domestic violence and the suffering christ

This week the focus of First Born Son is both Holy Week and the 5 Year Anniversary of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq.

"DOMESTIC VIOLENCE"

You poor child.

There you are,
following in the footsteps of your ancestors,
but your father is his own man.

He beats you. And your mother.
Women and children are not safe around him.

He takes you by the neck, and tells you to stop crying.
If you don’t, he warns,
he’ll beat you some more.

What could be worse?
Maybe the police officer standing in the window,
watching your father beat and rape you.
He walks through the door, but makes no arrest.

Just a nod, once;
the slow, subtle nod of permission
meant to go unseen by others.

And so your father beats you,
and rapes you,
(and your mother)
while the police watch for hours.

Then, quite suddenly, the officer breaks down the door,
pulls out his nightstick
and begins to beat your father… and you.
Both of you he throws around the room
breaking pictures and lamps and tables and chairs and walls.
Now the doors are wide open to the world.

Father finally submits to the handcuffs
and is taken away.
Then the officer looks at you, and asks why you are not thankful
that he stopped your father from beating you.

Then he commands you – you all covered with blood and broken bones and mental scars –
to clean up the house quickly, or else he’ll look bad;
all the while the world comes through your door and takes your heirlooms.

While you crawl through your own blood
over broken glass and the remains of your home
with genitals exposed and swollen,
this ignorant, determined, self-righteous cop
stands proud and declares out the door:

“Here to protect and to serve.”

When I first wrote this poem in 1993 it was only four stanzas. I penned it after my uncle died in Baghdad because the embargo on Iraq made finding medicine for his kidney failure impossible. I came back to it for two reasons in 2006. First, the woman at the checkout in Wal Mart who, after looking at my name on my credit card and asking where it was from, then asked, “Why don’t they like us much over there? Don’t they know we’re just tryin’ to help?” And second, my cousin’s murder in Baghdad during the recent civil war.

I’ve never really “finished” it. It grew (and has continued to grow) out of my realization and frustration that Saddam was a tyrant and the U.S. was a bully: First Saddam brutalizing his own people and using chemical weapons, but at the time the U.S. needs him to fight Iran, so we look the other way... later the U.S. bombs Iraq into the stone age, and then leaves Saddam in power and never lets them rebuild... then the U.S. decides that bombing Iraq will be adequate retribution for 9/11, and so a country that has nothing to do with the radical Islam of Osama Bin Laden is turned into one... and the thing is done so poorly that civil war breaks out.

Almost 30 years of the Iraq's sons and daughters bleeding to death between a beast and a bully.

The Scripture tells us that before he is arrested and crucified, Jesus goes into the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. So overcome with shock and awe at the terror of what is about to happen, one account tells us that, “his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.”

This is the moment in our Story where the sins of the entire world for all of history are placed on the Lamb of God. All this sins. Of all the world. For all of history. And so this is the moment in our Story where the Son of God bleeds with his children in Iraq for the sins of a beast and the sins of a bully.

Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy.

Jesus in the Garden statue at the Abbey of Gethsemani Monastery in Trappist, Kentucky.
My wife took this picture right after a rain.  I have always thought that the water on the metal looks like blood.