As I prepared to participate in a local No Kings event, I was reminded that the seeds of today’s horrors were planted long ago and have been nurtured through many generations.    This is not only time for protest and resistance to evil, but a collective gut-check, a call to renewed personal integrity and commitment, and a time for fresh (if difficult) learning.  How we remember the past and learn from it has an enormous impact on how we act in the present, and live into the future.  For years I have witnessed Americans of varying political temperaments, and political leaders of both major parties, embrace assumptions about our collective history that are distorted and even fictional. This doesn’t help us, our neighbors, or newer generations.

Today, as we rightly recoil at the Nazi-like behavior of ICE agents, we must acknowledge again the long history of “law enforcement” and “criminal justice” abuse of people of color in America, as well as our brutal “foreign policy” victimizing countless peoples and countries throughout our two-plus centuries as a nation.  The No Kings Rally in Harleysville, Pa was a large, boisterous, patriotic gathering.  There was an abundance of American flags and members of the crowd chanting, “USA, USA!” My friend Roger was approached and thanked repeatedly for his sign, “Veterans Against Fascism.” Everyone recognized that they are not alone.

Later in the day, a young woman stood near us holding a sign with a message took my breath away: “It’s a good thing Jesus lives in our hearts. If he lived in America he’d be in a prison camp in El Salvador by now.” What she had written wasn’t clever or sarcastic.  It was truth.  There is no room for the Jesus of the gospels among the powerful today, and he will share the fate of their victims, just as there was no room for Christ among the powerful during my time in El Salvador in the 1980’s an early 90’s.  The abductions and disappearances of people by ICE agents remind me of the death squads in El Salvador who disappeared people back when I was a mission partner with churches there; masked men abducting and terrorizing people, their destination hidden and humanity erased.  The military leaders of those units were trained at Fort Benning, Georgia.  One of the most murderous battalions got their training at Fort Bragg.   Apparently, there is room in El Salvador for Jesus today; he can join his people in the CECOT hellhole, courtesy of the United States.  The throughlines are painfully obvious.

Several decades ago, German theologian Geiko Muller-Fahrenholz authored a rather remarkable book, The Art of Forgiveness.  He wrestled honestly with the meaning of forgiveness in the wake of the Holocaust, even as the world was witnessing the genocides in the Balkans and in Rwanda.  Muller-Fahrenholz describes the deathly results of “selective remembering” and contrasts it with the more honest and promising practice of “deep remembering”, describing the movement from one to another.

“Selective remembering is a way of rereading history that looks at national victories without counting the damage done to others, that is, without contemplating the guilt involved.   It considers defeats solely in terms of unjust victimization, thereby laying the blame entirely upon others.  Selective remembering necessarily produces ideologies of denial and suppression.  It needs to demonize the other in order to preserve its own purity and sense of mission, thus leading to cultures of revenge and policies of retaliation.  Often, selective remembering will be related closely to racism, helping to turn shades of skin color into ontological differences.  Selective remembering leads to the dehumanization of fellow human beings across the border.”  

He first published those words in 1996.  They are vivid commentary on the United States of America nearly thirty years later, but not only in addressing 2025.  With the rise of the MAGA movement, so many of us protest, “This is not who we are.”  I understand and resonate with the sentiment, but we are not being fully honest about who we have been.   I read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter, Letters from an American. She frames current events in historical context.  While she perceives historical roots of our current crisis, she unfailingly raises the treasures of our history, beckoning us to re-membrance, that we might reclaim all that is life-affirming and inspiring.  As we face the challenges of today, there are manifold resources from our very own history that are indispensable. None of them have anything to do with the myth of “American exceptionalism.”  So often it is the underside of American history that shines light and helps guide our path.  It has always been people close to the ground who have stepped up at great cost, initiating and authoring our most valuable social movements.  I thought of that on Saturday at the rally, knowing that faithfulness and love will require much more than one-day mass demonstrations.

How does “forgiveness” begin to apply or even speak to our present situation?  Surely those who shot the pastor with pepper balls in Chicago deserve no forgiveness!  Or, even more so,  the agents who terrorized a whole community, ripping families from their homes in the middle of the night and zip-tying children (“F— them kids!)?  Let me humbly suggest that we begin with our own need of forgiveness.  Each of us has a part in the collective journey to where we are now.  God’s for-giveness names us once again as God’s beloved, God’s giving empowers us to claim our relationships with God’s larger family and not to break faith. To re-member who we truly are. The Holy Spirit builds community; the demons and unclean spirits fracture it.

Muller-Fahrenholz continues hopefully:

Processes of forgiveness, by contrast, start by taking into account the victims of each victory.  Here the concern is for the ones who always have to pay the bill.  Forgiveness looks at history from the underside.  It uncovers denial and oppression.  Behind the great conqueror it sees the soldiers who were slain; behind the names of the mighty it remembers the names of those who do not count.  Forgiveness knows that victims are the same everywhere. So it approaches history in a more inclusive way. It transcends the borderlines and recognizes that human beings are essentially the same here, there, and everywhere.   This is what we call “deep remembering.” It is grateful for genuine greatness, but does not shun guilt and suppression.  It rejoices in human inventiveness and ingenuity, but it shares in the many forms of suffering.  It regards the wealth of people, races and cultures as transient constellations in the evolution of the human race, to be cherished for the beautiful variety they have in store,  but never to be idolized or absolutized.  Deep remembering is about transforming  the art of the possible.  It makes the possible possible.”

My friend Chris, an army chaplain who tends moral injuries borne by veterans of war, summarizes: “Selective remembering denies guilt, avoids suffering, and demonizes the other; deep remembering encounters guilt, shares suffering, and humanizes the other.”  Jesus would say that in the first process we are lost, and in the second we are found.  Referencing David Grossman and Shelly Rambo:: “Selective remembering, through denial and avoidance, enables psychic, emotional, and moral numbness . . . deep remembering enables the community to feel, enter into trauma, remain with the pain, in order to engage the shared human condition and transform it.”

What is possible?  The COMPASS Healing Circle that a group of us formed more than a decade ago was a circle process, a safe space for veterans of war to tell the fullness of their stories and have them received.  Its ritual and practice created a holy space that was both sanctuary and crucible.  It was a setting where moral pain was acknowledged, honored, and tended. We brought together veterans, veteran family members, and civilians.  The presence of the civilians was important; they represented the wider community that sent the soldiers into war then failed to receive their stories and tend their needs when they came home.  “Thank you for your service” gave way to the need to listen to a veteran who didn’t necessarily want to be thanked for their service, but instead heard.  The learning was difficult.  Some civilians continued to repeat the mantra, “You fought to protect our freedoms”, when testimony by veterans in the circle would reveal the betrayals they experienced when they realized that the stated reasons for the mission were fraught with lies, that it was privilege and not freedom that was being defended. Many times those privileges were not available to the very ones doing the fighting, killing, and dying.  Warriors themselves needed to discern between lawful and unlawful orders, moral and immoral demands.  The healing journey (ies) that emerged in COMPASS involved everyone.  New futures were manifested in freshly committed relationships, “deep remembering”, and the acknowledgment of difficult truths.   A model like COMPASS might encourage much of our good work in the future.

These are dangerous days, yet paradoxically hopeful.  Yes, the times are painfully revealing, with little apparent relief: the constant violence, cruelty, selfishness, scapegoating, shameless projection, the idolatry of weapons, the worship of death’s power, the scorning of empathy. Who are we in this story?   We don’t get to explain everything away, or turn our heads and hope it passes, or long for a national savior that will do the heavy lifting for us. Who ARE we?  And who will we be for others?  It is a time for us to practice solidarity, not measured charities.

The good news is that in a season of lies we are closer to the truth, and truth is indispensable to the transforming power of forgiveness.   “Forgive and forget is the language of violence.”  It is remembrance, rather than amnesia, that stokes the transformative journey.  The entire history of our nation is our inheritance, and we are the ones to receive it, and act upon it.  We will not outlast MAGA and its profoundly unclean spirit.  Either its inhumanity will triumph and define our emerging future, or we together will engage an honest and courageous collective journey, step-by-step, human by human, with true possibilities for justice, healing, and new life. We must embody the alternative.

My late mentor Daniel Berrigan sent me this poem at a dark and difficult time in my life.  It resources us today.

DOMESTIC WEATHER REPORT

No great miracles for us

Not even small ones,

nothing of the sort.

(They’re terra incognita, lunar.)

Omega doesn’t walk there, even anonymous.)

From my brothers, my friends

I come on a dark clue–

eyes that see,

ears taking note,

the heart heard from,

the tongue, a prisoner of conscience

learning truthful words, and

expedient, silence.

Thus (eventual!) the human, difficult, step-by-step, hard won

glory.

 

_______________________________________

 

Two quotes above from Muller-Fahrenholz, Geiko. The Art of Forgiveness: Theological Reflections on Healing and Reconciliation. WCC Publications: Geneva, Switzerland, 1997, pp. 47-48.

Chris Antal did much to stoke these reflections.  Quotes above from: Antal, C.J.  Patient to prophet: Building adaptive capacity in veterans who suffer military moral injury. Doctoral Dissertation: Hartford Seminary, 2017. pp. 5-6. Chris references the important work of David Grossman and Shelly Rambo.

Grossman, David. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Little, Brown, and Company: New York, 2009.

Rambo, Shelly.  Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of  Remaining. Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, KY, 2010.