A
Bent Towards Love
Dirk Ficca
Executive Director,
Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions
Witherspoon Society Annual
Luncheon
215th General Assembly
Denver, Colorado
May 25, 2003
In February 1943, Langdon Gilkey was a young American teacher at Yenching
University near Peking, when word came that the Japanese military was
rounding up all foreigners into a civilian internment camp in northern
China. For the next two and a half years, two thousand people occupied a
former foreign mission compound in the Shantung province. Businessmen and
academics, career civil servants and lawyers, doctors and junkies,
Protestant missionaries and Roman Catholic priests, monks and nuns, the
young and the old, mostly from American and Europe, all crammed together
in a set of dull gray institutional buildings stretching a city block.
With machine gun toting Japanese guards paroling on six-foot high walls,
this cross-section of humanity became a living laboratory of what it means
to live together, an experiment in civilization.
In the early weeks, a governance structure was
established with working committees to oversee camp life. Gilkey was
originally appointed to the Quarters Committee. Families of four or more
were assigned to a 9' by 12' room. Single men and women crowded into
bunkrooms with only a cot and footlocker to one's own. Kitchens were set
up to provide three meals a day on limited rations of cereal, flour, meat
and vegetables. A makeshift hospital was established. Slowly the camp was
transformed into a miniature society. Salesmen became bricklayers.
Executives became cooks. Socialites were assigned latrine duty. "Everyone
was entitled to the same basic rations and the same amount of living
space. And above all, everyone was required to do the same sort of work,
according to his (or her) physical abilities."
(2)
And as time moved on, as the camp felt at least one step
away from the brink of survival, a strange new sense of "normalcy"
developed. A black market surfaced, peddling eggs, fruit, jam, and
chocolate. Romances blossomed. A baseball league was formed. Three act
comic revues on camp life gave way to full-blown productions of Coward,
Barrie and Shaw and performances of Handel's Messiah and
Mendelssohn's Elijah. All of this in the midst of the daily
social and moral crises of living together, with endless battles under the
ethical guise of fairness and decency over food, space, comfort, and
privacy.
As time went on, the supply of food began to dwindle.
Bread was rationed to six slices a day; a bowl of stew for lunch, a cup of
thin soup for dinner. Gilkey dropped from 170 pounds to just 125. However,
in July of 1944, two hundred Red Cross parcels arrived, with a cover
letter addressed to the two hundred Americans in camp. Gilkey described
this treasure trove and want it meant:
Each parcel had four sections. Each section contained
a pound of powdered milk, four packs of cigarettes, four tins of butter,
three of Spam or Prem, one pound of cheese, chocolate, sugar, and odd
cans of powdered coffee, jams, salmon, liver pate, and a one-pound
package of dried prunes or raisins. After a diet made up largely of
bread, low on meats and oils, and lacking in sweets of all sorts - in
fact, without real taste - fifty pounds of this sort of rich, fat-laden
and tasteful food was manna from heaven….as my friends and I found out,
if a hungry man disciplined himself and ate only a little each day, his
parcel could be stretched to supplement the daily diet for almost four
months and keep its owner from being really hungry. (3)
And furthermore, given the fact that…"without exception
Americans were most generous about giving their non-American friends food
from their parcels, made the whole affair the source of a good deal of
international good will…" (4)
Of course, after several months, these parcels had run
out and food supplies were lower than ever. A sense of gloom gripped the
camp. Then, unexpectedly, one January day, the front gates of the compound
swung open, and in came a seemingly endless stream of Red Cross parcels,
loaded on donkey carts. Clearly marked from the American Red Cross, there
was however no cover letter designating their recipients. By count there
were 1,550 parcels, with now 1,450 persons in camp, 200 of them Americans.
"That means seven or eight parcels for each American," someone yelled, a
pronouncement that was met with frowns and anger from the other nationals.
Two days later, the Japanese authorities announced that
parcels were to be distributed the next day, with each American receiving
one and a half parcels, and everyone else one parcel, an ingenious stroke
of diplomacy that seemed to satisfy everyone. But the next morning at 10
AM, as everyone lined up to receive their bounty, they were confronted
with a statement, tersely written, that, due to protests from the American
community, the parcels would not be distributed. Seven Americans had
demanded of the Japanese commandant the proper documentation for such a
distribution plan. Given the customary military inflexibility of the
Japanese, the commandant referred the matter to Tokyo.
In the interim, all hell broke loose in camp. Hostility,
jealousy and national pride boiled to the surface. Those who had been
friends and neighbors for a year and a half did not speak to each other.
Fights broke out. "A community where everyone had long forgotten whether a
man was American or British, white, Negro, Jew, Parsee or Indian, had
suddenly disintegrated into a brawling, bitterly divided collection of
hostile national groups. Ironically, our wondrous Christmas gift had
brought in its wake the exact opposite of peace on earth."
(5)
At that moment, humiliated to be associated with being
an American, Gilkey and some of his friends decided to poll the American
camp about the situation. They spoke with a number of people believed to
fairly representative of prevalent attitudes.
The first person Gilkey approached was blunt: "These
parcels are mine because I'm an American, and I'm going to see I get every
last one that's coming to me. I'm sorry for these other guys, sure - but
this stuff is ours. Why don't their own governments take care of them?
No lousy foreigner is going to get what belongs to me!" (6)
The second person argued from a legal perspective:
"Don't misunderstand me. I'm not worried about the parcels - about how
many I or the other Americans get. I couldn't care less. With me it's the
legal principle that counts. This is American property - simple, isn't it?
You can't question that! You see, this property can only be administered
by Americans and not by the enemy. We've got to make sure in this
hellhole, whatever price we have to pay in popularity, that the rights of
American property are preserved and respected. Come to think of it, we've
also got to be faithful executors to the American Red Cross donors who
sent these here for our use. But mind you, I speak as a professional
lawyer. For myself, I don't really care how many parcels I get."
(7)
The third person, an American missionary with a Chinese
wife and four children, argued from a moral point of view: "You
understand, of course, that I am not at all interested personally in the
parcels, even for my family. I only want to be sure that there be a moral
quality to the use we make of these fine American goods. Now as you are
well aware, Gilkey, there is no virtue whatever in being forced
to share. We Americans should be given the parcels, all right. Then each
of us should be left to exercise his own moral judgment in deciding what
to do with them. We will share, but not on order from the enemy, for then
it would not be moral…If the Japanese share it for us, no one is
doing a good act, and so there's not morality in it anywhere."
(8)
Several days later, the word of arbitration came from
Tokyo. Each person in camp was to get one parcel. The additional one
hundred parcels would be sent to another camp.
It was the rationales for not sharing their American Red
Cross parcels that have stuck with me since I first read this account over
ten years ago. I was also struck by Gilkey's reflections on them, giving a
fresh understanding to the age-old moral dilemma:
…a man's (person's) moral health or unhealth depends
primarily on the fundamental character, direction, and loyalty of his
(or her) self as a whole; of the "bent," so to speak, of this deepest
level of his (or her) being where his (this) spiritual unity is
achieved. But sadly enough, it seemed just as plain that this
fundamental bent of the total self in all of us was inward, toward our
own welfare. And so immersed as we were in it that we hardly seemed able
to see this in ourselves, much less extricate ourselves from this
dilemma…In all of us, moreover, some power within seemed to drive us to
promote our own interests against those of our neighbors…We were caught
willingly and yet unwillingly in a self-love from which we could not
seem to achieve our own release, for what was wrong was our will itself.
Whenever we willed something, it was our own distorted will that did the
willing, so that we could not will the good. Though quite free to will
whatever we wanted to do in a given situation, we were not free to will
to love others, because the will did not really want to. (9)
I remember the first time I read this account thinking
to myself: Geez, you can create a case to justify just about anything.
Perhaps more than anything else, that goes for religion and politics.
That's probably while we were given the age-old advice never to talk about
these topics.
Tucked away in the 19th chapter of Leviticus,
amidst instructions to be a holy people, and among another things, to turn
away from idols, to not let your cattle breed with a different kind, to
not eat any flesh with blood in it, and so on, the Lord commands…you shall
love your neighbor as yourself…" (Leviticus 19:18)
Perhaps to insure that the neighbor you are to love is
not only those of your own people, a few verses down the page there are
also instructions that…
…When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you
shall not do him (or her) wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you
shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him (or her)
as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt….
(Leviticus 19:33-34)
That's followed in the opening verses of the next
chapter, however, by an admonition to put death anyone who serves the god
Molech and therefore lives and worships in a different way than those who
belonged to the Hebrew people.
This tension between a notion of holiness as the
exclusive claim of God's people as chosen, or the notion of holiness as
being chosen for the sake of the whole world, in the service of others -
this tension between the conditional and the unconditional regard for the
other - exists throughout the Hebrew scriptures. You can use these
scriptures to create a case to justify either point of view. And in fact,
many have done so, and continue to do so, both those who claim these
scriptures as their own, and those who claim them as part of their
religious heritage.
So the important question here is this: Why does one
person argue for one reading of the tradition, and another person for a
different reading? How is it that one person sees the conditional, and
another see the unconditional? It must lie with something deeper than
merely the rational, even the moral or religious. It must have to do with
a more fundamental orientation, that lies at the heart of who one is. It
must depend (as Gilkey says) "…on the fundamental character, direction,
and loyalty of (one') self as a whole; of the "bent," so to speak, of this
deepest level of (one's) being…."
A scribe asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal
life, and Jesus asks for his reading of the tradition. Love God with your
whole being and your neighbor as yourself, is the way the scribe states
his case. To which Jesus replies, if you do this, you will live.
But that's not the end of it. "Who is my neighbor," the
scribe asks. It's not merely a question of loving one's neighbor - of the
imperative - but also a question of who is my neighbor - of the
indicative. Who should I consider to be my neighbor? What conditions must
the other meet to justify my unconditional regard?
By way of answer, Jesus might have used the example of
Ruth - the Moabitess, the outsider, the woman, the widow - who, upon the
death of her Hebrew husband, could have returned to her own land and
people. But who chose instead to return to the land of the Israelites with
her beloved mother-in-law Naomi. "…for where you go I will go, and where
you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my
God." That's one answer to the question of "who is my neighbor?" Anyone
who casts their lot with us, who puts themselves under the protection of
our God, regardless of race or nationality or gender or station in life,
he or she is to be considered our neighbor.
Or Jesus could have chosen the story of Jonah, who
resists the call of God to preach repentance to the heathen city of
Nineveh. Jonah, who has more regard for the plant that gives him a bit a
shade and then withers in the heat of the day, than he does for the people
of Nineveh, even after they have repented. Let the wideness of God's love
and mercy, extending even to the foreigner, but your guide. Even the
unrepentant foreigner should be considered our neighbor.
But Jesus chooses to tell his own story, of the
Samaritan who lived outside of the chosen circle, who cares for the man
who falls among robbers and is left for dead in a ditch. What's
interesting about this parable - who goodness has become such a part of
our cultural currency - is that the question that Jesus poses back to the
scribe is not, "Do you understand now that anyone in need, like this man
in the ditch should be considered your neighbor?" Or "do you not see that
even a despised Samaritan can be good, and therefore worthy of our
unconditional regard." No, Jesus turns the indicative back into the
imperative. "Who proved to be a neighbor to the person in need?"
In her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography,
Kathleen Norris writes about the tradition of hospitality practiced in
ancient Christian monasteries:
"Visits to monasteries are as old as monasteries
themselves. We think of monks as being remote from the world, but Saint
Benedict, writing in the sixth century, notes that a monastery is never
without guests, and admonishes monks to 'receive all guests as Christ.'
Monks have been quick to recognize that such hospitality, while
undoubtedly a blessing, can also create burdens for them. A story said
to originate in a Russian Orthodox monastery has an older monk telling a
younger one: 'I have finally learned to accept people as they are.
Whatever they are in the world, a prostitute, a prime minister, it is
all the same to me. But sometimes I see a stranger coming up the road
and I say, '"Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?"' (1)
There have been any number of strangers coming up the
road lately in my neck of the woods. They've also been showing up at the
Walmart, at the orientation for parents of 5th graders at the
middle school, and in the radiology department at the hospital. They are
strangers from all over the world, of religious and spiritual traditions
other than the traditional American red, white and blue of Catholic,
Protestant and Jew. This more recent wave of strangers started in 1965,
with the signing of an immigration bill by Lyndon Johnson that paved the
way for those coming from Africa and Asia. Since that time, one million
new religious immigrants have come to the place that I live - metropolitan
Chicago. What this means today is that one out of every seven persons in
the Windy City is a immigrant of non-European ancestry and of a religion
other than Christian or Jewish. There are: 500,000 Muslims praying in 60
mosques and community centers; 220,000 Buddhists, practicing in 32 temples
and centers; 80,000 Hindus, worshipping in 19 temples, 18 of them in the
suburbs; 20,000 Native Americans, representing 200 of the first nations;
5,000 Sikhs; 5,000 Jains; 5,000 Unitarians; 2,000 Bahais; 500
Zoroastrians; and, a whole host of other indigenous and New Age religions
and spiritualities.
The landscape is not only changing in Chicago, but in
every major metropolitan area across the United States and Canada, and in
communities as small 10,000. In the next decade, it will not only be the
mainline church or reform synagogue that will be our religious neighbor
but also the mosque, the temple, the center, the gurdwara. And more and
more, when there are misunderstandings or tensions or hostilities between
religious and spiritual communities in the world, those same
misunderstandings or tensions or hostilities will be felt among or with
our neighbors around the corner.
The burning questions are now, and will be, how will we
as Christians seek to maintain the integrity of our own faith while
relating to people of other traditions? It is one thing to think about
evangelism in the midst of those without a religious affiliation; what
does it mean to proclaim the gospel to those who believe with their heart
and mind and soul and strength that they too know God and are committed to
serving their neighbor? How are we in the Church going to come to grips
with our long-held and decisive views on the uniqueness and centrality of
Jesus as the Christ for us with a religiously diverse and post-Christendom
world? And how will we reconcile these long-held views about Jesus as the
Christ with the commandment of this same Jesus to love these new neighbors
as ourselves?
One way to do it is to observe the rule of Saint
Benedict and welcome these strangers as we would Jesus Christ. To leave
the indicative of "who is my neighbor?" to God and to focus on the
imperative "to love my neighbor as myself". To welcome the Cambodian
Buddhist and the Punjabi Sikh and the Nigerian Muslim as we would Jesus
Christ. To heed this rule as an unconditional claim on us at the same time
frees us from having to play God with our love.
But to say that we should welcome the stranger as we
would Jesus Christ can also mean that the God who has come to us in Jesus
Christ also comes to us in the Hindu, the Jew, the Jain. That the God we
know in Jesus is also at work in the life of the stranger. That the God
who is at work in our lives is reaching out to us through the welcoming of
the stranger as much as through the scriptures, the Sunday morning service
and the sacraments.
For some, I know, this is a tall order. For others,
impossible. So be it. I'll take my chances with Saint Benedict on this
one. But for virtually all of us it is very difficult when the neighbor is
not only a stranger but also your enemy.
On this particular day I left the house at the usual
time, and after dropping Dillon and Connor off at school, I drove into the
city. I arrived at the Council office at the usual time, and began working
my way through a long list of e-mails when the phone rang. It was
Jeannette, our part-time bookkeeper.
"Dirk, are you alright?" she asked.
"Sure," I said.
"No, I mean, is everything alright?"
"Yes. I mean, we're down to our last dollar again, but so what is enough
new."
"No, are you alright physically?'
"Yes, sure. I'm fine. "
" Okay, I just wanted to make sure. Dirk, please take care."
Pre-occupied with my e-mails, I was only mildly puzzled
by her questions as I hung up the phone. Ten minutes later my colleague
Francesca arrived. "They've bombed the World Trade Center," she said.
"Yeah, right, " I said with a wave of my hand. "No, really," she said. We
stumbled into our conference room to turn on the television in time to see
the first tower come down, and my life, and hers, and all of our lives on
the planet, changed forever.
With the Oklahoma City bombing the first impulse in the
news media and public perception seemed to be that the perpetrators must
be Islamic. I had this curious and terribly mixed sense of relief when it
turned out to be homegrown terrorism, though no less horrific. But with
September 11th, the perpetrators were from the Middle East and
Islam was clearly implicated. Which created an enormous backlash against
the Muslim community in the United States. In the days following September
11th virtually every mosque and Islamic school in metropolitan
Chicago had to be shut down under a siege of bomb threat and death
threats.
Two weeks later the organization I serve organized a
series of round-the-clock weekend vigils at two prominent mosques, with
groups from over 50 local churches, synagogues, temples, gurdwaras,
colleges, universities, and service organizations taking two-hour watches.
It was a statement to the broader community that we needed to distinguish
these long-standing, peace-loving Islamic neighbors from terrorists. Sadly
the effort to distinguish the two in the news media and public perception
continues to be a struggle.
You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your
neighbor and hate your enemy. " But I say to you, Love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your
loving god who is in heaven; for God makes the sun rise on the evil and on
the just, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love
those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors
do the same? And if you salute only your cohorts, what more are you doing
than others? Do not even the Gentiles to the same? You, therefore, must be
perfect, as your loving God in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)
Yes, this is a tough one. I have sympathy for the
Irish-Catholic fireman from the Bronx who complained bitterly: " I can't
stomach this Richard Gere kind of peace, love and forgiveness crap. Let
him come down here to Ground Zero every day and get down on his hands and
knees to sift through the ashes for the bones of my buddies and then tell
me to forgive the bastards who did this. No, it's going to be an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth on this one."
Indeed, there are those who say that the ethic of loving
your enemy doesn't really apply when it comes to terrorists. That it
doesn't belong in matters of national defense and geo-politic realities.
That it is too idealistic.
I remember reading or hearing William Sloane Coffin
describe three basic stances toward the world: isolationist,
interventionist, and internationalist. Following the events of September
11th, our country had an opportunity to take an
internationalist approach to dealing with this tragedy. Instead of
declaring war on terrorism, this unspeakable act could have been declared
a crime against humanity. The United States could have appealed to the
international community that suddenly felt great sympathy for the lone
remaining superpower, asking them to join with us in bringing those
responsible to justice. We could have enlisted the support of suddenly
sympathetic moderate Arab and Muslim nations in putting pressure on those
countries that are actively engaged in state-sponsored terrorism. In the
process we could have strengthened international institutions - the United
Nations, the World Court - in addressing a growing specter of anxiety and
violence that will haunt my sons' generation for decades to come.
Many would say that this is not realistic. That using
this approach we will never bring those responsible to justice. But then
again, after bombing the hell out of Afghanistan we still haven't found
Osama Bin Laden. Many would say this approach is not the way root out
state-sponsored terrorism. But then again, even after the defeat of
Afghanistan and Iraq, we're haven't made a dent in the terrorist threat.
The fact of the matter is, all the military might in the
world is not going to win the war against terrorism. As starkly stated by
Saad Mehio in his December 2, 2001 editorial in the New York Times: "The
United States has lost its sovereignty. Suddenly security in the streets
of Washington, New York, Boston and Los Angeles are inextricably linked to
the curriculum of schools in Peshawar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Cairo, Algiers and
Deoband. " Suddenly, human relations are as crucial to national security
and the prospects for world peace as the number of aircraft carriers and
F-16 fighter jets and "smart bombs" in our arsenal.
The interventionist approach we've taken to September 11th
has appealed to our fears at home and has been used to bully those abroad.
We have not appealed to our best selves, or to the humanity of our
enemies, much less our allies. This is my understanding of why Jesus says
not to return evil for evil, but to turn the other check, to give up your
cloak, to go the extra mile. In doing so, you appeal to the humanity of
those you call your enemy.
If not forever, at least first. At least at every
opportunity that presents itself. But some would argue, there is no
humanity in a Saddam Hussein, or a Bin Laden. Granted. But nevertheless we
must be careful with that term "enemy." Remember, we once used it to
describe the British, the Germans, the Soviets. The fact of the matter is
we might be able to march on Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein without
allies - who really believed we wouldn't, eventually - but we will not win
the struggle against terrorism without allies
The fact of the matter is, one way or another, we will
eventually have to appeal to the humanity of those children who currently
receive only the back of the hand of the one remaining world superpower,
who struggle in poverty and degradation intensified by the indifferent
forces of globalization. We have to appeal to their humanity or they too
will become our enemies. This is not the idealism of Jesus. This is the
realism of his gospel.
But what happens when your enemy happens to be, not the
one from halfway around the world - from a foreign country, speaking in an
ancient language, worshipping a seemingly different God, at the other end
of the political-socio-economic food chain - but someone who worships at a
church that bears that same name as yours. What happens when your enemy is
a member of your own faith community, your own…denomination?
Okay, love your neighbor. All right, love your enemy.
But, wait a minute: Love one another? Yes, I've saved perhaps the toughest
call to last.
In an upper room, on his last night with his disciples,
with those whom he also calls his friends, Jesus commands his followers to
"…love one another, as I have loved you." Jesus was referring here, of
course, to the inner circle, to the family of believers, to those who
would someday belong to that community of faith we call the Church. How
are we going to do this?
The place to begin is with the acknowledgement that
there will never be complete agreement in the one, holy, catholic, and
apostolic Church, much less in the Presbyterian Church (USA). There are
cases to be made and more than enough material from our readings of our
texts and history to justify our own points of view. We are never going to
completely agree on how to read scripture, on the meaning and use of our
creeds and confessions, on christology, on matters of sexuality, on
approaches to conversion, on our views of salvation, on our understanding
of and relations with those who follow other religious and spiritual
traditions, and on and on and on. Never.
And given that, then I suppose the question becomes: Can
there be meaningful agreement? Can there be enough agreement on enough of
a common understanding and practice of the faith that justifies our
continued communion with each other? Maybe, maybe not. Where one draws the
line here is likely going to be pretty much in line with where one draws
the line on all these other matters. Or, is that in fact what finally
matters?
The writer James Carroll recalls what it was like
growing up a son in the house of US Air Force General Joseph Carroll
during the 1950s. General Carroll was the founding director of the
National Defense Agency. In their home was the Red Phone - yes, the same
Red Phone that was in the Oval Office. The Red Phone that would ring only
in two instances - one of a test of the system, and the other to announce
the ultimate threat, the ultimate danger, of World War III.
James recalls driving home once late at night with his
father from his office at the Pentagon - his father looking out of the car
window at the lights of Washington DC - and his father's warning: "…one of
these nights I might not come home. If that happens, I might not even be
able to call. If that happens, it will be up to you and Joe, just get your
mother and the boys, and go." James understood this as his father's way of
expressing their bond as a family, the bond as a father and son.
Then in the late 60s, the Vietnam War began the chief
focus of his father's military service. James came to oppose the war, but
feared that to openly express this might damage their relationship. He
came to learn, however, that his father's sense of his own integrity was
not determined by his son's approval.
Nevertheless this became more of an issue when one of
his brothers, Dennis, became subject to the draft. At the moment of
choice, Dennis became a resisting conscientious objector. At first, his
father was shocked and hurt. This was followed by an ongoing agony
argument and emotional pain in the house that seemed to escalate as the
war escalated.
Dennis applied for conscientious objector status and was
denied. He applied a second time and was denied again. The last time he
applied he knew that if his appeal were rejected again, he would have to
go into the underground, or leave the country, and go against his
conscience and serve. And this last time he was informed that he could
appear in the company of his lawyer.
Before becoming a general, his father was a lawyer.
Dennis asked father to appear with him. His father went, general's uniform
and all. He argued on his son's behalf, and CO status was granted.
James says that when his brother Dennis told him he was
going to ask his father to defend him, James thought his brother was
crazy. That this would be the occasion of the final rupture, that it would
destroy the family. What he came to realize later is what a profound act
of trust his brother was making in has father, and that to be trusted in
that way, for most people, for his father, was irresistible.
James likens his family story to the relationship of
Jesus to the Father. He describes this as "two acts of integrity in
relation to each other. Where there is abandonment, it is mutual, a
consequence of two freedoms at work on each other. And where there is
forgiveness and repossession, it goes both ways."
I would also liken this to the only kind of relationship
that ultimately works within the Church, "of acts of integrity in relation
to each other." For trust is not the same as agreement. And more than
agreement, trust is the glue of any relationship.
How can we engender more trust in the Presbyterian
Church (USA)? For starters, we can give up the knee-jerk notion that those
with whom we disagree simply don't care as much as we do about the faith
and fellowship of the Church. That what must really lie behind their view
has more to do with personal or political agendas, while those who think
like we do are untouched by such mixed motives.
We can, in fact, own up to our own assumptions and give
those who see things a different way the benefit of the doubt. We can
listen to each other long and hard in order to really understand what the
other is saying, and more importantly, why. We can do this, without losing
our integrity and authenticity. We can do this, whether or not we come to
any consensus or compromise. We can come understand one another, trust one
another, without agreeing with one another.
So I pray for the ministry of Charles Colson that is
freeing men and women from the demonic grip of impoverishment, crime and
prison, even though I'm appalled by his views on the separation of church
and state. I cannot go past a Salvation Army bell ringer without offering
my spare change for the soup and bread that will be given in the name of
Christ, even though I'm not crazy about the doctrine of the
substitutionary atonement that will be preached with dessert. (This, of
course, is the short list of my successes in this area: I won't bore you
with the long lists of my current failures to practice what I'm
preaching.)
And too, I believe that we must give up our claim to
being right, without giving up the rightness of our claims. By that I
mean, that we acknowledge our grasp of the truth is always hindered by the
limitations of our knowledge and experience, and colored by our biases and
blind spots. That this applies as much to us as to those who see it
another way. And that is one of the reasons why we seek the broader
counsel of the Church.
In listening to the historic proceedings of the United
States Supreme Court to consider the disputed presidential vote count in
Florida, I was struck by the way, occasionally, a justice appeared to be
berating one of the lawyers for his or her argument. What I learned is
that this is a common practice. The justices look to the lawyers to
present the case, in all of its facets, to play out all the relevant
positions and options, in order to help the court as a whole in making its
deliberations.
Can we find a similar way to look at our collective
deliberations in the Church? Can we search together through our
disagreements, acknowledging the incompleteness of any of our views? Can
we seek the mind of God, the heart of Christ, the movement of the Spirit
in our midst, by earnestly looking for elements of truth advocated by
those who sit on the other side of the pew? Can we prayerfully and
passionately make our case, but always on the way to a larger sense of the
truth? Can we see the greater value in seeking the collective wisdom of
the Church, even when we think a particular decision is profoundly and
completely and utterly wrong?
As one who cares deeply about the need to be biblically
and theologically clear about our faith, nevertheless I want to propose
that the peace, unity and purity of the Church do not
depend upon it. And thank God for that, for if it does, then I
truly believe we are hopelessly lost.
Whatever truth we find in the Bible and our creeds and
confessions it is always according to our reading of those texts. Our
theology is, as Augustine put it, faith-seeking understanding, so
ultimately the reality of our faith is beyond our conceptions about it.
Again, it has to do with this deepest level of who we are. And given the
nature of language and thought itself, I don't believe we're ever going to
get it completely right on paper. But we do have some hope of getting it
right in the way that we live, according to our bent.
So, as we must continue, in a real way, to endlessly
disagree with each other about serious matters that have far-reaching
implications for our own lives, for our life together, for our life and
witness in the world, we can nevertheless, along the way we, come to trust
each other. It is upon such trust that our unity as Christians rests. What
would it mean for us to spend as much thought and time and effort
building trust between us as we do honing and debating
our doctrinal stances and position papers?
Several months ago I attended the annual meeting of the
Kentucky Council of Churches. While standing in line waiting for lunch on
the closing day, I found myself talking with other ecumenical and
interreligious types. A Lutheran minister who directs a local ecumenical
association was talking about a group of Cambodian refugees being
sponsored by a Southern Baptist Church in his community.
"Of course, they're all Buddhists," I remember him
saying. "It has been very interesting to watch the Southern Baptists
struggle with that."
I don't remember who made the next comment - whether it
was he, or someone else, or even me, but I distinctly remember thinking
what was said. "Interesting to watch Southern Baptists discover that
Buddhists are human beings too."
Then he added, "But what's just as interesting is how
the rest of us have discovered the same thing about Southern Baptists."
The fact of the matter is, I'm more comfortable with
Buddhists than I am with Southern Baptists. I feel more affinity with the
hospitality of Sikhism than I do with the morality of the Presbyterian
Layman. I don't need to convert Muslims and Jains. I can listen to
the litany of their beliefs and practices, agree and disagree with them,
but in the end I don't need for them to have a change of mind or heart.
But I can't say the same thing for Parker Williamson. I want him to
change. I want his view of the faith to be different. What does it mean to
love Parker Williamson? What does it mean to let him be the way he is in
just the same way that I would a Baha'I or a Shinto practitioner? How can
I come to view the intra-religious diversity of my own denomination in the
same way that I do the interreligious diversity of the world?
I know the answer to this one. It's a decision. To work
on the deepest level of my being. To work on my bent. On a bent towards
love. To my neighbor. To my love enemy. To love one another. Of course, I
can make a case to do otherwise, for all sorts of reasons.
There is a story that I tell to all sorts of people. And
it is interesting that people of many different traditions claim this
story as their own.
Two brothers - one a bachelor, the other married -
owned a farm whose fertile soil yielded an abundance of grain. Half the
grain went to one brother and half to the other.
All went well at first. Then, every now and then, the
married man began to wake with a start from his sleep at night and
think: "this isn't fair. My brother isn't married, he's all alone, and
he gets only half the produce of the farm. Here I am with a wife and
five kids, so I have all the security I need in my old age. But who will
care for my poor brother when he gets old? He needs to save much more
for the future than he does at present, so his need is obviously greater
than mine."
With that he would get out of bed, steal over to his
brother's place, and pour a sackful of grain into his brother's granary.
The bachelor brother too began to get the same
attacks. Everyone one in a while he would wake from his sleep and say to
himself: "This simply isn't fair. My brother has a wife and five kids
and he gets only half the produce of the land. Now I have no one except
myself to support. So is it just that my poor brother, whose need is
obviously greater than mine, should receive exactly as much as I do?"
then he would get out of bed and pour a sackful of grain into his
brother's granary.
One night they got out of bed at the same time and ran
into each other, each with a sack of grain on his back!
Many years later, after their death, the story leaked
out. So when the townsfolk wanted to build a - and here you can fill in
the blank according to your own tradition - church, they chose the spot
at which the two brothers met, for they could not think of any place in
the town that was holier than that one. (10)
If, my friends, we can learn to love our neighbor, the
stranger, the enemy, and if we can learn to love another, like these two
brothers, than the whole world will indeed become holy ground.
References
1 Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.
Kathleen Norris, Mariner Books. Boston / New York. 2001 p. 191
2 Shangtung Compound. Langdon
Gilkey. HarperSanFrancisco. New York. 1966. p. 23.
3 Ibid, p. 99.
4. Ibid, p. 100.
5. Ibid, p. 104.
6. Ibid, p. 108.
7. Ibid, p. 108.
8. Ibid, p. 109
9. Ibid, p. 115-6
10. Taking Flight. Anthony de
Mello, S.J. Doubleday. New York. 1988. p. 60-61.
