Bring the Troops Home Rally & MarchMarch 17, 2007
Dr. Rebecca Brown, East Lincoln Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Along with being the minister of East Lincoln Christian Church, a congregation I am privileged to serve, I am a sandwich generation single mother, with responsibilities for my aging parents. I have in recent years become an occasional poet, in part, I believe to make sense out of the busyness and complexities of my life. Last summer I wrote a poem that was subsequently published in Disciples World, the magazine of my denomination. I'd like to begin my brief remarks today by reading that poem:
Mothering
My teeth are clenched most mornings
Twinges in my head warning
of aches awaiting wakefulness.
Anxiety threads through my dreams
before the alarm sounds
"A mother's love is fierce love" Sue spoke truth on mother's day
There is ferocity in my feelings as my boys turn into men
more fierce than ever I felt when still I felt powerful
to protect them, feed them, love them, clothe them
When they were sweet babies,
and wilely, wonderful, squirming, learning children.
and noisy, flatulently-boysey middle-school squirrelly-
Not-yet-Men.
Even last year, I slept well while they were awake at night busy
with rock and roll and girlfriends (Not too busy with the girls!)
And physics and marching band and late-nights writing papers
for teachers pushing, pushing, pushing them
to think, to learn, to work, to wrestle, to emerge
as learned and caring men.
I remember when my sons were born
in a spate of boys- boy children everywhere- the old women said,
"All these boys mean soldiering" and "war is in the air"
And we didn't heed the warning.
Late at night a week ago the pundits glibly said,
"This is the start of a new world war..."
A tinder-box, primed to combust just as my eldest son turns eighteen.
Raised for making music, bringing laughter, hope and joy
Raised for living fully, for loving freely, Raised well
for waging peace -
These tears upon my pillowcase, this tension in my head-
a nagging, silent, wordless prayer for me and mothers everywhere
Who fiercely love our just-grown sons.
The alarm sounds.
Oh, Mother God, protect our boys
because we know we can't.
The past two weeks I have become well acquainted with the names of the boys and girls, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers who have died in the war in Iraq. The names of those whom their parents could not protect:
...Mark A. Barbret, Noureddine Ahmad, Bradley S. Beard, Ahmed Khalaf, Omer T. Hawkins II, Son of Fawzi Haloob Sahi, Ronald W. Baker, Abbas, son of Qais, Victor A. Gonzalez, Karrar, Paul M. Felsberg, Hamza Firas Khuzai...
Lincoln Clergy Peacemakers have organized two events to commemorate the fourth anniversary of our war in Iraq. Next Tuesday's service at First Presbyterian Church, and an interfaith effort in congregations across Lincoln this weekend to read in worship in a form of prayer the names of all our fallen soldiers, along with an equal number of Iraqi non-combatants. I prepared the packets to be mailed to the 21 congregations participating in this weekend's observance. The pages printed slowly. Page after page printed on the printer next to my desk. I had to load more paper at one point, and it was then that I stopped what I had been doing to pay attention to the work I had assigned the printer. My printer was working on printing-out two lists, one of US service men and women confirmed dead in the war, and another of Iraqi non-combatants dead as a direct result of the war. I started to weep when I lifted a heavy stack of paper off the machine; forty-five names per page of young Americans dead, 23-30 names of Iraqis of all ages dead, 225 pages total. I was overwhelmed by the lists' weight.
As I prepared the packets I read hundreds of
names and wept as I read. The list of Iraqi names I used also contains
information about the person's age, occupation, date of death and where
and how the person was killed. Two year olds and four month olds and 78
year olds and 47 year olds (like me) along with all the people in their
teens and twenties and thirties. It's the babies that make me the
saddest...and the batch of folks who died falling off a bridge during a
stampede, and the school kids who died from a suicide car bomb
attack...no, they all make me sad. The weight of the loss makes me sad.
I
am a Christian Minister. I am a mother. I am a daughter. I am a citizen
of this nation and of the world, and I believe with all my heart, mind,
strength and soul that the good news of the gospel is real; that love
conquers hate. That's the message the savior I serve went to the cross
to demonstrate. As we commemorate the fourth anniversary of this war,
as we remember with deepest sorrow all who have lost their lives in
this un-just on-going war, may God forgive us for believing in weaponry
and the ways of war more than we believe in unleashing the power of
love to change the world. May the words of the prophets call us to
accountability. May the dead whom we grieve rest in peace, may God
protect those whom we thus far have been powerless to protect
ourselves, may our nation finally turn from this folly and may we never
rest from our peacemaking until earth is as it is in heaven.