Rev. Linda Simmons

Rev. Linda Simmons

Tragedy and Redemption

December 5, 2015

Bryan Doerries who wrote The Theater of War and All that You See Here is God translates Ancient Greek plays and hires actors to perform them for the military and those who work in prisons. It is his contention that these ancient Greek plays contain something that is so deeply human that they can unburden soldiers and prison guards alike from their official and unofficial codes of silence.

Doerries translation of Prometheus Bound is gorgeous. He offers the reading of it by actors to prisons and their wardens, social workers, and guards and well as to the military who have served in recent areas of conflict. The effect these plays have on those who see them is extraordinary, as if someone from long ago has given them permission to feel and speak and cry and grieve and express anger.

Prometheus is a complex character. He switched sides during the war of the titans and helped Zeus, an Olympian, come to the throne by sending all of his own family of resisters, the Titans, to the underworld.[1]

Prometheus in Greek means, forethought, and so Prometheus proved to be a great predictor of the future and became Zeus’ chief counselor. Shortly after Zeus came to power, he issued a series of decrees that caused Prometheus to regret his collusion with him. Chief among these was an edict to exterminate the human race. Prometheus, who always possessed a special affinity for the humans, could not stand by and watch this genocide happen. And so, he gave fire, a gift only the gods possessed, to humans and from this gift came many of those things we now associate with being human: medicine, architecture, writing, storytelling, consciousness itself.[2]

Prometheus tells the story of a god who is placed in solitary confinement, and nailed to a cliff in a remote region of the Caucasus Mountains somewhere in Scythia for his crime of giving fire to humans.

The play is not about Zeus’ laws as much as it is about what happens to Prometheus once he is punished for breaking those laws. It is a story about martyrdom, suffering, mercy and redemption too when redemption is forgiveness, of self or another. Redemption is usually associated with supernatural forgiveness in which an all mighty ruler forgives, over which we have no control.

But I am more interested in the equally as awesome power of redemption offered from one person to another and offered to ourselves for our own transgressions. Both of these human redemptions are necessary in order to go on.

Prometheus Bound is the story of what happens to Prometheus as he is bound to the cliff and thereafter. Here is what Prometheus says to his captures, Kratos, which means force, and Bia, which means power, after he is nailed to the cliff:

Prometheus:

I saved men from total annihilation, from almost certain Death and now I am to endure these terrible tortures, painful to feel, almost worse to observe.

I treated men with compassion, but was not thought worthy enough to receive it in return.

Instead I will be displayed for all to see, so ruthlessly abused that even Zeus averts his eyes.[3]

My punishment is a disgrace to the one who punished me.[4]

How many today can speak these words, from refuges to the prisoners of Guantanamo or those in other prisons who live on death row?

Some scholars believe that the courts and jails may have been emptied in Ancient Greece during the City Dionysia, the annual spring theater festival. The prisoners were released on bail in order to attend the performances.

It seems likely that those awaiting sentence as well as their adjudicators were present for the premier of Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy, which included Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound about his release and Prometheus the Fire Bringer, which was likely about his reintegration and reconciliation with the gods. Of these 3 plays, only Prometheus Bound has survived.[5]

Prometheus argued that his crime was one of conscience: he stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. At the precise moment when Zeus wished to exterminate humanity, Prometheus offered up his freedom to save it.[6]

Near the end of the play, when Prometheus taunts Zeus to punish him more by refusing him the information about how he will fall from power one day, Prometheus is his most grand. Reading it, I cringed knowing that the unspeakable could happen if he continued to taunt Zeus. And of course, it does happen. Prometheus wails:

Prometheus:

So let the lighting lash me from above; let mighty thunder rattle the heavens and whip up the gales; let a swirling storm uproot the earth and send giant waves cresting skyward into the orbits of the stars and spheres; let him pick my broken body and cast it into the darkness of Tartarus.

I will stand in the eye of the storm, staring down necessity, but my spirit shall never be broken.[7]

Where does Prometheus live in you? Can you locate him or her, the martyr, the long suffering one, the one who can endure but who fights back with ferocity too, that considers it his or her duty to speak truth to power, to stand in the storm and do what conscience demands. Prometheus too is the one who does not know how to stop suffering, to improve his or her situation by compromising, by mediating, by allowing other voices to comfort, advice, instruct.

He or she has a will that is unbending. Do you know this in yourself? Prometheus is martyr and also, the self harmer, the one who cannot offer ourselves forgiveness, acceptance, allowance for the mistakes we or others make.

And where does Prometheus live in the world around us?

Who is Zeus in these settings? Zeus is that within us that cannot compromise, cannot give in to the pleas of another, cannot offer forgiveness to another or ourselves. Zeus is he or she who imagines omnipotence, the capacity to control outcomes, to act and have that action only create the consequences intended.

Zeus accepts no one else except those that can offer us back to ourselves exactly the way we see ourselves. Do you know your Zeus?

One of the places that Byran Doerries brings his play, Prometheus Unbound is Gauntanamo, known colloquially as Gitmo. Gitmo is an American village at the mouth of Guantanamo Bay and has been in existence since 1903. Apparently, we still send a check for leasing the land every year to the Castros who purportedly keep in uncashed in a desk drawer. Gitmo houses service members from the army, navy, air force, marines and coast guard.

The naval side of the base contains a golf course, coffee shop, library, chapel, pub, marina, an elementary school, a movie theater, a tiki bar and other amenities. A high-security area on the other side of the base houses detainees from foreign countries behind razor wire. The US is holding them indefinitely, without due process-as “enemy combatants.” Fewer than 150 such men live there now.[8]

There is a high rate of suicide and hunger strikes by prisoners at Gitmo. Force feeding takes place when one is deemed at risk of death. Doerries saw a man being force fed, wailing in a mixture of English and Arabic that could have easily been ancient Greek.

These words of Prometheus came back to him:

Witness how the gods now cause me to suffer, inflicting immeasurable pain

upon one of their own. Look upon the tortures I shall endure over this endless sentence, passed by…the blessed ones! …Who knows how long the suffering will last, and when I will be finally relieved?[9]

After Doerries stages Prometheus Bound at Gitmo for guards, marines, FBI agents, military lawyers, navy and army officers he asks, “Who is Prometheus? Have you ever seen him? Have you ever worked with him?”

“I am Prometheus, one of the guards answered, I am the one who is chained to this rock- this island- at the end of the earth.”[10]

And then Doerries asks at the end of the play when Prometheus refuses to comply with Zeus’ requests, knowing this will end in increased punishment and Zeus increases his punishment. Who wins?

A Judge Advocate General’s Corps or JAG answered, “I’m glad you asked that question because we have lost all moral authority in this war and will never regain it until we give these men fair trails.”[11]

For this judge, the prisoners were Prometheus.

I recently read the book Guantanamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi. This shows a Gitmo in which prisoners are kept in solitary confinement, in which what counted as acceptable discipline and methods for extracting information changed after Donald Rumsfield authorized what they call “Special Projects Teams”, which employed what are called “enhanced interrogation techniques” that the CIA had been using for many years. These techniques involve “extreme sleep deprivation, loud music, frigid temperatures, stress positions, threats and a variety of physical and sexual humiliations.[12]

Slahi has been imprisoned for 13 years now without a charge against him.

Just this past week, the White House rejected a Pentagon plan to close Guantanamo, relocating it to a prison on US soil saying it was too expensive.

For Sahil, he is Prometheus and the United States is Zeus.

What does it mean that martyr and persecutor shift depending on perspective? How can we keep track of what is needed, how it is needed with so many perspectives, orientations, cultures, needs, priorities?

The truth seems to be that both Prometheus and Zeus live within us all. And so from this place, from this place of partial power, of lack of certainty about the endpoint of our actions, what do we do now? Where do we go from here?

Donald Trump is suggesting we all register ourselves in terms of our religions, that those who are Muslim wear a visible outward sign. When our Massachusetts governor says that we will not accept Syrian refugees, when just this past week every Senate Republican except 1 voted against legislation to prevent people on the F.B.I.’s consolidated terrorist watchlist from purchasing guns or explosives,[13] in a country where there has been more than one mass shooting every day this year, including the twelve of this past week,[14] what is ours to do?

We are so overwhelmed, so torn between social justice projects, so despairing that we cannot do it all and there is so much to be done. We often need to walk away, throw our hands up and be small, too small to build a matrix of justice.

Sharon Welch in her book Ethic of Risk writes that we as middle class Euro-Americans give up too easily when our plans for social change are not met well, when we cannot see a way forward that is clear, easily mapped, one that offers us the illusion of control.[15]

Welch names this despair, this exasperation as a result of operating from an Ethic of Control, which is an ethic doomed to failure.

Many things contribute to an ethic of control including the ideology of a god that is omnipotent, that cannot err, that has absolute control. Modeling our lives around this omnipotent god, we set ourselves up to live lives that are only satisfied when in absolute control, when feeling absolutely powerful, when able to set goals and achieve them without question or ambiguity.[16]

When we postulate a God who has absolute power, we also imagine a condition in which absolute power can be good. This is dangerous. Absolute power is destructive and always requires domination. We must begin to know a god, if we are to posit a god at all, that is partial, relative, constructed through and with us and changing as we change.

Welsh speaks about a moral life and writes that “The drive of moral life is that we can never know the difference between that which we can change and that which we cannot.

Our challenge is to move creatively in a very different sort of adventure, one whose prayer is more like this: “What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we undertake today?”[17]

For Welch, we need to begin to practice an Ethic of Risk. “An ethic of risk offers a model of maturity that challenges the equation of maturity (as) resignation…Maturity is the acceptance, not that life is unfair, but that the creation of fairness is the task of generations, that work for justice is not incidental to one’s life but is an essential aspect of affirming the delight and wonder of being alive.”[18]

This same maturity leads us to the forgiveness of ourselves we all so desperately seek. For to work for justice in the world requires that we do the work of offering ourselves the justice of our humanity as well. Redemption comes to us not through an all saving power that lives elsewhere, it comes right here and now from the matrix we are building not only to allow the work of justice in the outside world to go on, but also to allow us all some mercy, some self forgiveness, some capacity to go on in hope.

We act with as much justice as we can decipher from living together in this world, with those like us and those unlike us, we listen, we discern, we discover what justice means in communication, and we act not because we will achieve justice, not because we will win, not because we will see the fruits of our actions, but because each act builds in communion with each other and all others and strengthens the web that will hold future generations, making clearer the path of honest inquiry. Each act that seeks understanding, opens one to another so that not only the world outside of us but the world within us becomes visible, comes within our reach.

With an ethic of risk, we know that we may never see the changes we seek to bring about but we go on because we are fulfilling our humanity.

What is ours to do now? What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we undertake today my friends? I am working with Unitarian churches on the Cape and we are researching what it would take to sponsor a Syrian refugee family on the Cape. Will you join me in this effort? Can we learn how to support Muslims who are advocating peace? Can we join others who are advocating for gun laws?