Cakes and Ale

Reprinted from Senior Correspondent. This was written before so-called Islamic State terrorists burned a captured Jordanian pilot alive — an unspeakably depraved act that has enraged Muslims and the Arab world.

By Philip E. Jenks

What ‘y’a gonna do? The question, accompanied by a weary shrug, is rhetorical. Some problems are so big nothing can be done.

So it is with the scourge of religious extremists who populate sinister organizations with which the U.S. is at war: Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and a host of collateral groups with common goals. And while they directly threaten few in the U.S., it is chilling to know one of their goals is to kill Americans.

The so-called war on terrorism is 161 months old but the threats continue unabated. Horrible images appear on our HDTV screens with nauseating clarity. Masked terrorists coolly decapitate innocent captives whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Boko Haram extremists kidnap schoolgirls to use as pawns in their fight against a corrupt and ineffectual Nigerian government. In Paris, Islamist gunmen seeking to avenge slurs against the Prophet slaughter writers and cartoonists. A triple suicide bombing in Iraq mutilates and kills 58 civilians.

Who are these people? Why do they hate us so much? And what are we going to do about it?

The answers to these questions are elusive for several reasons. One is that most westerners have scant understanding who these radical extremists* are, and – if they are Muslim as they claim – why they appear to have lost touch with the basic truths of Islam.

Virtually all radical extremists would identify themselves as strictly adherent Muslims.

Yet most observers – including most of the world’s 20.8 billion Muslims – see little connection between the extremists and the teachings of Mohammed. “Show mercy to those on earth so that He who is in heaven will have mercy in you,” the Prophet said. (Sunan At-Tirmidhî) “Whoever is deprived of gentleness is deprived of all good.” (Sahîh Muslim)

Mohammed also offered advice that would benefit all persons of faith. “The religion (of Islam) is easy,” he said. “No one ever made it difficult without it becoming too much for him. So avoid extremes and strike a balance, do the best you can and be cheerful, and seek Allah’s help (through prayer) in the morning, and evening, and part of the night.” (Sahîh Bukhârî)

Following the attack on Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris, Muslims around the world rose up in protest against bloody acts by extremists that do more harm to Muslims than their intended targets. Arab Journalist Abdul Rahman al-Rashad, quoted by Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times, called upon Muslims to go even further to repudiate extremism. “The story of extremism begins in Muslim societies,” wrote al-Rashad, “ and it is with their support and silence that extremism has grown into terrorism that is harming people. It is of no value that the French people, who are the victims here, take to the streets. … What is required here is for Muslim communities to disown the Paris crime and Islamic extremism in general.”

Even so, if the words of the Prophet himself are insufficient to nudge violent extremists toward God’s truth, how are the rest of us to understand what motivates them? And, short of confronting them with superior military strength, is there anything that can be done to stop them?

These questions are heatedly discussed in Christian and Jewish circles. Christians in particular, who follow the paradigms of the Prince of Peace, claim a vast gulf between their own idealistic faith and the wild-eyed perpetrators of cruel violence.

But perhaps the gulf is not as wide as it appears, and perhaps violent extremism is not so much an aberration as a dormant impulse in the unconscious minds of persons of faith. Of course we recoil at the carnage brought about by fundamentalist extremists. But our horror may be a reaction to genetic memories of our own Christian barbarism that took place not so long ago.

It is appalling indeed to be reminded that similar brutal acts — and worse — have played a pivotal role in Christianity’s own dark history. Our past is sated with live burnings, disembowelments, and the drawing and quartering of human bodies, all theologically designed to give heretics a suitable send-off to eternal damnation. An Internet search of torture implements of the Inquisition makes simple decapitation seem humane by comparison.

At the root of all these tortures is the conviction of some religious people that their faith is correct and those who have a different faith ought not be allowed to live. And despite relatively rare examples of saints whose lives were loving and kind, the main story of Christianity since the third century has been one of murderous crusades, anti-Semitic pogroms, religious wars, and the sadistic torture of perceived heretics.

One of the more telling examples of misdirected sanctimony took place in Holland in 1569. A Mennonite preacher named Dirk Willems was so sure he was acting Christ like by rejecting the state church that he refused to back down when his Dutch Lutheran neighbors jailed him for heresy. When Willems escaped from jail, his Lutheran neighbors, in order to be Christ like, hotly pursued him. In the heat of the chase across a frozen pond, one Lutheran fell through thin ice and was about to drown. Willems, being Christ like, stopped running and pulled the man to safety. The Lutheran, being Christ like, arrested Willems immediately – and burned him at the stake.

It’s small wonder that oppressed religious minorities hopped on the first Mayflower to the new world, where freedom from persecution seemed assured. But freedom didn’t come immediately. The Puritans — one of whom was Oliver Cromwell, infamous for his genocidal murders of Catholics in Ireland — sought religious liberty for themselves but denied it to others. In 1651, the Puritan establishment in Boston arrested and whipped the flesh off the back of Baptist Obadiah Holmes because he held an unauthorized worship service in Lynn, Mass.

Today, of course, Christians are more ecumenical, and in 2015 we are pained to remember how our ancestors deviated from the path of the Prince of Peace. Not that we have changed that much. “I like your Christ,” said the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi. “I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

Gandhi knew Christians didn’t burn each other at the stake any more, but neither were they were entirely free of the primordial drive that made them do it in the first place. It is, after all, a distorted application of Christian views that inspired the beating, rape, and lynching of African Americans, the bombing of churches and public buildings, the murder and beating of LGBT persons, and more.

Religion is a nasty business. And as we seek to understand what motivates extremists, we can get some insight by peering into a mirror darkly. We are humans, and we share ontological weaknesses. Our innate human ability to hate aggressively is at the heart of the human soul. Why do extremists hate us so much? Because they can.

Even so, extremists don’t hate us just because they don’t like our looks or the cut of our credos. We have given them ample reason to mistrust and despise us.

Meetings between U.S. religious leaders and Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in January and February 2007 revealed remarkably different views about the two countries.

The Rev. Dr. Shanta Premawardhana, then associate general secretary for interfaith relations at the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC), was part of a 13-member delegation in Iran representing the Mennonite, Quaker, Episcopal, Roman Catholic, Baptist and United Methodist churches.  They spent six days talking with Iranian religious leaders, government officials and general citizens.

Premawardhana said the group reminded Iranian leaders of the simmering U.S resentment over Iran’s capture of 52 U.S. hostages for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981. The brazen act sanctioned by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini continues to enrage Americans.

But the Iranian narrative is quite different, Premawardhana pointed out. For them, the enduring image of the U.S. is the bully that overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and replaced him with the hated Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was regarded as a tyrant.

The Iranian story is one of many outrages and indignations suffered by Muslim caliphates and governments at the hands of European powers, ranging from the bloody medieval crusades to remove Muslim “infidels” from the Holy Land to the systematic seizing of land and redrawing of traditional national boundaries by imperialistic European oppressors. U.S. and European citizens who wonder why they are hated scantly notice this history, but Muslim children are thoroughly immersed in the tradition.

Today, a new narrative has formed. U.S. drones and aircraft that target suspected extremist leaders in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen are also killing uncounted numbers of civilians, including children and first responders. In addition, scores of suspected terrorists have been held for years in Guantanamo and other prison facilities without charges and, in many cases, without convincing evidence. For a generation of Muslims who played no role in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, it may be regarded as heroic to support extremists or join their ranks.

So what are people of faith going to do about this inextricable mess? How are we going to stop the killing, the drones, the suicide bombings, the terror?

It’s tempting to suggest that religious leaders already have the answers in their own traditions. Mohammed and Hillel both spoke out against violence and hatred, and the loving words of Jesus have been amplified by panoply of saints: Teresa, Ignatius, Francis, Romero, and more. Few have been listening to them so far, and there is no good reason to believe their words will have an impact now.

On the other hand, it beggars belief that the three Abrahamic faiths that changed the world no longer hear God’s true voice, or embrace their power to speak God’s truth to one another.

Abdul Rahman al-Rashad is partly right. His call for Muslim communities to rise up and repudiate terrorism and extremism is important.

But equally important is for Muslims and members of all faiths, especially the Abrahamic trio, to rise up and renew the message of love that emanates from the God they all worship. The young terrorists who believed virgins in heaven would reward their martyrdom somehow missed the cautionary words of the Prophet himself: “You will not enter paradise until you have faith. And you will not complete your faith until you love one another.”

For U.S. leaders, most of who reside in the Abrahamic tradition, an important next step would be to acknowledge errors in foreign policy that enraged Muslims and pushed them to the brink of murderous extremism.

No one, of course, expects that to happen, and I can’t imagine any president of the United States admitting that launching CIA-led coups, propping up brutal regimes, or launching deadly drones were errors.

So if truth is to be told, it falls to religious leaders to tell it. Alas, as any priest, minister, rabbi or imam will tell you, speaking God’s truth in any house of worship can be politically hazardous.

But the truth that must be told, as hazardous as it may be.

The late Bob Edgar, former general secretary of the National Council of Churches and President of Common Cause, never hesitated to speak truth to power, said, “A central tenet of the Christian faith is that Jesus is the Son of God, that he is God, and that in the Bible he speaks for God,” Edgar wrote in 2006.

“There are ‘red-letter’ editions of the Bible with the words of Jesus printed in red,” Edgar said. “In one of those red letter paragraphs Jesus says, ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…’” (Matthew 5:44)

“A lot of people stop at that verse,” Edgar said. “But right after that, Jesus continues ‘…so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.’” (Matthew 5:45).

“God takes no side in war,” Edgar concluded. “Do not let anyone tell you differently.”

That’s an inexplicable reality for Americans who felt the sting of 9/11 and cry out for vengeance against radical extremists who killed thousands of innocent people.

But it is also unfathomable to extremists as well as innocent Muslims who live in the path of U.S. drones and bombs that God does not endorse violent retribution against their murderers.

The difficult truth is that God’s love extends to both sides. Accepting that truth may be close to humanly impossible.

But it is a truth declared by Jesus, Mohammed, and volumes of Holy Scripture from many traditions.

And it is a truth all participants in the “War on Terror” will have to embrace if there is any hope of bringing it to a close.

Reprinted from Senior Correspondent:

By Philip E. Jenks

Winter has not chilled the ongoing protests over the summer slayings of unarmed African American men by police.
Clergy and religious leaders have been major players in the demonstrations. Some, like Al Sharpton, are national figures. Many are lesser-known pastors in local communities who want to see justice done.

The National Council of Churches governing board went to Furguson, Mo., where the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed August 9 by a police officer, to be a prophetic presence when a grand jury decision about the culpability of the officer was handed down.

The Council also deplored the July 17 death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who died after a police officer subdued him with what some witnesses said was a choke hold.

“These killings, as well as those of hundreds of other Americans each year at the hands of militarized police forces, is of great and growing concern,” said National Council President Jim Winkler.

“A peaceful, healthy society requires trust and positive relationships between citizens and law enforcement.” Winkler said. “That can best occur in circumstances in which … racism and inequality are being addressed.”

At first glance, these and other clergy statements appear to accuse law enforcement officers of reacting out of racist impulses.

No doubt racism accounts for many police assaults on persons of color, and no doubt religious leaders have a responsibility to condemn the sin of racial enmity wherever they see it.

But do religious leaders also have responsibilities that extend beyond condemnation?

Historically, religious leaders have played pivotal roles in weeding out social evils in U.S. society. In most cases, leaders have taken clear stands against the evils they confronted. Prohibitionist Carrie Nation was an imposingly large woman known for chasing men out of bars with an ax, shouting, “I am a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn’t like.”

Other religious crusades against evil left little doubt who leaders thought the bad guys were. For abolitionists, the evildoers were slave owners. For suffragists, the malefactors were males who jealously guarded their electoral supremacy. For authors of the 1908 Social Creed of the Churches, scoundrels were capitalists and factory owners who forced children to work twelve hours a day. For the For civil rights marchers of the fifties and sixties, it would be hard to imagine more maliciously ignorant adversaries than Bull Connor and his police dogs. For anti-war protestors of the sixties, the bad guys were soldiers, sailors, and the military industrial complex.

Readers of the bible and other religious scripture know the authors of holy writ were not interested in exploring the causes of evil. Slaveholders, boozers, capitalists, oppressors of women, Jim Crow cops, and arms merchants are bad people. Period.

For those who march to protest shootings of unarmed African American men and grand jury inactions, the bad guys are racist cops.

It all seems so simple. And so traditional.

Yet in the long history of religious social engagement in the U.S., one activist declined to condemn all the bad guys as irredeemable scum. John Woolman, an 18th century Quaker preacher, was an abolitionist, pacifist, and animal rights advocate. What distinguished him from other activists is that he didn’t believe the bad guys were automatically hell-bound.

Woolman must have cut a comical figure as he traveled around the primordial areas of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia. Once he realized the caustic dyes used to blacken traditional Quaker wool coats were blinding the slaves of tailors, he discarded his own coat. According to legend, he wore wrinkled white muslin suits instead. When he saw coach drivers whip their horses, he decided to walk instead.

Most notably, Woolman, an itinerant notary public, refused to endorse the wills of clients who intended to bequeath slaves to their successors. “Many slaves on this continent are oppressed,” he would explain to his patrons, “and their cries have reached the ears of the Most High. Such are the purity and certainty of his judgments, that he cannot be partial in our favor.”

John Woolman must have been an exceptionally persuasive man, because most of his clients released their slaves. He could have condemned them as evil sinners. Instead, he convinced them to step into the light.

That was an amazing accomplishment, and not one that was entirely consistent with the one-sided traditions of U.S. protest movements.

Amid the swirling passions unleashed by the tragic events in Ferguson and New York, is such Woolman-like reconciliation possible?

It’s possible, perhaps, but it would require a radical empathy on all sides that hardly seems possible.

Scripturally and theologically, as Woolman knew, the foundation of such reconciliation was laid millennia ago. Jesus put it this way: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind … And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37)

This variation on the golden rule is found in most religions. Rabbi Hillel said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” The Prophet Muhammad said, “As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don’t do to them.”

It’s bewildering that a tenet proclaimed at such high authority, and so universally held, plays such an insignificant role in human engagements.

In the recent protests over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, even expressions of empathy were polarizing. Protest signs emblazoned, “Black Lives Matter,” were instantly countered with, “Police Lives Matter,” and Garner’s sad last words, “I Can’t Breathe,” are still chanted in protest against the New York police.

Yet the key to reconciling these conflicts remains obvious. Protestors and cops alike need to reflect on the ancient principle: what is hateful to you, don’t do to your fellow.

In New York, the conflict between Mayor Bill de Blasio and the police union has become emblematic of the standoff. De Blasio, a white man, is the father of Dante, a bi-racial son. The mayor is one of the few white fathers who must face a common dilemma of black fathers. He has to warn his son to be especially cautious when confronted by white police officers.

When de Blasio expressed his anxiety about that, the police union excoriated him for not backing up the police.
“The mayor should be teaching his son that police are his friends,” a union leader said.

The union said the mayor should not appear at the funerals of two New York police officers who were shot down in cold blood December 20 by a mad man who seemed to be seeking vengeance for the death of Eric Garner. The assailant, an African American male with a history of mental illness, killed himself.

The mayor, religious leaders, and police may be looking at these tragedies with partially obstructed views. The main obstruction is racism, which continues to be endemic in U.S society. For decades, Christian sociologist Tony Campolo has contended, “You just can’t grow up in the United States without being a racist.”

The election in 2008 of an African American president has convinced many U.S, citizens that they live in a post-racial age. But in many respects, Mr. Obama’s presence in the oval office has only exacerbated racist views and allowed them to rise to the surface.

As the winter of conflict between law enforcement officers and their critics continues, some religious leaders are calling on all participants to take a closer look at their own attitudes toward race, and examine them in the light of God’s greatest commandment — the “golden rule.”

Let me add to that a few personal observations.

As a parent of six adults of color, I recognize that my particular vantage point does not make me any less a racist than anyone else. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mayor Di Blasio feels the same way. By the standard of my former sociology prof Tony Campolo, of course I am a racist. I grew up in a society where racist threads were intricately woven into the social fabric. My prayer is that by recognizing my racism, I can minimize its pernicious effects on my life and the people around me.

And as the son-in-law of a cop, I also recognize that law enforcement officers are true heroes in our society, and that the vast majority of them have felt a profound calling to be of service in their communities.

But still, some cops racially profile individuals by the color of their skin. And some cops will tend to react out of fear or an abundance of caution when they confront males of color in ambiguous situations.  Horrific anecdotes include the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles; the 1999 shooting in New York of Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who was reaching for his wallet when he was shot 19 times by police; and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a New Orleans officer fatally shot an unarmed black man named Henry Glover and several of his fellow officers burned his body to cover-up their crime. NOPD officers also shot and killed two unarmed black men on the Danziger Bridge.

The tragic events of 2014 have locked police and protesters in a merciless grip of fear, suspicion, animosity, and hatred. As a result, it can hardly be denied that men of color have good reasons to fear the police, and police have good reasons to fear for their lives when they believe they are being confronted by men of color. Life in the U.S. is too often a double-edged sword of racial tension that will lead inevitably to more tragedies in the years to come.

The only hope is that more religious leaders will be able to extricate themselves from this quagmire of racism and lead all participants to regard one another in the light of history’s most quoted and least applied guideline for living: “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

The Rev. A. Roy Medley, general secretary of American Baptist Churches USA and chair of the National Council of Churches governing board, recently made it clear that that everyone must embrace as never before the call of religious leaders like Jesus, Mohammed, Hillel, and many more: “What is hateful to you, do not do to others.

“Regardless of the color of our skin,” Medley said, “we all have skin in this crisis.”

For a wider report of religious reaction to the crisis, see http://bit.ly/1D0Ugs6

The woman on the left is my mother, forming an artistic opinion about my drawing of John XXIII. And wondering if I got his nose right.

For four members of our family, a trip to Rome in November was the spiritual highlight of the year.

Yes, we saw Pope Frank. Twice. (I included some details in an earlier piece: http://bit.ly/1tAiweK). The man in white is an undisputed international celebrity, and charismatic and photogenic to boot. He is certainly important enough to stare at and photograph, and we did both.

Thanks to Martha and Victoria, two photographers with a great eye, we returned home with a superior photographic record of the trip. Their pictures, which can be found on Facebook if you know where to look, include studies of some of the world’s greatest art and architecture. Plus some nice pictures of Katie and me trying to look like beautiful Americans.

In fact, I would go so far as to say Martha’s and Victoria’s photographs are the best souvenirs we brought home with us. There we are, frozen in time in well-lit and superbly blocked portraits, gazing at Rome from the top of St. Peter’s cupola, stepping gingerly between fallen columns at the Forum, standing in the ruins of Augustus’ reception room on the Palatine, staring at invisible gladiators in the Colosseum, or gazing at dead popes in St. Peter’s basilica.

You can’t go to Rome without some kind of camera. Martha and Victoria carried SLR cameras with several lenses and filters, but you can do almost as well with your smart phone. You’ll be looking at your pictures of Rome for the rest of your life.

However. Thousands of tourists have supplemented their photographic gear with something called a selfie stick. This is an expandable wand that holds your smart phone a couple of feet beyond your head so you can photograph yourself at a perfect angle. The damn things have caught on in Rome, and hundreds of street peddlers insinuate themselves in your path on crowded historic streets to offer you a stick for 10 euros.

I first became aware of selfie sticks during our visit to the Vatican Museum. Two young men kept stepping between our group and our guide to take selfie pictures of themselves with some of the world’s greatest art as background. Every few feet they would pause to frame their vacuous smiles into their pictures. Some where there is a Facebook posting that preserves a bizarre album. Here are Andres and me blocking your view of beautiful medieval tapestries. Here are Andres and me and, out of focus behind us, a beautiful Bernini statue. Here are Andres and me and — what is that — the Pieta? 

One of the holy places I wanted to visit was the tomb of Pope John XXIII in St. Peter’s Basilica. John’s body has been perfectly preserved since his death in 1963 — a miracle, perhaps, due more to mortuary artistry than divine favor — and it is on display in the Basilica.

John XXIII, now Saint John, was one of the heroes of my youth. He was — as Andrew Greeley wrote about his fictional creation Blackie Ryan — one of the three Johns of one’s adolescent hall of heroes: John XXIII, John Kennedy and John Unitas.

Martha and I decided to sit at one of the kneelers that have been set up around John to say a prayer. As I stared at his perfectly preserved face, I kept thinking of my efforts to draw an India ink portrait of him when I was in high school. Struggling to capture his likeness, I thought I was drawing his nose too large. “No one has a nose that big,” I thought, and I kept erasing it to try again. But as I gazed at the remains of this kind old man, I realized I had been right all along. His nose is enormous.

As I was meditating on John,  a short, middle-aged priest stepped in front of the body with a selfie stick. The priest removed his glasses and held the stick out at arm’s length so he could take a picture of himself and John. The priest smiled broadly and the camera flashed. Saint John XXIII remained impassive. Or maybe he frowned a little. The priest stopped smiling and scampered away.

After we returned home to New York, I mentioned the selfie stick phenomenon to a friend.

“I can’t imagine using them in New York,” she said. “It would make it far too easy to steal your phone.”

Perhaps that caution is the one think that will keep selfie sticks out of the Bronx.

But it could well be that selfie sticks will catch on at family reunions, graduations, Christmas parties, and other places where you don’t want to leave anyone out of your pictures.

But still. How is that priest who was so eager to place himself in John XXIII’s catafalque going to use the selfie he took?

And how is he going to respond to puzzled parishioners who see the framed picture of the less than dynamic duo on his desk and whisper to themselves, “Father! What the hell were you thinking?”

I was in the attic this morning, searching for a drawing I made in 1964. I didn’t find the drawing but I discovered several long-lost items including two scrapbooks, a large framed family portrait, and a functional paper cutter. I hauled the items to the living room, where they will be set aside to make room for Christmas decorations and will soon be consigned to the attic again. Such is the cycle of life.

But I also found two minor presidential artifacts: a letter and an autographed picture from Harry Truman dated August 6, 1964; and an autographed White House portrait of Jimmy Carter, probably signed in 1977 or 1978.

I have written about my correspondence with both presidents before (See http://bit.ly/12nzPIm and http://bit.ly/1iEmxeL), but I thought these particular items had been lost forever and I was delighted to find them.

The photograph of Truman, signed more than two years after my earlier correspondence with him and eight years before his death in 1972, was personalized with my name. The “P” appears to have been reinforced after a hesitant beginning, leading me to wonder if the 80-year-old ex-president was squinting through his thick lenses to read my name. Whatever was happening — and it is impossible to understate the actual historical significance — it was a very nice touch by a retired politician who was no longer seeking votes.

The picture of Jimmy Carter was a gift from a Baptist colleague, the Rev. Mary Ann Forehand, who was working for the White House correspondence office in the Old Executive Office Building when I invited her to join the American Baptist communication staff. She used her insider influence to request autographed pictures of the president, and I was the lucky recipient of one of them. This was the original official portrait of J.C. when he assumed office in 1977. As Carter’s single term began to encounter long stretches of political turbulence, some members of his staff whispered the smiling portrait looked too sappy for the leader of the free world and it was updated with a more presidential pose. But I am delighted that, after years in the attic, this one has re-emerged into the light of day. I have, alas, lost touch with Mary Ann.

From 1946 to 1950, my family lived in an apartment on the third floor of Flora Cramer’s house on Main Street in Morrisville, N.Y. The house was reportedly the first frame house built in Morrisville, whatever that means, and the closest neighbor was Lyndon Howlett, Morrisville’s unofficial historian. I would often escape to the Howletts while my mother was preoccupied with my baby brother Larry.

But it was not Mr. Howlett’s wizened brow or aromatic rum and maple pipe tobacco that attracted me to his house. It was Mrs. Howlett’s kitchen, redolent with sweet smelling cooking aromas and populated with perfumed daughters dressed in slips.

The daughters would welcome me warmly, cooing to each other how cute I was (I was 3),  and lift me onto their seminude laps. I remember so vividly the shaved stubble on their shapely legs that I wonder if this was the beginning of my earliest erotic stirrings. But what I remember most is the molasses cookies they served with milk.

The cookies, in my sometimes lonely opinion, were delicious. They were sweetened entirely by dark molasses, which many people don’t find sweet enough. For me, the  spicy tartness in my mouth, combined with the sensation of warm legs rising and falling beneath my butt, were bliss.

Mrs. Howlett gave the cookie recipe to my mother, who passed it along to me. Over the years I have successfully recreated those cookies on a number of occasions and I loved each bite. However, none of my children liked them very much. In fact, they hated them. Consequently, I have not baked these cookies for years, mostly because five cups of flour combined with two cups of one of nature’s most effective purgatives is too much for a solo endeavor.

Recently, however, I was surprised when daughter Angela called from Southern California to ask for the recipe. I am not sure if she was trying to determine whether her unpleasant memories of the cookies had been a childish error, or perhaps she wanted to share the concoction with her anthropology students to compare it with indigenous mud pastes. Whatever the reason, I am delighted to allow the recipe to resurface.

Mrs. Howlett’s Acquired Taste Molasses Cookies are best in fall and winter, and they add an unusual if not universally appreciated ambience too any meal. I’ll be pre-heating my oven soon. If you are also inspired to try them out, let me know – as politely as you are able – what you think.

Grandma Patience was real, and she really had a daughter named Desire.

She also showed her droll wit (and spelling flexibility) in naming her other children: Wata Jencks Veltman, Sally Jencks Hogeboom, Hannah Jencks French, James Jencks Jr, Elmore Jenks, and Sylvester Jencks.

Jencks and Jenks are used interchangeably throughout family history. No doubt the c was dropped to save the cost of ink.

[Reprinted from Senior Correspondent.]

By Philip E. Jenks

“War,” said Martha Gellhorn, “happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say.”

In two sentences, Gellhorn captured the essence of war reporting.

No matter how graphic the videos of shock and awe on CNN, no matter how insightful the pundits’ advice about how to kill terrorists, no matter how piercing their denunciations of extremist jihadists, it all comes down to this: war happens to people.

Temporarily obscured in the mists of Hemingway when she was his third wife, Gellhorn emerged as a clear-eyed interpreter of human conflict.

It was important to tell the true story of war, she said, because so many people are indifferent to it.

“Unless they are immediate victims,” she observed, “the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.”

Gellhorn saw more of war than most of her contemporaries. She covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the D-Day landings, the liberation of Dachau, the Vietnam War, the Six Day War in the Middle East, and more.

Woven tightly throughout her prose was a common thread: war is caused by human stupidity and injustice; war mutilates human bodies in grotesque and ghastly ways; and war happens to people one by one.

Twenty-first century journalists have had ample opportunities to weave their own rhetorical threads. Bloody wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Ukraine, the Middle East, and God knows where, make it clear war correspondents will always be in demand.

What is less clear is whether journalists will be able to convince their viewers and readers that the basic truths of war have not changed: no war is an act of God; no war is inevitable; and wars elsewhere are everyone’s business.

CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and others have their pundits, but few of them work to get beneath the surface of the causes of war. Most discussions focus on whether President Obama is showing wise restraint or weak hesitation, whether ISIS can be defeated without boots on the ground, why Hamas keeps hurling missiles into Israeli territory, forcing Prime Minister Netanyahu to retaliate with troops and bombs.

The result is a public left largely uninformed about the human beings who are directly affected by war, or the underlying reasons wars begin. Is it merely madness and sectarian fanaticism that inspire young men to join ISIS militias? Is Hamas firing missiles into Israel solely because of an ideological bias that Israel should not exist? Are Russian rebels infiltrating Ukraine just because Vladimir Putin has megalomaniacal designs on territory?

If the public accepts those simplistic views, it’s largely due to the headline grabbing summaries of reporters and pundits. In order to attract viewers and advertisers, video coverage of wars makes them look like trailers of blockbuster summer movies, featuring noise, fire, and smoke, and starring two-dimensional politicians.

It takes more than a looping five-minute video clip to tell the whole story of a war.

It takes a reporter willing to spend weeks or months on the ground, talking to people, learning their history, observing the oppressions and injustices that spawn the desperation that leads to war.

And it takes editors and producers willing to provide sufficient time to peer beneath the headlines to tell the complex stories that rarely rise to the surface.

Perhaps if more people understood why wars begin, wars would be easier to prevent.

Very often, detailed and nuanced reporting of complicated stories is the province of freelance reporters who risk their lives to get the details.

One of these reporters was James Foley, a teacher and journalist from Rochester, New Hampshire, who worked for GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse during the Syrian Civil War.

Twice insurgents captured Foley, the first time in 2011 when he was released after 44 days.

He returned to Syria the following year and was captured again on November 22, 2012.

He became the first person with U.S. citizenship to die at the hands of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria caliphate movement (ISIS). A crude video shows him being decapitated by his captors on August 19 in the Syro-Arabian desert.

The gruesome nature of Foley’s death sheds little light on ISIS ideology, except to confirm the assumption they are a group of madmen with a theology forged in the seventh century. Sadly, the impressions left by Foley’s death will only harden the riddles Foley returned to unwrap.

In memorial services for Foley, Roman Catholic Bishop Peter Libasci of the Manchester, New Hampshire diocese, said Foley “was living his faith by bringing images t9 the world of people suffering from war and oppressive regimes.”

According to Fox News, Libasci read aloud a letter from the Vatican expressing the condolences of Pope Francis. He also prayed for another captive journalist, Steven Sotloff, and all captives.

“Jim went back again that we might open our eyes,” Libasci said. “That we might indeed know how precious is this gift. May almighty God grant peace to James and to all our fragile world.”

What James Foley knew that many of us miss is that Mideast violence is not the exclusive domain of violence and sectarian bigotries. Much of it has to do with millennia of strife between Sunni and Shi’a sects, and centuries of brutal European colonialism. It has to do with U.S. and European powers propping up brutal dictators to ensure access to oil and ports. In Israel and Palestine, it has to do with walls and roadblocks that prevent Palestinian farmers from attending their livestock or crops, and forces Palestinians — Muslims and Christians — to pass through abusive checkpoints to purchase groceries or visit the doctor.

Unfortunately, too many producers and publishers think it would take too long to tell these stories, which they fear would bore the viewing masses.

But it is in this hidden reality that people live.

Without a deeper understanding of the causes of wars — the “atrophy of imagination” Martha Gellhorn feared — peaceful solutions in the Mideast seem forever futile.

The only hope, it seems, is in reporters like Foley and Sotloff and others who put their feet on the ground and risk their lives to remind us about Gellhorn’s truth:

“War happens to people, one by one.”

And wars will continue to happen to people if we don’t invest the time to heed the reporters who remind us.

Millions have their memories.

As President Obama escalates the newest war in the Persian Gulf, the question is whether remembering September 11, 2001 eases the pain and makes sense out of all that has happened since.

Martha and I had just settled into our offices in The Interchurch Center that day, more than 100 blocks north of the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, Martha directed public relations and communication for the United Church of Christ Pension Boards on the 10th floor (as she still does), and I was communications officer of the U.S. conference for the World Council of Churches on the 9th floor.

I was probably sipping the last dregs of my morning coffee in the 9th floor office of the U.S. Conference for the World Council of Churches when Martha called. “Did you hear a plane has flown into the World Trade Center?”

Instinctively, I turned to my keyboard and typed http://www.ap.org. The Associated Press had moved a tentative story with a file picture of the twin towers.

“What a mess,” I thought. I could imagine a small plane veering off course from Teeterboro and straying into one of the 1,340 foot-high towers. No doubt some office workers in the tower had been injured.

Martha called back. “We have an office on the 19th floor,” she said. “We can see the towers from there.” I met her at the elevator and we went up. Tom, the office IT director, shook his head as we walked in and nodded toward a southerly window.

The towers were nearly seven miles south of us, but in my memory they seemed just a few blocks away. Black smoke billowed from the northern façade of the North Tower, and I still assumed an errant small plane had done the damage. Most of the people in the office had stopped looking out the window and had returned to their tasks.

We watched the smoke streaming eastward for several minutes.

“I have a service downstairs in the chapel,” Martha said.

One of her coworkers had died over the weekend, and Martha, an ordained Baptist minister, was in charge of the memorial. We thanked Tom for allowing us to satisfy our curiosity and walked out. Seconds after we closed the door behind us, the second plane hit the South Tower.

An hour later, when Martha and her colleagues emerged from the memorial service, both towers were fully involved in flames and on the verge of collapse.

Across the river in Hoboken, Martha’s cousin Tony watched in horror as people leaped from the towers to escape the flames and fell to their deaths on the plaza below.

Martha’s cousin Alina was stranded with her colleagues at Brown Brothers Harriman on nearby Wall Street. In the Empire State Building on 34th street, Alina’s husband, Steve, was making urgent calls to her office to see if she was all right.

Back at the Interchurch Center on 120th Street, my colleagues Jean and Sonia were literally holding each other up as news came of the collapse of the North Tower. Jean’s niece, who had been staying with her that summer, worked at one of the buildings adjacent to the towers and Jean had been unable to reach her.

As I sat in my office overlooking the Hudson River, I spun my radio dial, seeking additional updates. I listened briefly to an FM deejay who said he was broadcasting from one of the towers. “They’re telling us to evacuate,” he said excitedly, “But I’m staying at my post as a public service, ‘cause folks need to know what’s goin’ on …” I spun past him looking for 1010 WINS or another all news station and didn’t give the deejay a second thought. But 13 years later, I wonder: did the guy wise up and get the hell out of the tower? Or did I accidentally tune in to his last words on earth?

It wasn’t easy getting news about what was happening outside. I began receiving emails from a World Council of Churches colleague in Geneva, Switzwerland. Martin Robra, a German Lutheran peace activist, was monitoring the news in Europe and it was in one of his emails that I learned a plane had also struck the Pentagon in Washington. “You are at war,” Martin wrote ominously.

Our offices in The Interchurch Center at 120th Street and Riverside were far from Ground Zero and still unaffected by the calamity that was unfolding downtown. Two days later, a foul yellow haze that stung the eyes and burned the throat would spread throughout all of Manhattan. But in the midday hours of September 11, the air was still clear uptown. If you turned northward toward the George Washington Bridge, it was a beautifully pristine late summer day.

Outside the city, persons following the events on television wondered if all New York was in flames. Our son, Will, then a junior at Port Chester High School, left an urgent message on Martha’s cell phone. He had heard the city was under attack by military jets flying out of the White Plains airport and he pleaded with his mother to get in touch with him. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the message until hours later, when we were all safely home.

Daughter Victoria was in sixth grade in Port Chester on September 11 and we felt sure she would be safe with her teachers until the end of the day. However, daughter Katie was in a special education program in an outside school district and needed to take a school bus home. What the traffic situation would be like in Westchester County was anyone’s guess.

“Let’s go pick up Katie,” Martha said. I told Jean and Sonia that we were heading home, and they waved their hands as if to shoo us out. “Be careful,” Jean said. She had just heard that all bridges and access routes to Manhattan has been closed.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s see how far we can get.”

As it turned out, Riverside Drive was virtually empty. When we got to the Bronx-bound Henry Hudson Bridge, I looked for signs it had been closed. Instead, an MTA officer waved us through the tolls. We made it to Katie’s school in Ardsley in half the usual time.

But there were scores of cars jamming the high school parking lot. Parents from all over the district had come to take their children home. We parked at the far end of the lot and headed for the nurse’s office to sign Katie out. We found ourselves waiting in a line of anxious parents as a stressed-out gray-haired nurse scolded us.

“This is crazy,” she hissed, “You people are over-reacting,” as she impatiently scribbled her signature on dismissal slips.

After several minutes, Katie was escorted to the office by her teacher, Erin. Erin smiled at us but she must have had other things on her mind. She knew her brother, an employee at Cantor Fitzgerald, could have been one of nearly 3,000 people killed at the World Trade Center. It would be weeks before his remains were identified, but hours after the attack his fate was still unknown.

That night, as the sun began to set on September 11, the Port Chester members of the family were safely home on Wesley Avenue. Throughout the tri-state area that night, thousands of shaken people who made it home kept an eye on their neighbors’ homes to see if they returned safely. But many never did.

As supper was being prepared, I stepped outside briefly, probably to retrieve something from the car. A military fighter jet roared overhead at a low altitude; if the jet had been slower, I could have read the words on the fuselage, but it thundered angrily and disappeared. My knees buckled as I ducked instinctively, but in an instant the air was silent again. I thought to myself, “We really are at war.”

It’s difficult to exaggerate the worldwide effects of September 11. The attacks – and our reaction to the attacks – had an indelible impact on billions of people. On September 12 we learned that our British friends John and Bridget had been traveling from London to New York on September 11. When U.S. airports closed, their flight was diverted to Nova Scotia. They and other passengers were taken in by friendly Canadian farmers until the planes started flying again, on September 14.

Our daughter Lauren had planned to fly from Washington State to Philadelphia on September 11.

“I was going to a wedding in Philadelphia on the 15th,” Lauren recalls. “My flight was supposed to be a red eye leaving on the night of the 11th, but it didn’t get out until the 14th. I waited on line at (the Seattle-Tacoma airport) so long that I got free water and snacks from the Red Cross.”

Lauren was in a tiny minority of Americans who still wanted to fly that week. As it turned out, she made it to the wedding on time. “The minister pointed out that weddings are always audacious acts of hope in a world full of tragedy,” she recalls. “It’s hopeful, loving, life affirming acts like marriage that get us through everything else.”

It was not easy to find loving, life affirming acts in the aftermath of September 11. It’s not any easier today as the war in Afghanistan, launched as a direct reaction to the terror attacks, goes on and on. For many of us, the murder of Osama Bin Laden a decade after the attacks did little to ease the anger and salve the grief.

Perhaps one of the most prophetic statements that came out of September 11 appeared within days after the attacks. It was called, “Deny them their victory,” and it was written by four interfaith leaders* and signed by 4,000 people, including Martha and me and perhaps including you.

“We, American religious leaders, share the broken hearts of our fellow citizens,” the statement said. “The worst terrorist attack in history that assaulted New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, has been felt in every American community. Each life lost was of unique and sacred value in the eyes of God, and the connections Americans feel to those lives run very deep. In the face of such a cruel catastrophe, it is a time to look to God and to each other for the strength we need and the response we will make. We must dig deep to the roots of our faith for sustenance, solace, and wisdom.”

The statement continued: “The terrorists have offered us a stark view of the world they would create, where the remedy to every human grievance and injustice is a resort to the random and cowardly violence of revenge – even against the most innocent . . . The terrorists must feel victorious.

“But we can deny them their victory by refusing to submit to a world created in their image. Terrorism inflicts not only death and destruction but also emotional oppression to further its aims. We must not allow this terror to drive us away from being the people God has called us to be. We assert the vision of community, tolerance, compassion, justice, and the sacredness of human life, which lies at the heart of all our religious traditions. America must be a safe place for all our citizens in all their diversity. It is especially important that our citizens who share national origins, ethnicity, or religion with whoever attacked us are, themselves, protected among us.”

Ten years after the attacks, I still can’t bring myself to watch the television images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. They are simply too painful.

But there was another historic event that occurred less than a week after September 11, 2001, and many religious leaders have called upon people of faith to recognize it whenever they pray about September 11.

On September 17, President George W. Bush, in an extraordinary act of statesmanship, began his day with a visit to a mosque in Washington.

He bought coffee for a cafeteria full of people as he appealed to Americans to get back to everyday business and not turn against their Muslim neighbors.

The Associated Press reported that Bush removed his shoes in Muslim fashion and “padded through the ornate mosque on Washington’s Embassy Row and heard stories from his hosts about Muslim-American women afraid to leave their homes for fear of prejudiced backlash after last week’s terrorist strikes.”

“Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior,” Bush said.

He quoted from the Quran and fervently defended the Islam faith: “Islam is peace,” he said. “These terrorists don’t represent peace, they represent evil and war.”

The judgment of history is still pending on George W. Bush, and millions of his admirers and critics engage in spirited debate about his preparedness for a terrorist attack, or his decisions to go to war in Afghanistan – a war that continues to this day.

But on September 17, 2001, he demonstrated the kind of leadership the nation needed most. He made it clear that the terror attacks were the acts of mad and evil men who had no connection to millions of peace loving Muslims around the world. And he said people who felt otherwise “should be ashamed.”

It was a reminder that should engage us all as we look back on those terrible days.

And looking back, we will always wonder if the U.S. response of war and mass destruction was the correct one.

Or would the world be different today if we have responded with a courageous “vision of community, tolerance, compassion, justice, and the sacredness of human life”?
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* The writers of “Deny Them Their Victory” were Jim Wallis, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, David Saperstein, and Bob Edgar.