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Who Will Lead Us? We daily witness the irony of a large portion of the world perceiving the Bush administration as the most dangerous force on earth and the Bush/Cheney believers’ perception that they represent the righteousness of God in the war on “Terror.” A fascinating description of the terrible jeopardy President Bush presents to all of us is a brief article in Zion’s Herald by Patrick Slattery, “Moby Dick and the American Mythos,” using Melville’s classic to illustrate the danger of leaders obsessed with agents of evil; losing sight of their true mission to the people (crew). The weapon here is the ship, Pequod, a Native American term meaning “Destroyer,” and the crew that to a man falls under the spell of Captain Ahab’s monomania to kill the great white whale Moby Dick. Ahab sees him as the epitome of evil, a distorted view born of his woundedness. Herman Melville speaks eloquently of the inherent beauty and dignity of man: “man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature.” However, as Slattery points out, “behind such praise lurks a shadow of the myth that is no less powerful and darkly radiant. Within the shadow are retribution, vengeance, woundedness, and unyielding predatory self-righteousness.” As you well know, Ahab and the entire crew perish in the madness of the pursuit. Slattery’s cry, plea, is the need for discussion as words like Security and Safety “flatten into empty mantras of hope that bear increasingly less resemblance to the reality unfolding on the world scene.” Between the Bush believers and us non believers there seems to be a language block, an abyss that Slattery describes better than I can, “Yet, in the limited Fear Frame in which the present conversation is stuck, I feel like one of those whalers on the quarter deck being told: Conform. to my vision.” In the meantime we can, like Liz McAlister, resist the “violent culture”: with all our being and seek “to create a way of living without killing, without violence, without enmity.” The question of leadership is of monumental importance in both the epic events of history and the more modest ones in our lives. In the lifetime of many of us, as Taylor Branch, the author of the trilogy on Martin Luther King illustrates, King changed forever the face of America. The commitment of King to non-violence deepened over the years as the only way to change America, and he persuaded Lyndon Johnson to champion the Civil Rights Act, even as Johnson recognized it probably meant the permanent loss of the South to the Republican party. King and Johnson parted ways on Vietnam, as Johnson, trapped in a war he didn’t seem to believe in, self-destructed his own presidency. Whether it was democracy in Vietnam or the U.S., King did not believe the cause could succeed by the gun. Branch points out that we have forgotten the power and success of non-violence, King’s legacy, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and South Africa. When Mandela embraced the liberation of the oppressor as well as the oppressed, apartheid was doomed, and he became President of the country that imprisoned him for 27 years. I have observed the American Catholic Church closely the past 40 years, and the leadership of Bishop Tom Gumbleton strikes me as light in the darkness, one prescient on virtually all the issues of consequence these 40 years. He resides in an inner city parish in Detroit. Gumbleton opposed Vietnam, led the way on the Bishops’ pastoral condemning nuclear weapons as incompatible with the Gospel, championed conscientious objection, and took up the cause of the oppressed in Latin America. He actually accompanied Aristide back to Haiti when Clinton restored him to the presidency in 1994. He was in Iraq working to prevent the first Gulf war in 1990. He led the way among the hierarchy on the rights of gays and passionately defended the sexually abused victims of wayward priests. Bishop Gumbleton has repeatedly asked his fellow bishops to unequivocally condemn the ongoing war in Iraq. His is a monumental legacy, but the fate of many prophetic leaders is to be ostracized by the institutional powers. I think he’s viewed as out of touch, too radical, a confirmed pacifist, not compatible with the thinking of the moderate majority. For many of us Tom Gumbleton is a “Giant” in the American church; his legacy will endure. Compassion is the life-line he brings to the people. The moral of this story is to choose very carefully your leaders; to follow them faithfully entails sacrifice, suffering and joy. Joe Bradley |