It was on this day in 1863 that one hundred seventeen men and officers of the Massachusetts 54th died in a failed assault on a Confederate stronghold at Fort Wagner just outside of Charleston.
While it would take some years for him to receive it, one of the survivors, Sergeant William Carney, would be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his part in this conflict. Because of the delay Sergeant Carney would not be the first black man to receive the award, but this was the first battle that led to that award to a person of color.
Among the dead was their regimental commander, the white Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Of the dead officers, his was the only body not returned to the Union side. The Confederate commander announced of the colonel, “We buried him with his niggers.” The bodies of all the soldiers had been robbed and stripped and thrown into a ditch which became their common grave. Regarding the colonel, by this action the Confederates thought they were adding insult to the injury…
I’ve thought long and hard about this.
For one, I find it a central act in the deeper truth about the Civil War. Despite the flowery opinions espoused here and there, the truth is there was a single state’s right that was being defended. And these men who died, nearly all black, knew what it was. And they, together with Colonel Shaw and a handful of other white officers, the only kind of officers allowed to the soldiers, put their lives on the line, and many of them died, to end that right forever. But that’s not the principal thought that bubbles up for me…
Fast forward to June of this year.
At our Unitarian Universalist General Assembly we had a bit of a controversy over a proposed statement that was meant to situate us as a denomination broadly within the tradition of peace churches. It was actually not a very good statement. It tried to hold up a peace witness, but it also tried hard to acknowledge the valor and good intentions of those UUs who served in the military. The problem was impossible to avoid. Despite some cherry picking of historical precedent, particularly among the Universalist side of the tradition, this draft statement was, is, a violation of our history. Rather, the American liberal religious tradition has produced pacifists like John Haynes Holmes, who are honored in our history, and like Colonel Shaw, it has produced war heroes who are also honored in our history.
There was quite a conversation that led to the vote and its defeat. And frankly, perhaps even justified the process. As a by the bye, to my mind the best reflection was Paul Rasor’s Beyond Just War and Pacifism. But the conversation, some of which was held on the pages of this blog, more than anything showed up the flaws in the two principal positions. Just War theories, grounded in an assertion of a right to self-defence, are easily subverted by nationalist sensibilities, and even at “best,” leaving a tsunami of blood, a tidal wave of unintended consequences. While pacifism becomes an opting out of the responsibility individuals have toward one another, abandoning one’s family and neighbors for an abstract higher good, one that, to put it brutally, has never existed in reality.
So, here I am.
While, as I say, I am a near pacifist, I believe that freedom of conscience demands that we uphold the right of self-defense within the Unitarian Universalist Association together with the right to surrender it to a higher stance in the world for those who feel compelled to do so. That uneasy reality is who we are.
Whether there is a possible statement that can square this circle, I don’t know.
And this whole conversation also challenges me as a liberal Buddhist.
On the one hand, unlike for Unitarianism, Universalism or Unitarian Universalism, the Buddhist tradition is clearly pacifist. The most famous story in this regard involves a woman who comes to the Buddha and who asks him what became of her son killed in a war. He refuses to answer her repeated entreaties. After she leaves the Buddha’s attendant asks why he refused to respond? The Buddha said because those killed in conflict all tumble into hell.
Now Buddhist hells are not forever things. Rather, at least to my liberal stance, they reflect the point that we are the product of our intentions and actions. And at the very least the terror of war creates situations where no one who dies goes to any “heaven.” Rather it is hell all the way to the bottom.
But we don’t exist in isolation, we are the product of relationships. And things change.
And within that change eventually we can leave any hell.
The play of the universe continues, now here, now there.
Still the classic Buddhist response to the mess of life is withdrawal. In its earliest forms it appears the quest was very much a private one, toward personal liberation. But quickly the narrowness of this view was replaced by an understanding what one does is done for all. Still, the practical response was withdrawal.
And while I am sympathetic to the monastic commitment, in the end I reject that response. I consider this commitment to working it out within the world a hallmark of liberal Buddhism.
Our salvation must be worked out together. No one goes to heaven, no one is saved, alone.
But as a practical matter what does this mean?
There is, to my experience, no way to avoid the fact we are all related, every blessed one of us. And, in fact, this is an even deeper assertion than to a claim of human family. We’re all related, every thing in this cosmos. And no doubt there are ethical consequences to seeing into this reality as my personal, intimate truth.
And, proximity counts. We have pressing obligations to family and friends that appear to be stronger demands than those of people more distantly related. I’m quite sure this sense of obligation is rooted in biology. And as the science of evolutionary biology advances, we will gradually understand those grubby roots of our affections. Of course while knowing from where it comes is important, what we do with it is what actually counts. I am deeply aware of my deepest obligations to my spouse and to my neighbors, both in the literal sense of those with whom I live, and in the somewhat more abstract sense of those who form my communities of faith, my church and my sangha. I’ll do crazy things to take care of my family. I will do somewhat less crazy things for church and sangha.
By the time we get to the nation state, I find my sense of obligation stretched very thin. I do feel love for country. I’m deeply stirred by the story of the men of the 54th and feel proud that Colonel Shaw was a co-religionist. But, I am also more viscerally aware of the tenuousness of this when wrongs are perpetuated by the state. I think of the recent conflict in Iraq. I was completely opposed to this as what has come to be called an optional war. Indefensible by Just War theory, except that I know it was defended by just such reasoning by those who put it forward. And I’m torn by our involvement in Afghanistan, feeling our nation was justified by Just War theory to go in. But now we’re in, in what has been called with some justice, the graveyard of empires. What now?
I really, really like the idea of the United Nations. I wish it weren’t such a failed institution, captive to tyrants and international bullies.
I also believe the only way to end war is to move beyond the nation state toward a single world that acknowledges differences and celebrates them while at the same time balancing these with a sense of universal rights that override those differences when push comes to shove. Equality of sexes and races, of equal rights for gay and lesbian and transgendered people, of a fundamental human right for an education and basic health care, to enough food and to adequate shelter, as a list of human rights for instances.
Of course we’re not on track in that direction. Instead the threat to the integrity of the nation state is not any united nations, but rather multinational corporations.
But I digress.
The issue is how to act in a sacred manner in this mess of relationships that are our lives?
How do I, by my actions, contribute to or hinder the possibility of life and joy on this planet?
How do I contribute to awakening, to liberation for myself and others?
For me the reality is that it is impossible to be right. As the tradition declares: one continuous mistake.
But there appears to be a rule of thumb.
So, in my person I need to integrate the truths of connection, of the fact we’re at the same moment one and distinct.
I find that through the discipline of noticing, particularly by sitting down, shutting up, and paying attention. But the discipline is bigger than that. It demands returning to this moment over and over and over and over again. Not so much as mindfulness, but rather in the sense of open rather than closed.
And informed by this I need to meet each situation as it arises with fresh eyes.
Open. Open as wide as the universe.
So hard.
And absolutely necessary.
But, if there is any way through the morass, I’m confident this is it…
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