Category Archives: Journal

Fourth of July in an American Embassy

When I worked in U.S. embassies and consulates overseas, the Fourth of July was not a relaxing holiday for us. Embassies have national days, like Bastille Day on July 14 for the French, or a royal birthday for the British. The embassies and consulates usually celebrate their national days by inviting guests for some sort of feasting and perhaps entertainment.

Typically, we staged a formal gathering the night of the Fourth. The staff, American and national employees, worked on preparations—lists of the invited, the invitations themselves, security, parking, menu, program, and so on. Our guest list included former enemies, now staunch allies. I doubt any U.S. official mentioned to the British ambassador anything about 1776 or talked to the German ambassador about Hitler.

Invitations went out to other foreign embassies, as well as the host country’s high ranking politicians. We tried to include as many American citizens as possible who lived in the country. Obviously including everyone is easy in a country with few Americans, but not possible, say, in London or Paris.

American and national employees met guests, guided them to meet the ambassador or senior official at the entry, then guided them to tables or to the refreshment center. Then we mingled and talked with the guests. Drilled into the head of every new diplomat from orientation on is that embassy entertainment is for the guests, not the staff.

After an evening of meeting, greeting, and conversing, the introverts among us went home exhausted, hoping to be in the States on vacation for our next 4th of July.

Reading as Fundamental

Provided the world goes somewhat as it always has, my children will have to decide what to do with all the books I’ve accumulated over the years. It’s not only that I read a lot and have read a lot for years. It’s that when I began reading, all books were print books.

I began my career with the U.S. Foreign Service in 1989 and was stationed in various countries, retiring in 2004. All books were in print when I began my first assignment in Saudi Arabia, and a lot of heavy boxes followed me there. Since I didn’t have access to a public library, I bought enough print books through the mail to fill several more boxes while I was there and throughout my career.

In a sense, my career paralleled the development of wide internet use, including email, but even when I retired, most books were in print.

Now settled within walking distance of our public library, I continue to walk over and check out print books, as well as add library eBooks through my iPad. I also subscribe to several periodicals, most in print and digital format.

Looking around, however, I notice a lack of deep reading by many Americans. Yes, cell phones are a wonderful invention for keeping in touch, checking on products to buy, and finding quick information about whatever we want to know. It doesn’t require much thought, however, and it’s open to just about anybody, with few checks as to their credentials for what they present.

For our communities not only to flourish but simply to survive, we require knowledge. We are no more able to grow beyond mental babyhood if we depend on internet offerings than a child will grow into a healthy adult on a little pablum and a lot of junk food.

We cannot overcome the myriad problems that threaten us, from nuclear weapons to political lying, without hard thinking and a disciplined approach to taking in knowledge.

If you haven’t already, grow your mind through a bit of dedicated reading and mental roaming and deep thinking. Your country will thank you.

Writers and Faith

“Where faith and poetry both work is in getting people to accept that things don’t line up in an easy way. And by learning that, ideally, we learn how to be with each other and how to be in a relationship with God.” (Shane McCrae, “Obliqueness and Extravagance; A Conversation with Rowan Williams and Shane McCrae,” Image, Winter, 2022)

As I remember, I was not a particularly early reader. Somewhere, however, as the alphabet came together in words, I discovered the joy of story. I read, and I mimicked by writing stories myself. I wrote all kinds of stories: children having adventures, solving crimes, righting wrongs.

Through stories, as I continued writing them into adolescence and adulthood, I dealt with everything from boredom to the wrongs in the larger world. My ability to right wrongs might be limited, but I could call out the wrongs and show how the characters of a story dealt with them.

I learned that a struggling individual has need of the “serenity prayer.”
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference. (First publicized by Reinhold Niebuhr)

Writing is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or bad—to build up or to tear down. Not everything built is good, nor is everything torn down bad. As the prayer says, we need, not only talent or opportunity, but wisdom.

And so some of us who are Christians, humbly asking God’s guidance, begin to write what we are given.

Strange Meetings and Grace

People called to some task when they were not expecting it have changed the world: Moses discovering the burning bush as he leads sheep in a desert; disciples of Jesus who don’t even recognize him when he meets them on the road to Emmaus; Paul meeting Jesus on the way to Damascus even while he is intending to arrest Jesus’ followers.

Some may at first resist the calling and the changes it requires. Commenting on Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Caitrin Keiper notes the time it took for Valjean to change from thief to benefactor of those in need. In the beginning, after Valjean is caught stealing and brought before the bishop, the bishop not only pardons the man but even gives him more silver. Valjean, however, leaves only to steal again—but then he realizes what he has done, and the redeeming process begins. (“Masterpieces of Impossibility,” Plough, Autumn 2022)

At some point, a calling is answered or a debt is forgiven or a gift is bestowed and accepted. The results, Keiper writes, are a “contract with grace.” The contract stretches “to infinity as it is passed on from one person to the next.”

Somewhere today, even among political hatreds or attacks on defenseless civilians or misery caused by selfish oligarchs, those usually small but called ones are working. They are the ones we search for, to join our callings with theirs.

The Out of Step Jesus

The writer Philip Yancey (www.philipyancey.com) in his book, Soul Survivor, says he often feels like the most liberal person among conservatives and the most conservative person among liberals.

This statement resonates with me. I was raised in a Southern evangelical church. Fortunately, unlike Yancey’s childhood church, this church was a loving congregation, led by a pastor both caring and intelligent. The lower middle /working class church forgave him his sometimes scholarly sermons because he loved and cared for them.

Thus, I had no need, as I grew up, to rebel against a die-hard fundamentalist culture. For me and the other young people, the caring of the adults allayed the path of rebellion sometimes chosen by young people in less loving churches.

In my adult years, spent in myriad cultures and regions, my politics became more liberal. Because of my fortunate childhood, this liberalism was one of growth, not of rebellion. It is not rebellion against the childhood-taught faith I continue to practice.

I remember a song we children sang in loud abandonment: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white; Jesus loves the children of the world.”

On the wall of our Sunday school room was a picture of Jesus walking joyously with those children—red, yellow, black, and white.

My childhood church no doubt included people we would call racist. Certainly the majority held, I’m sure, quite conservative beliefs. Over time, Jesus’ teachings, if taught sincerely, may not necessarily lead to political liberalism. They certainly will result, however, in a repudiation of hatred.

August 1991

From my job at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I watched with millions all over the world as a coup attempt played out in Moscow. Were the efforts to finally install democracy in countries of the Soviet Union doomed to failure? Were similar attempts in Russia itself to be overcome?

Mikail Gorbachev had become leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the youngest member of the Soviet politburo. He had attempted a loosening of the Soviet system, allowing some Eastern European countries to begin breaking away and forming their own governments. He also began instituting changes in Russia’s governance.

However, for a few days in August 1991, while Gorbachev was away from Moscow, hardliners placed him and his family under house arrest and attempted to wrest power away from him.

Countries in eastern Europe, having begun steps toward their independence, watched in horror, afraid that their new freedom would be taken back.

George Krol, a U.S. diplomat serving at a U.S. consulate in Russia was especially concerned. He had traveled into the Baltic republics as they began throwing off the Soviet yoke. Awakening now to the news of the attempted coup, he drove across to Riga in the Baltic republic of Latvia.

He found government officials there watching in horror as Soviet armored personnel carriers threatened their own country. Krol then met with leaders of the Latvian parliament. As they thanked him for being there, he realized, he said “what it meant to truly represent my country.” He was standing with them, as a representative of America in their darkest hour.

The world watched as resisters under Boris Yeltsin eventually overcame the attempted coup, a victory to be savored as former Soviet nations continued steps toward democracy.

No one, however, should think that some sort of ultimate victory was won. Not all Russians were happy to see their empire fading away. Economic hardships ensued for many.

This stage was part of an ongoing story, still being written, as Putin’s attempts in Ukraine attest.

It was, however, a most important step. As Krol wrote, “On that beautiful summer’s day, as I drove with the windows down through the idyllic Baltic country-side, I thought: I represent the United States of America; I can’t believe they pay me to do this.”

Different Rules for Outside the Box

A religious group once intended to trap their nemesis, the Jewish teacher Jesus. This particular group disagreed with another religious group over resurrection of the human body, taking the stance that resurrection violated what we “know.” As indeed it does, if one looks merely at what we know in a physical sense.

They purported to prove that Jesus’ belief in resurrection was untenable according to the laws of this world. If a woman is married, then is widowed, then is remarried and widowed six more times, with no children, whose wife is she in the resurrection? That question, they thought, should settle the idea of any resurrection.

Jesus replied that the inhabitants of heaven don’t marry. Marriage, so important in this life, isn’t a part of the heavenly kingdom. His questioners judged the future by present rules, but they left out the possibility that the future may operate by different rules. They left out the power of God to set up different rules for another time and place.

As science has increased our knowledge of this physical universe, we know things our ancestors didn’t: that the earth is round, not flat; that tomatoes are not poisonous; that bleeding the body during illness does not cure, but causes harm; and so on.

We live in a closed universe with set rules. We suppose that is all there is. From our little box, we presume things about what is outside the box. We judge the outside of the box by what we know of the inside of the box.

We are giants in the physical realm but pygmies in the spiritual.

 

Christmas: Jeddah Saudi Arabia 1990

Other than a few hours in Mexico and a few days in Canada, I lived my entire life in the United States until December 1990.

Exactly one year before that date, I was happily living in north Georgia, working as a historic preservation planner. Then in the spring, I received a telephone call from the U.S. State Department. A position was available in a State Department’s orientation class for the U.S. Foreign Service. I had applied a couple of years before, but lawsuits within the State Department over hiring practices had put most applications on hold. I had gone on to other interests. Now hiring was beginning again.

After thinking it over a few days, I accepted and spent several months in primary training in Washington, D.C.  Then, in August, 1990, as I went into the second phase of my training, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein conquered the country of Kuwait and threatened the nearby oils fields of Saudi Arabia.

I completed my training in December as the United States considered sending troops to protect Saudi Arabia, our oil ally, and I began the journey to my first foreign assignment. I found myself wheels down in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, just as the Christmas season began back home.

I was jet lagged, had picked up the wrong luggage while exchanging planes in Riyadh, and was soon to come down with a throat infection. Nevertheless, I immediately became part of U.S. consulate Jeddah’s team. What can I say? It was physically taxing but the most marvelously exciting time of my life.

I found friends in neighborly get-to-gathers and home church services. I was tossed into adjudicating visas of those wishing to go to the U.S., my official job, but the buildup to the war effort for what would be the first Gulf war thrust me into other positions.

The consulate organized a 24-hour control center in a nearby major hotel. I worked night shifts and performed other duties, including laying out briefing materials for news people arriving from major U.S. networks. I watched senior U.S. officials welcomed in the hotel lobby.

We, the working stiffs, established rapport known only to those joining together in crisis conditions.

Unfortunately, peace efforts failed, and war would come, though quickly over as Saddam was pushed back into Iraq. Eventually, a whole new age would begin, known as the post Soviet era, with its own difficulties and shortcomings.

Nevertheless, that Christmas, thrust into instant dependence and friendship with people I had never known before, remains possibly the best Christmas I have ever had.

Breaking the Cycle: Hope

My mother’s father came down from the mountains of east Tennessee to the big city of Nashville and began working in an iron foundry. My father’s father also moved from rural Tennessee to the big city and found employment as a policeman.

Something happened in the next generation. By the time my brother and I came along, our parents were solidly middle class. They sidestepped aimless lives that trapped some of their brothers and sisters.

Both my parents underwent a spiritual transformation when they were in their teens. Something happened to them that shot them away from ruinous personal choices. A sense of hope gave them meaning and purpose and a sense of responsibility.

My parents were disciplined with their money, saving from modest salaries so their children received the college education they themselves were unable to enjoy.

Except for buying a house, my parents never went into debt. We had health insurance, which kept medical emergencies from overwhelming us. When my father died at the age of fifty-three from a heart attack, his provision of life insurance kept us going, along with our paid-off house, the social security my mother received as a widow with two children, and her modest job as a school secretary.

All these programs benefitted my parents, enabling them to give their children a good start in life. Today’s generational poor need access to jobs that pay a living wage. They need health insurance that stresses good health habits and prevents medical emergencies from ruining family finances. But it may be up to families, ministers, and teachers to instill hope and purpose.

Community Fails

The Covid pandemic has shown us how dangerously shallow are our community connections.

Several decades ago, Americans transformed from generational living to the nuclear family: mother, father, and minor children.

In the more recent past, community often disappeared altogether, becoming a collection of one-person units or single parent families. Singles and studio apartments and temporary live-in romantic relationships proliferated. Some apartment dwellers didn’t know the name of a single neighbor.

The pandemic saw many single Americans working from home with few ways to connect, given the danger of catching Covid from physical proximity.

Parents, especially single parents, may have lacked grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins to help them through the pinch of forced home schooling.

Obviously, a family doesn’t automatically make for healthy living. Some families, unfortunately, are toxic. However, closer connections require overcoming our propensity of the past few decades to equate freedom with singleness. Families, it seems, are actually necessary.

While avoiding too much dependency for young people who need space and time to spread their wings, rebuilding family and community relationships is a task for our times.

Nomadland: This Land Is Your Land

I watched the movie Nomadland the day before it won the 2021 Academy Award for best picture.

Merely watching the picture was itself a momentous event—the first time I’ve publicly attended a move in more than a year. Our local movie theater recently re-opened to masked, socially distanced audiences. I attended a matinee exclusively for those patrons vaccinated for the Coronavirus.

Frances McDormand, who won best actress in the awards, played a widow, living a fairly normal life until the main employer in her small town shuts down, and the town begins to die.

An employment official says her best choice is to go on early social security. McDormand says she can’t make it on the reduced benefits. “I only want to work,” she says, voicing the cry of so many of today’s unemployed.

So McDormand, in her small van, joins other rootless men and women who, for one reason or another, cannot find a place in mainstream America.

The movie did not have a villain, so far as I could see. Not Amazon, where McDormand finds seasonal employment to help her get by. Not the woman who nervously tells McDormand that she can stay the night in a store parking lot and mentions that a nearby Baptist church offers food. Even a policeman ordering McDormand off a public space, is I suppose, merely doing what he’s paid for.

McDormand wants to support herself. She works seasonal jobs and travels in between, sometimes stopping for a while to stay with other nomads, sometimes seeming to enjoy the solitariness of camping alone.

I was touched by the precarious existence of so many in America, no matter whether they remain stationary or travel around.

Bank accounts? Medical emergencies? Vehicle breakdowns? The simple need for bathroom facilities?

Others with more expertise perhaps can offer solutions. I only know that simple human kindness requires that we seek ways to help the non-belongers find a place in their country.

Foreign Service Officer: What’s That?

The call from the Marine on duty in the U.S. consulate in this Middle Eastern country came late in the evening. I was the American consular officer, responsible for, among other things, being available for American citizens with problems.

“There’s an American lady here who says she wants help. She’s had some kind of fight with her husband, and she left him,” the Marine said. “ Her baby is with her.”

I hurriedly dressed and made my way from my house to the Marine’s post. The young American woman waited with her months old baby. I took her into the consular section where she could nurse her baby and we could talk.

She was one of many American citizens who show up, sometimes literally, on the doorstep of an American embassy or consulate asking for help. Working as a Foreign Service consular officer for the U.S. State Department, I was privileged to know some of them.

Writes one Foreign Service officer: “The most urgent calls rarely came during embassy business hours — the wee hours of the morning were much more common, no matter the country. ‘We found the body of a young American male at the airport hotel. It appears to be suicide,’ one caller reported. ‘I’m 14 years old,’ pleaded another. ‘My parents brought me here on vacation to visit family. But it turns out they want to marry me off to a 50-year-old man I don’t even know. Please help!’”
—Matthew Keene, “For Americans in Trouble Abroad, a Consular Officer May Be the Only Hope,” Washington International Diplomatic Academy,” March 21, 2021

Some of my own experiences as a consular officer included the following: An American killed by an apparent terrorist. Americans arrested for making booze in a country where any alcohol consumption was forbidden. An apparently mentally ill American showing up at the consulate needing money.

Oh, yes, we used to say. Consular officers have the best war stories, better by far than our colleagues working at more rarified heights. They visit the jails. They make welfare checks on American children of divorced parents when the child lives with the foreign parent. They check the bodies of dead Americans at the morgue before calling a relative in the States with the sad news of the death.

Working for our country is a noble occupation: A soldier serving in a foreign land or one setting up hospitals for victims of Covid-19 in the U.S. A diplomat working out an agreement for free trade or one visiting an American in a foreign jail. A U.S. Supreme Court justice deciding between differing views on the Constitution or a judge seeking the best outcome for a juvenile offender caught shoplifting.

Easy work? Often not, but justifying the honorable title of “public servant.”

The young woman with the baby I mentioned earlier? Her husband, a young man who seemed to deeply love his wife and child, came to the consulate later in the evening, and the two made up. Sometimes we witness happy endings, too.

Ritual Appreciation

Several years ago I discovered the Grantchester mystery series by James Runcie They follow a young British cleric in the years immediately after World War II.

The series delves more deeply into purpose and meaning than many “detective” type stories. We know from the beginning of the series that Sidney Chambers is a veteran of fighting in the war. The stories are more than mysteries. They highlight some purpose or higher meaning.

In the latest book, The Road to Grantchester, Runcie provides the background for Sidney’s decision to become an Anglican minister. As we might expect, Sydney suffered horrible wartime experiences fighting in Italy during the war. The first part of the book recounts those experiences, made more terrible by the minimalist reporting style.

The next part of the book recounts his spiritual journey as he chooses and trains for the ministry, a surprise to his not particularly religious family and friends.

One of the insights of the book is how rituals sometimes sustain us in hard times when we are simply hanging on. Great knowledge or insight escapes us. We mumble the 23rd Psalm or the prayer Jesus taught his disciples.

In those desperate times when we may doubt any purpose in the universe or in our lives, ritual can offer us a way to survive. We overcome feelings with a kind of faith that hangs on to time-refined wisdom, sustaining us as it has sustained generations before us.

To Community

Community has no official verb form. Someone I know said we should invent the verb form “to community.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us many things, but one stands out: the need “to community.”

Families and singles are locked down, connecting by Zoom and Facebook. Schools are closed as are gathering places: restaurants, bars, and churches.

Families suffering grief over the death of loved ones must postpone funerals and memorial services.

We can’t interact with our hair stylists or barbers. We dash in for pickup of food, not stopping to chat with staff.

We are born to community, to be part of a group: our family, relatives, and friends. Yet, in the age past, we put community behind things—making as much money as possible, buying as many gadgets as possible, putting tax breaks ahead of community services like health care.

We pay minimum wages to care givers who work with our elderly, as the virus spreads, and to the janitors, so important in a new age of cleanliness.

Have we learned to change our ways? After this pandemic passes into history, as please God it will, what changes will we make?

What will we do, for example, to strengthen that first community, the family? Healthcare, decent housing, education, and time to spend on nurturing?

Have we learned anything?

Divine Nationalism

In his book The Immoral Majority, Ben Howe coins the term “divine nationalism.” This is his name for the political battles waged by many evangelicals for Donald Trump.

He discusses one of their names for Trump: a “divine vessel.” Howe says they are “claiming a divine approval for him that he’d never claimed for himself.”

Howe talks of an unsettling aura in the white evangelical embrace of Trump. “Trump evangelicals have taken this earthly object of their adoration and quantum-locked him to God’s will.”

Trump is freed even from “the burden of accountability.” Indeed, Howe says, Trump has become an idol to his evangelical followers. The same evangelicals who denounced Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern are perfectly okay with Trump’s affairs.

Perhaps this seeming moral relativism is one reason the number of evangelicals appears to be declining while the religiously nonaligned are increasing.

When is debt an investment?

Education is free for American schoolchildren, but salaries for teachers are paid for by taxes. They are part of the public “debt.”

However, most of us would agree that the country benefits from an educated population. Isn’t the money we pay for those free schools more of an investment than a debt?

After secondary school, education generally is not free. In fact, over the past few decades, colleges and university have grown beyond the ability of many American families to afford.

Writes novelist Marilynne Robinson: “As state financing fell, tuitions rose, involving many students in burdensome debt. For generations people had, in effect, prepaid their children’s and grandchildren’s tuition and underwritten the quality of their education by paying taxes. Suddenly the legislatures decided to put the money to other uses, or to cut taxes, and families were obliged to absorb much higher costs.” (What Are We Doing Here? Essays)

Learning, Robinson points out, no longer fits into the economic equation.

But, of course it does. It’s one of those long term costs not addressed when only material costs are calculated.

Polluted streams in Montana are a cost passed on to ordinary people. If they drink the water, they will sicken, perhaps die. If the government pays to restore the streams, the costs are passed to citizens in the form of higher taxes. The companies, who mined but did not pay for preventing pollution. get off with more profit now paid for by citizens.

Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy writes: “For too long, governments have socialized risks but privatized rewards: the public has paid the price for cleaning up messes, but the benefits of those cleanups have accrued largely to companies and their investors.” (“Capitalism After the Pandemic,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020.)

Mazzuecato suggests a long term view for our economic policies. Stakeholders in our economy, the workers, who also are consumers, need help to weather economic downturns and again be able to both work and consume.

In these and other instances, government “debt” is more of an investment.

We Fear the Unworthy

We are afraid that unworthy Americans will receive entitlements they don’t deserve. Food, perhaps. Or medical care. Or housing.

In my own life, I have received many good things that I did not, in fact, do anything to earn.

I was born into a loving household. We were healthy and needed no unusual medical care. I was born at a time when unemployment was low. Both my parents were able to work and afford comfortable housing for their family.

At the time, a college education was still possible for those of ordinary means. My brother and I profited from four years of college.

Again, I came of age in boom economic times and never wanted for employment—with health insurance—whenever I needed to work.

Thus, I’m not bothered by the fact that in a wealthy country no one would go hungry. I’m not thinking of steak dinners—just basic food for all who are hungry.

I wish all working Americans had access to affordable housing, including janitors and home health aides. I’d like to see adequate resources for the mentally ill and help for the drug addicted to recover meaningful lives. I wish no child to suffer homelessness.

I wish all America’s children had access to adequate education, no matter their parents’ standing in life.

I wish all Americans could receive basic health care.

I’d like to see a fairer tax system—one that taxes wealth as well income—to underpin meeting these basic needs.

Of course, these views are selfish. Healthy, educated, well-housed Americans ultimately benefit the entire country, including me.

Wandering Jews and Christians

Polls tell us that fewer and fewer people today, especially young people, identify as religious, including as Christians.

Christianity has lost its majority following before, usually after too many people calling themselves Christians followed gods other than Christ. Nazi Germany is one example.

Wesley Hill is a professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry. He uses Chaim Potok’s books about Jews in America, struggling to keep their faith, as an example for American Christians. (“Chaim Potok’s Wandering Jews, Holding to Faith in a Critical Age,” Plough Quarterly, Autumn 2020.)

Hill writes: “A religiously observant life is less and less accessible or intelligible to modern Westerners, yet many of us remain haunted by its possibility.”

Despite many who leave organized Christianity, others, like Hill, continue in the faith, perhaps in altered form from their childhood.

“Like Potok’s characters,” Hill writes, “I went away to university and experienced something of the wider world beyond the confines of my Baptist, Republican childhood. . . . I am now a member of the Episcopal Church, which, to my childhood eyes, was barely a church at all.”

And so he remains, as do many of us. “. . . “I can’t be the Christian I used to be, but I want sill, very much to be a Christian.”

But isn’t that the story of the Christian church? Over and over again, dying, then finding rebirth as a more humble but risen faith?

Of Gods and Men

I recently watched the movie CD Of Gods and Men, in French, with English subtitles. The story is loosely based on the kidnaping  in 1996 of eight Cistercian monks by fundamentalists in the north African country of Algeria. The monks had lived as a community, ministering to the people of the area.

Algeria has suffered one of the bloodiest struggles among former countries colonized by European powers. French settlers, some of whom had been there for generations, were forced to leave by native Algerians who wanted their country back.

Early governments after the French expulsion were managed by former Algerian fighters but ended up themselves corrupt. As is often the case, fundamentalist Islamists saw an opening and began a campaign of terror to gain power.

Fear gripped areas where government forces now fought the fundamentalists. The monks attempted to minister to all in need, which included a wounded fundamentalist fighter, brought to them one night. This action made them suspect by the national army forces.

The fundamentalist soldier was later captured by the army and allowed to die, the army soldiers joying at his suffering. The commander of the government forces then brought in the leader of the Cistercians to identify the dead fundamentalist soldier. The monk, named Christian, does so.

Christian prays over the dead fundamentalist. The army leader is angered—angered that sympathy would be shown to this man, who has probably killed and perhaps tortured some of the commander’s men. As the army is now responding in kind. No doubt the commander believes that torture must be met with torture—leading, of course, only to more torture . . .

That scene so poignantly illuminates for me the absurdity of war. One should not show sympathy toward one’s enemy. The only way for war to take place is to inspire hatred for the other.

But, of course, killing and torture, once loose, keep escalating on each side.

Meanwhile, ordinary people, to whom the Cistercians have ministered, suffer the consequences of a reign of terror.

We don’t know exactly what happened to the Cistercians after their capture. Their deaths were announced a couple of months later by an armed Islamist group. Their heads were found three years later, but we don’t know the circumstances in which their deaths took place.

No matter. The examples of those who defy hatred live on after their deaths to inspire us.

My Lost Algeria

My assignment from the U.S. State Department to the North African nation of Algeria in 1993 was supposed to last two years. I was evacuated out within a few months of my arrival because of terrorism concerns for embassy personnel. I’ve always felt a sense of loss for not completing that assignment, something like one feels for a lost friend.

A few weeks before I left, I had accompanied the ambassador on a “show the flag” trip around the northern section of the country. I got to know our Algerian driver, a Berber from the mountainous Kabyle region. We visited several sights, including an ancient Islamic mosque. The stone walls around its well were scarred from more than a millenary of providing water for the faithful to wash before the call to prayer.

Just after my arrival to the capital, Algiers, I had visited a Christian church. It was open to the public, but the lay worker reading papers at a desk as we entered seemed nervous. I’ve often wondered what happened to him and his church when the country shut down because of the terrorism.

I thought about these people again when I read an article by Stephanie Saldana, “The Martyr in Street Clothes” in Plough (Spring 2020).

I left Algeria in December, 1993. A group of monks who had chosen to stay and serve in that country were kidnaped and killed in 1996 by extremists. Their story is told in the film Of Gods and Men.

Another incident occurred in August 1996, when a bishop, Pierre Claverie, and his Muslim driver, Mohamed Bouchikhi, were killed in a bomb blast. Mohamed, a Muslim, had grown up next to the bishop’s church and become a volunteer there. Pierre at one time, concerned for the death threats he was receiving, asked Mohamed to consider no longer helping so that he would not be in danger. Mohammed became upset that the bishop would consider such a thing. Thus, they were killed together.

I studied the picture of the painting along with the article in Plough. All these martyrs are depicted, including Mohamed, in his street clothes, beside a small depiction of a mosque.

I have loved other assignments—in Saudi Arabia and Tunisia and Canada—but I will always grieve for the one in Algeria.