Author Archives: Trevor

IRAQ: From bad to worse

Posted on by
Reply

by Peggy Gish

“From bad to worse,” is a common phrase Iraqis use when describing what is
happening in Iraq. Working here, outside the isolated Green Zone or
military bases, we get a different picture from the optimistic depictions
released by the U.S. government. I mostly hear from Iraqis that the presence
of American military has lowered their quality of life, and set back their
progress in building a peaceful and democratic society.

Even from those who say it is necessary for the US military to remain longer
in Iraq to prevent greater factional fighting or civil war, we hear despair.
They speak of the snail-pace progress in repairing infrastructure, the
growing humanitarian crisis, the depressed economic system, and the lack of
basic security.

Some brief examples:

1) Of the three million residents of Sadr City, a poor area of Baghdad, 72%
have hepatitis A or E, because of polluted water. In Sadr City we saw
trenches dug along the main streets for sewer system repair. According to
leaders of Sadr City, this project does not include replacing the cracked
and inadequate pipes along the side streets that connect to the people’s
homes.

2) Although more manufactured goods are available in the markets of Iraqi’s
cities, poverty is severe, with an estimated 40% unemployment, and
increasing malnutrition. Cheaper foreign goods flooding the market and the
take over of Iraqi businesses and oil production by U.S. companies, continue
to erode the economy.

3) Families in Fallujah are slowly starting to rebuild with little help
from the US or Iraqi governments. Since the Nov. 2004 attacks, U.S. forces
still wage active warfare in many other cities and villages. U.S. and Iraqi
forces currently [Gish wrote this release on August 14] surround the city of
Tellafar, west of Mosul and have used heavy bombs in attacks on the city of
Haqlaniyah.

5) Iraqi people live in daily fear of explosions and kidnappings by the
violent resistance groups as well as violent house raids, indiscriminate
roundups, abusive interrogations and imprisonment by U.S. and Iraqi forces.

6) They are also worried about corruption in the new Iraqi government and
the brutal violence of the newer Iraqi special police commandos, trained by
the US and operating under the Ministry of Interior. Some call this “state
terrorism.” Iraqis tell us about family members being abducted from their
homes, tortured and sometimes found dead by a roadside. Prisoners’ families
report paying thousands of dollars to prevent the prisoners from being
tortured or forced to give confessions on TV of crimes they did not commit.

Meanwhile, most Iraqis are trying to go on with life as normal as possible,
caring for their families. Countless Iraqis try to keep hope alive by
working with organizations that foster unity, human rights and local
democratic activity. They worry, however, that all the sacrifices and
hardships they have endured will not lead them to a freer and safer life.

-from CPTnet
25 August 2005

Touch

Posted on by
Reply

“Touch …. communicates in a way that exceeds or transcends reduction to verbalization. Touch, then, never occurs uninterpreted (and therefore unmediated by language), but it escapes total translation into words. Right when words fail, touch becomes a major expression of extreme feelings ranging from aggression to intimacy.

– Paula Cooey

The act of touching another, in which what is touched is sensed only as itself touching, establishes a circuit of exchanges in which two become one flesh and each becomes part of the other. Because this reaches into dimensions of our being that only an occasional poet or singers have been able to articulate, we should not think of this exchange as a form of communication so much as a form of communion..

– Donn Welton

The last light of day crept away like a drunkard after gin
A hint of chanted prayer now whispers from the fresh night wind
To this shattered heart and soul held together by habit and skin
And this half-gnawed bone of apprehension
Buried in my brain
As I don’t feel your touch, again.

– Bruce Cockburn

Tortoises

Posted on by
1

Sermon for Chicago Community Mennonite Church 8/17/05

Elegy for Giant Tortoises
by Margaret Atwood

Let others pray for the passenger pigeon
the dodo, the whooping crane, the eskimo:
everyone must specialize

I will confine myself to a meditation
upon the giant tortoises
withering finally on a remote island.

I concentrate in subway stations,
in parks, I can’t quite see them,
they move to the peripheries of my eyes

but on the last day they will be there;
already the event
like a wave travelling shapes vision:

on the road where I stand they will materialize
plodding past me in a straggling line
awkward without water

their small heads pondering
from side to side, their useless armour
sadder than tanks and history,

in their closed gaze ocean and sunlight paralysed
lumbering up the steps, under the archways
toward the square glass altars

where the brittle gods are kept,
the relics of what we have destroyed,
our holy and obsolete symbols.

This is a sermon about tortoises. It is about the particularity of their bodies. What strange animals they are, “awkward without water, small heads pondering from side to side, useless armour sadder than thanks or history.” But even as they move to the peripheries of our eyes we feel, viscerally and palpably, the expectation that they will materialize in front of us, interrupting our expectations, reframing our holy and obsolete symbols.
It is also a sermon about the uneasy relationship we have as modern people to our minds, spirits and bodies. We alternate between brash confidence and strange praise as we realize the possibilities for failure and success in our reason, passion and palpable sensibilities.
I want to deconstruct both the tortoise and modern subject this morning. Passages like Romans 8 are so involved and complex and have been subject to so much historical and doctrinal sediment that they need deconstruction in order become once again strange and palpable to us. We only understand that which we can touch and that which feels strange.
This insistence, that we only understand that which we can touch and that which feels strange seems to bounce right up against Paul’s words in early in Romans 8. Here we are told that we can’t trust flesh; that we need to die to our bodies and live according to the spirit. We’ve taken this message to heart. We believe that our bodies and our mind are distinct; that the mind is in a battle with the body; and that the impulses of our bodies must be shut down if we are to follow Christ.
Now life according to the flesh is death; I’m not trying to convince you otherwise. And I’m not going to engage in any detailed exgesis of sarx; Paul’s word for the flesh. I don’t want to do this for two reasons: it’s summer and you don’t want to listen to it anyways, and our love of words is one of the problems here. We distrust the flesh but we love the word. Especially when we are acting like Protestants or Postmoderns we love the word.
Protestants fell in love with the word during the reformation. The word, in the sole authority of scripture and the ascension of preaching and scholarship supplanted the much more embodied religion of icons, symbols and relics that had developed in mediaeval Catholicism. Mennonites found a middle ground between these two ways of being Christian. We abandoned icons, relics and symbols, but our words have always been supported by the inarticulate groanings of the Holy Spirit which are too deep for words. Our words have always been an afterthought growing out of the things that our bodies have already done. And our words never taste best spoken, our words are sung.
Postmodernity fell in love with the word as it tried to find a way to supplant modern ideals of rationality, progress, elitism, and time. Postmoderns turn to language and argue that language creates our bodies. In our speaking, writing and thinking, in dialogue with others and by ourselves, we inscribe our bodies with meaning and sense.
But the point as Paul gets around to telling us is not about the word. Its about the word made flesh. Words don’t negate our bodies as in protestantism. Words don’t save our bodies as in postmodernity. Words are the way we communicate, but there are strange groanings, too deep for words that are our best conduit to God.
I think what Paul is really after here is not at all an attack on the body. For Paul our bodies are not a shell holding our souls. For Paul our bodies are not the evil part of who we are. For Paul its all about how to follow Christ, how to best ready ourselves for adoption. What this means, I think, is that we shouldn’t live according to human logic but instead that we pattern our bodies according to God’s reign. The future redemption of all creation shows us that the body is not in and of itself evil, just that the body first must be God’s.
Tortoises help us learn this. They can’t trust their bodies according a gravity unmediated by water and buoyancy. They find themselves slow and ponderous, outfitted with a useless armour for a useless war. On land they are sadder than thanks. On land they are sadder than history. On land they are groaning inwardly waiting for the Spirit to intercede for them. Tortoises on land are like humans living apart from God. There is nothing inherent evil about it, but it’s clumsy, useless and sad.
In the water, tortoises are graceful moving quickly and articulately negotiating a world that was made for them. In water they are submerged by exactly that which created them, sustains them and will redeem them. In the water how can tortoises be anything but alive and vibrant? In the water tortoise’s can trust their bodies to be supported.
I know I’ve hit the difficult ideas to think about drum pretty hard this morning. I recognize the irony here. In trying to make palpable the body of Christ, I might have only made it strange. I don’t believe that strangeness is the only way to touch something, I’m just not a very good poet yet.
Meister Eckhart is much better.

IF I WERE ALONE in the desert and feeling afraid,
I would want a child to be with me.
For then my fear would disappear and I would be made strong.
This is what life in itself can do because it is so noble, so full of pleasure and so powerful.

But if I could not have a child with me,
I would like to have at least a living animal at my side to comfort me.

Therefore,
let those who bring about wonderful things in their big, dark books take an animal to help them.

The life within the animal will give strength in turn.
For equality gives strength in all things and at all times.

Ceremony

Posted on by
1

the body has got to be worth saving
eyelids are shining with headache and perspiration
morning is finding good intentions under sleep’s persuasion
the body has got to be…
our past lives were too heavy and too expensive
now we’re paying together for our inventions
maybe there’s a ceremony
written down inside the body
where maybe no one ever see
you begin like a lion and you end like a lamb
molars are grinding inspiration down to nothing
where are the instructions
on how to keep it going?
the body…
a patient motor in secret is whirring
binding together what was broken
with the heart’s string
to have without keeping
to sigh without boredom
to know without thinking
and to love without ever knowing
maybe there’s a ceremony
written down inside the body
where maybe no one ever sees

Caithlin De Marrais avers, with the depressed tentativeness typical in this genre, that the body is perhaps the body’s own best hope for salvation. A Better Version of Me, the album on which this song finds itself, is a masterwork devoted to exploring the ways that the body understands. Along with James Gronniosaw, a slave who heard a slave captain read the bible and was astonished to see a book talk, and Ezekiel who ate the scroll, De Marrias finds that our bodies are not governed in their appropriation of texts by the rules of discourse. She warns us not to assume the stability of ethics or interpretation. Good intentions do their daily battle with sleep’s persuasion. Molars grind inspiration down to nothing. The only hope is the eschatological one found in beginning like a lion but ending like a lamb.
This should not surpise us for the transmission and interpretation of truth is not stable or guaranteed when Ezekiel eats the scroll. Gronniosaw’s book so alarms him with its message that the message itself is lost in his amazement at hearing it. But while we should not look to our bodies to provide stability, certainty or any precise method, with De Marrias I want to explore the possibility of interpreting ethically with our bodies.
I begin with De Marrias not just because I like her music but because A Better Version of Me was created through a deliberately embodied process. De Marrias is trained as a dancer, not a bass player/vocalist and these songs grow out of a deliberate attempt to work from the inside out; to give voice first to the body. As an outline of the argument in this chapter, let us begin with an interpretation of the question of the body as Rainer Maria ask it. (continued … and it’s long … in the extended entry)

Continue reading →

Recruitment and Databases

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s a subpart from No Child Left Behind and some news from Marketplace. It seems that children aren’t being left behind from military recruiting, that’s for sure. Uncle Sam is also collecting teens’ data. The same company that helps catalog companies collect and track “deep insight” about customers is helping the government track high school and college kids.

Continue reading →

The Story of Language and the Body

Posted on by
Reply

The biblical story can be told as if the plot were one that took as a main theme the relationship of language and the body. It is a story with intricate twists and turns which is told and retold in the account in which we now have it. It is plural even in its beginning. In the first version (Genesis 1.1-2.4a) God speaks creation into existence. God’s language creates human bodies and the story begins with the precedence of language before bodies. In the second version (Genesis 2.4b-25) God forms a human (ʿādām) from the ground (ʿǎdāmâ) and the animating action is not words but breath; the precedence is reversed. Language only enters the second story with God’s expectation about what humans are allowed to eat. God speaks to let the humans know what they may take into their bodies. After the fall and decline of human civilization God begins again. God does away with all flesh, save a representative of every creature (Genesis 7). In response to this destruction of flesh God gives a promise―God’s words―that God will never bring this level of destruction upon living creatures again. God also gives a law which allows humans to now eat all living creatures but requires that the life of the creature, which is now located in its blood, be respected. Words take a new prominence in regulating the body with Noah, but the body is still the only concern of these words. These three creation accounts each figure the relationship of language to the body slightly differently.
Questions of language become God’s sole concern upon a plain in the land of Shinar (Genesis 11) as God recognizes that the unity of human language and the challenges and affronts this unity pose to God. This lack of difference and the violence inherent therein require God’s intervention and language becomes plural/confused. The plurality restored to language at Babel is then coupled by the particularization of the covenant with Hagar, Sarai→Sarah and Abram→Abraham. This particularity is marked on the male body by circumcision (Genesis 17.10). In this part of the story, which in its own way is a fourth beginning, the focus is on plurality of language and the particularity of the body.
In the next part of this story, the plot thickens as Moses receives two gifts. God gives both God’s name and the law as gifts which reveal to humanity who God is. In the giving of God’s name ( e͗hyeh a͗šer e͗hyeh) God reveals Godself to be a God who is what God does. The self-referential action orientated nature of God’s name points to the plurality of God’s body. In the giving of the law God expects the same of God’s people. The words of the law become the life of the Israelites. In the law the focus on language moves from plurality to particularity. A second reversal happens and the focus is now on the particularity of language and the plurality of the body.
God’s strategies for relating to humanity to this point are both particular and plural and happen through both language and the body. The prominence of language or the body is observable at one or another point in the story but not resolved. God’s strategies are careful and nuanced, but things aren’t going very well. From fall to flood, from the gifts of green plants to the gift of flesh, from the single command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to the Noahide code to the decalogue, God is more and more specific and lenient and humanity and then its chosen nation Israel only show an inability to follow God.
A radical shift occurs much later in Ezekiel where language and the body are combined. Ezekiel receives words from God but the point is not to follow them but to digest them. Ezekiel is faced with the particularly difficult challenge of how to incorporate God’s words. Language here becomes a body and Ezekiel’s body becomes the host, in a new way, for God’s words. In the incarnation God continues to act along this radical trajectory by decisively bringing together body and language as the Word becomes flesh. The law which was once written on tablets of stone is now written on the hearts of the followers of Christ.

The problem with the body

Posted on by
2

The role of the body in the history of western thought is conflicted and diverse. This sentence accurately depicts a significant dilemma in writing about the body; that any beginning point in any approach to the body is necessarily arbitrary and and account necessarily incomplete. But in its very structure this acknowledgement points to a further, perhaps more important, problem. This more important problem concerns the possibility of speaking or writing about the body in thought. Since Descartes, thought and embodiment have been set in opposition to each other. Other thinkers directly oppose this highly dualistic thinking. The challenge posed by the diversity and conflict in accounts of the body is met by the further challenge; in Western thought human reflective faculties are set against the body dualistically or hobbled by the need to attack this dualism so that almost all language about the body finds itself positively or negatively associated with dualism. A final problematic theme asserts itself at this point in the recognition that any writing or speech about the body is exactly that; language about the body. Bracketing for the moment the possibility of communication about my body in immediate situations without language, the question of the relationship of language to/about/in/before/after the body is again conflicted and diverse. At the simplest level should I talk about the body using nouns or verbs?
Is the body a person so that I privilege identity or the self when talking about the body? Is the body a place or a site open to the construction of a particular kind of building or colony? Is the body a thing so that I can account for it as an object, albeit a very special kind of object? Or should I employ verbs in approaching the body, so that I privilege what bodies do: bodies that touch, feel, see, occupy attention, smell, taste, hear, hum, move, relate, love, burn? Or, as much of contemporary thought on the body actually proceeds, should I privilege the adjectival body: the political body, the economic body, the female body, the gendered body, the black body, the brown body, the red body, the white body, the textual body, the machine body, the virtual body, the cybernetic body, the body of a cat, the body of Christ?