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A WORD FROM WASHINGTON, D.C. by Rev. Gail Unterberger, Ph.D.
The F-16 Fighter jets fly over my skies daily. I did crisis and grief counseling downtown out of the churches close to the Capital. I worshiped with survivors in my church who had lost loved ones. Our post office was closed for anthrax contamination. On Sept. 11 my son at University of Pittsburgh called to say the airplane had gone down quite near him; that the main buildings in his school and city had been evacuated. My parents and friends called to see if we were all right. My daughter came home when schools closed early. She watched the TV with me for a while; then somehow we found ourselves in a huddled embrace, weeping together for ourselves, our world, our future. Her exact words were, "Mommy, I'm afraid we are going to go to war." She wouldn't come to the TV to hear the historical story - she was always "too busy." A few nights she needed to be tucked in, read stories to, and sung Scottish Lullabies until she was asleep, the same ones my Scottish mother had sung to me when I was a young child. Every counseling session for a long while began with "how are you coping?" Discussions of politics were therapeutic, rather than diversionary. Anxiety and depression are common, people with PTSD were retraumatized, and the others were traumatized. Many folks became unemployed, my own income has plummeted as client load has increased, and stress levels are at an all-time high. People are grieving for the America as they had felt It - always safe and able to protect us. After all, the only other time we were attacked from abroad in generations of memory was Pearl Harbor, and comparisons with that have been exhaustive, while not ultimately comparable. And no one knows exactly what paranoia is anymore. Addictions are on the rise, as is attendance at self-help groups. For a while, the fatalist seemed the best adjusted - if one is meant to die on the metro from a bomb, then it will just happen that way - nothing you can do about it. The bullet with your name on it. This is in fact, George Bush's theology, "if it be God's Will... that America experience another terrorist attack..." he says resigned. What terrible theology. God never wills death and destruction to innocent civilians. God wills peace with justice. But does my process/feminist theology provide any certain safety? I keep reading and looking for theological hope - which the world will go on. After reading John Spong's Christianity Must Change or Die I've been rather bereft spiritually. I know the author writes of profound truth. Yet at times I wish I didn't have this new knowledge and could go back to old, outdated regressive ways of thinking. I pray, but with the understanding that it is primarily myself that the prayer is changing, a la C.S. Lewis. I'm trying to rebuild with David Polk's What's a Christian to Do, Suchocki's God, Christ, Church, and Soelle's Against the Wind. I admit I haven't yet read John Cobb's latest book Speaking of Religion and Politics, which I'm sure, would give me some hope. Some feminists really irk me - and I'm not alone in that ("love Osama Bin Ladan and he will learn to love" - Bullshit, after years of child abuse, brainwashing and religious psychopathology, he doesn't even care about his countryneighbors, much less Americans.) You know -- it always comes down to my two favorite preventatives: I teach parenting. I teach about healthy religions. Stop abusing children. Stop preaching/teaching xenophobic religions. Love/mirror your children. Preaching humble, loving grace-filled religions. Do we have to have religions that are patriarchal, exclusionist, and xenophobic? It seems so simple. But everything can go wrong in between here and there. Downtown D.C. remains eerily empty. Near bridges stand National Guards with a rifle; on top of buildings are snipers. I flew out of National the other day. It reminds me of being in other countries with armed people in fatigues at every checkpoint. Apparently only out of this airport (and perhaps Boston?) is the mandate that passengers stay seated for a half-hour after takeoff from and a half-hour before arrival to D.C. They give you plenty of time for the restroom, though the line is very long! But the people, striving for the first need for renewal - SAFETY, were friendly. Strangers in Gaithersburg as well as D.C. talk with one another no matter the ethnic or racial background - for once the town seemed pulled together by the crisis. We went downtown for a showing of the Vagina Monologues. The show was half-full, though sold out, and hysterically funny. We were a little community unto ourselves for just those hours. We emerged into the beautiful moonlit Washington, with its lights and immaculate streets and few pedestrians. What a shame people are missing strolling along on this warm October night here, we thought to ourselves. Self-care (the only positive self-word), after all, had become imperative among the caregivers, especially the pastoral ones. Once (well, I confess more than once) I had a freezing moment. I called one of my best friends, a foreign relations expert and my mother, with the intent of finding out "what is the answer here?" for I had lost the sense that we had any answers. I got the dogsitter, a Ph.D. student in landscape architecture - another friend. "Who says we're supposed to have answers at this point?" she inquired. How powerless we truly are. And to put our trust in our government? That is indeed a serious fear. To trust in God - whose God? This whole war started as a religious perversion. This whole disaster may come down to the goodness and ethics of a couple of good people, just like in the Cuban missile crisis. Then again, it could as easily end up with a nuclear blast. My parents wanted to know if I wanted to move from Gaithersburg, MD. I said, "hell, no, I'm at Ground Zero - I'm either ash, or I go outside and take a deep breath." I am so sad for my children I can hardly bear it. With life so cheap in Afghanistan, and the death toll mounting (though as of today few American casualties!) isn't there someone who wants the millions blood money to turn in Osama Bin Laden? Is there not one Judas in the ranks willing to risk his or her life to bring this thing to a closure? With the Pakistanis joining the search and the new cave bombs, perhaps the end is in sight. The cave we helped build when the Afghans fought the Russians? In talking with another woman, I asked her about Osama Ben Laden. She said she spends no time worrying about him. She just prays. I said, to what God? She said, "There's only one God." I said, "Well Osama Bin Laden is praying for his redemption to his God and for our demise." "So," she says, "we shall see how it goes with his prayers." I have a Women's Psychotherapy Group every Monday night. The topic this week was Thanksgiving. It has come about that we discuss the war every week at some point or another. We mirror larger feminist groups with our concerns about freedom at home and increasingly frightening civil rights constraints, our concern for Afghan women and children hungry, and women dying in childbirth. We worry that the three women representatives at Bonn are from outside Afghanistan and wonder how a truly representative government can come about. We, like 85% of American women, have endorsed military action in the short run, though we do not believe in "just war" theories, and we certainly are concerned about "civilian deaths as we are American deaths." When we hear about bloodbaths we think of boys and young men we know, instead of "just the way it is in a ground war." We plot ways to keep our sons out of a possible future draft. (I remember a Vancouver meeting of AAPC when Sam Keene made a grievous error and an insult to all women by saying, "Men will support women against rape when women stop sending their sons to war." I remember how several of us walked out - those who hadn't already left at the men and sheep joke). Continuing, our group is concerned for the Afghan earth, a place that looks so beautiful in some of the TV pictures, and so pockholed now that the bombs have cratered the land. As mentioned, we just came back from Thanksgiving. One woman reported that a sister-in-law had announced that she was "so happy with the way things are going with the war." A faithful Roman Catholic, my client was aghast; she could see feeling some relief that things may be more speedily moving toward resolution, with the (uncertain) hope of the Bonn meeting, but people dying? How could that make you HAPPY? Actually, as one of her children had noted, "God must be really, really sad." I had a daydream. Lots of people (like reporters) were gathered the night of the 12th of Sept. They were interviewing Jesus. That is, they were at the feet of Jesus, whose body was like the Corcodova in Rio. (I have a picture of myself standing at the foot of that statue with the Christ statue looming way overhead taken by James Farris in Brazil.) In other words they gathered at the hem of his garments. They were all shouting out, "a word from you, Christ?" and "what should we do?" and "Jesus, what would you have us do now?" After a while there was silence. And then Jesus spoke one word, three times. "Disarm." Disarm. Disarm." I knew this was the only answer, yet I knew the world was not ready for that, nor were we as the American people spiritually great enough to do so. Yet, in church that first Sunday, Sept. 16 when parking lots were overflowing with churchgoers, after I had heard the beautiful prayer for peace, a statement not mentioning military action from the United Methodist Council of Bishops, I dared to speak. I knew that many people in D.C. area were in the anger and vengeance stage of grief, so during joys and concerns, I plead with my congregation "that most people wouldn't understand this, but I knew that they as Christians would at least understand how that dream could come about." I told about the Christ and the reporters and the Response. There was silence. The pastor went on to other people. Two women came up to me after the service and said, "you are right, I know that is ultimately the only solution." And "I feel exactly that way, I wish others did too." That's it. The rest were silent. And I believe in my "vision." I remember in a history course in high school that the cold war was likened to people on the space of a mattress each holding a grenade. Who would discard their grenade first? I want you to know I am the ultimate peace (etc) protester. In high school where prayer in Texas was mandatory if done by the students, I got a prayer for peace approved by my sociology teacher, as was due process. One other friend, Louise, from Liberal Religious Youth, and I wore black armbands on moratorium day. Leaving the house that morning, my mother sighed, "My daughter, the political activist." She knew of the trouble ahead. She did not expect me to be expelled for my prayer for peace and my teacher fired for approving it. I attended the first Washington Vietnam Protest on the Mall, bussed from Durham in 1970. Subsequently I was there for MK days, later marching Pro-choice with my 4 year old daughter on my shoulders mimicking college girls, my baby yelling with her little fist punching the air - "Bush, Bush, stay outta my bush, Bush." Other marches like AIDS and GAY PRIDE (straight but not narrow) on up through the Million Mom March. But I have not participated in any peace marches this year. Not yet. I think this nation needs the healing, resolution and closure that can only come about when Osama Bin Laden has been brought to justice, and I am certain that that cannot be through the circus of an OJ Simpson trial here in the United States. I also think we are not just that shallow but that we want to see Afghans for the first time reach a peaceful ruling leadership with women's liberation and U.N. participation only as long as needed. As far as the end for Bin Ladin I am certain he or his brother, as he has said, will kill him when the time comes. That way he will be blessed by being taken into his heaven and be presented with 7 virgins. (Why is all of this always about sex?) (Why can men only love other men in the presence of death?) Sex and death, sex and death. WHO has trouble coming to grips with these? Sometimes I think the worst biochemical terrorism is really all about testosterone. And no, I am not a man hater, I love my father, my husband, my professors, my brother, my son and all his friends, my colleagues and my men friends who are numerous. I just hate misused testosterone. When first the flags flew on each housetop, I wanted to fly one too. But I couldn't find ours. Then as time went on, the symbol became ambiguous. I saw some criminals on TV waving the flag as they sought to beat up middle-eastern looking people in our country. I got out my old "religion and race" pin, which showed a series of faces, red, white, yellow, black and red in the shape of the U.S., and wore it proudly. Then I went down to Union Station and tried to find a world pin. The best I could do was a pin of the U.N. I wore both for as long as wearing pins were popular - and it still is in this area. Our house sports an Advent Cow flag in honor of my husband's family who are dairy farmers. What do I do for support? First, I have my own church, a United Methodist Church with a black pastor who worked with Martin Luther King and a colorful congregation, the least of whom are white. So far peace is preached. And if we are to look to our own culpability, it is to name our own sins of racism, sexism, homophobia, fear of stranger, needs for power, etc. We are called to love abundantly and clean our own house while praying for peace. Then there is women-church, a group that has existed for almost twenty years, named SAS by Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza. We meet at least every 3 weeks as a house church, our liturgies centering on world and community events. We met at my house last Sunday and gave thanks for hope in the midst of war.... And we found balms in Gilead. Third, a theological, ethics and ritual group started with the concern for serious theological and ethical discussion of terrorism and our response to it. It is rather a feminist and progressive's "think-tank" of sorts, through which I consolidate many ideas. One is we MUST think "outside the box." The second is a call to moral creativity. An idea has been expressed to sing a song of peace along with every patriotic song (as when the United Methodists sang Finlandia to conclude our service of worship at the National UMC church following Sept. 11). We critiqued the National Cathedral's service for ending with the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and for their continual mistaking Episcopal Bishop Jean Dixon, calling her (the only female leadership presence) "John." Flying a peace sign next to the flag has been offered as an appropriate symbol of our response. Vowing an end to such violence, not vengeance, honors the memory of the victims lost and mourned so deeply these last months. And to any country, which must finally agree to stop the fighting -- peace does not dishonor the last victims of terrorism, but rather honors them in the highest regard. I'm proud that Americans have asked the question "why do they hate us?" And what is Islam all about, and how do we differentiate between fundamentalist zealots and peaceloving Muslims? Our Clergy Association now includes Muslim participation. Many are reading the Koran, through not reciting it, as we understand that to respect it, we must be careful in taking its words as our own. Finally this week, I went to a conference on trauma and recovery. The speakers assumed that all of Americans are traumatized to some degree or extent, the children as well, having watched much of the images on TV that very first day. Excellent resources are available to all of us pastoral caregivers through the websites and through this source as well. I appreciate that NPR has, ever day, a piece of music, recommended by one of our famous musicians that they would like our country to hear. This is for our healing at a non-intellectual level. They are right that we need healing music from all of the areas, classical. folk, jazz, etc. This has heartened me. I hope next month, In January there will be much more good news. I also am afraid that the war against terrorism will mean that the U. S, will take it as our mandate to single-handedly take on the entire terrorist cells (countries?) in the world. I pray we will sustain the world's support in our efforts. I hope Afghanistan will receive the humanitarian relief it needs and that it ends up becoming a new country better than ever before so that our own loss and pain and work has not been in vain. I hope we will reconsider our Mideast policies and our positions or power and overconsumption. (I just heard a Program on NPR that harnessing the wind power of just three areas Dakotas, Nebraska and parts of Texas could provide the energy for all of the U.S.) I hope Mr. Bush will truly grieve as well as run his 7-min. mile, and continue to be in touch with all the world's leadership. I hope we, as IPCNSR, can be a place of comfort, enticement, thought provoking (as Howard Clinebell always is in his e-mailing), and blessing to all who stop by our site. Shanti, Salaam, Shalom, Peace with Justice for you and the Human Family, Rev. Gail Unterberger, Ph.D. No. Amer. Co-Chair, American Assoc. Pastoral Counselors, IPCNSR
Websites supporting this article: www.hers.com/water
list serve at www.maelstrum.St.John's.edu
The Only thing I yet believe in: A Statement of Faith of the United Church of Canada: We are not alone, we live in God's world.
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