Castle Bravo

Then they came to Jerusalem. Jesus entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written,

‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?

But you have made it a den of robbers.
Mark 11: 15-17

At the beginning of March, peace people in Asia and the Pacific invite our attention. March 1 marks Bikini Day, when in 1954, the U.S. conducted “Castle Bravo,” its largest of 67 nuclear weapons explosions carried out in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (Pacific atolls located between Hawai’i and the Philippines, now under extreme threat due to climate change) from 1946-1958. In addition to the people of the RMI, 23 crewmembers of the Japanese fishing boat The Lucky Dragon – about 80 miles from the explosion – witnessed and were exposed to the explosion (1,000x more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki a-bombs), and the radiation and ash that rained down.

Almost nine years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki a-bombings, this nuclear explosion catalyzed the Japanese nuclear abolition movement. Until then, hibakusha (a-bomb victims/survivors) from Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been stigmatized, marginalized, and silenced. Then, in response to the Lucky Dragon crewmembers’ illnesses and the toxicity of fish returning to Japanese ports, hibakusha and women across Japan stepped into the space of death and destruction and began to speak and act out against a- and h-bombs.

Meanwhile, many people of the RMI have been displaced from their irradiated homes and land, and experience extremely high rates of radiation-related illnesses. In recent years, the people and government of the RMI have been at the forefront of efforts to protect humanity and the Earth from the devastation of nuclear weapons; in 2014 the country filed a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice in an effort to push the nuclear-armed states towards disarmament.

Hibakusha and their descendents and supporters around the world enter the realm of weapons, biomedical experiments, and geopolitical strategy to make space for the truth of their experiences. They make space for telling stories, for disrupting casualties for the sake of technological and military innovation, for exposing treaty violations, for confronting destruction at the hands of the powerful. Women whom I met as a delegate of Shinfujin (the New Japan Women’s Association) along the 2014 Japan Peace March make space in their lives to collect signatures, to make paper crafts with tags that read “No More Nuclear Weapons! No More War!”

Might Jesus’ reference to the temple symbolize the sacredness of God’s Creation? Political and economic practices continue to rob life from the Earth; this neither began nor ended with the atomic and hydrogen explosions of the 20^th century. God urges us to make spaces to respond – from places where we’ve caused and experienced harm, from our faith, from our commitment to life, from what we know and from our values, from our honest reflections on the violence of human hands and minds, from our positions of power – be that power recognized or subversive.

God, you have entrusted the inhabitants of the Earth with the capacity for stewardship.

You invite us to pray and worship, yet all around us we see your holy Creation –

Robbed and destroyed, exploited, brutalized, bought and sold, traded, pillaged.

God, the Greater Good,

Help us to face the ways that life is robbed from your Creation, the ways that we allow for death to have its last word.

God, help us find courage and inspiration from those in our midst, across space and time, who insist that life may follow death. That from painful, violent deaths may come beautiful life, from and in the Truth of its broken source. Help us make space for the Truth of the death and destruction in which we are entangled.

And God, help us make spaces that imagine, demand, create ways, prayerful, reverent, humble – turning from death and destruction towards God’s call to be in fellowship with all of the nations, with all God’s diverse Creation.

For more information:

http://www.japan-press.co.jp/modules/news/index.php?id=11293

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc_IgE7TBSY

https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/03/29/radiation-japan-and-the-marshall-islands/