“We have gotten used to regarding as valor only valor in war (or the kind that's needed for flying in outer space), the kind which jingle-jangles with medals. We have forgotten another concept of valor — civil valor. And that's all our society needs, just that, just that, just that! That's all we need and that's exactly what we haven't got.”
“When, in 1960, Gennady Smelov, a nonpolitical offender, declared a lengthy hunger strike in the Leningrad prison, the prosecutor went to his cell for some reason (perhaps he was making his regular rounds) and asked him: 'Why are you torturing yourself?'
And Smelov replied: 'Justice is more precious to me than life.'
This phrase so astonished the prosecutor with its irrelevance that the very next day Smelov was taken to the Leningrad Special Hospital (i.e. the insane asylum) for prisoners. And the doctor there told him:
'We suspect you may be a schizophrenic.'”
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Although Solzhenitsyn does not explicitly link these two passages (they are ten pages apart) it is necessary to note that civil valor will be accompanied by a movement that others will perceive to be a movement into irrelevance. It is a desperate grasping for relevance that continually compromises the church [insert rant about Relevant Magazine here]. Such a movement is antithetical to following in the footsteps of Jesus. Looking at Paul's “master narrative” (Michael Gorman's term) in Philippians 2.6-11 this becomes clear. Because Jesus existed in the form of God he did not regard equality with God thing to be grasped, but emptied himself taking the form of a slave and becoming humble to the point of death on a cross. No, living Christianly means that the disciples of Jesus will be labeled irrelevant.
Paul has a few words for those who have pursued such relevance in Corinth. He says:
For, I think, God has exhibited us apostles last of all, as men condemned to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men. We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are prudent in Christ; we are weak, but you are strong; your are distinguished, but we are without honor. To this present hour we are both hungry and thirsty, and are poorly clothed, and are roughly treated, and are homeless; and we toil, working with our own hands; when we are reviled, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure; when we are slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become as the scum of the world, as the dregs of all things, even until now.
Because we are hopeful we will be called utopian.
Because we affirm the new creation of all things we will be called idealists.
Because we believe in one God we will be called exclusive and sectarian.
Because we believe we are the image of that one God we will be called arrogant.
Because we love with the oppressed we will be called romantics.
Because we rejoice in suffering we will be called masochists.
Because we embody forgiveness we will be called unjust.
Because we are committed to peace we will be called unloving and unrealistic.
Because we eagerly anticipate the return of our Lord we will be called fools.
It's a Wonderful Life
It's a wonderful life.
If you can find it.
If you can find it.
If you can find it.
~ Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Pink walls and children laughing in the backyard. Leaning on my desk not thinking anything. Looking at the phone in my hand…
Well, never mind.
Too sad to shift the responsibility off of my shoulders.
Too scared to be angry.
Fighting to stay honest.
Never mind.
Acts of Charity
Cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality. It is the law of complementaries [sic].
~ Arnold Susi (quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
And this, my mother, is what I think of most of our acts of charity. Mere sentimentality that offsets (and masks) our inherent violence and cruelty.
The fact that we (as gentle, well-intentioned folk) engage in such acts only highlights our ignorance.
Certainly God is able to brings some good out of these acts but let us not forget that God brought good out of crucifixion. That does not mean we are to continue to crucify others. No, we are to “take the crucified people down from the cross” (as the Liberation Theologians suggest). Or, better yet, we are to join the crucified people on the cross. To allow ourselves to be crucified is the only road that will liberate us from our sentimentality — and from our cruelty.
Ernesto
“We cannot foresee the future, but we should never give in to the defeatist temptation of being the vanguard of a nation which yearns for freedom, but abhors the struggle it entails.”
The whole time I was watching, watching and listening and thinking: we know what they did to him. They killed him. Him. They killed him.
“The solidarity of all progressive forces in the world towards the people of Vietnam today is similar to the bitter irony of the plebeians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory.”
And that is what he did. And this is the world we live in. A world that kills those who dare to look with compassion upon the oppressed. A world that kills those who speak honestly, those who swim the river at night so that they can be with the untouchables. A world that kills those who refuse to put on gloves to touch and hold the sick and segregated.
A world that takes a man who has loved not too little but too much and forces him to say,
“Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyhond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”
After he was killed (and his body displayed before being dumped into a mass grave) they say he looked like Christ.
Self-Esteem
Everybody knows you were trying to be discrete
There were just so many people you had to meet
Without your clothes
Everybody knows
~Leonard Cohen
If I had of known how much I was going to exactly replicate the lyrics of “Self-Esteem” (when I was in Bible college!) I wonder how much I would have liked the song when it first came out…
And maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been up all night and I’m a long way away from Toronto and those memories but I can’t help but smile now as I listen to it.
Damn, I am not the person I thought I would be. Hell, I’m hardly the person I think I am.
I shaved every place where you’ve been boy
I shaved every place where you’ve been
~ Tori Amos
Idolatry and Victimisation
Whether God exists or not, we still face the [problem] of idols. By “idols” we mean historical realities that do exist, and that promise salvation and demand worship and orthodoxy. Their existence, and the worship they demand, are decisively verified by the victims they inevitably produce. There must be many idols in our time, because their victims are millions of human beings.
~ Jon Sobrino
This is the essential difference between Christianity and idolatry. While idols will always produce victims, Christians will refuse to make victims of any other but will choose to become victims — in order to overcome cycles of victimisation.
While the idols' existence is manifest in the production of victims, the Christian God is revealed when Christians choose to take the victimisation onto themselves.
Jesus, the fullest revelation of the Christian God, makes this point painfully clear. Refusing to victimise any other person he goes the way of the cross. This is the character of God. God is not a sovereign Lord who victimises that which he creates. Rather, God is one who takes the pain, the sorrow, the wounds of victimisation upon himself, refusing to lash out lest he too ends up engaging in idol worship.
The fact that we see so many victims today suggests to me that we have all made gods of ourselves instead of following in the footsteps of Jesus who
because he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself taking the form of a slave, being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.
~ Philippians 2.6-8
Hope and Realism
Only utopianism and hope will enable us to believe, and give us strength to try — together with all the world's poor and oppressed people — to reverse history, to subvert it, and to move it in a different direction.
~ Ignacio Ellacuria (from an address given ten days before he was assassinated).
One is either an idealist or one is hopeless. Those who possess hope will always be labeled idealistic, utopian, and unrealistic by those too wounded, too fearful, too comfortable, or too knowledgeable to hope for anything more than what they already have.
I suspect that R.R. Niebuhr and those who follow in the footsteps of “Christian realism” miss this point because they never really understood the nature of Christian hope. And I suspect that they neglected hope because they misunderstood the nature of suffering love. And, here I tread with some trepidation, I suspect that they misunderstood the nature of suffering love because they misunderstood Jesus. Without hope Christianity is neither “Christian” nor “realistic.”
Building and Confronting
These are not times for building justice; these are times for confronting injustice.
— Philip Berrigan
The point is that, until we have discovered how deeply rooted injustice is, we are unable to genuinely know what justice is. Until we have honestly confronted the injustice in ourselves, and discovered how deeply it is embedded within us, we will not be able to build justice. Premature attempts to build justice will only create parodies that are inherently compromised.
April Books
Well, school ended mid-month so a lot of fiction and shorter encyclicals have dominated my readings the last few weeks. Without further ado:
1. Theology and Joy by Jurgen Moltmann with an extended introduction by David E. Jenkins(having read 8 or 9 of Moltmann’s larger works this one actually surprised me quite a bit. It seemed to have some very “unMoltmannish” thoughts and phrases. Still, as with everything he writes, quite worth the read).
2. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses by C.S. Lewis.
3. Writing in the Dust: After September 11 by Rowan Williams (not to be mistaken with Rowan Atkinson).
4. My Life for the Poor by Mother Teresa (edited).
5. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (so you would think a day in the life of some dude would be pretty boring [like Ulysses for example. That book is the biggest waste of time… ever. Never has such a shitty piece of literature received such widespread acclaim] but not when that dude is a prisoner in a Russian labour camp!).
6. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (what can I say, anybody who wrote both Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure deserves to be read extensively).
7. HappinessTM by Will Ferguson (you wanna know what’s cool? Getting books in the mail from friends, that’s cool).
8. Epileptic by David B. (an autobiographical illustrated novel [like Blankets by Craig Thompson] published in six parts in France. I had previously found the first three parts in English and the last two in French. I never found the fourth part. Then I found all six in one English edition and now I finally get what the hell went on in the last half — my French isn’t so great).
Contra Lewis
In his address entitled “Learning in War Time” C.S. Lewis says this about WWII:
I believe our cause to be, as human causes go, very righteous, and I therefore believe it to be a duty to participate in this war. And every duty is a religious duty, and our obligation to perform every duty is therefore absolute.
Lewis then goes on to liken the duty to go to war to the duty to rescue drowning people if we live on a dangerous coast. In fact, in such a situation, it may even be our duty to lose our own lives in order to save another. Thus, such duties are duties that are worth dying for — but not worth living for. As Lewis says,
A man may have to die for our country but no man must, in the exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claim of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.
While I agree with many of Lewis' points about the role of learning in war time, and the things that war reveals to us about day to day life, I most emphatically disagree with Lewis' conclusion that participating in war (any war after Jesus) is a righteous activity.
Lewis' analogy about saving drowning men* is fundamentally flawed because Lewis does not consider seriously enough that war not only calls us to save lives but also calls us to take lives. The duty of a soldier is to kill. Yet such a duty moves from laying down one's life for another and instead lays down another's life for oneself (and one's loved ones). By choosing to kill others I have decided to live for my country instead of die for my country and this is exactly what Lewis speaks against. War is the choice to lay down the lives of other's instead of our own lives — and this is a choice that Christians can never make.
_________
* Yes, Lewis wrote before the application of gender neutral language. Indeed, Lewis was a vocal supporter of male dominance over women. However (to be fair), he did love and treat the women that he knew personally with the utmost dignity, humility, and respect.