Belonging to Each Other in Our Darkness: I Am Lawrence Brewer, I Am Troy Davis
by Sarah Stockton Howell, guest contributor
“Love” by Christopher Brown (Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Wednesday night at 11:08, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, a man widely believed to be innocent. A last-minute delay went to the Supreme Court, where a stay of execution was denied.
Meanwhile in Texas, another man was executed. There was no widespread outcry for the life of Lawrence Brewer. His horrific crime was one of which he boasted, one in which there was no doubt of his guilt. He “deserved” to die.
I was troubled by the preoccupation with the “too much doubt” that characterized the Troy Davis case. Not because I disagree with the emphasis; the fact that our government would sentence an innocent man to death — and, by the way, “since 1973, 138 people in 26 states have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center — and then follow through on that sentence amid mounting doubt is appalling. A crime was committed in Georgia Wednesday night. One friend commented that the only physical evidence or weapon connected to the Troy Davis case was that used in the execution. That should make us shudder.
However, I found myself forced to wonder why we were comfortable executing Lawrence Brewer on the same night. The answer is obvious: Brewer committed and reveled in an unimaginably cruel hate crime, the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. I didn’t want to know about his crime, but when the phrase “I am Troy Davis” was splashed across various social media outlets, I felt like I had to add “I am Lawrence Brewer,” and I needed to know what I was really saying. Reading more about Brewer, I found a part of myself glad that he is no longer on this Earth. According to an article in The Huffington Post comparing the two death penalty cases, Brewer wrote a letter with these chilling words while in jail for Byrd’s murder: “Well, I did it. And no longer am I a virgin. It was a rush, and I’m still licking my lips for more.”
No one in their right mind wants this man on the streets. But it seems to me that part of the desire to shut away and then kill someone like Brewer is not only that we want to maintain public safety — it’s that we are afraid to acknowledge what we have in common with him. We do not want someone like Brewer to be human because we do not want to see ourselves in him. I do not want to identify myself with a white supremacist whose racism led him to torture and murder a black man. It is easy for me to say that I would never commit such a crime, but what really separates me from Brewer?
“It Is Finished” by Christopher Brown (Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Mother Teresa once said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” This quote gets used a lot of the time to highlight the nice things about human community and relationships, the ways in which we can and should build one another up and take care of one another. That is absolutely right, but it seems to me that in this broken world, if there is ever going to be healing and reconciliation, we must admit that we belong to each other not only in our goodness but also in our darkness.
The reason that history continues to go through cycles of violence, even genocide, is that we continuously (and with good reason!) distance ourselves from the perpetrators of horror, so much so that we fail to recognize those same impulses in our own hearts. We condemn German citizens who did nothing while Jews were rounded up and murdered in their midst, and yet we allow men to be killed by the state, systemic injustice to deny basic healthcare to the poor, suspected terrorists to be held and tortured with no evidence but their ethnicity or nationality in the name of homeland security, and unjust wars to be waged abroad by soldiers with no resources to deal with the repercussions of taking a human life.
Sister Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun and anti-death penalty activist (and the character portrayed by Susan Sarandon in the movie Dead Man Walking) said, “The profound moral question is not, ‘Do they deserve to die?’ but ‘Do we deserve to kill them?’” I am reminded of John 8:7, where Jesus challenges the men accusing a woman of adultery: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
I am not advocating lawlessness and disorder. But, innocent or guilty, no human being should have their life taken by the state. We need to acknowledge the inhumanity of the death penalty as being the very thing we are trying not to see in ourselves when we wash our hands of the humanity of someone like Lawrence Brewer.
I have to point out the reactions of each victim’s family to these two executions. The family of James Byrd, Jr., whose body was mercilessly mutilated by Lawrence Brewer, who was unrepentant to the last, begged the courts not to kill him. But the family of Mark MacPhail, whom Troy Davis is accused of killing, welcomed his death, feeling that justice had been served.
I was 14 years old on 9/11. I watched our country’s sense of security crumble with those towers. I still cry almost anytime someone talks about 9/11. And yet, I have never feared terrorists. I do not worry about my safety when I travel. I have caught myself looking at Middle Eastern people with curiosity that borders on suspicion, but I have never really been concerned that he or she is a terrorist or would harm me in any way. What I do fear is that darkness that lies in the human soul, in my own soul, that darkness that leads people like the MacPhails to see death as a victory, that causes crowd members at a GOP rally to cheer when Rick Perry is asked about the record number of executions that have taken place in Texas during his term as governor. I do not fear people like Brewer. I fear the part of me that wants to cheer at Brewer’s death.
As a Christian, I believe that there is only one death in all of history that constituted a victory. If we celebrate any other human death — even the death of Osama bin Laden — we have, indeed, forgotten that we belong to each other, and until our memory is restored, we will have no peace.
I am Troy Davis. I am Lawrence Brewer. May God have mercy on my soul.
Sarah Stockton Howell is a student at Duke Divinity School and regularly blogs at The Fast I Choose.
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The Vanishing Ego in Painting: An Interview with Painter Joan Watts
by Kim Russo, guest contributor
On a gloriously sunny Memorial Day in 2008, I arrived at the Santa Fe studio of painter Joan Watts. I was there to interview her for a review in a local newspaper. She led me into her impressive studio where her newest paintings, in cool gradations of blue, purple, and gray, lined the warm, white walls. As we talked, a friendship based on our mutual experiences in the studio and on the meditation cushion began.
When she moved to Santa Fe from New York in 1986, the New Mexico landscape became the influence critics and curators referenced when discussing her reductive paintings. Writers used words like “ephemeral” to describe the luminosity of her paint, or “meditative” to describe her subtle formal choices — all outcomes, they suggested, of her examination of the southwestern landscape. I wondered if, instead, the New Mexico landscape gave Watts — a practitioner of Zen since 1989 — the vehicle for relating the spiritual experiences she had on the meditation cushion and in her daily life.
So which is it Joan? Are these landscape paintings that are about meditation, or meditative paintings that are about the landscape?
(laughing) Well, the light of New Mexico has certainly been a penetrating vehicle enveloping my spiritual path, but it is also true that my spiritual path propels me to somehow discover the means to evoke light and space through painting. It’s true that after beginning my Zen meditation practice the process of making a painting also became a form of meditation for me.
Can you describe that?
Now when I begin a painting, I get started in the process and then let go. The painting takes over, and I disappear. But the moment before the ego drops is pure fear. It is the same experience in sitting meditation, when the ego drops away.
Do you think your paintings describe that experience of the ego disappearing?
Can a painting embody or transmit Buddhist experience? I don’t know. Can you convey something of your experiential state to the audience? I don’t know. It depends on the viewer.
How so?
Transmission between (Buddhist) teacher and (Buddhist) student is about both of them, but both of them becoming one. With art we have an object. Is there anything embodied in that object through which some transmission happens for the viewer? I don’t know. But the same things get in the way of the transmission between viewer and art object as Buddhist teacher and student: ego, assumptions, intellectual understanding, education.
That reminds me of when I saw the Rothko Chapel for the first time. When I entered and saw the huge black canvases, I didn’t understand why anyone would present black paintings of nothing to represent a spiritual space. I grew up in a Presbyterian church full of stained glass and light. I didn’t understand Rothko’s chapel at all. I sat there for a long time really looking at the work. Then I saw it: the paintings weren’t black — they were purple, blue, green, red — and they slowly revealed themselves to me. It was an experience that changed as my position in the room changed. I thought: Wow, this is what spiritual realization is like: slow, changing, and constantly transforming. Spiritual life is an experience, not a concept. Rothko had created an experience for me rather than showing me a picture. That was life-changing for me.
I visited that chapel several times after my mastectomy and also had a powerful experience with the work. Seeing the Rothko Chapel was healing for me, and it was the beginning of my meditation practice, although I didn’t know it at the time. It is interesting how you entered the chapel with an attitude and you got very conceptual and mental — What is going on? Why black in a church? — all assumptions based on previous experiences, and then the present moment went CLUNK!
Do you have the same experience while you are painting?
Yes. I think in the creative process itself, when it goes really well, the artist is gone during the process — and later the artist can reflect. But the reflection is not the experience. It’s a memory, which is not the actual making.
So you are moving in and out of a kind of meditative state.
You can experience life as a coming into and out of the ego-self, or you can be only in the ego-self, which is like the Xerox copy — this is what I want and this is what I expect. The ego-self is conceptual. In-the-moment, non-conceptual experience can be scary. Non-conceptual experience is never a Xerox copy of anything else you have experienced.
I want to talk a little bit about how your meditation practice has changed how you function within the art market.
I don’t have to worry about supporting myself financially. But for me there was an interesting relationship with my ego because I felt I had to make a big presence in the art world. That is why I made a business plan, I set up exhibitions, and I made the monograph of my work, which took three years. But getting the work out in the world is ego-based. I can’t work in both places at once, the art world and the studio.
Is it possible, really, to completely detach from the ego? Or is it only possible to keep it in check?
Some day I’d like to get free of the business and just work — but there is an ego base that creeps back in. My mom played gorgeous piano every day by herself because she just enjoyed it, and she composed music. She didn’t try to put it in the world. When I was a kid, I thought that if I was in her shoes I’d get it out there in the world. Now I really admire what she did.
I had a conversation with the Santa Fe photographer Herb Lotz after his recent retrospective exhibition. I asked him if he thought it was successful. He said he was really glad he had the opportunity to do it and now he doesn’t ever have to do it again. I remember being blown away by his answer. It was filled with gratitude — and no attachment.
About the images: The paintings featured above are part of Joan Watts’ One series, 24 x 24 inches, oil on canvas, 2008. (photos: Herb Lotz)
Kim Russo is an artist, writer, and Head of Fine Arts at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. She has written for the Journal Santa Fe and Pasatiempo, and is currently working on a book, funded by the Frederick P. Lenz Foundation, about how Buddhist practice can help contemporary artists negotiate the ego-traps of the studio and the art market.
We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.
