April 11, 2010

Sande Ramage

Low Sunday


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

It’s official. Corporal Willie Apiata is hot. And it’s not just his smouldering good looks or toned up body parts that do it for us. According to the recent ‘you sexy things feature’ in the Sunday Star Times magazine it’s because, with automatic rifle in hand and sizzling with 12 kinds of fire in his eyes, he strode purposefully from a building where he’d probably just wasted three baddies. [i]

Richard Dawkins and the Atheist Bus Campaign are probably on the wrong track. It’s not what we mean by God that’s the problem; it’s the power of destructive mythologies embedded in the human unconscious and which influence negative human behaviour that need debunking. 

The myth of redemptive violence that suggests we can be made safe and whole through violent actions is on the rise in our culture supported by heart warming stories and advertisements in the media courtesy of the military PR department. Strange that none of the ads enticing young people towards a leadership career in the military ever mentions that its central purpose is to apply the maximum amount of force on the enemy. But maybe Willie’s candid shots from Afghanistan have got that omission covered.

In case we should be in any doubt that war stories are the flavour of the month, Television One has been rerunning Band of Brothers which will culminate in Spielberg’s, The Pacific, delivering us wrung out and grateful worshippers at the altar of redeeming violence on the state’s most holy ANZAC Day.

ANZAC commemorations draw heavily on the value of redemptive violence by honouring the role of the soldier, sketched out as a saviour figure sacrificed in battle so that we can live in peace and freedom. Across time this mythology has been used to soothe the internal human terror of being overwhelmed by forces we cannot control and ultimately our fear of death.

If we think beyond this imagery we know that ANZAC Day only remembers part of the story. A more complete memory includes the women raped in military campaigns, children bombed, conscientious objectors tortured and imprisoned, families torn apart, cultures, animals and environments destroyed and political deals done in the name of greed. 

Perhaps it’s a peculiar mix of compassion and guilt that keeps us locked into this annual ritual of forgetfulness. Compassion for those young soldiers sent to experience terrors they should never have been forced to endure on anyone’s behalf and our guilt for being part of a system that allowed it then and now encourages its continuance by inducting another generation into the belief system.

In Australasia as we trudge towards ANZAC Day we also tread the road to Easter. Transplanting Christianity to the southern hemisphere has located Easter at the wrong end of winter and locked two mythologies in an awkward tango, jarring and jostling one another for space in the collective unconscious.

This year the dance sequence has been disrupted by the Waihopai Ploughshares 3 in New Zealand and the Bonhoeffer 4 in Australia. Both groups have used non-violent but newsworthy direct action against military installations in the belief that these systems cause immense suffering across the world. 

As you know at St Matthews, an element of theatre is necessary to gain attention in a distracted world. The Easter story has drama in spades, parts of which dear Thomas in the gospel story today was, frankly, sceptical about. Like Thomas, the Waihopai Ploughshares 3 and the Bonhoeffer 4 have a healthy disrespect for the stories people in power want us to believe. Their moral compass guides them on a form of Christianity that is transformative but which can bring dishonour, danger and even death. In this regard they walk in the footsteps of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian honoured in our liturgical calendar last week. 

Bonhoeffer had a constructive story to live by. He maintained that the followers of Christ are called to peace, not just having peace but making it; to be concerned with overcoming evil with good and establishing the peace of God in a world of war and hate. For him, living this way in Nazi Germany meant an involvement with the political underground movement which led to his arrest by the Gestapo in 1943 and his execution at on the 9th April 1945. 

Christianity, Bonhoeffer said, stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. He didn’t think Christians were doing enough, instead asserted that Christendom, and lets translate that to the institutional church today, adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. 

Constantine, that politically savvy operator got us hooked early to the worship of power when he claimed at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge that God promised victory to the Romans if they would paint the sign of Christ on their shields. As a church one of the ways we still live with the remnants of that master stroke is in having chaplains embedded in the military and continuing to bless the machinery of war. Military chaplaincy is a poignant symbol of our association with power. 

Anglican pacifists during World War II struggled with this power dynamic. Geoffrey Haworth in his book Marching to War notes they were toughened by years of opposition and disillusioned by their church’s perceived compromising of its core beliefs. He quotes Charles Chandler the vicar of Cambridge who said, ‘by and large the Church is on the side of the big guns and as ready to stone her prophets as ever she was in days of old’. [ii] 

Today the institutional church stands on the margins of society with limited formal power. That’s the proper place for us to be so that we can run with Bonhoeffer’s advice to give more offence, shock the world far more and take a stronger stand in favour of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong. 

There are points of similarity between the Easter and ANZAC stories which will help us dance in step. Both stories require a journey to the interior encompassing times of hunger, loneliness, despair and pain. Both ask that we stand up to evil regimes and the unreasonable imposition of power on the weak. Both recognise that people will die in the attempt to make peace. However, our stories will stumble over any attempt to retain the myth of redemptive violence as a framework for the future. 

The Ekklesia religion and society think tank in Britain suggests that this pivotal moment of realisation offers us the opportunity to begin reimagining remembrance. To mourn all lives lost in conflict, not just our side. To continue to hear the stories of soldiers but to make space for others including conscientious objectors, those New Zealand tortured at the front and the 800 imprisoned at home during World War II. To listen to the women who picked up the pieces when men broken by the devastation of war returned. To weep for the needless destruction of the land, animals and cultures and for the poverty of the human spirit which led to deals done in greed. 

The White Poppy project can be a quiet but powerful way for the institutional church to begin influencing the reimagining of remembrance in New Zealand. This project dates back to 1926 when it was suggested in Britain that the centre of red poppies could be imprinted with the words, with no more war. The request was refused. But by 1933 the Co-operative Women’s Guild had produced the first white poppies to be worn on Armistice Day and very slowly the idea is catching on. Here in New Zealand Peace Movement Aotearoa co-ordinates the project and through donations collected is supporting White Poppies study scholarships.

One reading of the Easter story challenges us to wonder if humanity can evolve further than resorting to violence to calm our inner fears of being overwhelmed. The history that is often sidelined tells us this is possible, if we dare. As sideliners in the world of politics we thankfully don’t have the power to overwhelm anyone with this message of potential. We do though have the ability to ask others to dance. Up close and personal in the sultry and passionate tango, we can whisper words of love into our partner’s ear so that the whole story can be told and we are all made whole by the truth that will inevitably set us free.

[i] Sunday Star Times, Sunday Magazine, ‘you sexy things’, 21 March 2010, p18.

[ii] Geoffrey Haworth, Marching as to War?, Wily Publications, Christchurch 2008, p188.