I ALWAYS HAVE been drawn to John’s vision of God as warming, illuminating, loving, life-giving light.  It is a theme that runs through Scripture … from the very beginning.  But each time I sought the warmth of that light last month, I found myself sucked into the depressing darkness of evil -- the appalling crimes at Abu Ghraib.  That depression deepened as those responsible sought to hide in the darkness “lest [their] deeds should be exposed.”

In the sickeningly pale light of those self-damning photographs from an American torture chamber, I found echoes of other crimes by other people that have rattled around my mind and haunted my conscience for far too long.

In seeing the boarded-over windows of the Abu Ghraib cells, I recalled another place of horror. Taking visiting Americans on tours of Auschwitz as American Consul in Krakow 1973-1975, I learned that carbon monoxide was pumped from vehicle exhausts into the hermetically sealed basement cells where Soviet POWs were killed in early extermination trials.

Later, as consul in Munich 1982-1985, I often visited Dachau and came across a book by Wendy von Staden, the wife of the German ambassador in Washington -- a courageous account of growing up near a small concentration camp where prisoners from Dachau were sent to die of starvation and disease.

In that book, Darkness Over the Valley, she described in personal terms what Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil.”  Toward the end, as French troops approached, she and her mother came face-to-face with a work detachment rioting over a kettle of potatoes.
“‘What kind of people are these anyway?’ mother asked [an SS guard], horror-struck.

‘“They’re no longer human beings. … They are Jews,’ replied the guard, ‘subhumans.  You can see that for yourself.’
“I was standing next to mother when suddenly we heard a man’s voice behind us.  The voice itself was low and soft, speaking in good clear German, but there was an undertone of almost menacing fury.  ‘It’s you who’ve made us into animals, and you’ll pay for what you’ve done to us.’”

Later, at home, Wendy’s mother confronted her father, who had been watching from a window:

“‘Keep out of this,’ my father said almost threateningly.  ‘It has nothing to do with us.  We can’t do a thing about it.’  And then he grabbed his walking stick and went outside.  Mother continued to pace, talking as if to herself, ‘These people are simply starving.  That’s it.  They’re half-crazed with hunger. ...That man was right, we’ve made them into beasts, into subhumans.  We.’”

I remember yet another instance in 1965 of evil in a darkened place – a place called Long Phu.  I was a young officer, the junior of two advisers to a Vietnamese unit.  The senior adviser, Dale, and I shared a thatched “hootch,” the opposite side of which comprised the “office” of our counterpart, Lieutenant Qui.  The wall between was open at the top.

One night, as we were dozing off, a dim bulb on the other side clicked on amidst a commotion of shouts and pleas as a VC prisoner was hauled into the “office.”  There were sounds of pistol whippings, the click of an unloaded pistol and screams of torment.  Pushing back the mosquito-netting, I hopped out of bed and was about to dart around to the other side of the hootch, when Dale barked at me, “Go back to sleep.  It’s none of our business.  That’s the way they do things.”

I fell back on the cot in tears and sweat, listening to the screams, watching the shadows on a dimly lit thatched roof … unable to form a prayer.

It was against this flood of awful memories that I tried last month to process the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and the murder of a young American, Niccholas Berg.  I’m still trying … and still crying … trying to form a prayer for forgiveness.  For it is we who have created – in a gulag stretching from Bagram to Guantanamo -- new legions of “sub-humans” who will seek to “make us pay.”  But we have already paid.  For, in staring at those awful pictures, we are staring at our self-made, self-willed hell.

But are we, like Wendy’s Germans, condemned to live in an unending hell of collective guilt?  If, like Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity and O’Reilly, you believe that we have nothing to apologize for or confess to, perhaps.  If, like President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld, you believe that the ultimate epithet to be tossed at the crimes of Abu Ghraib is “un-American,” perhaps.

A people that so believes in its exceptionalism that “God” becomes “America” and “sin” “un-American” deserves a divine slapping around.  It is truly surprising that a president who views the world through a neo-Manichean prism of black and white, good and evil, light and darkness, cannot recognize a sin when he sees one.

On the whole, I’m inclined to believe that sin is universal and that we, too, are capable of sinning in the same way and to the same extent as Germans 60 years ago.  As Christians and Americans, we are called upon to resist.