We are four years into the war in Iraq. It is a war that was as unjust as it was unwise in its inception, that has been carried out in a gratuitously violent fashion and whose burden is being borne almost solely by a handful of young men and women in uniform who are being physically, psychologically and spiritually brutalized.
Any way you cut it, it is an immoral enterprise that stains the reputation of America and Christianity on whose behalf it is ostensibly being waged. It begs us -- as Americans and Christians -- to speak out for a just and speedy end to the horror and futility.
But in our pews and pulpits, there is a deadening silence, an unwillingness to speak truth to power, an averting even of our eyes from the truth that no longer can be hidden. It is a truth that is no longer -- as if it ever was -- acceptable.
"A time comes," Martin Luther King Jr. said 40 years ago, "when silence is betrayal." "That time has come for us," he added, "in relation to Vietnam."
And now it has come for us in relation to Iraq.
To be sure, our bishops have spoken out and pointed the way forward. I think especially of our bishop of California, Marc Andrus, who last December heard others counsel propriety and the dignity of office…and found greater dignity lying on the ground for peace before a federal office. And I think of our Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who told us in January that she was "deeply saddened" by the president's announcement of a new escalation of the war in Iraq.
But it is a message that has had a hard time making it through the red doors of our parish churches. Too many parishioners want a tasteful experience in church and are reluctant to take Christ's message out those same doors. Too many pastors are reluctant to rock the boat with uncomfortable messages.
And everyone is fearful of mixing faith and politics -- as if they were divisible. They seem never to have heard the words of Oscar Romero, a latter-day martyr for justice and peace: "A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone's skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed -- what gospel is that?"
What gospel indeed! Christ's message of peace -- of the shalom that is not just the absence of war, but rather the justice and positive sense of well-being that underlies true peace -- can be not only unsettling to hear, but also difficult to bear witness to.
But there is much witnessing to do. For, as William Sloane Coffin, reminds us: "Peace does not come rolling in on the wheels of inevitability. We can't just wish for peace. We have to will it, fight for it, suffer for it, demand it from our governments as if peace were God's most cherished hope for humanity, as indeed it is."
If we really want that peace, we must be honest with ourselves and clear with our government about how to get it. The president, in announcing his Iraq "surge" in January, rightfully challenged those who disagree with his plan to articulate an alternative. That plan has failed and it is, indeed, time to implement an alternative that will end an unjust war and further bloodshed.
Silence in the face of such further senseless bloodshed is betrayal. It is time to speak out and work for de-escalation, negotiation and reconciliation.
The task will not be easy. For, as Dr. King said in that speech of 40 years ago, the mission to which we are called "is a most difficult one.
"Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world…But we must move on."
And, he concluded: "Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak…"
We must speak!
-- The Rev. Vicki Gray, deacon at St. James Episcopal Church, San Francisco, is a retired senior foreign service officer with a Ph.D. in political science. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, she is a Vietnam veteran and taught at the National Defense University. To respond to this commentary -mail commentary@episcopal-life.org. We welcome your own guest commentary.
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