The Blood, the Scar

As a weekly columnist for the Ashland Times-Gazette, I have the responsibility and the privilege of writing approximately seven hundred words to be read as my neighbors sit on their patio with a second cup of coffee on Saturday morning. I enjoy the challenge of finding a subject to bring a smile, a tear, or even an argument to my regular readers, but the once-a-week Saturday format means that my thoughts may not be published in a timely manner when they address something seen as a blip on the news cycle by the time a week has passed.

In my need to write about the protests in Charlottesville, I battled with the “old news” concern, and wondered if there were possibly any more words to be written about what happened in our nation a week ago. Talking with a wise friend, I mused, “But it will have been a week already when my column is printed.” And she turned it around and said, “It’s only been a week. Write what you need to write.”

In recent weeks, I’ve read a number of novels bookended by the first and second world wars. I didn’t seek them out, but they’ve come by way of suggestions from friends, discoveries on the library shelves, and binge-reading authors I’m meeting for the first time. Through their stories, I’m experiencing the sights and sounds of the trenches of World War I, the anguish of the Nazi occupation, the courageous actions of the resistance, and the unspeakable horrors of the concentration camps. Has that unintentional immersion in the worst of man’s inhumanity to man made me particularly sensitive, I wondered, as I watched the clips of the Nazi flag being brazenly waved on the streets of an American city, an American college campus? What are we possibly forgetting from the lessons of history if we do not shudder with the sight of that flag, that salute?

And I wonder, could this happen here? What if a permit was applied for in our city? What if a demonstration was scheduled on our university campus? What would I do? How would our community react?

As a retired clergywoman, my thoughts also go to the church in times of unrest. What is our role? The images of clergy standing with linked arms in the face of trouble in Charlottesville are powerful, but what of those in communities large and small across our nation? Do we believe the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and pastor who said, “The church’s task is not simply to bind the wounds of the victim beneath the wheel, but also to put a spoke in the wheel itself”?

Shortly before we left on vacation, on my way to trim the other half of the bushes in our yard, the orange extension cord and I took a plunge off our front porch. By the next day, I looked like I’d gone ten rounds with Rocky Balboa. But within a week or so, my scabs were falling off, my bruises had faded, and my fractured nose was beginning to adjust to its new alignment. “Not displaced, no surgery needed,” was the doctor’s evaluation.

I’m sensing that same kind of experience post-Charlottesville, as we’ve watched and listened, wept and stood vigil, and argued about who is/was at fault. By now, a week later, we’re moving on, just as we did from the World Trade Center and Selma, Normandy and Auschwitz, Gettysburg and Antietam. But I won’t easily forget the copious blood that flowed that day, and I wince as my fingers trace the broken path across my nose.

Be it a week or a century, we must not forget the blood or the scar. John McCrae, a Canadian physician serving in World War I, wrote: “To you from falling hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders fields.” In a time of great disquiet in our nation, might we flinch as we trace the reminders of our brokenness, yet lift our own lighted torch to drive out the darkness.