CHAPTER 3
NATIONAL ATONEMENT
In spiritual terms, the state of the soul is the awakened state, while the mortal personality dwells in perpetual sleep. That is why enlightened masters are often called the “awakened ones.” Great souls—and all of us have a capacity for spiritual greatness when our hearts are open wide—have the ability to see beyond personality to the more spiritually real world than that of practical, worldly concerns.
Behind every human event is a spiritual drama, a deeper movement of the soul toward greater darkness or greater light. With every event, the soul either forgets itself or remembers itself, is either veiled by fear or shining forth in love. The individual life is a soul-drama, and so is the collective life of a nation, an ethnic group, a civilization, and so on.
We have established already that the Founding Principles of the United States were a burst of light for all humanity. They form a system of liberty and justice, both of which are faces of the divine. But we have also eatablished that, from our earliest days, the spiritual light of the United States has at times been eclipsed by the darkness of certain historical forces, many of which our Founders themselves had not outgrown. The march of modern civilization from its most primitive to its most evolved state—from the power of brute force to the power of soul force—is not always a straight but sometimes a jagged line. Two steps forward, one step back, three steps sideways, and so goes history.
The plan of spiritual evolution is marked not only by God’s will that we move ever in the direction of love, but also by another of God’s creative principles: that humanity has free will. What that means is that in any given moment, it is our choice whether we move toward love or retreat from it. What is not love is fear. But in the larger scheme of things, there is a limit past which lovelessness cannot remain. Fear is not life-giving enough to sustain itself. We can move in the direction of fear only so long before it brings us to our knees or to our end.
God is all-forgiving. He does not seek to judge and punish us, but to correct and heal us. He is not invested in our guilt but in our innocence. The spiritual principle by which He helps us return to love when we have strayed from its ways is the principle of Atonement.
The Atonement was introduced into human consciousness by God Himself, as a response to our capacity for fear. It is our eternal opportunity to choose again. That is what makes the Atonement a miracle—it is something introduced into the laws of time and space, by a power beyond them both. Grace supersedes the law of karma. To atone is to admit our errors, praying that God free us from what would otherwise be their inevitable consequences. It is a humble return of our minds to God’s love. It is to recognize where we ourselves have taken a path away from God’s will, and ask to be corrected and forgiven and healed. The story of the Prodigal Son makes clear how delighted the father is when the son who strayed returns. By willingly and consciously unburdening ourselves of the weight of our mistakes, we are given the chance to begin again, to go forward in life from a healed perspective.
Could America atone? Could America not use a miracle? The command to atone is a universal spiritual theme. In the Jewish religion, Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, where Jews admit our errors of the past year, asking God’s forgiveness and for His willingness to inscribe us in the Book of Life for another year. Catholics are called to confess their sins in regular confession. In Alcoholics Anonymous, “we admit to God, and to ourselves; the exact nature of our wrongs.”
In an individual life, the importance of taking stock of our own sins—as opposed to indulging the ever-present temptation to catalogue someone else’s—is a well-understood spiritual imperative. We cannot heal without it. And what of the life of a nation? Do we have collective sins to atone for as well? Is Atonement part of our national healing?
Abraham Lincoln thought so. In proclaiming a National Day of Fasting and Prayer on March 30, 1863, Lincoln said,
We have been preserved, these many years; in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!
He added,
It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness. It is the duty of nations as well as of men, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon. . . .
And what are America’s sins or spiritual errors? Some are open to interpretation, of course, but some are clearly not. There are three main areas where America’s need to atone weighs heavily on our national psyche: our cruel treatment, indeed genocide, of the Native American people; our racism toward African Americans throughout our history; and the terrible mistakes that were the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
A GREAT NATION, like a great person, is not one who has never fallen down, but one who has done what it takes to get back up. Once we’re mature enough, we understand that there isn’t one among us who has not made mistakes. The issue is not whether we have erred but, rather, what is God’s attitude toward human errors? What would He have our attitudes be toward error in ourselves and others?
Atonement is the release from fear, not a dive deeper into it. It is a corrective device, not a punishment, to admit the exact nature of our wrongs and to do our best to make them right. Atonement is essential to the healing of the United States, because there will be no new America until we have done everything possible to right the wrongs of the old one.
Our nation, for many reasons, has developed a public personality that has great difficulty admitting when we have been wrong. Politicians, who ideally should be our primary healers, seem particularly loath to offend any voters by pointing out America’s errors. This deeply obstructs our national healing because a collective, like an individual, simply cannot grow without taking responsibility for its mistakes.
This clearly annoys other nations, which find our sometimes constant finger-wagging in their direction while refusing to admit our own transgressions the stuff of outrageous nerve. Even this, however, is secondary to the fact “that, from a spiritual perspective, God Himself is not amused. “God shall not be mocked” means simply that He isn’t.
What is our resistance to saying, “We have been very wrong. We are sorry and we apologize,” in situations where it is so very clear that our capacity for error is as great as anyone else’s? Are we afraid our children will find us weaker for doing so? Should we not rather be afraid that we are teaching them a false sense of strength—one that does not admit mistakes or humbly ask forgiveness? Should our children not know that, in fact, we are a great nation, with much to celebrate and be proud of, but that has also made mistakes and must ever be on guard against making them again?
Atonement is more than a mere apology. To atone is to do more than say you’re sorry; it is to commit to never do it again. When we atone for past abuses toward someone, our prayer is that God remove whatever character defect within us led to the abuse to begin with, and transform us into someone not likely to repeat the error. And atonement includes the making of amends wherever and however possible.
Many people would say today, “Hey, I wasn’t a slave owner! It’s not my responsibility!” or even, “It’s tragic what they did to the Native Americans, but hey, it’s over.” Yet the concept bears a closer look. Are these things really over? Doesn’t the answer to that question have something to do with who you are and where you live? For poverty-stricken Native Americans living on reservations, or poverty-stricken African-American children living in the inner city, it could be argued that these situations are not over. Their legacies live on. The sins, or misperceptions, of the parents have been handed down to the children in successive generations, and while the original abuses no longer occur, they have “legs” that continue through the course of history. Contemporary poverty is the great-grandchild of abuses long past.
The abolition of slavery could be likened to the removal of a malignant tumor. The question for the doctor would not just be “Did you get out the tumor?” but “Did you get out all the cancer?” As long as there are any cancer cells left in the body, there is danger—because cancer spreads. An institution has been abolished, but the thinking that gave rise to it still lives. When it comes to slavery and racism, we got out the tumor but we didn’t get out all the cancer.
To do that, it would help to apply the tenets of holistic healing. We must address the deeper causal issues involved in racial and ethnic tension today, and then apply the powers of body, mind, and spirit to bring forth the healing of our national wounds. It was another generation’s job to abolish slavery from our country; it is this generation’s job to abolish racism from our hearts.
Forgiveness and Amends
Some people wish we were a color-blind society, but would that really be so wonderful? Homogenizing everyone so as to offend no one is hardly the way to true healing. It is both our unity and our diversity, after all, that underlies the American ideal. The only way we can become truly color-blind—that is, get to the point where we see each other only through the eyes of spirit, not even recognizing physical color—is if we first acknowledge the brilliance of the various colors.
Metaphysically, healing occurs when the darkness is brought to the light. You can’t just say, “Okay, everybody. Let’s love each other and pretend our colors don’t exist, okay?” and then expect everything to be great. Of course not. All that does is to force our issues down deeper, and thus to ultimately exacerbate them. If you go to the doctor with a broken arm, you don’t pretend you’re there to heal your leg. The doctor says, “Let me take a look at that arm.” And similarly, the divine physician says, “Let me take a look at that wound in your psyche,” not, “Let’s ignore that wound.” We need to show it to Him, not cower from Him.
Years ago President Clinton initiated a “national conversation” on race, and certainly with the best of intentions. But that conversation never went deep enough for genuine healing to occur. It remained shallow, for the most part, because most people involved in it did not feel emotional permission to get real, to be authentic, to tell it like it really is. Such a conversation, in order to be meaningful, must be facilitated by someone with the professional skill set to create emotional safety for everyone involved—including those with two or three hundred years of unexpressed anger burrowed deep in their cells. Each of us is carrying around not only our own issues but also the issues of our parents and grandparents and their grandparents before them; like the adult children of alcoholic parents, we are living lives tainted by unprocessed feelings belonging to people long since gone. Psychologically, the United States is like a dysfunctional family system in which huge secrets go undiscussed, unprocessed, breeding all manner of unconscious turmoil within various family members.
Within each of us, however, there is a reservoir of divine power that responds fully to our invitation to enter and restore us. Whether we call this force God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Jewish shekina, the Atman, the Oversoul, nonviolence, universal love, or whatever other words we wish, it is the all-powerful action of a “higher power.” This power cannot work, however, counter to our free will; it must be invoked or consciously invited into our thought system. Then and only then can the Atonement principle free us of the consequences of past mistakes.
Through the power of the Atonement, we summon a higher power to do what the mortal mind by itself cannot do. The hand of God comes upon us and heals our hearts. As we make amends to those to whom we owe amends and try to forgive those who have hurt us, healing forces are released. Through Atonement in the present, we both heal the past and release the future. As America atones for its mistakes, allowing itself the grief and sadness without which hearts cannot heal, love will replace the anger that underlies so much of our national life.
Spiritual understanding takes us beyond a traditional understanding of our problems, and beyond a traditional set of solutions. That is why it is such an important new addition to our political awareness. Some problems take heart work, not just head work. All the laws in the world can’t take a nation through its grieving or to its knees. Our wisdom will do that, or ultimately circumstances will. Those are our only two choices.
In the twenty-first century humanity is being challenged to bring our external realities into line with our internal ones. There are many uncried tears in this country, and every day we put off crying them, we simply create more tears for our children to cry later. Healing any area begins to heal them all.
DANCES WITH DEATH
Native Americans had lived on this continent for 1,000 generations before our European ancestors “discovered” it. The wisdom of the indigenous peoples of North America graced this soil for centuries before the white intruders arrived. It is estimated that in 1492 anywhere from 10 to 25 million indigenous people lived north of Mexico. Within 150 years, as a result of war and disease, there were fewer than a million Indians left here alive.”
Part of the irony of the devastation of the Native American population by white expansion is that the Western world is now near the brink of global disaster because we lack contact with the very quality of consciousness that so many of the Native peoples personified. We killed them, and now we need them. How much better off America would be today had our ancestors been wise enough to take advantage, on a mass level, of the extraordinary opportunity presented to them to marry European and Native American cultures. Using anthropologist Riane Eisler’s terms in her landmark book The Chalice and the Blade, they opted for the dominator rather than partnership model of human development. The only hope for humanity today is if we let go the dominator model and embrace the partnership model instead.
Americans love cowboys. We’ve embraced the myth of the brave pioneer, the explorer of strange lands, the conqueror of unexpected dangers. There’s an upside to that from which clearly we were born as a nation. But the myth has a dark side as well, and processing that myth is critical to our healing. Once again, the yang is extraordinary, but woe the absence of yin, of feeling and understanding. Whether the explorer cowboy pioneer we embrace is Christopher Columbus sailing to America, Buffalo Bill riding out West, or a modern CEO of a multinational corporation expanding uninvited into communities and nations around the globe, it should not be forgotten that that figure, despite his courage and self-sufficiency, is an outlaw. He is not known for his respect for other people, his honor of those who got there first, or his willingness to leave well enough alone when told that he can’t have his way.
The way consciousness operates is that a myth represents a part of ourselves. If we applaud in a myth what should not be applauded, then (1) we are stuck at that place within ourselves, and (2) we are at the effect of that place within ourselves. The price we pay for admiring the conqueror is that we will inevitably be conquered. The universe will make sure of it; it’s an area where we have something to learn.
Demythologizing this figure, removing him (or her) from his pedestal in our imagination, will help free us from his dominion. Our misplaced respect, as well as its dismantling, begins on a symbolic level. Our glorification of Christopher Columbus, for instance, is a mythological distortion, and repealing Columbus Day would be a move in the direction of national healing. For all the fiction created around him, Columbus was a murderer of indigenous peoples, and exalting him is a symbol of our neurotic attraction to violent outlaws. At our current stage of development, if someone violates one person, we can see that the person is a criminal. But if the individual violates many, the material power involved can weirdly obscure the horror of the deed. Part of our evolution involves healing our deadly unconscious connection between brute force and excitement. It is at the core of humanity’s problems, as evidenced by our national as well as personal politics. Once again, if just one person attacks another, it’s obviously horrible. But if a nation attacks another nation—and the attacking nation happens to be us—then all too often it’s a reason to have a drink and celebrate.
Given the fact that Columbus’s life was a model for the standard of enslavement and killing that came to characterize much of European settlement in the New World, to honor him is deeply insulting to our Native American citizens. Moreover, it stunts the collective psyche of the nation that we are so dishonest about our history.
In 1992, at the time of the quincentennial celebration of his “discovery” of America, there was a national rethinking of Columbus’s appropriate place in history. The National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical body in the United States, called on Christians to refrain from celebrating the quincentennial, saying, “What represented newness of freedom, hope, and opportunity for some was the occasion for oppression, degradation, and genocide for others.” When it comes to celebrating Columbus or Columbus Day, we should just say no.
I have heard people acknowledge that Columbus himself poses a problem, yet they wouldn’t want to give up Columbus Day as a holiday because it celebrates the contributions of Italians to American civilization. If what we are excited about, and indeed we should be, is how many people from other lands have enriched America, then perhaps we could change Columbus Day to Immigrant’s Day; I realize how many people today would not want that, of course, but that’s all the more reason why we should propose it.
We are not so much undereducated regarding Native American history in this country as we are wrongly educated. For better or for worse, we are taught as much by television and movies as we are by textbooks, and in both cases, we have been fed misleading stereotypes regarding the “Cowboy and Indian” days. There was nothing romantic about that era from the Native American point of view. By the late 1800s, there was little left to do but clean up the mess after centuries of the white European’s complete devastation of the indigenous American culture. Native Americans by then were finished as a major civilization; their numbers were decimated and their cultural subjugation was nearly complete.
Brutish behavior toward Native Americans had started centuries before, but that behavior was codified into American law in the nineteenth century. In 1830, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, paving the way for the forced relocation of the Cherokee nation. What followed was an intense political controversy, in which many brave Americans—including the celebrated Tennessee Senator David Crockett—stood up for conscience against the injustice of the U.S. policy toward Native Americans. His words ring powerfully through the air today: “I would sooner be honestly damned than hypocritically immortalized.” Alas, however, he spoke them to no avail.
In his book Don’t Know Much About History, author Kenneth C. Davis writes:
Early in the summer of 1832, General Scott and the United States Army began the invasion of the Cherokee Nation.
In one of the saddest episodes of our brief history, men, women and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift forts with minimal facilities and food, then forced to march a thousand miles (some made part of the trip by boat in equally horrible conditions). . . . About 4,000 Cherokee died as a result of the removal. The route they traversed and the journey itself became known as “The Trail of Tears” or, as a direct translation from Cherokee, “The Trail Where They Cried”. . . .
And so a country formed fifty years earlier on the premise “that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” brutally closed the curtain on a culture that had done no wrong.
While the Trail of Tears is the most dramatic single example of our nation’s violent behavior toward Native Americans, it was unfortunately part of a much larger historical pattern. What might have been a most glorious cultural partnership—we should remember how many Native Americans graciously welcomed their new white “friends” from across the ocean—became instead the most debased domination of one culture by another. It is left to us to atone for past errors, and seek to redress them.
While in some cases in our history it was death to Native Americans, in others it was merely death to their culture. “Helping” people become “more like us” is more oppression than liberation unless those people want to! And in so many cases, why would they? Native Americans could see, long before we did, the spiritual errors of the white man’s way, the insane brutality of an order that made the word “bigger” more important than the word “good,” and that values outer power over internal wisdom.
While the majority of Native Americans had sought to live peacefully with the white man, their proffers of peace had been met by murder, enslavement, and land theft. The basic suppression of Native American culture became an entrenched cultural phenomenon in America that continues to this day.
Throughout the twentieth century, Native Americans were the poorest of the poor in American society. In the early 1900s, Native Americans were concentrated in remote regions of the nation, distant from urban centers of economic growth. From 1890 to 1930, the federal government’s so-called allotment programs vigorously promoted farming as a means for Native Americans to become self-sufficient, but the farmland they were allotted was often arid and of poor quality. In some areas, many tribes were former nomadic hunters and had neither the knowledge nor the desire to become farmers. The history of this period is replete with examples of the most egregious violations of Indian rights.
After forty years, during which time Indians had failed to become self-sufficient, President Roosevelt created the Indian New Deal, trying to help reservations deal with the economic hardship created by the Great Depression. With the outbreak of World War II, however, the Indian New Deal was cut short and a new set of policies—“termination” and “relocation”—were designed to dissolve reservations and resettle American Indians to urban areas. Between 1952 and 1972, more than 100,000 American Indians were relocated to cities, under the belief, illusion, or pretext that exposure to urban labor markets would improve their standard of living. However, Native “Americans often lacked the education, skills, and experience to find employment and benefit from such relocation.
I am not a Native American, and so I can hardly speak for the Native American soul. But words like “relocation” are chilling to me. Forcing people who once roamed free and magnificently over lands they had called theirs for thousands of years, into little areas that we deemed unworthy of us and therefore good enough for them, or into the brash, clinkering maze of urban society on the pretense that “maybe they can find jobs there,” is culturally, spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically criminal. It warrants the grief and tears not only of Native Americans but also of all people of conscience and goodwill. Native American culture is not market based, but spirit based; that is not its primitivism but its sophistication. The sacred nature of all things is deemed far more important than the economic value of anything. We are the barbarians.
Since the early 1970s, the federal government has adopted a policy of “self-determination” that has allowed Native Americans to be more involved in issues affecting their reservations. Native American leaders have taken a variety of steps to increase economic activity, and many of the reservations are endowed with natural resources such as timber, minerals, and water. During the 1980s, many tribes established gambling operations, which have been lucrative for many, though understandably controversial.
Little we have done can heal the collective wound on the soul of the Sioux, the Navajo, the Cherokee, and others—peoples who bear the legacy of one of the most spiritually advanced races of people, now diminished in both stature and freedom. Today’s rates of alcoholism, poverty, and depression within the Native American community are understandable tragedies given the historical circumstances from which they stem.
If we’re interested in healing our national soul, we will officially atone to the Native American culture and its people. Among other things, this will have to include Atonement for the ways we continue to transgress today.
Now, of course, America is once again embroiled in a drama by which America’s shadow is threatening to obscure the light at the heart of Native American culture. The imperialistic tendencies of our ancestors never having been fully faced, and healed, we continue far too often to repeat the historical patterns by which we seem to feel entitled for no other reason than that we want to, to steal other people’s land, culture, and resources. Such is the reality today at Standing Rock, in North and South Dakota. Since 2014, Sioux tribes have been opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would stretch 2,600 miles from Canada, through the United States, partially on land located above the Sioux water supply. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has reported more than 3,300 incidents of leaks and ruptures at oil and gas pipelines since 2010 and in 2017, 210,000 gallons of oil leaked from the similarly controversial Keystone pipeline, also in South Dakota. Sioux “water protectors” have been joined by thousands of others in protesting the Dakota pipeline, in defiance of gargantuan corporate and governmental efforts to ignore, and even trample on, Native American rights.
Once again, this is not a new historical contest; it is the continuation of an ancient one, one that has in fact never ended. The good news, if there is any, is how many Americans do now recognize that this is a struggle not only for the Sioux, but for the soul of America. The task of every generation is to do our part to further manifest America’s First Principles. More than water is at stake here; the principle of equality before the law is at stake here. Whether it is Native Americans seeking to protect their water in South Dakota, or poor residents seeking to protect their children from lead in the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, it behooves every American to ask ourselves whether the problem would exist if these things were happening in one of America’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
In the last few decades, there has been a growing renaissance of regard for the genius of Native American culture. Hopefully, this will increase awareness among all Americans, not only of the debt we owe to Native Americans for what they gave to us but also for what was done to them as a result of the white man’s expansion westward. Native Americans themselves have been having a good long cry for the last three hundred years; when our hearts are touched by the tragedy of Native American history, by the obliteration of practically an entire civilization, then surely we, too, will cry. Americans need a good cry over things such as this. Our apparent insensitivity to the sufferings of people “not like us” is a national character defect, a part of our political personality unworthy of who we really are. If one suffering child, of any color, were to be placed in front of the average American, I believe that that American would care and act to assuage the suffering. But there is something about lots of people suffering that, quite counterintuitively, makes Americans tune out instead of tune in. Awareness of our tendency to deny what is too difficult to face—and asking God to heal us of this collective defect and wound—is part of our path to higher consciousness and ultimately our national healing.
Dear God,
Please forgive us our grievous errors.
We atone and ask forgiveness for
our early treatment of the indigenous people,
the natives of the North American continent,
who suffered devastation at the hands of our forefathers.
We atone and ask forgiveness for
the places where we dishonor them still.
Help us, Lord,
to mend our thoughts that we no longer
rebel against Your Spirit, which is Love.
Forgive us now.
Turn our darkness into light, dear God,
through Your power which does these things,
that we might awaken to a new America.
May hatred be replaced by love here,
and true justice prevail at last.
May we meet each other in reborn brotherhood,
and begin again in love.
Dear Lord,
Please compensate for the injustices done
unto the Native American peoples,
and use us to bring forth new good.
We atone for the past,
and ask that our hearts be opened now.
Dear God,
Please restore what has been harmed
and heal us all.
To our Native American brothers and sisters, we say:
Please forgive us
for the evils that have been perpetrated
against your people
in the name of the United States.
At last,
may the spirit of your ancestors
shine joyfully in your children.
Forgive us, God.
Amen
RACIAL ATONEMENT
The United States is like a torch that has, in various chapters of our history, both enlightened the world and burned the world.
A wound very much alive in America is the tortured relationship between blacks and whites. For this, atonement is only the beginning of what is morally demanded of us. “I tremble for my country,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “when I consider God is just, and that His justice shall not sleep forever.” With the abolition of slavery we began the road to political justice, and with the civil rights movement we continued it. The underlying conflict regarding racial tension in America today is between those who essentially believe that we’ve done enough—that we’ve created social equality for African Americans—and those who believe that while we have made strides in certain areas, in other ways the legacy of slavery continues and we are still in the process of making true amends for its evils.
Thought is the causal level of the universe. In abolishing slavery, we did not abolish racist thinking. Indeed, such societies as the Ku Klux Klan were founded after the end of the Civil War, in direct response to the abolition of slavery. While external legislative remedies are an aid to racial healing, spiritual forces are necessary to heal the terrible wounds to the heart and soul. Cellular memory of hatred and abuse has accumulated among African Americans to such an extent that it has become a generational resentment, leaving only two choices on the road ahead: greater love, or greater violence.
There are myriad reasons why so many Americans resist a deeper level of atonement toward African Americans, much of it having to do with an ignorance of certain facts about our history. Part of our job, then, is to better understand our past so we can heal our present and free our future.
There is much to understand, much to dissect, much to pray about, and much to do. America will not heal on the issue of race until we acknowledge our culpability in institutionalizing racism not just in the past but in the present, and seek to make serious amends for transgressions which have occurred throughout our history. While it is true that millions of African Americans now have opportunities their ancestors could only dream of, it is not just what people have experienced but also what their parents and parents’ parents experienced that often moves through our veins and erupts like hot oil. Have we done a lot? Oh, yes; the abolition of slavery, civil rights legislation, and so forth were hardly nothing. But do we still have a lot to do? Again, oh, yes; current issues regarding voter suppression, police brutality, and mass incarceration show an alarming trend in the wrong direction. Through Atonement we must heal the past, and through the making of amends we can heal the future.
While it’s true that great strides have been taken in the area of civil rights—I remember as a child seeing a sign at the doctor’s office building in Houston, Texas, that said “colored bathrooms downstairs”—in other ways, the darker shadow of racism within the American psyche has simply morphed into other symptoms. The racial inequity in America’s criminal justice system is an example; according to a report released by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, black men receive prison sentences 20 percent longer than do white men for similar crimes. America is now incarcerating a higher proportion of African Americans than South Africa incarcerated black Africans at the height of apartheid.
One in four black Americans lives in poverty—double the rate of whites. Half of all black children in America under the age of six live in poverty. Unemployment for African Americans is almost twice as high as it is for whites. For the same educational background blacks can expect to make 69 percent of the income of whites. Economic injustice toward blacks in America is a systemically racist phenomenon, and to minimize it is further racism. When African Americans understandably object to underlying racism in economic or criminal policies, they’re liable to be told in one way or another: “There you go—complaining again!”
We are saying to people who are as afraid of the police as they are of the criminals, whose children do not have safe schools, whose children are at risk even walking to school, whose children do not even have enough school supplies and textbooks at their schools, whose children have practically no chance of finding a job in the neighborhood even if they do by some miracle muster the courage and the inner strength to make it through that dangerous maze and graduate from high school, that you’d better fly right now and not make a single false step from here on out, because we’ve had it up to here with helping you. I’m not an African American so I can’t speak for anyone else’s feelings, but if it were me I would find that deeply insulting.
The problems run deep, and so must the healing. Many Americans now understand that we need an integrative approach to the healing of our political wounds—one that recognizes that how people feel about something is not just a secondary issue. And that is where the power of Atonement comes into the mix, achieving the “qualitative change in our hearts” to which Dr. King referred. All over the country, people are gathering in racial healing circles to talk out these issues, pray for reconciliation, and seek the power of genuine forgiveness.
In 1997, President Clinton offered a public apology on behalf of the nation to the victims of the federal government’s Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, an infamous chapter in the history of American medical research. In that study, starting in 1932, 399 indigent black men from Tuskegee, Alabama, were told that they would receive free medical treatment for syphilis, but instead were left untreated and carefully monitored. Even after penicillin was found to be a successful cure in the mid-1940s, the men were left untreated. “To our African-American citizens, I am sorry that your Federal Government orchestrated a study so clearly racist,” said the President. The government, said President Clinton, “did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens.”
It was very heartening to hear the President make his statement, but that was decades ago. It is also very important that we not use our apologies for specific instances of racism to help us ignore the larger issue of our society’s debt to a long-enslaved people. It is not enough to treat the symptoms of racism; we must treat the disease itself. Tuskegee was part of a larger pattern of abuse that stemmed from a general feeling that the lives of black people do not deserve the same respect and consideration as the lives of white people. For millions of black children today, the social diseases of poverty, ignorance, and substandard medical care are going every bit as dangerously untreated as was syphilis in Tuskegee all those years ago. The bigger problem is far from behind us.
I do not believe the average American is racist, but I believe the average American does not truly realize how tilted our public resources are away from America’s black communities and in the direction of America’s richer white citizens. Although the emancipation of the slaves gave African Americans their political freedom, their bondage was replaced by a more subtle but equally oppressive form of slavery: an economic slavery that continues to this day. Lack of educational opportunities, lack of health care, lack of job training, lack of economic revitalization measures, lack of mass transit, and lack of adequate housing among poor segments of the African-American population are all examples of white America’s failure to pay one of its most important debts. In fact—and this is the larger issue—we do not have in America today a consensus that there is even a debt to be paid.
What is this in our national temperament? Why is it that we resist the recognition of the tremendous moral debt we owe to a people brought here against their will and enslaved for centuries? Are we afraid that our feelings of guilt, were they to be authentically owned, would overwhelm us? Why are we avoiding what any individual knows: that cleaning up the past is a prerequisite for a fruitful future?
After the Civil War ended, America’s former slaves were just left on their own to try to make lives for themselves. But in many cases, because of the rise of the most heinous forms of white supremacy, they were not actually allowed to. From lynchings to Jim Crow laws to segregation, blacks in the American South, though no longer slaves, were denied the ability to truly move forward. This problem was not addressed adequately until the 1960s. Given the historical circumstances of the nineteenth century, one can understand why Abolition itself seemed such an extraordinary thing—which it was. But while many of the descendants of slaves have clearly forged lives of triumph and abundance, millions more now pack the inner cities of the United States. For them, the trauma is far from over. Those neighborhoods are, in many ways, new slave quarters.
Today, one is reminded of the words of Dr. King, “If it happens to white people, they call it a Depression. If it happens to black people, they call it a social problem.”
An apology is the yin we need, and serious restitution is the yang. When African Americans say the word “reparations,” you’d think they had suggested something completely outrageous. But the general concept is legitimate. Germany has paid $89 billion in restitution to Jews since World War II. The United States paid $20,000 to every Japanese American who had been sent to a concentration camp here in America during World War II. Nothing short of a massive investment in America’s African-American poor—the true legacy of slavery—is a responsible sign of America’s willingness to heal itself racially. The most depressed communities in America, which are primarily African-American, cry out for help and we act like it’s some major liberal coup every time we even throw them a crumb.
After World War II, the United States spent $12 billion over four years on the Marshall Plan, rebuilding the devastated economies of Western Europe. Why would we be less generous to citizens of the United States? The idea that helping people—particularly people whose ancestors we have wronged, and transgressions against whom we have not yet fully redressed—is some liberal conspiracy promulgated by political Progressives intent on creating a culture of dependency, is itself but propaganda created to justify unjust economic policies.
We need rituals of atonement and apology for American racism, past and present. I have experienced such prayers, and their healing power is profound. But we also need to make a serious and honorable amends, in the form of substantial efforts to economically revitalize a segment of our population that happens to be poor and happens to be black. Why should our national attitudes be so punitive rather than loving? Dr. King said that the American Congress was much less compassionate than the American people, and I think that is true today. We are a better nation than this. If we will devote the next ten years of our history to turning this area of national shame into an area of national atonement, the gift to our children and our children’s children—all our children—will be immeasurable.
AN APOLOGY IS so important because, without it, there is no real atonement. It releases the emotional truth of a situation. Certain Americans think that blacks just need to forgive slavery and move on with their lives—but isn’t it easier to forgive someone when he or she has had the courtesy to apologize?
A sincere apology is more than just “emotional symbolism.” An apology is an act of atonement, and only in a society that trivializes faith is atonement viewed as mere symbol.
Faith, for those of us who embrace it, is as real as a car, a house, or a piece of legislation. The power of God in our lives is no less real than technology, business, or money. The fact that the action of faith is invisible to the physical eye does not make it a mere function of our imagination or a metaphor or psychological child’s play.
The trivialization of faith by the political status quo—from the Left with its rolled eyes, to the Right with its hypocritical words of support—has created a huge void in the center of American political consciousness. Faith in God is not faith in a particular religious dogma. Faith in God is faith in love, faith in a higher power, and ultimately faith in each other. Atonement means turning back the darkness through a prayerful embrace of the light.
Human beings, on the level of spirit, are not separate but joined as one. In the words of Dr. King, “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” The reason the Golden Rule is essential to all religious thought is that what we do to others will be done to us, and if not to us then to our children or our children’s children. We will reap what we sow, and what we withhold from others will be withheld from us. Time itself is a trick of the mind. We must give justly, not merely because we’re “good” but because we understand spiritual Law. It is no longer possible to be realistically satisfied with our own circumstances, if the opportunities for the same abundance are unfairly denied to others. The day of reckoning is at hand.
There are those who would point to blacks who have behaved criminally or dysfunctionally, and try to use that as justification for not performing our ethical duty to the African-American community. Or, conversely, one can point to black stars who have triumphed, and try to claim that because they made it big in America, that proves there is no real problem. But neither argument is valid. Every group of people has its shadow element, and every group has its geniuses. Neither is an excuse for failing to live up to our moral obligations. America has a huge—not a nonexistent, not a small, nor even a medium-sized—problem on its hands. We should see this for what it is and act accordingly.
When it comes to institutionalized systems of racial injustice, there is a myth in the United States that what has merely lessened has in fact ended. White America has not yet given up our collective attitude, however covert, that we are a superior race and culture. While there are many millions of people to whom this attitude truly does not apply, it continues to permeate our social, political, and economic policies. God does not love anyone more than He loves anyone else, and His universe will not endlessly tolerate an attitude on the part of white-skinned people that we have, for any reason whatsoever, greater right than others do to the opportunities afforded us by this great land. It is astonishing to me that a culture that mass-murdered Native Americans and brought millions of Africans here to be slaves has the audacity to still say to those and those like them, “Make sure you don’t ask for too much.”
Psychologically, we are subconsciously afraid of those whom we have wronged. We are afraid that they will punish us, as we secretly feel we deserve to be punished. I believe that this psychological dynamic is at the core of much of white America’s attitude toward African Americans. We are afraid to truly share power with blacks because we are afraid of what they might do with such power if they had it. We are afraid that they might treat us as we have treated them.
Meanwhile, with this attitude—however unconscious on our part—we perpetuate the very forces that would make anyone angry, thus adding to the already raging fire that burns within so many hearts.
Today, we have issues in our criminal justice system that are as troubling as any economic transgressions against our African-American population. Mass incarceration now constitutes the single largest urban industry in America, as tougher sentencing laws instituted in the 1990s have led to an explosion of our prison population. Unfortunately, while African Americans make up 12 to 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 35 percent of jail inmates and are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. Add to that the clear instances of police brutality against blacks that have occurred over the last few years in cities such as Ferguson, MO, and Baltimore, MD, coupled with the extraordinary failure of our criminal justice system to convict those whom we saw in video after video, with our own eyes, proactively assault unarmed blacks, and I don’t know how any white American can say, “I don’t understand what they’re complaining about.
America will come face-to-face with this shadow element in our national psyche, or we will continue to pass along its effects from generation to generation. There will be no healing of America’s soul until we pray for racism to be removed from our hearts, and for the strength and political courage it will take to remove its tentacles from our society. We must stop pretending there is no problem here; our denial and obfuscation makes a mockery of love. Meanwhile, there is a profound spiritual authority among those who have already forgiven us, in spite of the fact that we have not yet even asked forgiveness. It is particularly prevalent among certain black women—particularly older ones—and it is one of the sacred spots on the American psychic landscape. I have been personally blessed by it. The day will come when we will see things with our spiritual eyes, and when we do, we will stand in awe before the power of this love. It is a big love. It is a blessing on us all. It does more to keep this country from exploding than any of us will ever know.
THESE WORDS OF Robert Kennedy resonate today:
I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. Our country is in danger: Not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies, and what they can do to this country. There is a contest, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America.
The universe will compensate us royally if we do what it takes to truly right the spiritual course of this nation. White America will not lose money or power if it pays off its moral debts: The whole country will become richer and more powerful beyond our wildest imaginations. We will take a quantum leap forward as a nation if we embrace the opportunity before us and genuinely atone.
“The holiest of all the spots on earth,” according to A Course in Miracles, “is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.” Let us imagine the glory that could be, and pray to bring it forth.
Dear God,
Please forgive us for the evils of slavery,
racism and injustice.
Please heal, dear Lord,
our hardened hearts.
We atone to God,
and ask forgiveness of the African-American people,
for the slavery in both body and spirit
of your men, your women, and your children.
To you who have lived among us,
and suffered the sting of our unfair dominion—
For the abuse of both your ancestors
and your children,
we pray for the absolution of the Lord.
We ask that God restore us all,
and use us as His instruments
for the resurrection of good.
We deeply apologize for the errors of the past
and ask that America’s heart be opened now.
If we could rewrite history,
we would.
We cannot,
but God can.
Dear God, please do.
To the African-American community,
we acknowledge the tears of your people,
the suffering of your ancestors,
and the brilliance of your culture.
We bless your children,
please bless ours.
May God in His glory
forge a brotherhood between us,
for brothers indeed
we are.
Dear God,
Please work this miracle.
Amen
“THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM AND IRAQ
ONE OF THE reasons we need to atone for our treatment of both Native Americans and black Americans is that it will help us break the chain with that part of our national character that still wants to grab for what it wants in the world, without regard for the life or livelihood of others.”
Robert McNamara, who was President Johnson’s Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, wrote in his memoirs that the war was “a terrible mistake.” More than 59,000 Americans dead, and 2 million Vietnamese, plus countless other devastated American lives, and it was all “a terrible mistake.” McNamara also mentioned that he, and others who planned and directed that war, had no knowledge or understanding of the religion, language, philosophy, or character of the people of Vietnam—and no one to teach them, even if they wanted to learn.
After hearing that, if we were an enlightened society, we would all have gone to bed for three days. We would cry, moan, get sick, scream it out, punch punching bags, do whatever it takes to get the pain up and out of our cells. There is an inestimable human tragedy stuck to this nation as a result of that war, a significant aspect of which is the ever-more-frayed bond of trust between the American people and our government.
The Vietnam War Memorial is a uniquely powerful place because it is emotionally true. It doesn’t lie. It pictures the war as a huge black gash across our landscape, which it is. It appropriately memorializes the lives of those who died such purposeless, tragic deaths in Vietnam. And it helps us grieve not only for them but also for who we were as a nation before that war so wounded us.
At a traveling exhibit of the Vietnam Wall, I saw the following letter posted by an ex-Marine. It reveals more truth about that war than most history books do.
At a traveling exhibit of the Vietnam Wall, I saw the following letter posted by an ex-Marine. It reveals more truth about that war than most history books do.
On the Second of July 1967, Alpha and Bravo companies of the First Battalion, Ninth Marines were on patrol just a few hundred meters south of the DMZ.
Bravo blundered into a well-set ambush at the marketplace; soon, Alpha, too, was in the thick of it.
The enemy consisted of a regiment of the North Vietnamese Army supported by artillery, heavy mortars, rockets, anti-aircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles.
Charlie and Delta companies were rushed to the field in support, but the outcome had been decided. The Marines were overwhelmingly outnumbered.
But, worse than that, they were equipped with Colt M-16 rifles. Their M-14 rifles, which had proven so effective and reliable, were stored in warehouses, somewhere in the rear.
The M-16s would fire once or twice—maybe more—then jam. The extractor would rip the rim off the casing. Then the only way to clear the chamber and resume firing was to lock open the bolt, run a cleaning rod down the barrel, and knock the casing loose. Soon it would jam again.
This was the rifle supplied to her troops by the richest nation on earth. The enemy was not so encumbered. They carried rifles that were designed in the Soviet Union and manufactured in one of the poorest nations on earth—the so-called People’s Republic of China. Their rifles fired. Fired every time. They ran amongst the Marines, firing at will.
Sixty-four men in Bravo were killed that afternoon. Altogether, the battalion lost around a hundred of the nation’s finest men. The next morning, we bagged them like groceries. We consigned their bodies to their families and commended their souls to God. May He be as merciful as they were courageous.
Today, people are still debating the issue: Was it the fault of the ammo? The fault of the rifle? Neither. It was the fault of the politicians and contractors and generals. People in high places knew the rifles and ammo wouldn’t work together. The military didn’t want to buy the rifle when Armalite was manufacturing it. But when Colt was licensed as the manufacturer, they suddenly discovered it was a marvelous example of Yankee ingenuity.
Sgt. Brown told them it was garbage. Col. Hackworth told them it was garbage. And every real Grunt knew it was garbage. It was unsuited for combat.
There was no Congressional investigation. No contractor was ever fined for supplying defective material. No one uncovered the bribes paid to government officials. No one went to jail. And the mothers of dead Marines were never told that their sons went into combat unarmed.
To all outward appearances, those Marines died of gunshot and fragmentation wounds. But a closer examination reveals that they were first stabbed in the back by their countrymen. The politicians, contractors, and generals have retired to comfortable estates now. Their ranks have been filled by their clones—greedy invertebrates every one. They should hope that God is more forgiving than I.
Brave men should never be commanded by cowards.
First Lieutenant Harvey G. Wysong
0100308
United States Marine Corps Reserve
First Battalion, Nine Marines”
It was not just Johnson and McNamara who made a terrible mistake in Vietnam: the entire nation made a terrible mistake in letting them do it. One would think that, after such a debacle, America would no longer allow those in power, in uniform, in “command,” to so easily make absurd decisions on our behalf. And yet we do. What a tragedy, all that false respect we had—and still have—for the trappings and illusions of worldly power. We still have not opened ourselves collectively to the shame and horror of that huge mistake. We have not atoned to our vets, to their families, to God, to other nations involved; or to ourselves. Until we do, we shall remain in some way at the effect of that mistake. Even worse, when you do not atone for a mistake—when you do not allow the horror of it to penetrate your conscious awareness—then you are almost doomed to repeat it.
During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, I was one of many Americans saying, “This is Vietnam all over again.” At the time, of course, we were described by officialdom as facile thinkers who simply didn’t understand the severity of the situation. What we did understand, of course, was that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11; there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq, and in fact that country played the part of buffer with Iran; and even if Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, let us be adult enough to remember we do business with countries that have weapons of mass destruction every day. Oh, and Saddam Hussein killed his own people? So have the Chinese, and we did not invade them.
We need a miracle of God to remove from us what has become an almost pathological romanticization of the military. I have great respect for the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces, but their idealization as ultimate and exclusive saviors in times of national distress is a disservice to them and to us all. If America spent more time and resources waging peace, we would find ourselves waging far less war. In the words of Defense Secretary General James Mattis, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, I need to buy more ammunition.”
Yet our attitudes in this area, judging from our military budget and behavior, are if anything less enlightened today than ever. We seem to have a slavish devotion to the idea that brute force beats soul force, spending one dollar on conflict prevention for every $1,885 on the military. The increased militarism in contemporary America is part of a larger, deeply appalling glorification of violence. We must heal ourselves of this, and with God’s help we can. In the words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Dear God,
Please forgive us
for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq,
and any other military misadventures
that might have been prevented.
We deeply apologize
to other nations we have wronged,
and to ourselves;
to their people,
and to our own.
And most particularly, dear God,
to our veterans,
and to the spirits of those soldiers who lost their lives,
may they rest in peace.
To those who were sent there and survived,
may you be restored.
To those of you who lost your loved ones,
may you find peace.
Dear God,
Please remove from this nation
our militaristic illusions,
our temptation
to see more power in hatred
than power in love,
and to believe the lies
of a war machine
before the truth
in our hearts.
Dear God,
Please forgive us
for our violation of any nation
toward whom we have done wrong.
Please lift us up.
Please heal this wound.
Amen
To heal ourselves, we must grieve our past.
You cannot dedicate a nation to the high ideals to which this one was dedicated and not expect the soul to rebel in some way when you start acting as if you didn’t really mean it.
From the genocide of Native Americans to our systemic racism to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the United States needs, as they say in the twelve-step recovery program, to take a “fearless moral inventory.” We are not to spend the rest of our lives in an endless string of mea culpas, but as soon as we say at least a few sincere ones, the miracle of atonement will begin to release our collective soul.
God is merciful. I do not believe He is angry, but He’s not kidding either. He has asked us to love each other as He so loves us. And to Him, these are not just words.
Chapter 4 will be emailed tomorrow!
I mean, each and every one of these chapters should be read globally. I can only attribute the paucity of comments to peoples' attention spans; I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that history will look back on Marianne as one of the most powerful truth-tellers in generations.
Powerful thank you 🙏