"I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world."
Roibeárd Gearóid Ó Seachnasaigh/ Bobby Sands
March 9, 1954 -- May 5, 1981
It is a soft, grey morning in Western Maine. Last night was the exact midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, so by some reckonings today is Lá Bealtaine, a shimmering, trembling, liminal time, that marks the beginning of the bright half of the year, and, at certain moments in history, the end and beginning of worlds.
Today is also the anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands in the H-Blocks of the Maze prison in the occupied North of Ireland in 1981. Bobby was a Prisoner of War in the struggle for freedom and dignity for the people of the occupied North of Ireland that had begun a decade earlier in the wake of the murder of unarmed civil rights marchers by British troops. He and his fellow prisoners had gone on hunger strike, demanding that they be recognized as political prisoners. When Bobby (who was elected to the British parliament while in prison) and his fellow hunger strikers were at death’s door, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made their mothers decide whether to override their sons’ wills and force feed them. (See the beautiful and harrowing 1996 film “Some Mother’s Son.”)
Bobby Sands showed courage and grace in the hell that was the H-Blocks, and left behind poetry and songs that spoke of his dream of freedom not only for his own people but for all people. (And he also was responsible for the deaths of innocent people during his days with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Oppression and desperation blinds so many otherwise noble hearts to the harm that they cause in the name of liberation. And we also now know what Bobby did not know – that the escalation of he violence of “the Troubles” was in large part the result of British intelligence carrying out random killings of civilians in order to provoke a cycle of retaliation between both Republican and Loyalist factions in the North of Ireland at a time when the armed struggle was close to reaching a negotiated end.)
It was not until this year, that I realized that the death of Bobby Sands fell on a date a close to the dates of the 1916 executions of the leaders of Ireland’s Easter Rising, and just one day after the anniversary of the 1970 murder of four American college students by the National Guard at Kent State. That all these deaths came so close to Bealtaine is a synchronicity too strong to ignore -- especially poignant in a week where police in the U.S. have been raining violence down on college students and their allies speaking out against the genocide unfolding in Gaza.
Implicated in it all is the complicated mythos of blood sacrifice and redemptive suffering -- the idea that the coming of a new world can only be brought into being through the willingness of some to die. This idea of death as a necessary element of any movement toward liberation ironically has its origins in the conversion of Christianity from a countercultural movement into an imperial religion and the appropriation and transformation of the concept of martyrdom.
The English word “martyr” has its roots in the Greek word “martur” which originally meant “witness.” For the early countercultural Christians, to testify that a man executed by the state had risen again and held a way to defeat death was to risk being executed themselves. (The Episcopal theologian William Stringfellow spoke of the fact that all the power of the state lies in its ability to kill, and said that it was the resurrection of Lazarus that made Jesus a threat to the Roman order.) When Christianity became a state religion in order to honor the early saints who had already grown popular, it became necessary to make their deaths rather than their testimony the mark of their sanctification.
There is a subtle but tremendously important distinction between the willingness to risk death by bearing witness to a forbidden truth and the active courting of death. Bound up in this is a corruption of another concept – that of sacrifice. Etymologically, “sacrifice” means to “make sacred.” A life is made sacred through dedication. (And animist worldviews recognize that all of life is already sacred, and honor life and death through reverent, reciprocal relation.)
In modern understandings of the past seen through the lens of a Christianized worldview so ubiquitous and pervasive that we no longer recognize its presence, we view the idea of sacrificing your life for your land and your people as ancient and honorable. But if we remove that lens we can see that the truly sacred act was to dedicate not your death alone, but your life to the people and the land. Sometimes the consequence of this would be facing death rather than forsaking that dedication. But this was not the desirable outcome. Better to live a long life of generous blessing. (Some might object that old Irish and old Norse texts celebrate heroic deaths – but we have to remember that the versions of these stories that we have were recorded by Christians. And in the case of Viking culture they were stories reshaped by warlords trying to recruit men into their armies.)
The earth has had enough of our blood and enough of our tears. If we truly want to usher in a new world, let our sacrifice be to live in ways that honor all of life, let our holy witness be a witness to the fact that all life is already sacred.
We stand at the threshold of another trembling world. Let that trembling be not death throes, but the ecstatic shudder of conception and the life giving convulsions of birth.