Remembering Marla

Dear James, Seven years ago, the world lost a passionate advocate for civilians caught in the crossfire. Today, CIVIC will have a moment of silence in remembrance of our founder Marla Ruzicka and her Iraqi colleague Faiz Ali Salim.  We’ll pause our work at 2 PM EST, and we invite you to do the same. Marla’s life is an example of the impact one committed individual can have. We honor her legacy every day by working to make warring parties more responsible to civilians in war. We train troops to prevent civilian harm. We work with warring parties to create civilian tracking and response systems, so they learn from mistakes and know who to help. And when military intervention is considered, as it may be in Syria, we remind them of the potential civilian cost. We invite you to honor Marla's legacy and help us continue to grow with a donation to CIVIC. In remembrance and commitment, The CIVIC Team PS.  Setting up a monthly, quarterly or yearly donation is easy, secure and ensures that our work will continue.  Click here to become a sustaining supporter.

CIVIC Updates and Email Alerts 1210 18th Street NW, 4th Floor, Washington, DC 20036 : 202.558.6958 To subscribe, visit http://action.civicworldwide.org/subscribe You are subscribed to this list as revjimr@yahoo.com. unsubscribe

Wednesday in Holy Week: Do we have to “accept joyfully our suffering”?

The theme of Wednesday in Holy Week is suffering. Fasten your seatbelt:

The reading from Lamentations 2:1-9 is about the destruction of Jerusalem, “her gates have sunk into the ground.” The Apostle Paul, writing in 2 Corinthians 1:23-2:11, talks of not being “overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.” And Mark 12:1-11 quotes Jesus telling the rather hideous parable of the vine grower who sends his son to the vineyard where the tenants kill him.

Even the prayer for Wednesday in Holy Week underlines the theme of the day:

“Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed …”

The other day, a couple people asked me why we seem to be “descending” into Holy Week. What’s with all this suffering? Can’t we get on with it and “ascend” to the glory of Easter?

Do we really have to “accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time”?

It is true that there are branches of Christianity that glorify suffering with self-flagellation and re-enactments of the crucifixion with real nails and real blood. The readings for today seem to feed into the masochism of those traditions.

So why do we descend at all? Why not get straight to Easter?

The descending is a reminder, first, of our own mortality, and that suffering inevitably accompanies life. Paul’s letters tend be filled with advice to “toughen up.”

The biblical writers are telling something more about the mystery of death. We will get to the new life of resurrection but first we pass through the wall of death. Rather than “accepting joyfully” our suffering, we should not be so quick to glorify death as “natural.” Death sometimes comes as a relief, and death sometimes comes quickly, but there is nothing good about death. Death is the ultimate enemy to be conquered because it robs of us of seeing the life that comes next.

And there is something else at work: Jesus goes to the Cross, not be emulated by us by glorifying his suffering, but rather he goes to the Cross to stand with us in our worst suffering – to suffer with us. We don’t have to re-enact suffering – there is plenty of it in our world to go around.

He goes to the Cross in a plea with us to end the suffering, to end the torture, to end the warfare. He pleads with us to not accept joyfully the sufferings of this world, but to bring end the violence, end the injustice– and eliminate the human-made crosses that kill people and create hells on earth. The traditional icon above symbolizes that by showing Jesus rescuing Adam and Eve from the gates of Hell and bringing them out of death and into new life.

This Holy Week each of us can do something that others might suffer a little less. It may not be huge, but it will be something:

Episcopal Relief and Development is our arm around the world that brings needed help and relief in places destroyed by hurricanes, earthquakes, famines, disease, poverty and other calamities. Robert Ratdke, president of ERD will be with us April 22 at St. Paul’s and I hope you will join us to meet him. You can find out more about ERD and how you can contribute by clicking HERE.

The other organization I highly recommend: Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC). These brave souls go to the most war ravaged lands of this earth to care for refugees and those caught in the crossfire. They advocate with governments for relief, and at no small risk to themselves. Please contribute to CIVIC by clicking HERE.

May you have a blessed Holy Week, and may your walk this week bring you to a closer awareness of the divine within you.

By James Richardson, Fiat Lux

The Holy Innocents: Million of children die in warfare and we can do something about it

Memorials to the dead in Libya including children
Photo by CIVIC

“Blessed are all 
who take refuge in him.”

Psalm 2:11b

The Christian calendar today holds grimmest of markers for the year: The Feast of the Holy Innocents.

It is the day we remember that King Herod murdered all of the first born boys in Bethlehem in an attempt to kill Jesus, the one who the Magi had told him would grow up to be a king. Jesus and his family escaped, but the carnage and anguish in Bethlehem was great.

It does not sound like much of an occasion for feasting.

There is perhaps some consolation in the fact that it didn’t happen, at least not this way. The Gospel writer of Matthew came up with this story as a literary device to render Jesus into the “new Moses” by having the Holy Family flee to Egypt so that Jesus could emerge like Moses in a “new Passover.”

No other gospel writer – no other historian – says that Herod slaughtered all of the babies in Bethlehem to kill Jesus. Indeed, the gospel writer of Luke – the only other account of Jesus’ birth – has the Holy family returning in short order from Bethlehem to Nazareth, where Jesus grows up in relative safety and calm. In Luke, there are no innocent babies killed and no terrifying trips back and forth from Egypt.

What then to make of the Holy Innocents? Should we ignore it?

No.

What comes to mind is that the world is full of Holy Innocents – children who are killed or maimed in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, Somalia – and children are still murdered in the Holy Land. The children die as pawns of the powerful. Children die in Gaza and the West Bank and Bethlehem all too frequently because the adults are at war. We don’t need a King Herod to feel shame for the deaths of millions of innocent children in our world.

But we can do something.

For several years I have been supporting the work of CIVIC – The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, an organization that documents the plight and advocates for refugees and victims caught in the cross-fire of the world’s conflicts. Its purpose:

“Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict works on behalf of war victims by advocating that warring parties recognize and help the civilians they harm. CIVIC supports the principle that it is never acceptable for a warring party to ignore civilian suffering.”

Marla, right, with a family in Iraq
shortly before she was killed

CIVIC was founded by a very brave young woman, Marla Ruzicka, from Lakeport, California, who in the months after 9/11 went to the frontlines herself to document what she saw, and then bring that information to the doorstep of decision-makers in Washington.

Marla was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2005. She was only 24.

It was my privilege to say prayers for her in the California Senate after she died, and I can tell you some very hardened politicians shed tears that day.

CIVIC has not only continued her work, but expanded it, going to Libya, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon and Israel. CIVIC works on a shoestring budget but it has had a huge impact by getting Congress to allocate funds to compensate war victims in Iraq and Afghanistan, and bringing the stories of real people caught in warfare to the media.

CIVIC has gone everywhere it can go, working with officials from the United Nations, and with governments in Israel and Lebanon, Russia and Georgia, and everywhere there is warfare. To read a summary of CIVIC’s accomplishments, click HERE.

I know that all of us are inundated this time of year with appeals for funds. But what better way to remember the Holy Innocents than by giving to CIVIC? I will be giving today as my devotion to this Holy day. Please join me. You can make a donation to CIVIC by clicking HERE.

Feast of the Holy Innocents and the innocents in our world

Today our lectionary commemorates the Feast of the Holy Innocents (pulling it forward a day because St. Stephen's Day fell on Sunday).

Today at 5:30 pm we will have a Holy Eucharist at St. Paul's to remember this day; it will be the last Eucharist of the calendar year at St. Paul's, taking the place of our regular Wednesday Evening Prayer. I hope you will join me.

The Feast of the Holy Innocents is meant to remember when King Herod murdered all the young children in Bethlehem because he had heard a king had been born who would take his throne.

Did it happen exactly this way? Probably not. The story appears in Matthew 2:13-18 and nowhere else. Biblical scholars will tell you it is a highly symbolic story meant to evoke Jesus as the new Moses and to fulfill the predictions of the prophet Jeremiah.

That said, I don't want us to lose sight of the Holy Innocents. It was by no means certain that the infant Jesus would survive in the world where he was born. Disease and malnutrition was an ever-present danger. So was warfare.

In our own world, the infant mortality rate is highest in places of extreme poverty and warfare. According to statistics published by the United Nations, the worst infant mortality rates in the world are in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sierra Leone and Angola -- all places torn apart by warfare.

The safest place in the world to be born is Iceland.

For several years now, I've supported an organization, The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or CIVIC, which documents the plight of refugees in war zones and advocates for their relief. The organizations puts people on the ground for first-hand accounts, at great risk to themselves (CIVIC's founder, Marla Ruzicka, was killed by car bomb in Iraq in 2005).

CIVIC has a new report on the plight of people caught in the cross fire in Northwest Pakistan; you can read the report by clicking HERE and a summary is below:

The number of civilian casualties-meaning deaths and injuries-is significant in Pakistan, though exact figures are unknown due to insecurity and government restrictions on information. In 2009, an estimated 2,300 civilians were killed in terror attacks alone with many more injured. Counting losses from Pakistani military operations and U.S. drone strikes, civilian casualties in Pakistan likely exceed in number those in neighboring Afghanistan.

Despite the severity of losses and consequences of ignoring them, civilian casualties receive too little attention from US, Pakistani and donor-nation policymakers, military officials, and international organizations alike. Overlooking the majority of civilians harmed or displaced by combat operations is undermining the Pakistani government's legitimacy. The US, too, has an obligation to these victims, as a major supporter of Pakistan's anti-terror efforts and as a warring party itself, with small numbers of troops on the ground and drones conducting strikes from overhead.

I would commend to you support for CIVIC; you can make a year-end donation by clicking HERE. I am making a donation today. Please join me.

Photograph of refugee children in Afghanistan.