Tonight, I listened to Shane Claiborne tell stories about Baghdad. He’s taller than I expected (6′ 3″, maybe) and skinnier and younger. I mean, I knew he was young, but after reading his diaries for the last few weeks I somehow expected him to carry the weight of his experience in his skin. He’s just a kid, though — a couple years younger than I am, in fact. Looks like that skater kid who annoys you at the mall. The one with the flared pants and chunky glasses who you avoid making eye contact with. Shane had the pants and the glasses, along with a light brace around his chest that restrained his left shoulder. The one he dislocated while riding at high speed through a militarized zone on the road from Baghdad to Amman. The one he dislocated while bombs fell in every direction. The one he dislocated while his friends’ skulls cracked open beside him.
Shane is a local boy — a graduate of Maryville High School who went off to college in Philadelphia a few years ago and decided to stay. He and several friends committed to spending five years together in community, living Christ’s example in an inner-city neighborhood. After his talk tonight I told him that I was glad he was home safe, that I had prayed for him. Then I thanked him for being one of those voices that has brought me comfort in recent months, when I have felt so alienated from so much of American religion. With typical grace, he smiled and said, “That’s the struggle, isn’t it? At some point you have to stop complaining about the Church and start being the Church.” The Simple Way, they call it.
Shane left for Baghdad a few weeks ago as part of a Christian Peacemaker Team, in cooperation with Voices in the Wilderness. He went, he told us, with two goals in mind: first, to comfort the people of Iraq, showing them the other face of America, and second, to document that experience so that it could be shared with everyone willing to listen. I was deeply discouraged to hear him confirm my worst suspicions. Whenever they fought to bring specific humanitarian crises to the attention of reporters, the international media would soon be on the scene, asking questions, conducting interviews. Shane’s one experience with the American media — a live interview on one of the morning news programs — was cut off soon after he began answering the first question: “How does it feel to be considered a traitor in your own country?” A quick sidenote: one of the crises that they experienced was the bombing of the Baghdad market. Shane visited the scene the next day, and tonight I held a small part of a civilian vehicle that was incinerated in the attack, immediately killing all of its passengers.
He had plenty of stories to share, many of which are posted in his diaries. There’s the one about the thirteen year old girl whose birthday party he attended. She wished for “Peace” as bombs blasted the horizon, an image that I would dismiss as cheap sentimentality in a film, but not in life. There’s the one about the bombs that explode before impact, spraying uniformly sized cubes of shrapnel into homes and families — the cluster bombs that we promised we wouldn’t use this time. (Shane has photos of those cubes, scraped from the bloodied walls of apartments near his camp.) There’s the one about the well-spoken (in English, that is) Iraqi doctor who stitched Shane and his friends back together after their accident, refusing payment. He asked only that they tell the world that the Americans had bombed their smalltown hospital three days earlier.
My favorite story was of an Iraqi Christian who Shane met during a worship service. I didn’t realize that there were so many Christians in Iraq — upwards of one million, he told us. After a service, this man and Shane were discussing the war, and the man asked, “Do Americans support this war?” “Some do, but there is growing opposition.” “And the church?” Shane said that his heart sunk when he heard that second question. “Well, most do not, but some parts of the Church do support the war.” “Not Christians,” the man said, startled. “Yes, Christians.”
“But, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’”
What I love about this story and about this man is that his mind could not reconcile such a gross contradiction. It was impossible for him to imagine a Christian Church that imagines disaster and that accepts Bush’s heresy of redemptive violence as so many segments of ours have. He is such a wonderful reminder of the catholicity of Christ’s church and of how powerful it is despite our best efforts to castrate it.