Turning

"0 Gracious Lord, with whom disguise is vain, Mask not our evil, let us see it plain! But veil the weakness of our good desire, Lest we lose heart and falter and expire."

--Rumi

In the same column, in which he writes of a shameful event of his own wartime experience, Murray said,

I remember my months in combat with pride--and shame. I was proud that I could do what I never thought I could do; I was ashamed that I could do what I never thought I could do.

Speaking of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Murray wrote,

Perhaps I would need no direct order. Soldiers depend on one another. They need to be close; would I have had the courage to stand up to the pressure that peers place on one another? I suspect not. I live with the guilt of sins committed and sins I could have committed.

To me they are all victims, the persecuted and the persecutors alike. I suspect that acts such as those at Abu Ghraib emerge from a culture of violence and that they have their origins far above the rank of private soldier. I sincerely doubt that these were the isolated acts of a small group of miscreants, as higher-ups would have us believe. Though I am disgusted by what they did, I am equally disgusted that those who are really responsible will probably never be punished. Meanwhile, promising young lives are ruined on both sides.

As wiser folks than I have suggested, we have little control over what will happen after the "dogs of war" are unleashed. A little over a year ago, I worried with you about whether this war would make the world a safer, a better place. I guess the jury is still out, but I must say it doesn't look good to me. Certainly, in the eyes of the rest of the world, we have lost face. As Murray so eloquently points out, war is always a losing proposition because of what it does to us or causes us to do.

These thoughts occur to me as we prepare to observe the Memorial Day holiday. It is one of my favorites, not because it glorifies war--quite the opposite--but because it gives us pause, or ought to, to remember the horrors of war and its terrible consequences. Memorial Day, after all, started out its existence as "Decoration Day": a day for "decorating" the graves of the Union and Confederate dead in the American Civil War: hundreds and thousands of them. No family in the Civil War era was left untouched.

I confess that I am not terribly patriotic, unless you count the real meaning of patriotism, which is "love of place." I am skeptical of patriotism, tending toward Dr. Johnson's claim that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Let's just say that I doubt the claims of patriotism. I love my country, not necessarily what the politicians and generals are up to. And I am a realist about its history. I agree with Murray on those bumper stickers. Rather than being proud, we ought to be humble, humble, and recognize the evil that dwells within each and every one of us. We are not the good guys all the time. Perhaps we never were. The enemy, as Murray says with truth, is "all of us." It's not an easy message to hear, but we'd better be willing to hear it.

Today, in the Christian tradition, is Pentecost. If we were in our Transylvanian Unitanan Partner Church this morning, we would be celebrating one of their high holy days. Pentecost is one of the four times during the year that our friends there observe the Lord's Supper (the others being harvest, Christmas, and Easter). It is a wonderful and moving experience to celebrate communion in Transylvania.

The people come forward in order of age, oldest to youngest, to receive the pieces of homemade Hungarian bread and to drink the homemade wine from a common chalice. The minister looks each recipient directly in the eye and says "Isten aldja meg," which translates "God bless you." While the men receive communion, the women sing, and vice versa.

There is no magic in the Transylvanian communion service, no bread and wine converted into the literal body and blood of Christ. It is strictly an act of remembrance of another great Unitarian, Jesus of Nazareth. When communion was served in this Unitarian church, its meaning was exactly the same. It is what it is: an act of recognition of the beloved community that we are striving to build together.

Pentecost marks the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles and the beginning of the Christian church. More to the point, it marks the conversion of its hearers to the message of the gentle prophet of Israel.

Conversion means, simply, "turning." One could say that we experience many conversions, many turnings, in the course of our lives. In Transylvania, this is the primary emphasis of the Pentecost celebration. It is a time for turning, or returning, to our better selves, those best selves that we dream of becoming.

My Transylvanian Unitarian colleague Kinga-Reka Zsigmond, one of a number of dynamic young women who have entered the Transylvanian Unitarian ministry in recent years, has written in a "Pentecost Sermon" that,

Conversion does not mean to speak all the time about belief, and it does not mean to be proud of it, because then we ridicule the most wonderful connection of human life. It has to be understood spiritually. The spirit dwelling in us, and our intention toward the world and other human beings have to be purified.

Conversion is the most beautiful miracle of human life. It is a revelation that elevates one and makes one free and happy. It is the revelation that one has to serve only God, that we have to live only under the spell of the spirit and not of money, fame, power, and violence.

Believing that the best opportunity for Transylvania to be reunited with the Hungarian homeland lay with the Nazis, they threw in their lot with Germany during the Second World War. The separation of Transylvania from Hungary in the first place resulted from being on the losing side in WWI. Under Communism, in order to gain privileges, neighbor spied on neighbor, and even reported on each other in church: they know a thing or two about unfaithfulness. Safe to say that our Transylvanian brothers and sisters also know a thing or two about the monsters inside us, the enemy within, and about the difficulty of turning.

But that is what, I believe, we are called to do. Are we willing to begin to make the changes in ourselves, and in our own country, that would help to make the world a safer place? Is it possible that our petroleum dependent lifestyle has anything to do with the fix we find ourselves in? Are we willing to confront the terrible disparities between our own lives and those of people in the developing world? To get to the root causes of terrorism, and not just to believe that we can defeat it by the use of force alone?

Indeed, these are perilous and challenging times. It is hard to remain hopeful in the face of so much dispiriting news. The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote,

0 gracious Lord, with whom disguise is vain,
Mask not our evil, let us see it plain!
But veil the weakness of our good desire,
Lest we lose heart and falter and expire.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock