Editor's Note: The first reading, The Bhagavad Gita, was chosen by Senator Dayton. Since he referred to it several times in the homily, we include it at the beginning of the homily. The Bhagavad Gita (The Song of God) The Bhagavad Gita is believed to be over 2500 years old, and to have originated from Pre-Hindu traditions in India. It is a part of a larger Indian epic, the Mahabharata. However, the Gita also stands alone as a complete work and one of the world’s great spiritual classics. Its setting is the evening before a great battle between the forces of good, who include the story’s human hero, Arjuna and his brothers, against the forces of evil. Arjuna is anguished by the prospects of the morrow’s carnage and his role in it. He is visited by Sri Krishna, who is an incarnation of God. The following passages are taken from Chapter 2, in which Sri Krishna begins to instruct Arjuna on performing his immediate duty, to fight in the next day’s battle and on how to conduct himself in all matters as an enlightened spiritual man. Stand up now, son of Kunti, and resolve to fight. Realize that pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat, are all one and the same: then go into battle. Do this and you cannot commit any sin. Then Sri Krishna describes an illumined soul: “He knows bliss in the Atman and wants nothing else. Cravings torment the heart; he renounces cravings. I call him illumined. Not shaken by adversity, not hankering after happiness. Free from fear, free from anger, free from the things of desire. I call him a seer and illumined. The bonds of his flesh are broken. He is lucky, and does not rejoice. He is unlucky, and does not weep. I call him illumined. The abstinent run away from what they desire, but carry their desires with them. When a man enters Reality, he leaves his desires behind him. Even a mind that knows the path can be dragged from the path. The senses are so unruly. But he controls the senses, and recollects the mind, and fixes it on Me. I call him illumined. When he has no lust, no hatred, a man walks safely among the things of lust and hatred. To obey the Atman is his peaceful joy. Sorrow melts into that clear peace. His quiet mind is soon established in peace. The uncontrolled mind does not guess that the Atman is present. How can it meditate? Without meditation, where is peace? Without peace, where is happiness? When a man can still the senses, I call him illumined. The recollected mind is awake in the knowledge of the Atman, which is dark night to the ignorant. The ignorant are awake in their sense-life, which they think is daylight. To the seer it is darkness. The man who stirs up his own lusts can never know peace. He knows peace who has forgotten desire. He lives without craving, free from ego, free from pride. I call him illumined.”

"If We’re So Right, Why Are There So Few of Us Left?"
Senator Mark Dayton
Sunday, September 1st, 2002

In 1968 I turned 21 and I voted for President of the United States for the first time. Earlier that year I’d watch my first political hero, Robert Kennedy, murdered on television in front of my eyes and something inside of me was kindled then in my conscience and my consciousness. If somebody told me as I cast that first vote that I would spend 24 of the next 36 years of my life under 5 Republican Presidents, the other 12 under 2 Southern Democrats, I would have joined the Space Program and asked for a one-way ticket past Pluto!

During the next few years I began to develop my political involvements in this country. I was active in the anti-war movement, for which I earned the honor of being the only Minnesotan named to Nixon’s enemy list; I taught in New York City and lived with a welfare family in a public housing project there and saw firsthand the social and economic injustice in this country; I took part in the first Honeywell Project, anti-Honeywell demonstration, at its annual meeting in the Spring of 1970 and voted to remove my father from the Board of Directors; the tear gas attack by Mayor Charles Stenvig’s police force in the streets of Minneapolis - what a homecoming!

Our causes were so good and so right and so just, I believed back then, of course, we would win. Economic inequality had to end. Environmental pollution had to stop. Of course women deserved equal rights, of course human rights must become the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. Obviously the nuclear arms race was insane. It would be soon brought to a halt. We would convert our country, and the world, to social justice, economic equality, to world peace. We’d win them all for everyone and still have time to retire and enjoy nirvana before our transcendence.

Now I’m 55 years old, with the emphasis on old, I am a senior citizen! With all those good and right and just causes, we haven’t won any of them. In fact, it seems to me we are losing most of them. Social injustice and economic inequality have gotten worse. The world is more likely to end in a nuclear or ozone-less disaster; or an Iraqi, Middle East holocaust. Our country has moved decidedly to the right. Our citizens, many are less involved. Our social system is less compassionate, government is less effective and liberalism is more distrusted.

What happened? Where did I go wrong? What didn’t I see or what did I misjudge so badly? And where is God in the midst of all this injustice? I don’t have a clue. I don’t know if He, or She, or Whatever doesn’t exist, died, is incompetent, doesn’t care, is laissez faire, or has a master plan I can’t understand. I used to hope to realize God before I died and see the beginning of a new world order, the Aquarian Age. I’ve given up hoping for anything that extraordinary and I’d settle for something that has become almost as unusual. I’d like to see one real Democratic President before I die. And I would like to see her succeed.

I’m not a lawyer but I’m told that, in a trial, you should never ask a question that you don’t know the answer to. In that case, I would not be a good lawyer because I don’t know the answer to the question, “If we’re so right, why are so few of us left?” I have some part answers, at least as they relate to conventional electoral politics. I believe the Right has been tactilely smarter, worked harder, organized better, fundraised more, and communicated more often and solidified those advantages electorally. Are there more of them in the country? I don’t believe so. But more of them vote. Our economically downtrodden, culturally disconnected, politically distrustful, don’t vote. And the Right is not shy about using the three most powerful icons in America: the flag, the dollar sign, and God. In fact they are shrewd and skilled in manipulating all three. They wrap themselves and their issues in the flag. They are the patriots, the Americans. The Left are the socialists, and the communists. The Right is the party of capitalism, of the American dream of becoming rich and getting richer. The Left is the party of more government and higher taxes and welfare cheats. They have been shrewd and shameless about expropriating God and using Him or Her on their side. Ronald Reagan invoked God’s blessing on America more than all his predecessors combined. In fact, maybe more than all the people on the planet combined. Bill Clinton picked it up and used it some but he’ll be eclipsed by George Bush next year.

Parochial schools, prayer in the schools, pro-life. The Right is the moral majority against the Left’s moral decay. Worst are the self-anointed “super saviors”, the self-proclaimed, self-ordained, members of God’s chosen few who enjoy, they say, unique access to the holy hotline, where God tells them decidedly what is right. Which is almost exactly what they believe is right. And then, are they ever right! People who have memorized the Bible, and don’t practice what it says, people who love to hate in the name of God, to denounce and condemn in the name of Jesus Christ. Progressive politics has too often ceded God to the Right, and the flag, and the American dream. Those are three major mistakes, which have cost us our causes and our allies.

So in the march of so many years, for myself, in the midst of so many defeats and disappointments, I’ve searched for a faith that I could have faith in. I’ve struggled to gain a little understanding of what is senseless and incomprehensible. I sought meaning in what might actually be meaningless or ultimately become meaningless, because I need meaning in my life.

I’ve learned that to become effective in public affairs, you have to become a realist. But to remain effective you have to remain an idealist. And I need reminders and consolation and inspiration. Which is why I like the Bhagavad Gita, which I take metaphorically in its references to warriors and battles and wars, not literally. But I like that Arjuna is a warrior, a trying, doubting, questioning, agonizing mortal, facing something big that he is feeling not ready for and wondering if it is the right thing to do; if he can do it, and even whether he will survive it.

I like that God, in the form of Sri Krishna, comes to Arjuna in his time of doubt and darkness, accepts him as he is; understands his fears; feels his pain. But the Lord is straight with him also. He says, “If you refuse to follow in your path to do your duty, to fight this righteous war, here are the consequences. But I will be with you; I’ll teach you the practice; I’ll show you the way.” That would make it all worthwhile for me. If the path, the work, the whatever - were a way to God, a way to connect with God and to serve God and to experience God in this lifetime. I don’t know that state. I can imagine it, but I haven’t experienced it. I don’t know how to attain it, or where to find it or even if it exists. But then, neither did Arjuna before his visitation.

I’m relieved that God visited Arjuna and taught him, while he was involved in the world, on the eve of a battle. It’s not one of those deals where you have to drop everything and drop out, find an Ashram with a guru, give up your inheritance, savings, and 401K and become an obedient devotee. I am not good at obedience. In the Gita story you are not only involved in the world, you have a point of view, an edge, a cause, a battle looms, the lines are drawn: the forces of good against the forces of evil.

Jesus was an activist with a point of view and a moral outrage at what he saw; the social injustice, the hypocrisy, the profiteering. In Matthew chapter 21 he goes into the Temple of God and over throws the tables and throws the moneychangers out. He drives them and the profiteers out of the Temple saying, “My house shall be called a house of prayer and ye have made it a den of thieves.” Later in Luke, Jesus says, “I have come to send fire on the earth. Suppose ye that I have come to give peace on earth, I tell ye nay, but rather division. Whoever shall seek to save his life shall loose it. Whoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.”

Jesus, as we know, did not win all of his battles. He didn’t retire victorious and vindicated, He didn’t even get out alive. But what both the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita make clear is that the spiritual scorecard does not equate in the earthly outcome. It is measured at a different level. And in the Gita the Lord begins to describe that level in the most beautiful passage, “Not shaken by adversity, not hankering after happiness. Free from fear, free from anger, free from the things of desire. I call him a seer and illumined. The bonds of his flesh are broken. He is lucky, and does not rejoice. He is unlucky, and does not weep. I call him illumined. The recollected mind is awake in the knowledge of God, which is dark night to the ignorant. The ignorant are awake in their sense-life, which they think is daylight. To the seer, that is darkness. The man or woman who stirs up his own lusts can never know peace. They know peace who have forgotten desire. And live without craving, free from ego, free from pride. I call them illumined.”

Now, as I said before, I believe that the story line in the Bhagavad Gita is meant to be taken metaphorically and not literally. Its reference to a righteous war means a righteous cause not a literal war. In fact, other than in this initial state setting, the Gita makes no reference to battle or war, the rest of the book is about the spiritual practice and the ethical conduct of an illumined soul. In my view, a righteous war in the Gita’s sense can be to prevent or stop a war in the literal sense, as was the case in the war against Vietnam. As is the case now with war looming against Iraq.

I must say that the description of an illumined person makes clear by contrast that the Bush Administration is comprised of few of them, and the record shows it. They came into office with an arrogant distain for these anachronisms like the ABM Treaty and “No First Use” doctrine and most international accords and they swiftly denounced and discarded them. In their place they put a major build up of our country’s military might, additional advanced weapons of mass destruction and a ballistic missile shield to enhance our security while weakening everyone else’s. Then President Bush proclaimed the right to launch pre-emptive attacks against our enemies - wherever they may be - and informed the rest of the world the United States would act alone regardless of their opinion. What a way to mislead the world. What a way to misrepresent the values and views of the American people. Americans may be Right, but they are not that far wrong. And if George Bush had campaigned on that platform, I believe that he would have lost the election decisively. Or I would definitely reapply for the one-way ticket past Pluto. Which is where we might all end up if he’s not careful and not showing some illumination.

To invade Iraq and to cause a holocaust now, in the hopes of preventing a future Armageddon, is a huge, huge gamble; with risks worse than ever before for this country and for this entire world. A holocaust now or an Armageddon later. Either would be so terrible, that both should be unthinkable. Invading Iraq would appear to be the less terrible option and that is essentially the Administration’s argument. One or the other is unavoidable, of that they are certain. Dissenters according to the Vice President this week are guilty of “ wishful thinking and willful blindness,” which the God in Bhagavad Gita says, “The ignorant are awake in their sense-life, which they think is daylight. To the seer it is darkness.”

For 50 years, our leaders have faced dangerous men in other countries who possessed weapons of mass destruction. They successfully protected our country and protected our planet by preventing a war, not starting one. When will we realize that our national security is inseparable from the world security? We cannot save ourselves without saving everyone else, nor should we try. If we increased our foreign aid budget by more than our defense budget, if we shared our expertise, our technological, scientific and medical advances instead of arms sales, if we helped feed the world and didn’t exploit it. If we were doing all of that, all of the time, all over this planet, would the rest of the world let Sadaam Hussein or Osama bin Laden or anyone else get away with murder against us? “The recollected mind is awake in the knowledge of God, which is dark night to the ignorant.”

The President has said that he alone will make the final decision on war against Iraq. Then he must not be left alone. He does not have that right. He does not have that right constitutionally, not morally, not any way. Congress, the American people, the rest of the world must make that emphatically clear and NOW. If not, there may be few of anyone left.

So stand up now, sons and daughters of Kunti. Realize that pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat are all one in the same and then go into battle. Do this and you cannot commit any sin. You just might help save the world.