  famous for her own books exploring spirituality, including The Cloister Walk (1996), Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (1998) and Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life (2008). She wrote the following Foreword for this new book.

This book of correspondence is a refreshment, a reminder that although “interconnectivity” has become a buzzword, and technology allows us to contact one another in a dazzling variety of new ways, something vital is missing. Emails travel around the world in seconds, but in gaining efficiency and speed, we risk losing the ability to listen. We long for deeper communication with others, and this book shows us one way to find it.

How to Be introduces us to Judith Valente, a married woman, a journalist and retreat leader with a hectic schedule, and Brother Paul Quenon, a celibate and a contemplative Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani. We all benefit from the decision they made to deepen their relationship by means of letters. Brother Paul’s helpful comment about the difference between an email message and correspondence is borne out in etymology. The word “message” is related to “mission” and implies using words to advance an agenda. The word “correspondence,” by comparison, is derived from “engagement,” suggesting something deeper, a pledge to be open and honest with another person. In corresponding with a friend, we have no agenda other than fostering friendship.

That’s intriguing, but the reader might wonder about the value of paying attention to the ramblings of two people, as interesting as they are. Reading their letters could seem as meaningless as hearing another person’s dreams. But the subjects these two touch on are universal. We all deal with illness and death, grief and loss, work, play, and the use of our time, and the musings in these letters can help us determine our own path through the glorious mess called life.

Like Judith, most of us know what it’s like to be so consumed by work that we lose sleep over it. We fret over being so overloaded and distracted that at the end of the day we feel it’s all been wasted time. But few of us hear the wisdom of Brother Paul’s responses to her lament: that a good way to get over the feeling that you’re wasting your time is to waste more of it. He suggests that she intentionally slow down and look around her to see what’s really there. How liberating to embrace his Zen-like wisdom, that the purpose of life is that it doesn’t need a purpose: the purpose of life is life.

It’s good to hear two thoughtful people reflecting on their lived experience. Judith, a self-described “over-achiever,” is often anxious and Paul is more calm, reflecting on the fruits of a monastic life structured so as to foster contemplation. Both are modern people, well aware of the uneasiness that pervades our culture. But Paul reminds us that it’s all right to admit that we don’t always know what to hope for. If we don’t understand what’s happening to and around us, maybe that’s how God wants it. Citing a comment by his mentor Thomas Merton that Jesus will always seek out the most lowly crib, he adds that the holy is often found in places we are most reluctant to look.

Many of us can identify with Judith’s difficulty in devoting time to pray, let alone praying attentively, and with Brother Paul’s admission that he tends to fall asleep when he’s meditating. Fortunately their views on spirituality and religion are not sectarian, and both reflect on experiences with people of other faiths. Paul offers an indelible image of Buddhist monks playing soccer with children outside Merton’s hermitage; Judith discusses her study of meditation with a Tibetan Lama. As Christians, both ponder their experience of receiving the eucharist at Mass. Judith speaks of the wonder of carrying the body of Christ within her; Paul says it makes him realize that every Christian is a reincarnation of Christ.

One thing that connects these two disparate people is poetry, and it’s delightful to see the way they share their own poems as well as the work of others who have inspired them: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and a contemporary, Mary Oliver. Poets do not shy away from difficult subjects, and the reflections on suffering and death in these letters have been especially helpful to me. Judith recalls that a man she’d interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article told her, as he neared death, that “the line between life and death is thinner than you think.” A Benedictine monastery is a thin place by design, as each monk lives with Benedict’s admonition in his Rule for monks, to “keep death daily before your eyes.”

Judith says she’s always struggled with the Christian notion of death as being “born to eternal life, as lovely as that sounds.” And Paul admits that he rarely thinks about heaven, but finds “much of the Resurrection in our love of the world and of the beauty that nature presents. In loving nature, in loving the world, we love something larger than ourselves, and we are made larger by that loving.”

This book is a generous invitation to a conversation, a word with special meaning for Benedictines. One of the vows they make is to conversatio morum, loosely translated as “conversation of life.” The word “conversation” is rooted in a word meaning to turn, to change, to be versatile rather than rigid. And the joy of conversation in that sense enriches these letters. In discussing the effect of the pandemic, for example, Judith says that the enforced isolation made her deeply grateful to see her mail carrier every day, and allowed her to engage in cooking as a meditative practice. Paul reminds us that “love starts at home,” and with people spending more time with their families the pandemic might be seen as a challenge to develop more compassion and empathy.

This book has given me a challenge: I now want to think of someone, a friend living close by or far away, who would be willing to engage in the kind of meandering but deeply meaningful correspondence contained in this book.

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By KEVIN VOLLRATH
Contributing Columnist

Meet Father Mamdouh Abusada, director of the School of Joy in Beit Sahour, Palestine. Father Mamdouh is a Catholic priest in the historically Christian town of Beit Sahour, just East of Bethlehem. Father Mamdouh was a pastor of family programs in the early-1990’s when he saw a significant need for children with disabilities to receive an education. In 1993 he and his family started the “School of Joy” for children with intellectual disabilities.

School of Joy now has 51 students, including nine residents, with various intellectual and developmental disabilities. School of Joy teaches Christian as well as Muslim students. Father Mamdouh says that education without discrimination is part of the school’s public witness.

Around the world, people with disabilities experience various forms of stigma and discrimination. That is especially true in Beit Sahour, where poverty affects many families’ diet, health care and the overall learning environment for children. In fact, the founders of the school initially were prompted by a significant number of homeless children with disabilities they noticed in their area. Some of School of Joy’s students were abandoned by their families. Some are orphans.

Father Mamdouh says he sees people changing their attitudes toward their children. To illustrate this, he told me the story of a father, frustrated by the slow learning of one child, who exclaimed, “I wish that God hadn’t given me this child.”

Father Mamdouh responded, “If you don’t see in the face of your child the face of your Lord Jesus, you’ll never be a good man.”

That child eventually joined School of Joy’s vocational training program and learned to work with olive wood. Over the years, he developed his talents as an artisan. Ironically, the child who once had frustrated his father grew up to become the main breadwinner of the family.

As Father Mamdouh puts it, at the School of Joy, “The most neglected become the most important.”

Old biases against the disabled continue in many families. Parents may even try to hide one child’s disability. Sometimes staff from School of Joy can only discover a child in need of education upon visiting families in their home. As a result, the School of Joy has on staff a psychologist and social worker to help children and their families.

Stigma is not School of Joy’s only challenge. Teaching online during the COVID pandemic has been as difficult for School of Joy as for schools in other parts of the world. The staff decided they could host just 10 students in person and would have all the others learn from home, which required extra planning for teachers and especially for low-income families. Few families can provide Zoom for their children’s classwork because of daily challenges with maintaining electricity and the Internet in the West Bank.

Funding is the school’s most significant need, Father Mamdouh says. Families often are only able to contribute small amounts to the cost of their children’s education. Donors are the main backbone of the school’s budget, but a typical donor only sponsors a child for a year or two, requiring constant attention to fund raising. Since tourism to Bethlehem has dwindled during the pandemic, this also has decreased awareness of the school among foreign visitors.

All of these dynamics also must be navigated through the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the resulting maze of legal and financial requirements both for students and the school itself. Farah’s story illustrates just one of the complications. She has been a student for several years at School of Joy after having been refused enrollment in public schools. Farah was caught in a legal requirement that all public-school students must have a birth certificate. She does not have one because birth certificates in the region must name both parents and Farah’s unmarried mother declined to name the father. Thus, she has no birth certificate and no access to local public schools. Father Mamdouh repeatedly tried to help obtain a waiver for Farah from authorities, but so far has been unsuccessful.

When asked why Father Mamdouh is so committed to this work, he says, “We’re human. Jesus came for all. Humanity is very important to me. Humans should treat everyone the same, without discrimination. We’ll all be okay if we do this.”

School of Joy is one of many institutions in the Bethlehem area in which Christians and Muslims work together. According to Father Mamdouh, the Church can play a unique role in helping people to realize their shared humanity. That requires, he says, seeing the face of the Lord Jesus in the face of one’s neighbor, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, whether able-bodied or disabled.

If you or your community would like to visit the School of Joy on a trip to the Holy Land, contact us at Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP).

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We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough.
We want something else that can hardly be put into words—
To be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it,
To receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it,
To become part of it.
C.S. Lewis

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By KEN WHITT
Contributing Columnist

We live among the beautiful hills, farms, forests, gorges and waterfalls of the Hocking Hills region of southeastern Ohio. Our lives are sustained by this luxurious canopy of life.

This sustenance is more than simply good. It is utterly necessary.

We long to actively participate in the creation of beauty. My wife Kathy weaves stunning rugs on one of her two looms. I create wood art in my workshop.

These activities are more than simply good. They are utterly necessary.

Why do I stress those words? Because so much that is beautiful is passing away. So must that is lovely, scenic, gorgeous and magnificent is passing. Will my grandchildren see the glaciers or the redwoods or the reefs?

Utterly necessary? This very day, grief threatens to overwhelm us—we who are among the most blessed and privileged. Scientists—and reports in publications like National Geographic—tell us that the overall bird population across North America is declining. My neighbors and I have noticed that song birds are suddenly gone from our back yard and much of this region.

There are so many sources for our grief in the midst of this pandemic. Just recently another traumatic loss pierced our lives, lives that we anxiously hoped were inoculated against such tragedy by the miracles of medicine.

If your visit our home, you might be tempted to think of us as strange folks. You couldn’t miss two large compost bins, one waiting for the spring when it will provide nutrients to our organic garden. You would certainly notice the 330 gallon water tank that is about to become part of a rain-collection system. Wood piles line the front of the house to feed our just-installed wood stove. We are adapting to the many intersecting predicaments that threaten our world. We are growing some of our own food—and canning fruits and vegetables, while knowing full well that we cannot be sure what adaptations are most needed, or how soon.

In the meantime, we absorb and create beauty.

Why do we devote time to creating beauty?

Let me tell you about a recent experience.

One morning, I was sitting on my porch at the start of what promised to be a beautiful day. However, I was deep in grief at so many levels that I had stopped trying to keep track of them.

I had kept trying to avoid them all, but such an effort is exhausting. I had barely dragged myself into this new day and had pressed myself into prayer. Finally, striving to remember God’s love and the safety I feel when I connect with God, I began to weep.

Various layers of grief caught my attention, one after the other. All I had to do was silently cry out, “I miss you!” Grief took over again. Each grief evoked its unique expression, yet each also led me deeper and deeper into God’s embrace—until I was spent and began to just rest.

“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” Jesus says.

Eyes closed. Stomach tension gone. Breathing softly. Resting.

Suddenly, I realized that from within the inner quiet I was seeing images. New patterns, new combinations of color and design—new projects waiting for me to see if they could be created in my woodworking shop.

“I’ve never done that before. Is that even possible? How can I know unless I try?”

As a direct result of what I saw as I rested—only after I had grieved and prayed—I found myself, over the next few days, magnetically drawn into my workshop at every opportunity. I began playing with new ideas, staring long and hard at the various woods that are found on dozens of my shelves and smaller pieces in a plethora of boxes.

I was seeing this wood as an artist and, at the same time, kept asking: Why? What is the good of this calling to creativity?

Apparently, it is healing!

Creativity can be birthed in suffering, because suffering sees reality through God’s eyes. Possibilities of beauty are hidden when we hide from the shadows. Beauty, as Brian Zahnd says in the title of his book, Beauty Will Save the World.

How can that possibly work? Well, for one thing, creating beauty and seeing beauty may cause us to fall in love, finally, or all over again, with the creation.

Can falling in love with the creation compel us to stop destroying it? Falling in love with the creation, spending time creating, draw forth every last ounce of beauty from the creation, just might compel us, at last, to action to help preserve the wonders of our earth.

And a Reminder from Isaiah 41

From the era of the Babylonian Exile, more than two millennia ago, comes this reminder that all of humanity are caught up in this divine process:

When the poor and needy seek water,
and there is none,
and their tongue is parched with thirst,
I the Lord will answer them,
I the God of Israel will not forsake them.
I will open rivers on the bare heights,
and fountains in the midst of the valleys;
I will make the wilderness a pool of water,
and the dry land springs of water.
I will put in the wilderness the cedar,
the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive;
I will set in the desert the cypress,
the plane and the pine together,
so that all may see and know,
all may consider and understand,
that the hand of the Lord has done this,
the Holy One of Israel has created it.

Let’s look at the hearts of these trees

Here are more of Ken’s photos from his woodworking shop.

Care to Learn More?

Ken Whitt’s book God Is Just Love is full of stories like this one. How can people of faith foster love and resilience in our children while building sustainable, diverse communities? That’s the big question Ken Whitt’s new book answers in light of the many threats looming in our world. Through wisdom he has gleaned from scientists, scholars and lots of real families, Ken shows how God’s love is a hopeful compass in our lives. He encourages enjoying stories, songs and explorations of the natural world with children, and closes with “100 Things Families Can Do To Find Hope and Be Love.”

You’ll also find lots of stories, columns and videos at the homepage for Ken’s ministry group: Traces of God Ministries. While you’re visiting that website, please sign up for Ken’s free email updates, which contain inspiring reflections, columns and updates that Ken shares with his readers.