By Beko - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
Why do people near death call for their mother?
I've been working weekends. It's nice that I had yesterday off work. I was trying to piece together some picture of negotiations for peace in Ukraine--responding to President Zelensky's visit to the White House.
I read various pages on proposals for negotiations from some American think tanks and was feeling disheartened. I looked at a little Storyteller figurine on my window sill, and mused about it. In my musings I also thought about this sculpture. Instead of searching for the sculpture, but with it pictured in mind, I searched:
"Why do people near death call for their mother?"
One of the pages that came up was an essay by Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today Magazine, Why Do Dying Men Call for “Mama?”.
I have a lot of contact with MAGA folks and many consider themselves staunch Christians. Often they, with expressions of pity, express the important difference between us and them: that we are not. I generally let the matter rest, they're not precisely wrong anyhow. Many of the stories I heard as a boy, and even listen to now, are Christian stories. So I wonder if they imagine that I don't know these stories too?
In his essay Russell Moore uses stories to think about an important question we share. It's a method familiar and appropriate for me.
The photo is of a version of Käthe Kollwitz's Pietà executed by Harald Haake that is installed at the he Neue Wache in Berlin, a memorial to the victims of war and dictatorship. Kolowitz emphasized that her sculpture, dedicated to her son who was killed in World War I, was not a religious work despite reference to ecclesiastical art. Perhaps what's important is the belief in mothers and not the belief in God. But as we're all born of mothers, our humanity is tangled up in religion.
Brian Eno in talking about a new book he created with Bette A., What Art Does, said that art is a way people use to imagine futures. Art is necessary to imagine peace.
To my own mind and heart the transactions proposals for peace are woefully inadequate. I believe there is wisdom in a memorial to the victims of war and dictatorship being a woman holding her dead son. How can peace negotiations succeed without remembering those calling out for their mothers? We are people and no peace can be secure without remembering our humanity.
If I hadn't found Russell Moore's essay, yesterday, I probably would have missed his powerful essay, The Moral Cost of Murdering Ukraine, published in Christianity Today yesterday.
The American government's actions against Ukrainians can't be separated from our actions against Palestinians. We have some reckoning we urgently need to do. We are called to "create something good."
