Reply #20: Comments on speech from my daughter

[karynnj]

The first comment on his speech that I thought merited mentioning is the
context of the quote he gave from Auden ("we must love one another or
die.") Now, it's more than possible he just found the quote and is not
familiar with the poem from which it comes, because it is a famous
quote. However, the poem itself is relevant and one of my favorites, and
I think it is worth reading alongside Kerry's speech.

The background of the poem itself is that Auden was himself going
through major changes in his life and worldview-- he had (on the brink
of World War II) just left Europe permanently for the United States, his
formerly Marxist convictions were starting to fade, his increasingly
Christian (High Church Anglican) tendencies were becoming apparent, and
he had just started a relationship with the poet Chester Kallman, a
relationship Auden called a marriage and was most definitely the most
significant of his life. The poem is permeated with disillusionment,
despair, and anger at a society driven by war and greed-- and the fact
that this society is ultimately constructed of the sad, selfish
neediness of individuals. Nevertheless, the last two stanzas ring an
unmistakably truthful note of hope, that even in this darkness, one can
"show an affirming flame."

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

—

I think that this poem is important to put up aside Kerry's speech. It,
first of all, speaks to the scariness of the new millennium, and Kerry
started his speech speaking of the same. It also speaks honestly and
plainly of the religious impulse of human beings, the darker tendencies
towards faith (conformity and selfishness) and those which speak of
hope, of a desperate thirst for healing a broken world. Auden never lost
his sense of religion as a prayer against a cold and heartless social
structure. Later, in his For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratio, a long
many-voiced poem of the Nativity, he has Gabriel urge Mary:

What her negation wounded, may
Your affirmation heal today;
Love's will requires your own, that in
The flesh whose love you do not know
Love's knowledge into flesh may grow.

And for such strength to affirm love, he has the society he scorned in
the earlier poem pray:

Joseph, Mary, pray for all
The proper and conventional
Of whom this world approves.
Pray for us whose married loves
Acquire so readily
The indolent fidelity
Of unaired beds, for us to whom
Domestic hatred can become
A habit-forming drug, whose will
To civil anarchy
Uses disease to disobey
And makes our private bodies ill.
O pray for our salvation
Who take the prudent way,
Believing that we shall be exempted
From the general condemnation
Because our self-respect is tempted
To incest not adultery:
O pray for us, the bourgeoisie.

This conviction that the religious impulse is at its core a rebellion
against broken, unhealthy, destructive, and soul-deadening society
(despite its frequent assimilation into the same structures) is the
force behind Auden's verse and a conviction that I share. It's the
reason I'm a Religious Studies major focusing in World Religions-- I
believe that by understanding how "at sundry times and in divers
manners" people have been called to faith, I can better imagine how a
broken world might be healed. I think this is important to note because
I noticed a comment on the link you gave me under Kerry's speech from a
reader not understanding why Kerry didn't focus more on how religion is
so evil and causes so much conflict. I think that religion is important
to study so that we can have a better comprehension of the conflicts
caused by it, but I do not think this is the only reason or even the
most important reason to study it. I think many people discussing the
need for studying "comparative religion" miss this point. I don't think
Kerry (generally) did.

It's interesting to me how the current president, Kerry, and Obama all
have such easily traceable theological "accents," more so than most
public figures. Not only this, but they are important voices, each with
more resonance in our society than most people probably know: the voices
of conservative socially-minded evangelicalism, post-Vatican II
Jesuit-inspired Catholicism, and Protestant liberation theology. What's
also so interesting is that these are conscious tendencies on the part
of all three of the aforementioned figures. They aren't unknowingly and
uncaringly using the religious language with which they have become
accustomed (which can be said of many politicans); they have consciously
thought over their religious alliances and influences and are plainly
disclosing them to anyone "with ears to hear."

The clearest example of this is Obama. As a Religious Studies major,
what bothers me most about the treatment of Obama in the press vis-à-vis
Obama's religious beliefs is how off-base it is. With all of the hoopla
over Rev. Wright and Obama's Muslim connections, people are forgetting
that Obama is in actuality a convert to Christianity, an adult convert
whose theology is therefore of necessity conscious and genuinely felt.
Describing his first visit to Trinity, he wrote: "And in that single
note-- hope!-- I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside
the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of
ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath,
Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of
dry bones. Those stories-- of survival, and freedom, and hope-- became
our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears
our tears." The scriptural emphasis, the connection of the African
American story with the story of the early Israelites and the later
Christian minority in Rome, a conversion based on a belief in
liberation-- all of these things 'mark' Obama religiously and show what
is really unique about his faith in American politics. For him, religion
is not synonymous with solid upbringing and stability; it is a powerful
force against corruption and injustice. Obama, I would surmise, is fond
of the more powerful rhetoric in Paul's letters, and one can imagine
that much of his vision of Christianity has been derived from Paul's
dramatic statements: "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but
against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the
darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the
heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may
be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the
breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the
preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of
faith" (Ephesians 6:10-16). I would classify Obama as coming out of a
definite tradition of liberal Protestant theology, and could probably
even guess at which theologians he respects the most.

Kerry, on the other hand, comes out of a different tradition--
left-leaning Catholic theology. You can clearly see the influence Jesuit
theology has had on him every time he speaks about religion-- just
compare it to anything you can find on the Holy Cross website about God
or justice or the purpose of education. He is more likely to rely on the
Thomist conception of the "common good" or the Vatican II councils than
on the fiery scriptural references of Obama. He also has clearly been
influenced by the Catholic (also generally Thomist) conception of
"natural law" (vaguely equivalent to the conception of Noahide laws in
Jewish tradition), which is the belief that, all creatures coming from
the same Creator, there is some "natural" (as opposed to the grace given
through revelation) understanding of what is good and just in all
people, though there are real differences given through revelation.
Traditionally, this would mean that there is good in all faiths, but it
is imperfect compared to faith in Christ. Kerry seems to have his own
interpretation of "natural law", however (and I wouldn't be surprised if
he also got this from some Jesuit friends)-- that the natural law exists
for all people, but different belief systems (perhaps not even
necessarily religious) build on this and each has something to offer the
others, all ultimately based in the shared sense of what is good and
right present in all people. And so most of his speech has to do with
this-- what the different religions can offer each other.

I liked his honesty about "not knowing enough about Islam" and his
assertion that "if you don't engage, you can't even find answers to the
most basic, fundamental questions: Why do you wear the hijab? Why do you
go to Mecca? What is jihad?" Regina Spektor, who immigrated to the US
(NYC) from Russia, once said that "if we had the Internet 20 or 25 years
ago, there would have been no Cold War because you could text someone
and be like 'Hey, is this really what your country is like?' and they
could be like 'No, actually, it's not.' Okay great, crisis averted!" As
much as I love her, I think Kerry's point shows that she was wrong-- we
can still be as clueless as people were then, even about people who are
our neighbors, friends, family. And a lot of times that comes from not
asking. One thing I really appreciated about Sri Lankan society was the
openness about religion. Here, talking about it is impolite and
embarrassing. And so we don't ask the questions we really have.

And the questions, as Kerry points out, should really be about the
moral imperative shared by all of the world's faiths. What I appreciated
most about the speech was what I said before-- that it wasn't mainly
about avoiding religious conflict (as if we were talking about
containing a flu epidemic) but about ways which people of differing
religious opinions can work together to combat social and political
evils. I thought his rhetoric was strongest when focusing on this, not
on the whole "we all believe in God" thing-- I think the speech suffered
from an ambivalence as to whether or not he was talking about the shared
goals of monotheistic religions or of all people. (My Buddhist host
family in Sri Lanka, for instance, would probably be confused by the
assertion that what unites all peoples is a worship of God. Not to
mention atheists and agnostics.) In any case, the speech overall I
thought was really interesting, a call for religious understanding based
in a transformation of old religious language: a new understanding of
what natural law might mean to Catholics, or what "city on a hill" might
mean to the (at least traditionally) New England Protestants of Yale
Divinity School.

One more thing that I think should be said about this "new kind of city
on a hill." Kerry mentions that the name Salem, a town that saw so many
religious conflicts, means "peace." What he doesn't mention is the
appearance of Salem in the Scriptures, from which the town took its
name. First of all, it is understood in both Jewish and Christian
tradition to be an earlier name for Jerusalem. However, in the Bible, it
is mentioned along with a story about its king-- Melchizedek, "king of
Salem" and "priest of God Most High." After Abram, not yet Abraham,
achieved a decisive victory against neighboring kings, Melchizedek
blessed Abram and offered bread and wine, and Abram gives him a tenth of
all he has. In the Psalms, the king is later referred to in a song of
praise as "a priest forever, after the manner of Melchizedek." In the
epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament, the (unknown) author makes
a complex and brilliant rabbinical argument related to this passage from
Genesis. In response to those who would discredit Jesus for not being of
the Levitical priesthood, the author notes that long before Levi was
born, in fact, while Levi "was still in the loins of his father
Abraham," Abram reverenced this "king of peace" as a superior man (the
author also points out that in Hebrew, "Melchizedek" can be read as
"king of righteousness".) Thus the author places the one of the likeness
of Melchizedek, one of the few people in the Hebrew Bible who, as the
author points out, is "without father, without mother, without
genealogy," over the established priesthood. This is a similar argument
to that made by Paul in his letter to the Galatians, in response to
conventional Jewish arguments against Paul's teachings (actually, it
seems likely that the author of Hebrews was influenced by Paul and took
a cue from his rhetoric.) In response to insistence that those who would
follow God must follow all the 613 commandments of the Law, Paul points
out that Abraham lived before the mitzvot were given to Moses and his
faithfulness was counted to him as righteousness. This might not seem
that radical, read from today's vantage point-- it seems that Paul is
simply arguing for Christianity over Judaism. However, at the time,
there was no such thing as "Christianity." Paul was a Jew arguing
against conventional Judaism, saying that being faithful to God
transcends religious precepts. This was the foundation of his ability to
"be a Jew among the Jews and a Gentile among the Gentiles," and the real
meaning behind his assertion in the same letter as the above argument
that "there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free"
among the early followers of Jesus. Whatever one's opinion, however, on
the early Jesus movement, Melchizedek, king of peace and righteousness,
a pagan priest reverenced by Abram, is a symbol of religious
transcendence. May that symbol lead us to greater understanding,
respect, shared worship and action.