Dark Prayer

The water churned and pushed against the ice with a dark
seriousness that reminded me of prayer.

Subzero Chicago night at the edge of the year, the edge of
change, the edge of what's bearable. I stood on an old breakwater, a
long, crumbling construction of concrete and steel that jutted into Lake
Michigan -- just stood, feeling the wind scrape my face. Whatever thoughts
came to me were honest ones. Or maybe I just needed to grieve.

"Courage grows strong at the wound."

Someone said this to me earlier this year and I felt a rush of
reverence as I contemplated wounds and war, a wrecked economy, a wasted planet,
hope, illusion, the holidays, the human condition. My niece just got married;
the same day, a friend was mugged in the alley behind her house. The dark water
undulated beyond the ice, gurgling, whispering. Dear God . . .

I don't pray easily. At least not for the big stuff. But
there I was, praying, it seemed, against the tide. Dear God, let us find the
courage to endure whatever is to come and the wisdom to pull together around
the worst of it. Europe, shattered after World War II, finally understood this.
Grant us transformation at the point of our wounds and the vision of a future
beyond them. Grant us a president who believes in something beyond the
military-industrial consensus that surrounds him and would own him. Grant us
sanity and the courage to face our worst fears. Grant us peace.

"Peace activists in Pakistan and India are attempting
desperately to be heard above the din raised by warmongers . . . in the wake of
the Mumbai carnage. Jingoism is in the air -- be it from so-called nationalists
(posing as analysts on television) advocating a nuclear attack for the defense
of their country, or the man on the street. Be they from Pakistan or India,
they speak of war with great abandon as if it is child's play."

These are the words of Zubeida Mustafa, writing for The
Women's International Perspective (published a few days ago on Common
Dreams). They scratch at the collective unreason of our age, the unyielding
obstinacy at which I felt my dark prayer hurling itself. It's so much
easier simply to be angry. How do we get beyond our national -- our global
-- impasse over what empowerment means?

We live in a world in which no word is more feared than
"disarmament" -- and the logic of that fear brooks no
compromise. There seems to be an unbroken line of logic that runs from personal
sidearms to nuclear weapons. My prayer as the year ends is that a few more
stalwarts see the greater logic of laying down both their weapons and the fear
that makes doing so unthinkable.

Since I was out, I decided to walk on this raw night to the
Barbara Tree. That's what I call it -- the tree I had specially
planted by the Chicago Park District some years ago to honor my late wife, who
died of cancer in 1998. Originally the tree was a linden, but that one died in
its second summer, during a drought. Eventually another tree was planted on the
spot; a cherry, I think. It's still, at any rate, "her"
-- leaning, just like the other one did, irreverently off square.

Death is the ultimate fear and the ultimate enemy, but when Barbara
died I learned that death wasn't the enemy at all -- rather, it was
something like the waves and the darkness, unknowable and beckoning and maybe
no more than a doorway. What does this awareness change? I don't know,
but if I hated death, my grief could have no dimension, no restorative power,
and would be as trite and hellish as regret.

As I thought about Mustafa's observations about
nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, and the carnage in Mumbai, I found myself
groping along the seam of the horror for the wrong turn toward revenge and a
desire to hurt back, consequences be damned. "They speak of war with
great abandon as if it is child's play."

The turn is political: the instant promised land of victory. This
real estate always appears attainable at a bargain rate, even in the nuclear
era that mocks the very idea of victory. The face I see at the juncture of this
wrong turn is that of our own Departing Fool, whose greatest (known) crime, in
my view, was steering the United States down the path of revenge after 9/11.
But he didn't do it alone.

Dear God, let George Bush be the last of his line, the 20th
century's smirking bookend. Let his successor be a true leader, whose
agenda transcends the interests that surround him. Courage grows strong at the
wound. Let us move as a planet to a unity greater than the blood cult of
nationalism.

I stroked the cold bark of the Barbara Tree one last time, then
turned, struck out across the snow toward the lights of the city and the life
waiting for me there.