What I did on my Summer Holidays Or Recovering Faith and
Re-imagining the Social Order
One of the most often quoted sentences
of Charles Dickens is from his Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of
times; it was the worst of times.” It is a sentence that I would
claim as a fair description of the times we live in. and it is a pretty
accurate description of my summer holidays/study leave. The world
I experience as God's expression of creative love, or God's household,
in some moments appeared with lucent beauty and as a Holy revelation.
In other moments it appeared wounded beyond repair, its human
inhabitants filled with that “warring madness” Harry Emerson Fosdick
wrote of in one of his most enduring hymns.
The lucent beauty was in the miraculous and awesome power of the open
waters of the Pacific, striking the fissured rocks near Sooke,
BC. It was also in the strength and beauty of the brilliant and
sun-drenched mountains surrounding us in Squamish, as I ran the trails
above the Power House, and heard the thundering of the Mamquam and Ring
Creek. It was in the faces and voices of my beloved Loretta,
Wade, Adina, and all my wonderful friends and family.
The warring madness was in the endless violence, subtle and explicit,
of our wasteful and destructive social order; the bombing and levelling
of peoples and nations in the Middle East; the criminal blindness and
ideological rigidity of too many of our political and business leaders;
and that destructive and life devouring Molech (Molech) and idol we call the “economy,” as it
wars against God's household. Are these signs of the best become
the worst, as the ancient wisdom writes (Aristotle and Aquinas), corruptio optimi que est pessima?
This is surely the work of Satan, once the best of Holy messengers who
falls and becomes the embodied reality of our human fears. For
Satan is nothing but our fears and hatred of the other-who is always
Christ for us-and our attempts to force, control and confine God's
diverse creation into an order of self-serving violence and deadly
sameness.
I return not so much refreshed as feeling I am on the edge of change,
knowing it as a spiritual recovery of an inner passion for the whole
household of God. However, and equally, I feel I am witnessing
the final violent and apocalyptic death throws of a social order that
in its violent patterns is doomed to self-destruction and may take
millions of lives, including the innocent, down with it.
Yet faith also has hope. My hope is not in my own personal
salvation, which is something one can never own; it isn't a personal
possession, but is a way, a truth and a life. Rather, the hope beyond
hope that I have is for a redeemed and healed world, where all can live
and die in peace and into the fullness of the Divine Life. When I allow
myself awareness of such a re-imagining and Holy recreation of the
world as given in scripture and Christian faith, I do so in the
compassionate presence of Christ, Spirit and Creator already incarnate
in the very world and people so imperilled. It is God who is
crucified in all our violent and self-serving acts. This Holy work and hope is one I see
in the many small movements for peace and justice that, despite fear,
are emerging or continuing in their path of non-violent
resistance. I see it in the Historic and New Peace Churches, the
Muslim and Christian Peace Maker Teams in Afghanistan and Iraq, the
Jewish and American war resisters and the Israeli and Palestinian Women
of Bat Shalom, who despite suffering death, threats of violence and
cries of treason, continue their work of Shalom and justice making.
It is a contradiction, I suppose, but what we hope for is already
present, even if it is difficult to see . It is what the Gospels
of Mark, Luke, Matthew, and Thomas have Jesus say, “The Household of
God is right there in your presence.” (Luke 17:21b) It has come
and it is yet to come, “The Household is within you and it is outside
you. What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it..”
(Thom 51:2) It is also in the words of the Gospel of John, where
the Divine Logos (Christ) in Jesus is the presence of God in the
flesh. This presence is the living bread that does not lead to
yet more hunger and violence, but satisfies and releases us from our
hunger for violence and revenge into a new life of non-violent and
creative love.
However, I must confess to a
depth of despair that others who call themselves Christian seem not to
feel. I have heard the triumphalist voices that claim salvation
as a personal possession, exclusively held by Christians. I have
heard our political leaders claim that the unprecedented greed,
over-consumption and obscene wealth of North Americans and
Europeans are values worth killing to defend and give us the right to
exploit others. They seem to want us to believe we have a Divine
mission to control other peoples and nations, because we are the chosen
people of God, more morally deserving than others. We are called
by those I can only call madmen in general's uniforms to a have our
young men and women kill and be killed to defend a way of life that is
ultimately suicidal and indefensible, and to inflict it on
others. We are urged to destroy, arrest or call people fools or
unpatriotic if they disagree that this can be called a moral order.
I cannot agree. I will not agree. The deepest part of my
soul, the deepest confidence, the faith I hold is not in a god
constructed to be the expression of such violence and vengeance against
the other, against creation, against our true humanity. If we hold to
the Hebraic and Christian traditions, this is after all made in the
image of the Holy One. My faith is constructed otherwise. My faith is in a very different
God. And as Luther once said, “Here I must stand. I can do
no other.”
Despite the passion I feel anew for my faith, there is nothing new in
this troubling re-conversion I have reached during my holiday and study
leave. It has been shared by many people of faith such as
Jeremiah, Jesus, the Buddha, Menno Simmons, George Fox, William Morris,
J.S. Woodsworth, Thoreau, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Caesar Chavez, Martin
Luther King, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, Wendell Berry throughout the
centuries. However, it appears to be under attack everywhere. I realize I will offend
many of you my friends and congregants, but too many of our present
religious, political and business leaders in our country and world have
attacked this faith, wishing to put in its place the idols they
call “economic efficiency,” “progress,” “modernity” and “military force
in the service of democracy.” This summer has seen the complete
abandonment of those virtues we as a nation have imperfectly stood for-
international co-operation, justice, peace keeping- and the adoption of
economic and military warfare against those we either call “enemies of
our way of life” or “failed human beings and states” or
“non-competitive.” I have never, in all the years of listening
and thinking about the relationship between the Gospel and the social
and political realities of our land, felt so deeply betrayed and deeply
dismayed and morally outraged as I do with most of our current
political, military and business leaders. I can only quote
Jeremiah, “Jerusalem hath grievously sinned; therefore she is removed:
all that honoured her despise her, because they have seen her
nakedness: yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward.”
But let me be clear, I am sickened and in despair not because I believe
myself above these leaders, or those who support them, but precisely
because I see my own complicity with them and my own inner
violence. They are not “they” they are, to misquote, Pogo,
“us.” I am not morally above them, but rather their sin is one in
which I am forced to share, merely by a shared humanity. When I
see an act of terrorism either by the so called good guys or the so
called enemy, I grieve for what we have done. This is how a theology of
the cross works: it reveals that violence is only overcome when
we no longer view the brokenness and sin of the other as something we
may escape through either violently rejecting the other or violently
destroying the sinner. The cross is the clear action of a
non-violent God who rejects all forms of violence and offers a
transformation and resurrected hope in non-violence and reconciliation
of all. Salvation means a recovered wholeness or health that
includes even those I call enemies.
The point is that the cross is the sign of God's justice as an
infinitely compassionate and grace-filled non-violent act, and our
faith must be precisely an expression of this compassionate
non-violence in action. God's wrath is not the violence of
retribution or punishment, but is the passionate awareness of the cost
of all our violence. It might be said that God's wrath is
compassion with a fire in its belly for the transformation of a violent
humanity. God expresses wrath not by punishment but by giving a clear
and painful revelation of the consequence of violence both for the
perpetrator and the victim. The cross is not one person of the
Trinity's (The Father) act of sacrificing another person of the trinity
(The Son). I suggest that we reject this violent theological
mistake. I see the crucifixion as our doing,
our violence against God's compassionate presence. The cross becomes a
revelation because God reveals in it the consequence of human violence,
the crucifixion of the Holy. God's wrath at the crucifixion does not
crucify Christ, but rather God's wrath is in the anguish of seeing
human violence naked and unmasked. The crucifixion is the icon
that reveals the horror of human violence. It reveals that human
violence violates God: God is crucified by our violence. The
cross reveals God crucified, not just in Jesus, but in all who are
victims of violence. That “all” extends beyond the human
community into creation. Our raping and destroying of the earth, sea,
air and all living beings is also revealed in the cross as a
crucifixion of God.
This is the difficulty with the faith I hold: It is not possible
for me to pretend that I can separate myself from either those
who destroy or use violence, or the victims of this violence. I
am joined to them, even as I am called to resist all violence within
myself. I mourn as much for the brokenness of those whose acts
are violent as I do for those who are violated. I seek to resist evil
not just outside of myself, but also the evil that has become part of
my being because of the society I live in and my complicity in its
systematic violence. I seek to travel by another road, the way of
the non-violent Christ, the Spirit of justice and peace, and the
compassionate creator. I live knowing the cross and in the light
and hope of the resurrection. It is a way, however, that I cannot
travel alone. None of us can. We are called to a resurrected life
not as individuals, but as members of the body of Christ.
What did I do on my vacation? I ran, hiked and walked the sea
shore and the mountains as I prayed, read, thought and felt more deeply
than I have for a long time about the Holy compassion and gut wrenching
Holy wrath that is Christ crucified and risen- in, for and to a fallen
world gone mad with violence and self-destruction. I prayed
beyond words into the great despair of Christ crucified. I felt the
winds of God's resurrecting power, even though I daily saw the signs of
God's crucified form. I recommitted myself to resist violence- my
own, my countries, my government's, and our violent, global, consumer
and consuming economy and culture-and walk in the non-violent way and
live in the oikonomia (oikonomia, the Greek root of the English
economy) or living household of God. I recommitted myself in
faith to the only God I know: the Holy One who is compassionate and
just, whose wrath is not violence but despair and anger at the
unnecessary repetition of crucifixion in a cycle of violence that only
a whole community's repentance and conversion to non-violence can
cure. In short, I come back to the only faith I can know in the
household of God's Creation, and I am freed by identifying with the
Crucified One's resistance to violence. My faith sees the resurrected
Christ as the first born of Holy, re-imagined and recreated community
and world.
As Dicken's put it, my metanoia (metanoia) or “re-birth” on my vacation
“was the best of times, [and] it was the worst of times.” but then the
good news of Christ requires facing the reality of the bad news of
human violence with radical hope in a new creation. As I return in this troubling time
to what I would call the authentic heart (the crucified and risen
Christ) of a radical and non-violent Christianity, I feel I must ask
you all as members of Squamish United Church to be with me as I discern
with prayer, contemplation and deep dialogue my own calling and, quite
honestly, whether I am called to or fit for continuing in ministry at
Squamish United Church. I have felt very affirmed and welcomed,
and very much loved by all of you as a people of God. I have wept
at the loss of loved ones, and laughed at the joy of new birth.
But I ask you, as I try to discern the call of the Holy Spirit, can
this radical-pacifist-communitarian-Christian called Daniel serve you
well as a pastor, prophet and priest (the three aspects of ordained
ministry) when I am so far on the edge of the institutional church and
our social order? I do not ask this lightly or
casually. It is a serious and troubling concern. I feel I
have sometimes and must compromise my integrity- that is what is truly
at the heart of my own faith- to care for and serve you and the
surrounding community. It has troubled me deeply over the last
nine months, and will no doubt deeply trouble me in the days to
come.
Therefore, let us use the next
year to discern together, and come to some sense of where God is
calling us. At this new beginning of what I sense is a time of
“metanoia” for us all- a turning around or “conversion” point- I cannot
yet see where the Holy Spirit is leading. I hope we will learn to
trust and pray together, and open ourselves to the “unseen” workings of
grace, the compassion and radical non-violence of communion in the
risen Christ.
On the way of the cross, in the light of the resurrection your brother
in Christ,
Daniel.