cartoon by Charles M. Schulz (Jeffrey Sher found this)

 

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

 

November 2, 2023

 

People who love are happy.

 

—Yogi Tea bag wisdom

*

 

My friends and I have been talking about the ongoing violence in the Middle East. Kim wrote:

 

I lie awake at night thinking about Gaza. I have a friend there. She has fled her home and is camped in a house near Rafah with six families.

Bombing happens there, too.

Hence, today’s (10/26) poem…

 

      Other Laws of War

 

Where anger flares, wisdom withers.

Where death thrives, truth dies.

Both sides are the bad guys.

As with weather, no one is in charge.

Even precision kills children.

War funds the hate school.

Dead soldier, mourning mother.

Strategic advantage limits thought.

Your vengeance vow is a trap.

Local victory, regional defeat.

Killing gives killers secret wounds.

A war wounds a generation.

Easy to start, hard to end.

Munitions makers always win.

 

—Kim Stafford

*

 

Mark Danley reminded me about Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” written in 1905. When asked if he intended to publish it, Twain said: “No. I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after my death.” Mark Twain died in 1910. “The War Prayer” was first published in 1923.

 

 

The War Prayer

 

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism. On every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun. Nightly, the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while. In the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles—beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

 

Sunday morning came. Next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams—visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said.

 

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work.

 

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. He ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting.

 

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside—which the startled minister did—and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light. Then in a deep voice he said:

 

“I come from the Throne—bearing a message from Almighty God!”

 

“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two—one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this—keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

 

“You have heard your servant’s prayer—the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it—that part which the pastor, and also you in your hearts—fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory–must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

 

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle—be Thou near them! With them—in spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid, with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

 

(After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”

 

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

 

—Mark Twain

*

 

On YouTube you can find a film version, adapted by Marco Sanchez and directed by Michael Goorjian.

*

 

from CNN’s website on October 27th:

 

Sari Beth Rosenberg was teaching a high school history class in New York City recently when a student interrupted her with a question: “Are you Team Israel or Team Palestinian?”….

 

Rosenberg, who is Jewish, feared that getting into a conversation on the complexities of the conflict could alienate some of her students with ties to the Middle East. So she tried to turn the question into a learning experience.

 

“I told them I’m ‘Team Humanity,’” she says. She told her students that she thought both the deadly Hamas terror attacks in Israel and Israel’s ongoing bombing of Gaza are horrific.

*

 

When I was a young man it was against the law to not join the military. I refused to obey that law for the simple reason that I didn’t want to kill anyone. Instead of going to Vietnam, I went to India and studied with yogis.

 

I am against all present and future wars. Our problems can be solved with words, instead of violence. Wars represent a failure of dialogue, of intelligence, of empathy, of good will, of love, of imagination. All children are our children. 

 

On the Fields of Peace website (fieldsofpeace.org) we learn that in World War I, one civilian was killed for every 9 soldiers. In World War II, the ratio was one to one. In modern warfare, one soldier is killed for every 9 (unarmed) civilians—most of whom are children. From the perspective of people my age, soldiers are children. Here’s my latest version of the Metta Prayer:

 

May all people be happy.

May we live in peace & love.

Even if some people are making other choices.

 

—Johnny Stallings

*

 

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022) was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who advocated for peace and refused to take a side in the war. He taught meditation & mindfulness to people throughout the world. He published many books, including Being Peace, Creating True Peace and Peace is Every Step. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King. Here is his poem “Please Call Me by My True Names,” followed by an account of how he came to write it:

 

Please Call Me by My True Names

 

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow—

even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving

to be a bud on a Spring branch,

to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,

learning to sing in my new nest,

to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

to fear and to hope,

the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death

of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing

on the surface of the river,

and I am the bird which, when Spring comes,

arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily

in the clear water of a pond,

and I am the grass-snake

that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.

And I am the arms merchant,

selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,

refugee on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean

after being raped by a sea pirate.

And I am the pirate,

my heart not yet capable

of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,

with plenty of power in my hands.

And I am the man who has to pay his

“debt of blood” to my people

dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm

it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.

My pain is like a river of tears,

so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,

so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can wake up

and so the door of my heart can be left open,

the door of compassion.

 

 

After the Vietnam War, many people wrote to us in Plum Village. We received hundreds of letters each week from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It was very painful to read them, but we had to be in contact. We tried our best to help, but the suffering was enormous, and sometimes we were discouraged. It is said that half the boat people fleeing Vietnam died in the ocean; only half arrived at the shores of Southeast Asia.

 

There are many young girls, boat people, who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries tried to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continued to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day, we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate. She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.

 

When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can’t condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

 

After a long meditation, I wrote this poem. In it, there are three people: the twelve-year-old girl, the pirate, and me. Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other? The title of the poem is “Please Call Me by My True Names,” because I have so many names. When I hear one of the of these names, I have to say, “Yes.”

 

—Thich Nhat Hanh