Wednesday, August 24, 2011
I Am Sorry!
I was recently in a museum displaying Rodin's “The Prodigal”. It is a large bronze sculpture, with a man lifting his arms to heaven in a heart-rending gesture of regret. Sculptures don't speak, yet a comic-strip like bubble seems to hang over this one, containing the words “I am sorry, I was wrong”. While Rembrandts painting of the same Biblical story focuses on the father and his readiness to welcome the son back, Rodin hones in on the son; in fact all other actors are absent from the scene and have to be imagined. Maybe this has to do with the fact that the artist intended it as a study for his monumental work “The Gates of Hell”: in the face of death, at the end of one's life, regret and sorrow will maybe figure prominently.
How powerful a phrase, yet how difficult to utter: “I am sorry”. Even when we know we have messed up, it costs us so much to admit it, and even more to express it publically. The gripping film “Dead Men Walking” shows how long it takes Sean Penn to admit his guilt of murdering a young couple; yet when he does, with the help of Sister Helen Prejean, the weight of the world falls off his shoulders, even though he still has to face the death penalty. “I am sorry, I was wrong”- the magic word, but so rarely spoken.
After the end of apartheid in South Africa, the government decided to replace the witch hunt with a wiser and more subtle institution, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): people were invited to give testimony about human rights violations and to request amnesty in return for having stepped forward and confessed their crime. Many took up that offer, and many did not. For the time being, it seems easier to hide with one's guilt than to admit it. May this is why we find so few politicians who admit their mistakes, and even fewer who survive their admission. Yet the strength of a man (or woman) lies exactly in their ability to face up to their mistakes and make amends.
The power of the Prodigal's story is that the simple statement of sorrow and regret opens up a new life; while the TRC only granted 859 amnesties and refused 5000 others, God is always ready to pardon. All he is looking for is honest regret. Maybe we should set up copies of Rodin's sculpture in more public places?
Who Is Afraid of Sharks?
“I don't need easy. I just need possible”. That is the reply of a young girl to her dad who points out that learning to surf is not going to be easy. The girl is thirteen years old, and a year earlier a tiger shark had bitten off her left arm while she was surfing. Now she wants to get back on the board, with only one arm. Her name is Bethany Hamilton, and her (true) story makes good reading in “Soul Surfer”. Bethany has lots of setbacks, but eventually turns pro and wins some major competitions, even though a few months after her near-fatal accident things looked very different. But thanks to a very supportive family, her faith in God, and a lot of grit and determination, she overcame the odds.
As I was pondering Bethany's story on an airplane (where else?) somewhere between Nairobi and Istanbul, above quote struck me deeply. It would have been easy not to try, or to give up, especially after her first futile attempts. But she did not choose the easy route- as long as it was possible, she was going to try. We all have missing limbs: if it is not a left arm which a shark has bitten off, then it's a fear of heights, a hatred of crowed social situations, or a sense of inferiority. Some of those handicaps we were born with, others we developed thanks to wild animals in our environment which attacked us, physically or emotionally. And most of us are crippled by these scars: I have a friend who struggles leaving his home, let alone his town; famous piano player Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli cancelled more concerts than he played, because of an usual case of nerves; and my heart sinks whenever I board an airplane any smaller than a 747 because chances are that I will feel the slightest turbulence and get afraid. In other words we are all handicaps. The question is what we do with them.
Bethany has inspired me. Not so much because she is winning trophies again; more because she did not listen to the little black dog inside her telling her “it will never work”. Instead she was willing to try, to risk, even to risk failure. And the rest is history. What are you risking this summer? As for me, I am going sailing for a week, even though I wonder what the waves will do to my stomach. But hey, I don't need easy: just possible!
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
K2 und Augustinus
Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner hat heute den K2 Gipfel (8611 Meter) erreicht und damit alle 14 Achttausender dieser Erde ohne zusätzlichen Sauerstoff erklommen. Wenn immer Menschen sich zu solchen Taten aufschwingen fragen andere, was es wohl sei, das jemanden dazu treibe. „Motivation“ wäre die technische und nüchterne Antwort: jeder von uns hat eine kleine Maschine, die uns antreibt, und diese wird je nach
Person von unterschiedlichen Dingen gespeist. Für manche ist es Abenteuer, für andere Risiko, für den Dritten das Überwinden der eigenen Grenzen. Doch wenn sie zurückkommen dauert es keine Woche, bis sie den nächsten Trip planen. Irgendwie hält das High nicht lange an.
Gerade Bergsteiger haben oft noch eine andere Motivation. Irgendwie fühle ich mich Gott besonders nahe, wenn ich am Gipfel stehe. Das ist keine seltene Aussage, und sowohl ethnologische Studien als auch die vielen Gipfelkreuze zumindest in westlichen Ländern bestätigen dieses Gefühl. Irgendwie sind Berge etwas Heiliges, und im Besteigen macht man sich auf den Weg zu Gott. Moses tat das so, der Prophet Elia, und viele andere in der Bibel. Aber wohnt Gott wirklich auf einem Berg? „Ich war im Weltall, und Gott habe ich nicht gefunden“, das war die Aussage von Yuri Gargarin, nachdem er als erster die Erde in einer Raumkapsel um
kreist hatte. Ähnliches könnte man vermutlich auch über Mont Blanc oder K2 sagen: „Ich war oben, Gott habe ich aber nicht gefunden“ Wie immer wir Gott definieren, gerade seine Nichtgeschöpflichkeit macht ihn zu Gott, per Definition. So darf es uns nicht Wunder nehmen, wenn wir ihn nicht mit geschöpflichen Sinnen wahrzunehmen vermögen. Und dennoch ist es vielleicht doch nicht ganz so einfach? Beim Bergsteigen scheint man sich oft den geschöpflichen Grenzen entziehen zu können, sowohl weil man die eigenen Grenzen zumindest für kurze Zeit überwindet, aber auch weil der Berg irgendwie aus der irdischen Welt in die himmlische hineinzuragen scheint. Daher sind Berge in vielen Religionen Schwellenorte, wo man vom Diesseits ins Jenseits zu schreiten vermag, zumindest für ein paar Augenblicke.
Und noch etwas: was immer wir für ein Motivationstypus sind, wir alle teilen
einen unersättlichen Hunger nach der Ewigkeit. Augustinus, der afrikanische Theologe, umschreibt das folgendermaßen: „Unser Herz ist rastlos oh Herr, und es wird es ruhig wenn es ruht in dir“ Mit anderen Worten sind alle Menschen zutiefst auf das Jenseits ausgerichtet. Jeder Versuch, diesen Hunger mit etwas anderem als Gott selbst zu stillen, muß fehlschlagen. Aber wenn wir diesem Verlangen nachgehen, dann begegnen wir Gott, gerade an Orten, wo wir die natürlichen Grenzen übersteigen: beim Sport, in der Kunst, in der Meditation. So würde es mich nicht überraschen, wenn Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner doch begegnet wäre. Hoffentlich aber nur kurz, und sie schafft es heil wieder den Berg herunter.
Monday, August 22, 2011
News of the World
Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.(Joseph Goebbels)
Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. (Joseph Pulitzer)
If it were not for London riots, the British headlines would still be dealing with Rupert Murdoch and his infamous “News of the World”. Many of us were shocked, while not necessarily surprised, by the depths that some reporters stooped to in trying to get some juicy stories: hacking of phones, paying off police officers in return for exclusives, doing everything to get your hands on classified information. All this has lead to some disillusionment, or at least to the confirmation of the view that the press is dirty, in bed with the government, and whatever they write cannot be trusted.
While I am sympathetic to this view, I would like to offer a slightly different perspective. I have just come back from East Africa, and newspapers there are a joke. They all report about corruption, but you cannot help but feel that most of the articles are carefully vetted so as to only ever accuse the little fish and leave the big crooks to comfortably run the country. Both the scope and quality of the articles remind you more of a school or student paper than of the press of the free country- not a good sign for democracy.
In February of 2002 an American-Jewish journalist was beheaded in Pakistan. Daniel Pearl had been writing for the Wall Street Journal and a week earlier had been abducted while seeking to meet a known Islamic leader. To this day it is unclear why he was targeted, and even though a person was executed for supposedly having killed him, the reasons for Pearl's dea
th are unclear-almost. Whatever the specifics which lead to his kidnapping, he was undoubtedly chosen because he was a journalist. His paper was accused of cooperating with the US government and its intelligence community, so killing him was possibly some kind of act of revenge. But Pearl pursued his passion to get behind the immediate scoops and to unearth background facts, stories, information. And that in itself, even not in league with the CIA, was dangerous and potentially lethal.
Year in, year out, thousands of journalist do the same thing in various countries around the world, and catch hell because of it: Anna Politkovskaya was murdered for her critical views of the Moscow regime, in Latin America and the Middle East alike journalists get jailed, sentenced to death, thrown out of the country for what they seek to publish. Not all of them are simply trying to get a news story out: many are trying to hold the government or big business accountable for what they do, and this costs them dearly (see http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/ ). In other words, while not all journalists are saints, not all of them are devils either, and some of them are heroes. And whether Watergate or “Cash for Honours”, journalists were the ones who managed to have such stories exposed. So next time we bad-mouth the press, let's remember Pham Minh Hoang who is in jail in Vietnam.
