War in Iraq Creates Ocean of Tears

Please hold these people in your heart: An Iraqi mother searches a morgue for the familiar curve of the hand of her child beneath a pale sheet;











an American father watches his son beheaded on videotape;










an Iraqi child wakes up in a shabby hospital in excruciating pain without his arm;









an American girl writes letters to her dead soldier father;













a young vet wraps a garden hose around his neck and leaps away from the nightmares that beset him.











And an ocean of tears spreads across both countries. ... A wail rises from the throat of all who love these people and shakes our hearts as it reaches for the crucified open arms of Jesus.

We are here tonight as the church. Each one of us is a witness to this war and to our own complicity in it—when were we silent and should have spoken, whose eyes would we not meet to face the truth?

Now we are prostrate at this altar—begging: Lord help us. War is our failure to love you, and peace is your command. Peace is not the easy way out; its creation is the most confounding, the hardest thing we can do. Help us.

Mrs. Celeste Zappala spoke these words at a National Cathedral service.
Sojourners


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I'm So Sorry

A renowned professor and prominent critic of the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq has now lost his son to the war. Lt. Andrew Bacevich, Jr. was killed by a suicide bomber on Sunday. A local Boston station reports that the younger Bacevich's captain said in an e-mail to the family that he was killed by a suicide bomber in a white sedan his unit had stopped on a main highway south of Samarra.

See my previous mention of the father of this courageous soldier and his comments to Tom Englehardt and Harpers Magazine. Mr. Bacevich has written the book The New American Militarism.

My prayers go out to the Bacevich family at this deeply sad time.