From: jsax@igc.apc.org (Joel Sax)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.quaker
Subject: T.Bunch - Death & Life
Date: 12 Dec 92 02:34:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1744600047:000:10334
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!jsax    Dec 11 18:34:00 1992


From: Joel Sax <jsax>
Subject: T.Bunch - Death & Life

/* Written 10:56 am  Dec 11, 1992 by dfinke@igc.apc.org in igc:gen.quaker */
/* ---------- "T.Bunch - Death & Life" ---------- */
                    Reflections on Tim Bunch's Death
                                                           12/11/92

When I awakened this morning, the radio news had the information which I had 
dreaded to hear and had avoiding trying to learn last night before I turned 
in: Indeed, at 11pm EST on International Human Rights Day, the State of 
Virginia deliberately, methodically, irrevocably, and violently extinguished 
the life of this Convinced Friend.

I say the "State of Virginia," and blush that I thereby perpetuate the deadly 
myth that governments have minds and wills.  In fact, it was prison guards 
and officers, ordinary employees, human beings like myself with feelings and 
families, who were commanded to put Tim into the instrument of death and let 
loose the energy that killed him.  One of the lies and horrors of capital 
punishment, as with war, is that it tries to legitimate the passing of the 
buck --somehow it's always someone *else* who is responsible, in this 
conscious act of prematurely ending the life of a sister or brother.  Surely 
Gov. Wilder must have consoled himself that it wasn't HIS decision --he just 
was letting the courts' due process be fulfilled.  Everybody, up and down the 
line, was just "doing what they had to do," "just following orders".  What 
terrible things must be conjured up as being let loose if compassionate human 
emotion, empathy, sympathy, forgiveness, or mercy were allowed to interfere 
with the mechanical grinding on of the social "order"!

I realize, somewhat to my embarrassment, that I had tried hard in the 
previous two days not to obsess on the fact of Tim's impending doom.  At some 
level, both conscious and unconscious, I was trying to honor him and me and 
our shared tradition by "getting on with life."  The partial irony is that 
since Tuesday, I have been involved in another person's death and thereby her 
life: I had been on the road with my Dad to an out-of-state funeral of his 
last surviving aunt, a woman of 88 years who had been exceptionally good and 
kind to each of us.  Only a dozen people were present at her memorial (almost 
all somewhat distant relatives).  There would have been no pall-bearers other 
than the undertakers had Dad and I not offered to carry her to the grave, 
lower her down, and toss in a few cold clods with our blessings and 
thanksgiving to her.  And then we strolled around the little snowy hillside 
hunting up the names of ancestors of ours dating well into the last century, 
and feeling very connected to them and to each other: somehow feeling both 
sober and fulfillled.

Once more I was deeply convinced that death becomes a lens that puts life 
into focus, that makes us consider what our days are about, that forces us to 
acknowledge that we have a finite span of consciousness upon our good earth.  
And then the Life-Death continuum asks, "What will you do with this?"

On our drive back Wed. and Thurs., I felt a tangible sense of the meaning and 
direction and purposes of our lives, and the debt that generations owe each 
other in constant learning as well as support.  By yesterday morning, with 
just the two of us, my father and I experienced a breakthrough in the ability 
to talk about deep and hard and puzzling things having to do with family 
relationships, more than once speaking the unspeakable and laying aside the 
myths and taboos, in a common pursuit of Truth, letting Reality speak to and 
through us.  These were the kinds of conversations and mutual searching that 
become possible between a person of 51 and one of 83, that we longed for but 
couldn't approach when I was a teenager and young adult.  And I am convinced 
it was in large measure potentiated because we were more aware of our own 
mortality --the limitedness of life.  We had been in the presence of Death.  
And we knew that we didn't have unlimited more years in which to talk 
together.

Does it seem that I have wandered from reflecting on the recent death of Tim 
Bunch?  Of course; but it is all of a piece.  For one thing, I (as I believe 
was the case for Tim) find a comfort and a renewal in trying to put things 
into words.  Sometimes we're not entirely sure what we're thinking or feeling 
until we write it out and share it into the public space.  I was especially 
pleased that in the national news bulletin of two sentences, they saw fit to 
say that before dying he gave a six-minute speech about how society treats 
the poor and the dispossessed and the imprisoned.  With his life, he bought a 
platform on which to bear witness to Truth.  Though we may hear more 
specifics later, at this point I am envisioning that in that grim and ghastly 
chamber of death there was for a few moments a Meeting for Worship in which 
even the most reluctant had to hear the preaching of The Word.  And my Quaker 
faith asserts that "That of God" in the executioners was reached to and 
perhaps touched.

I spoke earlier of a sense of embarrassment.  This goes beyond the statement 
of "chagrin" with which I introduced my public messages of clemency appeal; 
that had to do with the unseemly nature of Quakers appealing for the life of 
a fellow-Quaker, but being too silent too often for the lives of others not 
personally known to us.  The embarrassment emotion goes back many years.  I 
remember when the State of Illinois had last executed a prisoner in about 
1961, and I fervently prayed at that time that when I had children, I 
wouldn't have to acknowledge that our government killed people "in the name 
of the people of the State of Illinois."  For many years thereafter, there 
were sentences but no executions in capital cases in my state (yet true until 
this last year.)

But I was still not spared the personal pain of involvement in this atrocity 
of the death penalty: I vividly recall the sinking feeling when my daughter, 
around 2nd or 3rd grade, asked me if it were really true that there were such 
things as electric chairs (as an older playmate had graphically described to 
her.)  I was deeply ashamed of my society that I had to acknowledge in the 
affirmative.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could have said that it was like 
slavery or child sacrifice or drawing-&-quartering -- abominations that were 
true in the past but which we had, gratefully, outgrown and rejected as 
humanity became more civilized.  Having to admit to this dark side in our 
organized life was somewhat similar to having to explain to her, years 
earlier, that one of her grandfathers had been killed in a war.  How does one 
make the violently irrational fit into the reasonable presumptions of Life?!  
I warn those contemplating parenthood that there are some burdens we would 
much rather not bear, and we must ask the forgiveness of a newer generation 
for what is laid upon them.

I regret that (away from a computer & modem for several days) I had not 
extended my heart in open sympathy and support to our Friend Mike, who spent 
these last days and hours with Tim.  As always, I think there are dimensions 
of suffering for those surviving death that are not experienced by those who 
are resigned to the fact that their own life is ending.  For Mike, we must 
acknowledge that the State of Virginia has tortured him, perhaps even more 
than Tim's biological family:  To walk with a person to their place of death 
and have to witness the gruesomeness of such heartless cruelty must make 
terrible scars on the soul.  I have had Mike on my mind in a special way, and 
earnestly pray that our Lord may give him peace and solace, may help him 
transcend the bitterness or possible sense of personal failure which may 
unjustly tempt him.  Mike was, heroically, standing there for all of us who 
claimed to care, and he has borne a suffering I hope none of the rest of us 
will have to endure.  Thank you, Mike, and may you experience The Comforter 
in the depth of your being.

In my own attempt to make sense of the senseless, I reach for some vision of 
the possible redemptive nature of suffering.  I want to believe that this 
ordeal will give some new life within our Society of Friends to a concern for 
those on death row, will re-vivify our historic testimony against the taking 
of life by the state, will sensitize us to those appeals which may come from 
committed groups like Amnesty International: to be our Brothers' and Sisters' 
keepers.  It is a fact that the death of 4 Quakers in the Massachussetts over 
300 years ago turned the tide of public opinion against the Puritan theocracy 
and its determination to enforce with death its view of the Truth.  

I regret that there may be hundreds more executed in our country, in a 
mistaken pursuit of security,  before we leave the shameful ranks of those 
countries which still kill their own citizens in the name of justice: China, 
Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, (and we used to say South Africa, until 
they suspended further hangings.)  We are a long ways from obliterating 
organized violence and death in our world, but we must resolutely demand that 
our democratic governments cease forever the killing of our fellow citizens 
in our name.  When we speak of the abomination of war, let us not lose the 
opportunity to speak of the war against those without resources in our own 
midst, who are paying with their lives for the iniquities of an entire unjust 
social order which glorifies and commercializes violence.

I have said enough here, for now.  The end of life is irreversible, and must 
be faced by each of us if we are honest.  That is a given fact.  We have in 
our hand no control over our mortality, but we can indeed make choices about 
the quality of our lives and that of those around us, while we live.  I 
believe that in these recent years, Tim Bunch gave us a lesson in taking 
charge of the direction of one's life, seeking to minister to others, seeking 
to ameliorate to some extent the mistakes every one of us makes.  His life, 
for all its imperfections, was a witness.  May we get on with letting our 
Light also shine.

                                                           -D. Finke