Remembering
The Night of Broken Glass
… and the Church's Silence

by

The Reverend William M. Bigelow

From its inception, The Zoo Fence has avoided political issues. TZF visitors live in a lot of different countries and represent a wide variety of spiritual traditions. Accordingly, politics, and especially the politics of any particular country, have seemed to us inappropriate for the website. In this regard, our motto has been the Gospel lesson, “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's” (Mark 12:17). Or, more simply put, in the words of the first Guru we encountered more than thirty years ago, “No politics!”

And yet we have decided to post the following commentary. Perhaps we are moved to do so because it relates to the period in history in which we were born and grew up, and during which we first began to notice and to think about what was going on around us. Or, maybe it is because we are still inwardly struggling with the ideas of Sivak Sivaraksa, whom we heard a few months ago eloquently expound his argument for “engaged Buddhism”. Or it could be just that George Santayana's logic may be right, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

Whatever the reason, we sincerely hope that the writer is exaggerating the present danger; but in case he is not, we believe his words have a proper place on the Eco-Consciousness page of The Zoo Fence.

This article first appeared in the November 4, 2004 issue of The Ellsworth American, a weekly newspaper published in Ellsworth, Maine, which holds the copyright, and to whom we are grateful for permission to repeat it on The Zoo Fence. The author is a United Church of Christ minister serving Union Congregational Church of Seal Harbor, Maine and Union Church of Northeast Harbor, Maine.

To read an item on this general subject at TZF’s Open Forum, please click here.

Each year in early November, our church pauses in worship to remember Kristalnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and the silence of the church when its voice was desperately needed.

Sixty-six brief years ago, on November 9 and 10, 1938, thousands of Jewish shops, homes and synagogues in Germany were looted and destroyed by leaders of the German government who identified themselves as Christian. Over those two days, ninety-one people were killed. Hundreds were injured. Thousands were terrorized, and 7,500 Jewish businesses were gutted.

Some 177 synagogues were burned or demolished, and 30,000 wealthy Jews were arrested by the Gestapo, to be released on the condition that they surrender their property and emigrate. Police were ordered not to interfere.

This marked a major escalation in the German government's persecution of Jewish citizens. How could this have happened in a sophisticated, cultured European country which identified itself primarily as Christian?

The church was largely silent. It had become a patriotic church, confusing loyalty to a nation with faithfulness to God. This anniversary reminds us of the sins of the church's silence in the face of great cruelty and injustice. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the small group of Christians who spoke out and would not cooperate with the German government, believed that to separate the church from events in the world is to lead the church into sin.

He wrote, “If Jesus was a man who suffered for others, so must the church be willing to suffer for others”.

Bonhoeffer and a small minority within the church refused to cooperate with the patriotic cruelty that most of the Church silently joined. He was arrested in 1943 and executed at age 39; but his witness has lived on for decades, and continues to inspire many.

Where is the voice and action of the faith community needed today?

Where may that voice and action appear unpatriotic and require great courage?

What groups of human beings are we being encouraged to target with fear and cruelty today?

Bonhoeffer warned, “The church that becomes patriotic is a church in danger of losing its soul”. The church in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s was full of people praying and singing hymns, people who loved their country; but, with a few exceptions, it was a church that had lost its soul. A similar danger seems great in our land right now.

Recently, I came across the photograph reproduced here, and it broke my heart. As I have said here and there on TZF, I intentionally keep politics off this website, and I do not intend my posting this picture to be an expression of opinion about the war in Iraq, one way or the other. So, please do not read into it any more than itself. Here, this picture is intended solely to be what it is, or at least what it appears to me to be, a haunting image of a father going off to war. For those TZF visitors who are unable to see the image, this is a photograph of a soldier in camouflage uniform kneeling on one knee on an airfield tarmac, a military cargo aircraft immediately behind him. He is holding tightly in his arms a very young girl, presumably his daughter; his arms are fully wrapped around her, as he holds her to him. His face is turned downward, as if in deep thought, even prayer. He is tall, and being a child, she is short, and so, even though he is kneeling, her feet are not touching the ground. She has a hand on his shoulder. We cannot see her face, for it is behind his. Now, I fully understand that, in the separative universe we live in and by, war is a natural feature, inevitable and sometimes even necessary. But never pleasant. Over the decades, there have been lots of photographs that tell the pathos and the tragedy of war far better than any words can. To my eyes, this is one of those.
     Editor’s Note: The photograph originally appeared on USAA’s website, to whom my thanks.

The Buddha said --

Salvation does not come from the sight of me. It demands strenuous effort and practice. So, work hard, and seek your own salvation diligently.

Spoken by the Dalai Lami
in Seven Years in Tibet

The oak toad and the red-spotted toad love their love
In a spring rain, calling and calling, breeding
Through a stormy evening clasped atop their mates.
Who wouldn't sing — anticipating the belly pressed hard
Against a female's spine in the steady rain
Below writhing skies, the safe moist jelly effluence
Of a final exaltation?

There might be some toads who actually believe
That the loin-shaking thunder of the banks, the evening
Filled with damp, the warm softening mud and rising
Riverlets are the facts of their own persistent
Performance. Maybe they think that when they sing
They sing more than songs, creating rain and mist
By their voices, initiating the union of water and dusk,
Females materializing on the banks shaped perfectly
By their calls.

And some toads may be convinced they have forced
The heavens to twist and moan by the continual expansion
Of their lung sacs pushing against the dusk.
And some might believe the splitting light,
The soaring grey they see above them are nothing
But a vision of the longing in their groins,
A fertile spring heaven caught in its entirety
At the pit of the gut.

And they might be right.
Who knows whether these broken heavens
Could exist tonight separate from trills and toad ringings?
Maybe the particles of this rain descending on the pond
Are nothing but the visual manifestation of whistles
And cascading love clicks in the shore grasses.
Raindrops-finding-earth and coitus could very well
Be known here as one.

We could investigate the causal relationship
Between rainstorm and love-by-pondside if we wished.
We could lie down in the grasses by the water's edge
And watch to see exactly how the heavens were moved,
Thinking hard of thunder, imagining all the courses
That slow, clean waters might take across our bodies,
Believing completely in the rolling and pressing power
Of heavens and thighs. And in the end we might be glad,
Even if all we discovered for certain was the slick, sweet
Promise of good love beneath dark skies inside warm rains.