SUMMONED :

Mourners pay respects to slain hostage Burnham (CNN, June 14, 2002)

Martin Burnham was killed last week during a firefight between the Philippine army and Abu Sayyaf rebels, who had been holding him and his wife hostage since May 27, 2001. Gracia Burnham, 43, was shot in her leg during the rescue and remains in a wheelchair. She returned home to Rose Hill on Monday.

A public memorial service for her husband is expected to draw more than 4,000 people Friday to the Central Christian Church in Wichita.

In the weeks before his death, Burnham asked his wife that his funeral feature a sermon by a Kansas City pastor, Clay Bowlin, and a special song, "Ashokan Farewell."

Here are the words to Ashokan Farewell (Words by Grian MacGregor) :

The sun is sinking low in the sky above Ashokan.
The pines and the willows know soon we will part.
There's a whisper in the wind of promises unspoken,
And a love that will always remain in my heart.

My thoughts will return to the sound of your laughter,
The magic of moving as one,
And a time we'll remember long ever after
The moonlight and music and dancing are done.

Will we climb the hills once more?
Will we walk the woods together?
Will I feel you holding me close once again?
Will every song we've sung stay with us forever?
Will you dance in my dreams or my arms until then?

Under the moon the mountains lie sleeping
Over the lake the stars shine.
They wonder if you and I will be keeping
The magic and music, or leave them behind.

In addition, here's a poem by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45), written while he was in a Nazi prison, CHRISTIANS AND UNBELIEVERS :

Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,
For mercy for them sick, sinning or dead:
All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.

Men go to God when he is sore bestead,
Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead:
Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.

God goeth to every man when sore bestead,
Feedeth body and spirit with his bread,
For Christians, heathens alike he hangeth dead:
And both alike forgiving.

In a letter of July 18, 1944, Bonhoeffer offered his own analysis of the ideas he was trying to develop in these verses. He explained to his correspondent :

The poem about Christians and Unbelievers embodies an idea you will recognize: 'Christians range themselves with God in his suffering; that is what distinguishes them from the heathen.' As Jesus asked in Gethsemane, 'Could ye not watch with me one hour?' That is the exact opposite of what the religious man expects from God. Man is challenged to participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world.

He must therefore plunge himself into the life of a godless world, without attempting to gloss over its ungodliness with a veneer of religion or trying to transfigure it. He must live a 'worldly' life and so participate in the suffering of God. He may live a worldly life as one emancipated from all false religions and obligations. To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent or a saint), but to be a man. It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.

This is particularly stern stuff for us, who live in an age when religion has pretty much been reduced to a glorified self-help program, a sickeningly shallow way to feel good about ourselves. Even the Christians are now heathens, interested in God only for what He can do for them. As one of the lessons of Bonhoeffer's life and death is the power of faith to quiet a tumultuous soul when events oppress us, so must another be that the experience of God is not a oneway street, where we take, take, take. He does not exist merely to comfort us and heal our petty personal wounds, like some sanctified version of Deepak Chopra. Our approach towards Him serves also, perhaps more importantly, to understand something of the world as it must appear to Him--with billions of souls, besides our own, beset on all sides by sin, crying out for help.

When Bonhoeffer spoke of a godless world he meant something to the effect that God is not an immediate presence to be turned to when we have problems, as He had seemed in earlier times, but that instead we must learn to help ourselves. Mightn't we also say that the world is godless in the sense that we are not willing to participate in the suffering of others in the here and now, but are so consumed with the self that we seek only an escape of some kind from this reality? Bonhoeffer summoned us to live in this world, filled as it is with sin and wickedness, rather than to pine for the next, to lift our gaze from our own navels and to see and feel the suffering of others around us.

The Burnhams obeyed such a summons and Martin Burnham gave his life. This must seem a tragedy to some people, a waste to others, maybe even crazy to a few. But turning again to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in The Cost of Discipleship, he said : When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die. For people with the courage of the Burnhams, the summons is no less compelling for the fate that may await. And for that we honor them and the memory of Martin Burnham.

Here's a poem by Geoffrey Hill in honor of Bonhoeffer that speaks to us of Martin Burnham too :

Christmas Trees

Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell
bleached by the flares' candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,

restores the broken themes of praise,
encourages our borrowed days,
by logic of his sacrifice.

Against wild reasons of the state
his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.

Godspeed, Mr. Burnham.

N.B. : Black Robe (1985)(Brian Moore 1921-1999) is an exceptionally good novel and film about Jesuit missionaries in French Canada. There's also a good film about Bonhoeffer : Agent of Grace (2000) (directed by Eric Till 1929-).

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 15, 2002 6:18 AM