Time It Was

My brother Michael and I have been talking about the old days. "Old when you gain as much pleasure from memory as from prospect," an old friend once told me. (He also said, "Old is when physicians become impotent.") I am not one who subscribes to Old in religion as an unquestioned virtue, as in "Gimme That Old Time Religion." But there is something to be said about having a firm grasp on the journey. Michael and I had a seminal conversation last Sunday evening as we remembered the year 1969. The first astronauts landed on the moon in July of that year. Woodstock happened. For me, a peraonsl event involved the March on Washington, when hundreds of thousands expressed themselves against the war in Vietnam. I shudder when I think back on those days, when one generation was willing to sacrifice the manhood of another, seemingly without question. It turns out that Michael and I we had both come to that march by different routes. We did not know the other was there. We marched.

I recall the trip from Northern Lower Michigan to Washington D.C. in Joe Sobel's battered Mercedes Benz. The car was a rolling wreck. Six of us packed on its bench seats. The car had no functioning brakes. As we motored east across the mountains, I can recall being terrified for the entire trip, so terrified that my digestive tract punished me for days to come. We made it there and back, by the grace of God. But the car became a metaphor for me of that moment in our national life. The nation careened ahead with no brakes. Vietnam did, in fact had crashed our armed services. The consequences of the crash still haunt us in the vaunted "all volunteer military."

Each age follows on the foundation of another. When the Greeks translated the Jesus stories, they did so in the familiar Greek. There, the word for time is rendered by two words, chronos and kairos. Chronos attends to marking the passage of time. It is the consciousness of the clock. Listening to the Naval Observatory's exact treatment of time in seconds, minutes, hours and days is the mesmerising sound of chronos. Each tick has its own sameness, but over the short wave it had a peculiar texture. Chronos is hypnotic. When Jesus spoke about time, "the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand," the word is kairos. This is a notion that time is like a vessel, as it fills up with events. This time is shaped by events. Old men talk about kairos. And by the time you reach my age, the impact of events on character becomes ever clearer. We were of a generation on a fools errand, a careening Mercedes, condemned to great suffering among the compliant and among the resistant. Some sacrificed their lives. Others watched as our brothers fell to their deaths. I am still amazed how this shared tragedy created an enmity within a generation. How could that have happened?

1969 was the year that imprinted a generation with conflict. We continue to live the tension between mistaken official world and the truth of our own consciences. The Bush administration's fantasy government is the direct heir to the Vietnam fantasy. When I see the sign, Support our Troops, my visceral response is suspicion. "Support Our Troops lacks context. It is meant only to line up sides in a bitter conflict. Support our troops in Abu Ghraib? Of course not. Support Our Troops is but an introductory phrase. It requires completion. Support our troops, bring them home. The machinery of death rolls on the wheels of Support Our Troops. The focus never seems to wander to those who bear the weight of responsibility.

Truth is that way. It is chronos. It must be talked about and requires stories. How might we learn the empathy that can help us to understand one another? How can we look at Vietnam in wasy that reflect what actually happened to us?

We are again writing the story of a nation at war. How badly we want it to have a happy ending. Yet we pay no attention to the way we have set out to create it. The world tells us that we are again officially misguided. But we are far from any awareness of that ourselves. This is no surprise to Vietnam era folks. But it seems slow to dawn on the body politic.

The time is fulfilled. I do not regret the marches and the Days of Rage. Many will trivialize the resistance born of official treachery. They will speak of hippies and free love and Haight Ashbury. But that will miss the point. The kairos that still shapes us must be understood if we are to avert future Iraq catastrophes. When will we understand that we are together in a car with no brakes. Decades ago over 50,000 of us paid with their lives. Again, a generation is being winnowed with maiming and death. And for what? That is why it is essential that old men talk.

Can the Dream be Silenced?

I am old enough to remember the delivery of the "I Have a Dream" Speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. I am also old enough to recall the backlash from that speech. In those days, Martin Luther King, jr's name was whispered as a rabble rouser, a troublemaker. And while his speeches were broadcast, they spoke of change to come. That change was, at first, mightily resisted. Happily, on this day before Barack Obama is made our President, we can see progress in the fulfillment of that dream.

The Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire invoked God's blessing upon the Inauguration Celebration, last evening. His speech was blacked out, by mistake some say. Whether or not it was an intentional oversight remains to be seen. But that it was not broadcast to the nation is an ugly fact of life. Already, the whispering voices of fear and hate can be heard in the background. (to the eternal shame of the community the leading voices are those of Christians) The whispers seem to have carried the day. It is all very unpleasant.

But the prophets remind us that change is coming. Christians in particular are called to resist legalized mistreatment and to speak out against vigilante violence. Will the dreams of gays and lesbians; bisexuals and transgendered citizens be silenced? If history is any guide, we will look back upon Bishop Robinson's muted prayers straining hard to recall the hate that so permeated this moment. Even as we are being urged to "see ourselves in one another," let us include the nation's GLBT citizens in that invitation.

Clearly, we have a ways to go along the gender road, before we can be said to have arrived. "Now is the time," Martin told us in his dream. "Now is the time" for our GLBT sisters and brothers.

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama

By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire

Opening Inaugural Event
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC
January 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.