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On a June day in 1944, two weeks after D-Day, a few miles from the bloody shores of Omaha Beach, members of the 508th Squadron 404th Fighter Group worked to carve an airstrip out of the Normandy countryside. Their efforts cost the lives of 28 Army engineers at the hands of the German snipers who persisted and fought after the D-Day battle. Most were located and captured or killed. One lone sniper still remained in the nighttime distance.
Back at the airstrip, Capt. Jack Tueller took out his trumpet. He'd used it on many a starlit night to entertain the men of the 508th. His commander told him, "Not tonight. I know your trumpet makes the most glorious sound, but with the sniper still out there, you will put us in harms way."
In Tueller's own words, "I thought to myself, that German sniper is as lonely and scared as I am. How can I stop him from firing? So I played the German love song, 'Lili Marleen,' (made famous in the late '30s by Marlene Dietrich, the famous German actress). And I wailed that trumpet over those apple orchards of Normandy. And he didn't fire."
The next morning, the military police approached Tueller to tell him they had a German prisoner on the beach who kept asking, "Who played that trumpet last night?"
Tueller describes the moment, "I grabbed my trumpet and went down to the beach. There was a 19-year-old German boy, scared and lonesome. He was dressed like a French peasant to cloak his role as a sniper. And, crying, he said, 'I couldn't fire because I thought of my fiancé. I thought of my mother and father. My role is finished.'"
"He stuck out his hand, and I shook the hand of the enemy," Tueller said. "[But] he was no enemy, because music had soothed the savage beast."
Every one of us is afraid at times. Who knows all the reasons. But when it happens we revert to a zero sum view of the world. Resources--including compassion, mercy, kindness and generosity--are finite. Life is short and you get what you can. And if I don't know you, you are my enemy... or at the very least, someone to be mistrusted.
I love this story because music unlocks mercy... and who knows, maybe even the possibility for forgiveness or healing. And yes... it is better to light a candle for someone than to curse them in their darkness...
I have found great solace in the story that took place after the tragic bombing in the town of Omagh, Northern Ireland (in 1998 twenty-nine people died as a result of the attack and approximately 220 people were injured; the attack was described by the BBC as "Northern Ireland's worst single terrorist atrocity" and by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, as an "appalling act of savagery and evil"). After the attack, Daryl Simpson created a choir of Catholic and Protestant teenagers, to use music as a way to begin the healing. ("Love Rescue Me" is a U2 song sung by The Omagh Community Youth Choir. www.youtube.Omagh )
Love rescue me
Come forth and speak to me
Raise me up and don't let me fall
No man is my enemy
My own hands imprison me
Love rescue me
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I think about the little things--the profound determination to light just one candle... or play a trumpet into the night air--that really do make all the difference.
I know that many of our global problems are complicated by political nuances, but I grow very weary of our notion that solutions begin by shouting one another down. It is no surprise that the weight of the world's malaise--complete with political-pundit-noise-pollution--adds stress to our own daily quandaries.
But here's the deal: it's too easy to fuel the fire of misunderstanding and intolerance and small-mindedness when I witness all of this through the lens of my own labels. And I do know that when we label, we tend to exclude, rather than include.
More often than not, Tion Medon's counsel to Obi wan kanobi on Utapau (for Star Wars aficionados) is right on. "There is no war here unless you brought it with you."
I read this quote, from a pastor, speaking from the floor at a Southern Baptist convention, "I believe the Bible. Jesus believed the Bible. Southern Baptists believe the Bible. It's been said that we've got room for the most conservative and the most liberal in the southern Baptist convention. But brother, I say that's too much room." (No, I didn't make this up.)
I can tell you that we were very skilled at that kind of intolerance in the church of my youth. We knew exactly who God didn't care for. And we made no bones about naming names. (We never called it gossip, of course. We called it "Prayer Concerns.") You know the ones I'm talking about, the ones who would burn for eternity. What I don't get is how it made us feel so, well, superior. Maybe, we were afraid that we weren't necessarily on God's good side either.
What I am learning is this: Perhaps the very people I exclude, are the ones who carry the light--the candle--that will allow me to see. That will allow me to see the Grace of God. And the expansive reach of God's acceptance. To every single one of us.
Those who hurt, are angry and have nothing left to give,
they are my meeting place with God. Dorothy Day
The exercise of mercy is the measure of freedom--that state of being which is universally hailed as a human ideal in the Western world. When he healed on a Sabbath, Jesus was violating the rules and norms of his time because he was merciful, not because he was a liberal. Jesus understood freedom from the point of view of mercy, not the other way around. For him, freedom meant that nothing could stand in the way of the exercise of mercy. John Sobrino
Whether I like it or not, it seems that the kingdom of God will be radically and scandalously inclusive. Think of that. God loves infidels, idiots and heathens. Even the enemy. Now that, that is one radical hospitality.
Thought for your week ahead.
Psychologists have a word which is probably used more frequently than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word "maladjusted." Now in a sense all of us must live the well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I suggest that you too ought to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob-rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system, which take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence. I call upon you to be maladjusted. The challenge to you is to be maladjusted--as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, "Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream;" as maladjusted as Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; as maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, in words lifted to cosmic proportions, "All men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." As maladjusted as Jesus who dared to dream a dream of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men. The world is in desperate need of such maladjustment. Martin Luther King, April, 1957
NOTE: Capt. Tueller went on to fight in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and served in the Pentagon during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War. He retired in 1966 as a colonel, having earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, almost two dozen air medals and two Legions of Merit, the nation's highest peacetime award. Now 89, Tueller takes care of Marjorie, his wife of 68 years, who has Alzheimer's disease.
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