Sand Opera
Lenten Journey Day 7
Gospel MT
6:7-15
Jesus said
to his disciples…
This is how
you are to pray:
Our Father
who art in heaven,
hallowed be
thy name,
thy Kingdom
come,
thy will be
done,
on earth as
it is in heaven.
Give us this
day our daily bread;
and forgive
us our trespasses,
as we
forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us
not into temptation,
but deliver
us from evil.
--Matthew, 6:7-15
I’ve struggled
with what is called “The Lord’s Prayer” or the “Our Father” even as I’ve prayed
it, thousands of times, in boredom or fear, sadness or joy. I’ve thought: why “Father,”
if God is beyond all human reckoning? Could we not equally say “Our Mother”?
And why “in heaven” and not on earth? What of the incarnate Word, of creation
as a God’s? I suppose the notion of the Kingdom on earth is supposed to allude
to that. I’m on board with “daily bread,” though I’m sure the gluten-free among
us would get itchy just from the sound of it. The importance of forgiveness,
and the mutuality of forgiveness, seems crucial, though why we’ve translated it
as “trespass” requires more explanation. Perhaps my favorite moment is the “but”
in the final line; it suggests that temptation may be inevitable, and we may
need delivery from evil—that we do, as much as that is done to us.
Today’s poem
from Sand Opera, in the voice of one of the abused at Abu Ghraib,
testifies to the problem of evil and the miracle of survival. That despite the
depradations he faced, he lived. His voice, in the telling, is delivering
himself from the evil that he survived. But G, the ubiquitous anti-God Charles Graner,
brings “the dogs,” and the dogs are what end the poem. Dogs were one of the
instruments of torture used by military police, which is doubly sad given how
much comfort that a good dog can provide. Which is why I’m sharing Arab
American poet Hayan Charara’s amazing poem “Animals,” from his new book Something
Sinister (2016), about his own beloved
animals, and the animals his brother cared for in Lebanon when Israel attacked
in 2006. The animals that we become to each other.
“Animals” by Hayan Charara
The phone call,
from my wife.
She’s hungry, she’s pregnant,
someone kicked her
in the stomach—we have to.
I say yes, but
the reply
I keep to
myself is,
We don’t have to do a goddamn thing.
A dog. I’m
talking about a dog
I would have
otherwise left to starve.
Now though,
five years since,
I love this
animal, Lucy,
more than I can
most people.
•
A boy names his
dog and five cats
after our Lucy.
The boy, my brother,
born in Henry
Ford’s hometown,
lives now in
Lebanon,
which the
Greeks called Phoenicia,
and they tried
but failed
to subdue it,
same as the Egyptians,
Hittites,
Assyrians, Babylonians,
Alexander the
Great, Romans, Arabs,
Crusaders,
Turks, the British,
the French, the
Israelis.
There, my
father built a house
with money earned
in Detroit—
as a grocer,
with social security.
Also there, the
first alphabet
was created,
the first law school built,
the first
miracle of Jesus—
water, wine.
•
On the first
day
the bombs fall
they flee
and the boy
asks
to go back for
Lucy,
the dog. As for
the cats,
No. They take care of
themselves.
One week into
it
he wonders who
feeds them,
who fills the
water bowls.
Maybe the neighbors,
the mother
thinks out loud.
The father is
indignant: Neighbors—
what neighbors? They’re
gone.
The mother is
stunned:
What do you mean, gone?
After a month,
everyone forgets
or just stops
talking about
the animals.
During the ceasefire
my father
drives south,
a thirty-minute
trip that lasts
six
hours—wreckage upon wreckage
piled on the
roads, on what is left
of the roads.
The landscape
entirely gray,
so catastrophic
he asks a
passerby how far
to his town and
is told,
You’re in it.
•
My father finds
three of the cats,
all perforated,
one headless.
The dog is near
the carport,
where it hid
during lightning storms,
its torso
splayed in half
like meat on a
slab, its entrails
eaten by other
dogs
scavenging on
the streets.
Look. They’re
animals.
Which is to
say, there are also people.
And I haven’t
even begun telling you
what was done
to them.
2 comments:
After reading these juxtapositions of animals and war, I was reminded of one more. My father was a teenager living in the Netherlands during World War II. He wrote the story of his life for his family and shared his experience of the war. On the day that the Germans invaded Holland in May 1940, his family had to flee from their farm in Venhorst to another town Keldonk, that was out of the line of fire. The next day he went back to see what had become of their farm animals. Here is his description:
"I don't know who decided but that afternoon John van Kessel, who was 13 years old, and I, who was 15, went back to Venhorst to see how everything was. We went back by bicycle. Some places we had to use the same road going east as the German army used going west. My dad warned us to watch whether the road near our farm was mined (a minefield crossed our farm, but the road was still open.) Well, our farm was burned down, the hogs killed, and the chickens outside, including 300 1-week-old chicks, who were still keeping warm by the hot bricks. We moved them into the neighbor's chicken coop and got a stove going. We slept on the floor with the chickens that night and went back to Keldonk the next morning."
Phil, I appreciate the stimulus you offer us to form new connections between all these images and to simply be with these experiences.
What a great story! I have not had creature-comfort for most of my life, but now that I have a dog, I feel like I understand that sense of caretaking for creatures, how you'd risk your life to make sure that they were okay.
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