Reflections on Narrative

I've arrived in Chicago and snaked my way through one of the world’s largest airports and a completely foreign city to a campus nestled in south side of the city in Hyde Park, one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Chicago. A historic place that, during the time of black immigration from the south and white flight, decided it would set down a code of principals that would reverse the ongoing trend of segregation in another form. It is here that I have come, along with 26 other preachers from LA to the Bronx of New York to Eastern Ontario to Germany. Here we have gathered to delve deeper into the act of preaching: how we do it; how people experience it; what we're doing; and how we can be better at it.One of our professors, Dow, who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, shared this story with us yesterday."I'd agreed to do a workshop in new models for church leadership and like so many other things in life had put it off and put it off until it was now Saturday and the workshop was one week away and I had to get it done. So I decided that I'd read the Chicago Tribune, go for a short run and then get down to the business at hand. When I opened the paper there was an article that said while there were only 20,000 civilian casualties during the first gulf war, the consequences of the destruction of infrastructure, of schools, hospitals, stores, and roads has meant that an additional 200,000 Iraqis have died. That's a number I can get my head around because I grew up in a city of 100,000. So two times my city had died. With that in mind I went for my run and as I went along I could hear this repetitive thump, thump, thump and a kind of music layered over it. As I continued I came upon a group of young military men out running and it was their feet I could hear and the cadence they were singing. Fist I recognized the tune: put another nickel in the nickelodeon. The words however were nothing I'd ever heard before. A cadence works like a kind of echo sung response where the person running alongside leads and the group responds. The song went: throw another hand grenade. Look at what a mess I've made. bodies, bodies, everywhere. Bodies, bodies, bodies. The second verse went: look at what a mess I've made; bodies piled up to the sky. bodies, bodies everywhere; bodies, bodies, bodies." They we were the two of us running on opposite sides of the streets." Dow went on, yet that is the essential crux of his story.What dawned on me was the irony of the two sides of that road. On the one side a group of young men who probably hadn't ever seen bodies piled up to the sky (or they wouldn't be singing about it) and on the other side an objector to just this kind of mass mindless violence that not only destroys the body - that corrupts the soul.Corrupting the soul - one could imagine that it’s something that only happens to soldiers and the people who send them on these missions with grand plans of solving all the world's problems through more violence. Yet what they are missing is that in the process they are not only destroying their souls, they are destroying the soul of whole nations. They are corrupting the very gift of creation that God has given to us."bodies, bodies pilled to the sky," when will we ever learn that, as a colleagues 8 year old said, "arguing and violence doesn't even work between my brother and me, so why do they [the world's leaders] think it will work between countries?" Why indeed.