Death Blossoms: Reflections From a Prisoner of Conscience

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Politics



PEOPLE SAY they don't care about politics; they're not involved or don't want to get involved, but they are. Their involvement just masquerades as indifference or inattention. It is the silent acquiescence of the millions that supports the system. When you don't oppose a system, your silence becomes approval, for it does nothing to interrupt the system. People use all sorts of excuses for their indifference. They even appeal to God as a shorthand route for supporting the status quo. They talk about law and order. But look at the system, look at the present social "order" of society. Do you see God? Do you see law and order? There is nothing but disorder, and instead of law there is only the illusion of security. It is an illusion because it is built on a long history of injustices: racism, criminality, and the enslavement and genocide of millions. Many people say it is insane to resist the system, but actually, it is insane not to.

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The Search

LIFE HAS EVER BEEN in search of answers to basic questions -- What is Life? Who is God? Why?

As a boy, this quest took me to the oddest places. When Mama dragged us to church, it seemed more for her solace, than ours. A woman who spent most of her life in the South, she must've felt tremendous social coldness up North. "Down home" was "down South," for even after over a decade, the brick and concrete jungle we walked daily didn't seem like home.

Only at church did it seem that Mama returned home. It was a refuge where women her age sought a few hours for the soul's rest while the preacher performed. In a sense, Sunday trips to church were her weekly "homegoing." They were islands of the South -- its camaraderie, its rhythms, its spiritual community -- come north.

Yet for myself, as for most of my siblings, church was a foreign affair. We had never lived (and seldom visited) in Mama's southern birthland, and the raucous, tambourine-slapping, sweat-drenched, organ-pounding milieu couldn't be more alien. We weren't southerners.

Black preachers, especially those of southern vintage, are extroverts in style, diction, and cadence. They may yell, shriek, hum, harrumph, or sing. Some strut the stage. Some dance. Black Baptist preachers, especially, are never dull or monotonal. Their sermons aren't particularly cerebral. Nor should they be. They preach to congregations whose spirits have been beaten down and battered all week long. To them, Sundays are thus days when the spirit, not the mind, needs lifting. So preachers must perform, and sermons become exercises in exuberance.

I remember staring at the preacher -- his furrowed face shining with perspiration, eyes closed, lips locked in a holy grimace -- and wondering to myself, "What da hell did he just say?" His thick, rich, southern accent, so accessible to Mama, was Greek to me.

Part of me was embarrassed, but the other couldn't give a damn. I couldn't care less what the preacher was saying, and he couldn't care less what I was thinking. I was thinking: I am bored to tears.

The only "salvation" I felt in church was the rapturous joy I felt when I looked around me. Here, I thought, are some of the most beautiful girls in the world.

I was lost in a reverie, in rapt adoration, my eyes locked on a girl a few pews back. She had fresh pressed hair; a crisp, starched dress; patent leather shoes that shone brighter than the real stuff. Her dark brown legs shimmered with the luster of Vaseline ...

Then a painful pluck would pull me from my rapture, and Mama's clenched lips whispered, "Boy! Turn yo' narrow behind around now! Straighten up!" I would simmer. Who would choose to stare at an old preacher when there was a pretty girl to look at? If I hadda choice between 'em -- well, that wouldn't be no contest. But I was only ten. Mama made the choice for me. I turned, glowering.

It was only several years later, when I was no longer forced to go to church, that I really began to explore the realm of the spirit. Sometimes I went to Dad's church. Although Mama was a bred-in-the-bone Baptist, Dad was Episcopalian. He had taught me how to read by using the Bible, and seemed to take pleasure in listening to me read Holy Scripture.

After the raucousness of Mama's Baptist church, Dad's Episcopalianism seemed its quiet antithesis. Whereas Second Pilgrim's was cramped, Episcopal was spacious. Baptists sang and danced; Episcopalians were reserved and stately. Mama's friends shook their tambourines in North Philly. Dad's sang hymns in the foreign outlands of Southwest Philly.

Dad's church was vast, reflecting substance and wealth, yet it didn't feel like home. Maybe Mama's church was a sweatbox. Dad's seemed a cold fortress. Soon I began to seek my own spirit-refuge, going wherever I felt the spirit lead me. Like to the synagogue.

THROUGH READING the Bible and other books, I knew that the Scriptures were supposed to be the Word of God. I thus reasoned that among the Jews, whose faith is rooted in the Old Testament, I would find this Word in a purer form. One day I went to seek it.

In North Philly's bustling black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, Jews were a distinct and rare minority -- old men, and a few women, who sold chickens, clothing, or peanuts. Their house of prayer, however, was hardly distinct: a small synagogue, it stood recessed, tucked in between the storefronts that margined it like the edges of a book cover.

Inside the vestibule, six or seven old men stood, chanting in an unknown tongue. They wore yarmulkes on their heads, and prayer shawls fastened across their chests covered their stooped shoulders. The room was dark, and what little sun seeped in hardly penetrated the dimness. Dust motes swam like goldfish in thin ribbons of filtered light. To this day, I remember the dust; the dust of old stones, of old men. And the smell of old men.

The rabbi, his eyes enlarged by bifocals, shuffled over to me, his shoulders stooped, his eyes sharp. "Can I help you, young man?" His speech was guttural, thick; colored with Yiddish isms. There seemed to be -- or was I only imagining it? -- an aura of fear around him stirred, perhaps, by my entrance. Who was this big, beardless youth confronting him?

As tall black men learn to do, I made myself mentally smaller, and looked askance as I explained my reason for entering the synagogue.

"Yes, sir. I -- umm -- I'm -- umm ..I wanna learn about Judaism."

"Vy iz dat?"

"Well, I'm interested in learning about the religion that really began Christianity."

"Vell -- Vy?"

"Umm ... becuz I think I wanna become a Jew."

"Dyou vat? Vat you mean? Vy dyou say dat?"

"Well -- I'm interested in a pure religion. I've read that the Bible has been tampered with; there are different translations and stuff. I wanna study what God really said, you know ... "

The rabbi stared at me. He was trying to formulate an answer, but the words stuck to his tongue. I looked into his eyes and saw incredulity dueling with quiet surprise. Is he serious? silly? he seemed to be asking. Then he turned and looked around, as if searching for something.

"Vait uh minute."

"Zis vill help you, young man," he said, handing me an envelope, and walking me to the door.

"Ven you are finished, come back, ya?"

"Thank you, sir!" "By ze vay, dyou know, zair ah black Chews. Haf you efer heard von Sammy Davis chunior?"

I nodded assent.

"Vell, he is a black Chew, you know?"

He bade me farewell. I left the Market Street Synagogue high with expectation, racing home.

Once in my room, I tore apart the thick brown envelope and found a slim, rust-colored volume bound in leather. I opened it, but stopped short in dismay. What was this? There was not one English word within its covers! It was entirely in Hebrew. Tears leapt to my eyes. The search was sure to continue.

MY FIRST VISIT to a Catholic church was a visit into a place of contrasts, a place where the visages in stone radiated reverence, but faces of flesh reflected unmitigated hatred.

I remember sitting in Mass, listening to the strange intonations of the priests -- Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi ... miserere nobis. -- and noticing their turned heads, faces tight with spirals of hatred, aimed at me, a lanky black youth kneeling in the white midst.

"Do they know me?" I wondered. "Why are they angry at me?"

Confusion warred with amazement: how could the House of God so plainly be a house of hatred toward one who sought the divine presence within its walls? Wasn't this the Church Universal, the Mother Church?

Although barely in my teens, I knew what I saw, and I acknowledged the feelings of the people around me. Matronly heads covered in firmly-knotted scarves, these silent, solid, middle-aged Poles, Ukrainians, and Slavs (there were also a few Puerto Ricans) never said a thing, but their faces -- their coldly darting eyes, and tight, wrinkled mouths -- spoke to me louder than screams:

"Nigger! What are you doing in this church? Our church?"

Day by day, week by week, month by month, I began to ask myself that very question.

Where once the church had offered a quiet place for spiritual reflection on its catechismal mysteries, it now pulsated with resentment at my dark presence.

When I went to catechism I heard of one world; when I walked into church I saw another.

The straw of severance came on April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I was on my way to catechism, and as I trudged my way to the rectory, my slowing gait seemed to reflect my inner reluctance. A weight hung on my mind like an anvil.

"King believed in nonviolence -- and still they killed him!"

"They? Who they?"

"White folks -- white folks couldn't bear to hear him -- to see him!"

My conversation with self went point-counter-point ... By the time I got off the trolley near St. John's, my legs were leaden. I walked at a snail's pace.

Sitting down with Father to begin the lesson, he noticed my reticence.

"What's wrong, young man? You seem distracted."

"Father ... "

"Yes, go on."

"I heard on the news today that Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated ..."

"I heard it too. Some of the Fathers and brothers are glad."

"Glad?"

"Yes. They saw him as a troublemaker."

"Really? Really, Father?"

"Some -- not all. Especially not one of our Fathers."

"Why 'especially' not one?"

"Well -- how do I put it ... Well -- one of our Fathers is half-Negro."

"Really, Father?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Do you think I could talk to him?"

"Why?"

"Well, Father -- perhaps ... maybe he can understand how I feel."

"That may be, but, uh ... you cannot talk with him."

"Why not, Father?"

"Well ... it's a secret. I can't tell you which Father it is."

A man, a priest, ashamed of his race? I had come to catechism that night seeking peace for the tempest that raged in my soul. Now, leaving St. John's, I was more at sea than when I arrived.

All those months! A half-black priest! Ashamed of his race? Priests who were glad that King was killed? Where was I? What was I doing here? I wept bitter tears. Not for King -- I felt he was wrong, a soft-hearted non-realist -- but for my parents and all others who revered him. King was an educated preacher of nonviolence, yet to these priests he was just another nigger.

What was I doing in this place, a place that hailed his murder? If they thought that way about him, how did they really feel about me?

I cried for the loss my mother and her generation felt -- the assassination of their dreams, the scuttling of their barely-born hopes. I cried for the loss of a boy's faith. I cried for a nation on the razor's edge of chaos.

A BLACK NATIONALIST even in my pre-Black Panther youth, it was perhaps inevitable that my search for meaning would bring me, sooner or later, to test the waters at a local mosque. Little more than a storefront on an out-of-the-way street in South Philly, the building seemed the antithesis of all the religious sites I'd been to before. Christian and Jewish houses of worship were ornate as a rule, especially their cathedrals. This place could not have been plainer: walls painted white, with the front of the room adorned by a chalkboard that faced the assembled. There was also a flag featuring a white star and crescent in a bright field of red, with a letter in each corner: F, J, E, and I -- Freedom, Justice, Equality, and Islam.

It was a summer night and mid-week, so the gathering was small, yet Brother Minister, a dark-skinned man in navy suit, glasses, and bow tie who went by the name of -- was it Benjamin? Benjamin X? -- preached passionately. The captive audience punctuated his every sentence: "Uh-huh!" "That's it!" "Teach, bro minister! Wake 'em up!" His baritone was smooth, colored by that ubiquitous southern accent I was to find later in almost every mosque I visited, whether north or south of the Mason-Dixon Line. His message was not.

"Brotha ... I say to you here and now, the white man is the devil! Why, when you look at how this man has stolen millions of our people from Africa, sold our mothers and fathers into slavery in the hells of North America for four hundred years; beat us, abused us, lynched us, and tortured us -- well, how could any man be anything but a devil?"

"Uh-huh!"

"Preach it, Bro. Minister!"

"Our leader and teacher, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, teaches us, brotha, that the devil's time is almost over!"

"That's it, brotha!"

"Wake 'em up!"

"I said, 'The devil's time is almost up!' Why, look all around the world -- from Vietnam to Detroit -- and you'll see the white man catching hell! Am I right, brothas?"

"That's it!"

"Uh-huh!"

Minister Benjamin X spoke for what seemed to be hours, and after his lecture, a collection was taken.

Returning home, I reflected on the similarities between my Baptist and Muslim experiences. I was struck by how the Muslim minister -- though his mouth vibrated with the rhythms and cadences of the black South, and though his message was shaped in a way that spoke to my ethnic, historical, and cultural realities -- sounded for the most part like a Christian in a bow-tie.

The main difference, perhaps, lay in their views of evil. Where the Baptist spoke of a metaphysical devil, the Muslim preached of a living one. I couldn't bring myself to believe that the white man was supernatural, even supernaturally evil -- if anything, they were sub-naturally human, I thought to myself. Yet it seemed as improbable that they were devils, as gods. The search would continue.

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Thoughts on the Divine

An interviewer once asked the Mahatma Gandhi: "Gandhi-ji, it seems that you worship sometimes in temples, sometimes in churches, sometimes in mosques. What is your own religion?" Gandhi replied: "Follow me for a few days. Watch what I do; how I walk, what I say, and how I conduct myself generally. That is my religion."

THERE ARE AS MANY religions as there are cultures, and equally many names for the divine presence that is the heart of each. The energizing influence of belief keeps them apart, for to each adherent they contain truth that, from his or her perspective, is the only truth. All the same, it seems they flow in one direction, like many streams seeking release into one mighty river.

My youthful search for meaning revealed that no matter how differently the Infinite was clothed in the garb of a certain religion, it was there. In each, I found a new perception of the greatest good, that is, a belief in God or some other personification of the divine principle. I found, as George Bernard Shaw puts it, that there is "only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."

DON JUAN. My dear Ana, you are silly. Do you suppose heaven is like earth, where people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it; that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it the lie? No: heaven is the home of the masters of reality: that is why I am going thither.

ANA. Thank you: I am going to heaven for happiness. I have had quite enough of reality on earth.

DON JUAN. Then you must stay here; for hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heros and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, "Make me a healthy animal." But here you escape the tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, "the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on"—without getting us a step farther. And yet you want to leave this paradise!

***

THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing?

DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer....

THE DEVIL. Well, well, go your way, Senor Don Juan. I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force. I know that beauty is good to look at; that music is good to hear; that love is good to feel; and that they are all good to think about and talk about. I know that to be well exercised in these sensations, emotions, and studies is to be a refined and cultivated being. Whatever they may say of me in churches on earth, I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me. As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.

DON JUAN. But at least I shall not be bored. The service of the Life Force has that advantage, at all events. So fare you well, Senor Satan....

THE DEVIL. [gloomily] His going is a political defeat. I cannot keep these Life Worshippers: they all go....There is something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Senor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.

THE STATUE. And who the deuce is the Superman?

THE DEVIL. Oh, the latest fashion among the Life Force fanatics. Did you not meet in Heaven, among the new arrivals, that German Polish madman—what was his name? Nietzsche?

-- Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, by George Bernard Shaw

In Judaism, the ancient ancestral warrior is revered as all-powerful Yahweh, or Jehovah; to Christians, the Jewish carpenter Yeshuah is God yet also Man; for the Muslim, the ancient Meccan gods find fusion in one supreme being --Al-Lah, the God. In Hinduism, Lord Krishna emerges from a vast pantheon of ancient deities as a blue-black god who twirls and leaps in an eternal sacred dance. To the Buddhist, the insights of Gautama Siddhartha form the central core of a faith that holds the promise of enlightenment and the discovery of the true Self. In Santeria, Condoble, and Voudoun, the ancient gods of African antiquity have survived to smile behind the faces of the Catholic saints.

In the essence of each religion, then, we see a projection of the greatest good. For a threatened, nomadic desert tribe, what greater good than the worship of a mighty and powerful ancestor, a prominent warrior -- Yahweh -- who defended the clans? For the maligned followers of a Nazarethan carpenter, one crucified by the mightiest Empire of the age, why not the greater good of his victory over the tomb? For contentious Arab clans who saw each other through the lens of enmity and conflict, why not the clarity and simplicity of One God to reign over the throngs who crowd the K'aaba -- One God to bring unity to a people, a region, a sphere of influence?

To Hindus, whose plethora of deistic personalities reflect the God-force that permeates all creation, Krishna -- the beautiful, playful, dark boy-god who loves cattle and dances with other cowherds -- turns the boring and mundane into a sacred act. For the Buddhist, Gautama's attainment of enlightenment seeks the void beyond which no personality, human nor divine, exists. It bespeaks a greater good that sees past the soul to ultimate nothingness, a spiritual place of rest.

To millions of stolen and enslaved African peasants, for whom return to the grasslands, forests, and villages of the black motherland was physically impossible, their religion was the only means of a voyage home. Under a new, cooler sky, ancient gods and honored ancestors came to life once more and provided the greater good of spiritual survival, of an inner Self that could withstand the most dehumanizing assaults and empower the soul to remain sane. Even in the midst of a powerless existence, the world of the invisible pulsed with names like Yemonja, the goddess of the river; Obatala, chief of the gods; and Shango, the god of war and thunder.

Many of our ideas about God and religions simply mirror the traditions we have inherited from our forbears. They are imbibed with mother's milk, openly, uncritically, freely -- illogical human expressions, exercises in irrationality. Others are perceptions gained only by leaping into the dark arms of faith. God comes, in various faces, and numerous personalities, depending on our myriad perceptions, needs, and histories. Yet if there are any miracles left, it is that GOD IS ONE.

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Night of Power



IN ISLAM, during the holy month of Ramadan, it is said that one night is holiest of all: al Qadr, the Night of Power. According to Islamic belief, it was on this night that the Qu'ran was delivered to the Prophet Mohammed, and it is thus the holiest of all nights. On this night, prayers are granted "for everything that matters."

The Night of Power is so deeply ingrained in the Muslim heart that a short chapter in the Qu'ran is devoted to it. It begins, as do all chapters therein, with the exclamation, "In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful," and goes on thus:

Verily we have sent this
In the Night of Power.

And what will convey to you
What the Night of Power is?

The Night of Power is better
Than a thousand months:

The Angels and the Spirit descend in it,
By permission of their Lord,
For everything that matters.

It is Peace:
This until the rise of daybreak.

I will never forget the Night of Power that shook me, not during the holy month of Ramadan, but in the hot humid summer of 1995, when I sat on death row's Phase II with a date to die.

The sun had set behind the hills of West Virginia amid ominous thunderheads, and now the forces of nature struck like a divine assault team.

Lightning stabbed the earth as if in the throes of celestial passion, and so powerful were the bolts that the lights in the block -- indeed, the whole jail -- flickered out.

On Phase II, lights are kept burning twenty-four hours a day -- bright during the day, dim at night -- though in fact "dim" at two in the morning is hardly less than bright at noon. Tonight -- for now at least -- it was completely dark.

I sat on the cool metal table and looked out into the night. Cell lights, hall lights, yard lights, black lights, perimeter lights, and lights on poles had died, and not even stars broke the black carpet. So dark!

Then: a splash of illumination that bathed the hills in blue light, a rolling boom-BOOM of thunder, and a rapid procession of blinks as lights went out all over the prison complex.

It happened again and again and again, and yet again -- one sinuous bolt of lightning after the next forking the black sky, then white-washing it to midday brilliance for the brief space of an eye-blink.

I sat there in the first real darkness since my arrival to Phase II, transfixed by the display of such raw, primeval power. The strikes seemed so close, I felt the hair on my arms rise.

The storm moved westward, over the prison and across the hills, and in its magnificent wake, darkness reigned as man's lights bowed their mechanical heads to the power it had unleashed.

There I sat in the darkness, with less than a month to live, yet I felt better than any other night I spent on Phase II. I felt better even than I did a few weeks later, the night my stay was granted. Why?

Then it dawned on me, like bright writing etched in my brain:

"Here is true power, my son.

See how easily it overwhelms man's 'power'?"

Watching the veins of nature pulse through the night sea of air, making -- if only for milliseconds -- daylight over the hills, I felt renewed. How puny man seemed before this divine dance!

I saw, then, that though human powers sought to strangle and poison me and those around me, they were powerless. I saw that there is a Power that makes man's power pale. It is the power of Love; the power of God; the power of Life. I felt it surging through every pore.

Nature's power prevailed over the man-made, and I felt, that night, that I would prevail. I would overcome the State's efforts to silence and kill me.

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Material Life

America exists in a virtual sea of materialism. Here, one sees material excess in the midst of utter poverty. Here, in the cradle of global capital power, one finds more food, more clothing, more creature comforts, more material wealth than almost anywhere on this planet.

Ironically, the lives of many surrounded by opulence are awash in unhappiness. This nation eats most of the world's food. It consumes most of the world's energy. It treats the vast lands and seas of the earth as if it were a toilet bowl. It gains its material wealth from the theft of other people's lands and the exploitation of other people's labor.

Its principle is not -- and never has been -- something as amorphous as "Christianity"; it is naked materialism. This materialism drives not only the elite, but average, so-called everyday folk. It forms a perspective that permeates our entire society.

Even in the realm of sexuality we are, to paraphrase the singer Madonna, material girls and boys. We define ourselves by projections, the most variant quality in human personality.

If a man is born a male, but utilizes the latest biomedical technology to transform himself into a woman, is he a woman? Or is he rather a sexual materialist who has merely purchased a new sexual persona? Are we what we look like on the outside, or are we our biological functions?

As we are with our bodies, so we are with our environment. Consciously and unconsciously, directly and indirectly, by express intent and by oblique accident, we transform the natural world toward ends we neither know nor care to know.

We rape our Mother, Earth, for new toys to play with, in order to maximize profits for men already richer than Croesus. How much is enough?

If material things are not our salvation, why do we spend our energies in endless acquisition? If wealth makes us more cruel, more calloused, and colder, what is its good?

To be sure, we live in a material universe. We must eat, and we must drink of this earth's substance. Yet after we squander its resources and make it uninhabitable, will we be able, even with our material wealth, to restore the air, to reanimate our earth, to repair the genetic damage we have done?

We are greedily eating the very heart of our tomorrow and our children's tomorrows. And meanwhile our god -- the dark force of international corporate power -- decides, hour by hour, how destructive the day's economic engine will be; how much long-term gain will be destroyed in the race for short-term profit.

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Life's Religion

We northerners are undoubtedly descended from barbarian races, also in respect to our talent for religion: we have little talent for it.

Supposing one were able to view the strangely painful and at the same time coarse and subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking and unconcerned eye of an Epicurean god, I believe there would be no end to one's laughter and amazement: for does it not seem that one will has dominated Europe for eighteen centuries, the will to make of man a sublime abortion?

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The reading from the vantage of a distant star of the capital letters of our earthly life, would perchance lead to the conclusion that the earth was the especially ascetic planet, a den of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures, who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves, of the world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as possible out of pleasure in hurting — presumably their one and only pleasure. Let us consider how regularly, how universally, how practically at every single period the ascetic priest puts in his appearance: he belongs to no particular race; he thrives everywhere; he grows out of all classes. Not that he perhaps bred this valuation by heredity and propagated it — the contrary is the case. It must be a necessity of the first order which makes this species, hostile, as it is, to life, always grow again and always thrive again. — Life itself must certainly have an interest in the continuance of such a type of self-contradiction. For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules resentment without parallel, the resentment of an insatiate instinct and ambition, that would be master, not over some element in life, but over life itself, over life's deepest, strongest, innermost conditions; here is an attempt made to utilise power to dam the sources of power; here does the green eye of jealousy turn even against physiological well-being, especially against the expression of such well-being, beauty, joy, while a sense of pleasure is experienced and sought in abortion, in decay, in pain, in misfortune, in ugliness, in voluntary punishment, in the exercising, flagellation, and sacrifice of the self. All this is in the highest degree paradoxical: we are here confronted with a rift that wills itself to be a rift, which enjoys itself in this very suffering, and even becomes more and more certain of itself, more and more triumphant, in proportion as its own presupposition, physiological vitality, decreases....

Granted that such an incarnate will for contradiction and unnaturalness is induced to philosophise; on what will it vent its pet caprice? On that which has been felt with the greatest certainty to be true, to be real; it will look for error in those very places where the life instinct fixes truth with the greatest positiveness. It will, for instance, after the example of the ascetics of the Vedanta Philosophy, reduce matter to an illusion, and similarly treat pain, multiplicity, the whole logical contrast of "Subject" and "Object" — errors, nothing but errors! To renounce the belief in one's own ego, to deny to one's self one's own "reality" — what a triumph! and here already we have a much higher kind of triumph, which is not merely a triumph over the senses, over the palpable, but an infliction of violence and cruelty on reason....But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-in-itself": — in these theories an eye that cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first became seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the nonsensical is always demanded of the eye. There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a "knowing" from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our "idea" of that thing, our "objectivity." But the elimination of the will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, granted that we could do so, what! would not that be called intellectual castration?... "Life turned against Life," is — so much is absolutely obvious — from the physiological and not now from the psychological standpoint, simply nonsense....the ascetic ideal springs from the prophylactic and self-preservative instincts which mark a decadent life....it points to a partial physiological depression and exhaustion, against which the most profound and intact life-instincts fight ceaselessly with new weapons and discoveries. The ascetic ideal is such a weapon: its position is consequently exactly the reverse of that which the worshippers of the ideal imagine — life struggles in it and through it with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is a dodge for the preservation of life....The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for an existence of another kind, an existence on another plane, — he is, in fact, the highest point of this wish, its official ecstasy and passion: but it is the very power of this wish which is the fetter that binds him here; it is just that which makes him into a tool that must labour to create more favourable conditions for earthly existence, for existence on the human plane — it is with this very power that he keeps the whole herd of failures, distortions, abortions, unfortunates, sufferers from themselves of every kind, fast to existence, while he as the herdsman goes instinctively on in front. You understand me already: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life, this denier — he actually belongs to the really great conservative and affirmative forces of life....His "nay," which he utters to life, brings to light as though by magic an abundance of graceful "yeas"; even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction, it is subsequently the wound itself that forces him to live.

-- The Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche

***

And one day Zarathustra made a sign to his disciples, and spake these words unto them: "Here are priests: but although they are mine enemies, pass them quietly and with sleeping swords! Even among them there are heroes; many of them have suffered too much, so they want to make others suffer. Bad enemies are they: nothing is more revengeful than their meekness. And readily doth he soil himself who toucheth them. But my blood is related to theirs; and I want withal to see my blood honoured in theirs."

-- Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche

ONE MIGHT be both accused and excused of hyperbole if one were to assert that God has been utilized to justify more human evil than has Satan. Yet dozens of philosophers (not only Nietzsche) have pointed out that whatever its origins and promises, the reality of religion is this: it has often been less a force for liberation than a tool of oppression -- an impetus for civil unrest, warfare and genocide.

Wherever one stands on the religion divide, it seems clear that a new, life-affirming spirit needs expression as we end a century of carnage and move into a new millennium. Our supposedly enlightened age -- the Modern Century -- opened with the Boer War; it is still following the bloody path: after the Armenian massacres came the World Wars, the Holocausts of Jewish and European millions, and the atomic incinerations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; then came Korea, Vietnam, and widespread civil war in Africa, Latin America and, most recently, Europe, not to mention the brutal repression of one small country after another by self-appointed "peacekeeping" superpowers.

If religion has had no impact on the shedding of this blood (has it done anything other than aid and abet it?) then why the need for it? How is it that we have become so numbed, that we can pretend our faith is one of resurrection and life, when in reality it serves as one of the worst flash points of conflict in our culture of death?

We live in a world of megadeath, on lands reddened by its original peoples, and saddened with the tears of unwilling captives. We missionize and maim, westernize and rob, torture and starve the same fellow humans around the globe. We kill each other, but not only that; we abuse the Earth, our common mother.

We kill animals so as to be able to eat the dead. We make of our rivers, lakes, and seas, cesspools of leaden lifelessness. We pillage and burn our forests, then seek to determine why the raped earth beneath them dries into desert. We violate the mountains and line our pocketbooks with the sum of their gleaming ore. We poison our air.

Beyond the tide of materialism that encroaches our island of survival, the flood of death rises yet higher. We have attempted to mechanize, control, restrict, the very rhythms of the life process itself, and made our women's wombs into tombs. Chilled test tubes are the incubators of our perverted progress.

WHERE IS THE FAITH that truly trusts in Life? Where is the faith that seeks to bring her message to a world sliding down the slope of death? Where is the religion of Life? A religion that sets forth all the living as sacred? A religion that sees the human experience as only one paradigm in the whole connected web of nature?

Is our "God" the god of man alone? Can a Creator-God really bring into being creatures whose sole function is to serve the interests of themselves? Or is such belief really a smokescreen for our narrow schizophrenia, for the unholy greed that has brought our environment to the brink of destruction on which it now teeters! Put quite another way, do alligators live solely to be skinned for expensive shoes and luggage? Don't they -- doesn't every life-form -- have an intrinsic right to exist?

It is time to recognize, as do increasing awakened numbers, that the old split-brain approach that perceives man's existence in a vacuum dooms humankind, and species uncounted, to oblivion.

We are in need of a religion of Life that sees the world in more than merely utilitarian terms. A religion that reveres all life as valuable in itself; that sees Earth as an extension of self, and if wounded, as an injury to self.

We need a religion that recognizes the interdependence of man and this world; which sees that the atmosphere surrounding our globe is the same air we breathe, and part and parcel of our lungs -- that Earth's water is no different from the saliva in our mouths.

We need a religion that rediscovers the idealism that existed before institutionalism; to rediscover the primordial awe felt by ancient man when he first beheld creation spiraling outside of his insignificant self.

John Africa found such a faith and taught its simple, clear ways to others. In keeping with his natural simplicity, he called that faith Life. "Revere life," he taught: "Protect life, move in harmony with life." Founding the MOVE Organization on this life-affirming principle, he imbued his followers with an indomitable will to practice them and proclaim them to the world.

He explained to them the worth and power of unity, the relevance and necessity of natural law, and the meaning of resistance and rebellion against a system bent on global self-destruction.

He taught that Earth cannot be a mere way station for the next world, to be fouled, spoiled, or ignored.

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Christendom: Isn't it odd

that Christendom -- that huge body of humankind that claims spiritual descent from the Jewish carpenter of Nazareth -- claims to pray to and adore a being who was a prisoner of Roman power, an inmate on the empire's death row? That the one it considers the personification of the Creator of the Universe was tortured, humiliated, beaten, and crucified on a barren scrap of land on the imperial periphery, at Golgotha, the place of the skull? That the majority of its adherents strenuously support the State's execution of thousands of imprisoned citizens? That the overwhelming majority of its judges, prosecutors, and lawyers -- those who condemn, prosecute, and sellout the condemned -- claim to be followers of the fettered, spat-upon, naked God?

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Spirit War

IN AN AGE when the national currency is fear, not from external threats, but from domestic ones, prisons have become places of pronounced spiritual and psychic assault. It is not surprising: as an old adage teaches, "Nothing so concentrates the mind as death." While the truism has obvious resonance to the thousands on death row, it also has its echoes for thousands more who face "life" terms. Here in morgue-like holding pens of Pennsylvania's penitentiaries, "life" literally sentences one to imprisonment for the length of one's natural lifespan, with no possibility of parole. "Life" is thus but a grim metaphor for death, for only death releases one from its shackles. "Life," it might be said, is merely slow death.

Faced with the spectral imminence of slow death, it is not unusual that for some, prison becomes a place of spiritual renewal. Often, it is men who fled religion in society at large who seek its solace in the secular hell of society behind bars. Sometimes their searches for spiritual meaning are lauded as evidence of personal progress; sometimes they are discounted as nothing but jailhouse conversions. Some may be. Others are surely not. Who can peer into the well of another's spirit?

It is not rare for a prisoner to receive, unsolicited, a religious tract from a group wholly unknown to the recipient. The pamphlet, some four to eight pages, is small -- palm-sized -- with biblical verses scattered throughout. "Jesus saves!" it may trumpet. Or, "Do you know where you'll be spending eternity?"

Well-intentioned as they are, prison tracts often have the opposite of their desired effect. No matter how eloquently or cleverly they purport to spread good-will and fraternal encouragement, their essence is the same. Though they profess to care deeply about where the objects of their missionary zeal will land after death, few spare a thought for how they may spend the rest of their earthly lives. While their piety is concentrated on the Hereafter, it forgets the Here. Their writers, it seems, are so intoxicated with the thought of heaven, they are content to close an eye to the simmering hell they have helped create on earth.

They endorse, by their silence, the very systems that consign their correspondents to life-long imprisonment and scheduled death.

Often, a tract's content makes it almost impossible for the reader to escape a deeply felt suspicion that those who have sent it to him are fixated wholly on the state of his hereafter -- that they couldn't give a damn about his living flesh and living soul.

IS THIS NOT STRANGE, the prisoner muses, given the spiritual adherence they claim to the teachings of a crucified God? Is it not remarkable, coming from believers of a Man-God who gave his life as divine ransom for the souls of sinners? Why is it, he asks himself, that so many Christians want to rush into a grave, those they want to save?

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Imprisonment



JUST BECAUSE your body is in prison doesn't mean your mind isn't free, and even though this thought might be trite, there is some truth in it, because we are our minds. In the deepest sense we are our spirits. When you think of a person, or of your own body - is not this a prison in some sense? Are we not in a prison of time? We age, we lose our faculties, but that doesn't mean we cannot overcome, and we do that by the power of mind and spirit. We reach beyond.

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Christian? Christ-like?

Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and pity of the owners made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptism, should by virtue of their baptism be made free, it is enacted that baptism does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom; masters freed from this doubt may more carefully propagate Christianity by permitting slaves to be admitted to that sacrament.

-- Statutes at Large of Virginia. Act III (1667)

For centuries in America, the term "Christian" has been virtually synonymous with "white." It was used not so much to distinguish believers from unbelievers, but civilized, light-skinned colonists from uncivilized, dark-skinned natives -- the so-called primitive Africans, savage Indians, and other such heathen. It was a convenient spiritual underpinning for the sociopolitical economic order, that is, the "order" of white supremacy and domination. In such a context, the conversion of a non-white to the dominant, European faith meant next to nothing, for what did it matter what faith lived in the heart of a man, if his skin remained black or red?

Virginia's Act of 1667 was no anomaly. A similar act became law shortly afterward in South Carolina, and in another colony, an act passed in 1690 declared quite openly that "no slave shall be free by becoming a Christian." And so, new generations of Christians were baptized, and new generations of preachers, holding them in the thrall of a system that made reading the Scriptures for themselves a capital crime, continued to intone submission: "Slaves, obey your masters."

What did "Christianity" mean to those tens and hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children brought to our shores in shackles from the west coast of Africa? What did it mean to those hardy survivors of the dreaded Middle Passage who were forced to learn a new, foreign language and forbidden to speak their own tongue under threat of the lash? No less important, what does it mean today, to their great grandchildren, now legally free to practice the religion of their choice?

Should Afro-Americans praise the god of men who brought their forebears here in fetid, feverish holds? A god whose people wiped out all but the last vestiges of a native population? A god of invaders and slavemasters? Should anyone?

Formed in the age of Roman imperial supremacy and Palestinian servitude, Christianity became, in America, the faith of the slavemaster, the alleged belief of the rich, the protector of the propertied. For the slave, though, it was more farce than faith; in his eyes what was truly worshipped by all was wealth.

Indeed, "Christianity" became cultural shorthand for the status quo, the existing system of naked, race-based oppression. The fiction that the Euro-American conquest of the New World was motivated by efforts to "convert" indigenous peoples, or that African slavery was necessitated by a desire to bring "the gospel" to the "natives" is rebuffed by the hand of history. One need only examine the past five centuries from a native perspective -- centuries that brought devastating disease, bloody persecution, rampant alcoholism, and ultimately, confinement in concentration camp-like reservations -- to understand why the god of the pale-faced invaders seemed less a Great Spirit of goodness than a demon of destruction.

We have already seen above that even conversion had no real impact on the convert's state of bondage. As generations yet unborn were to remark, with a truth that resonated equally well for one of African descent as for the native American: "When the Europeans came, they had their Bible and we had our land; now, they have our land, and we have their Bible."

Did the native or the slave really expect his master to sacrifice property and power on the altar of piety? The story of the Cherokee, derisively referred to as the "White Indians," reveals a disturbing answer. [1]

In religion, education, cultural and political life, and even architecture, the Eastern Cherokee adopted European forms of life to a far greater degree than any other tribe in North America. By the early 1800s, they were building wood and brick homes; they also founded a capital, New Echota, organized a Cherokee Supreme Court, and published a newspaper in an alphabet developed by their famed linguist Sequoyah, a.k.a. George Gist.

Baptist and Moravian churches converted significant numbers to their faiths. The Cherokee were, relatively speaking at least, a wealthy people, with successful crafts and farming operations and hundreds of thousands of head of cattle, horses, and mules. So similar were they to whites that they owned a population of several thousand black slaves. Here was a tribe that was by all measurements a "civilized" tribe: it was Christian, literate, propertied, and law-abiding.

Cherokee "progress" did not come without a cost. Aside from the fact that it meant the destruction and replacement of their own indigenous culture by a European replica, it fueled the resentment of a white economic elite driven by supremacist and expansionist goals. In addition, poorer colonists agitated against their "red" competitors, and the government intervened. Before long, the Cherokee became victims of the same white greed that was to destroy every other native tribe.



Legal victory brought new hopes to the Cherokee in 1832, when they brought suit in the Supreme Court and won a judgment against Georgia, whose "Indian statutes" were declared unconstitutional and thus unenforceable. In Worcester & Butler v. Georgia (1832) the Court held:

The Cherokee Nation then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves or in conformity with treaties and the Acts of Congress.

Yet President Andrew "Indian Killer" Jackson refused to follow the ruling and was quoted by journalist Horace Greeley as saying, "[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can."

Apparently he couldn't. Already the same year, large tracts of Cherokee ancestral lands were surveyed, divided up, and assigned to white settlers by lottery. By the end of the decade, Georgia's entire Cherokee population was decimated. Evicted from their lands under force of martial "law," whole settlements were marched off to faraway Oklahoma under military escort, straggling along a wintry Trail of Tears whose hardships cost them (and their black slaves, though these were never deemed important enough to count) thousands of lives.

"Civilized" and "Christianized," the Cherokee still lost everything dear to them -- their ancestral grounds, their homes and livestock, their children, their women, their elderly, their sick -- all because other "Christians" wanted their land. Yet to white minds this unholy program of "resettlement" entailed no losses: it was simply another step in building the foundation on which the very existence of most southern and western states rests.

Today, the Cherokee exist only as a remnant of the past, their reservations an attraction for passing tourists. As for the descendants of Virginia's Christian slaves, they are now free, but the vast majority are still dutifully Christian. True, their churches have remained distinct from white churches in many ways. But those cultural trappings aside, one is tempted to wonder whether the black church doesn't carry the selfsame mission as its white counterpart -- and whether the vision that guides it isn't the same.

Certainly there have been men and women in every generation who have raised their voices to rouse their fellow brethren from stultifying slumber. In the fifties and sixties, one of the more notable of these, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., brought a new vitality to a church that up till then had largely sought the solace of martyred silence.

King's church was crippled not only by white supremacist terrorism, however. Equally crippling was its own counsel of quietude. Even in the face of naked injustice, there were clergymen -- most white, but some black -- who sought to emasculate his message: "Slow down!" "Hush, don't create such a stir!" "Wait for the right time." In a time of unprecedented struggle against the beast of American apartheid, they chose to stand firm in support of the status quo, to sprinkle on the meek and the dissatisfied alike the unholy holy water of centuries.

King's legacy lives on, but it has been twisted. His name and his words have become tools in the hands of the cleverest amongst his enemies to attack, belittle, and deny the very people he sought to serve. His dreams -- eloquently set to paper in speeches or essays such as Letter from a Birmingham Jail -- have been transformed, in the mouths of the powerful, into nightmarish excuses for new chapters of negrophobia, and into attacks on those few, limited, forward steps such as affirmative action, which -- if it did nothing else -- was at least able to open doors previously sealed by judicial decree.

In our own time, Jean-Bertrand Aristide has noted how Haiti's history has been marked by two imperialisms, political and religious, and how the second has resulted in the development of a theology that serves only to zombify the spirit of the people in order to further subjugate them.

Jesuit scholar Ignacio Martin-Bara has used the Latin-American context -- in particular the bitter milieu of countries scarred by recurring civil strife -- to similarly illustrate the continuing use of religion as a weapon of psychological warfare against the poor and oppressed. [2] Writing of the dueling purposes of the evangelical church and the Christian base communities in Brazil, he points out that whereas the latter have "gradually assumed a critical tendency" that questions the existing social order, the former has retained a "pentecostal posture of submission, marginalizing its converts and driving them away from any form of protest." He goes on:

[In] the banana plantation zones of Guapiles, Costa Rica, where aggressive labor unions have traditionally held sway ... the "Christians" (as they call themselves) not only do not join political or labor organizations but also oppose the struggles of working people and frequently work as scabs or strikebreakers. These "Christians" have become the banana bosses' trusted workers, and the bosses throw all their support behind the local evangelical churches and pressure their workers to join them.

-- Writings for a Liberation Theology, 142

Clearly, no matter how long ago the stone of white religious hypocrisy was cast into the waters of black and native consciousness, we still live in its ever-widening ripples.

At root, the message of the Bible is one of liberation. In the Old Testament it is exemplified by the exodus of the Jewish slaves from Egyptian bondage; in the New, by the coming of a Messiah who (it is promised) will save his people from the yoke of oppression.

Until those who today call themselves "Christians" acknowledge the carnage that has been carried out in his name, it is hard to see how they cannot but continue to commit deeds of devastation and evil. In his name they go on fighting wars of avarice, campaigns of greed, legalized land-theft, and regulated robbery; they go on firing their holy hatreds against the rest of the world. In the very shadow of the cross, they continue to pillage and rape. And in the name of one who, they claim, came "to set captives free," they continue to enslave.

_______________

Notes:

1. For documentation of Cherokee history, see John Ehle, Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1988).

2. Fr. Martin-Baro, five fellow priests, and their housekeepers were assassinated in November 1989 by a US-trained and -armed military death squad in El Salvador.

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Miracles

"Woe unto you that are rich,
for ye have received your consolation."

Not of a god of thunder,
a god of silk,
a god of the rich
did the carpenter speak,
but of a God of compassion,
of peace, of a day brighter
than today;

a God whose miracles still work
in the slave pens and shacks,
in the projects,
in the hellish daily life of the poor
and the oppressed --

not miracles
like walking on waves,
transforming water into wine,
but miracles of love arising
in hearts where it seems least
likely to flourish --

here and there
in the barrios and the favelas,
among those who have least,
beat hearts of hope,
fly sparks of Overcoming.