I apologize for the lateness of this post, I was hosting and am in the middle of cranking out a pair of seminar papers, and there is only so much time in the day and only so much writing one set of hands can do.
Regarding Hopelessness
These reflections will follow the traditional outline of the four weeks of Advent, with their emphases on hope, peace, joy, and love. We’ll cover hope today, asking whether the hopelessness endemic to our situation is at least partially a product of bad theology (unsurprisingly, I think it is).
Last week ^, we talked about Hope, and the need to understand the reality of our world in order to hope for something better, this week will be on the idea of peace.
Peace, in the Christian sense, is over-defined and under-comprehended. We know that Christ says “peace I leave you, peace I give you, not as the world gives do I give it to you”, but we have little sense of what He means by peace, and what exactly he is differentiating it from. I will, unsurprisingly, provide you with the words of St. Bishop Oscar Romero:
“Peace is not the product of terror or fear.
Peace is not the silence of cemeteries.
Peace is not the silent result of violent repression.
Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all.
Peace is dynamism.
Peace is generosity.
It is right and it is duty.”
What this means for us is that we have been going about our search and effort for peace in exactly the wrong way: by finding scapegoats and enemies in our midst and blaming them for our hatred. “If [INSERT INDIVIDUAL, GROUP, ETC.] were ground into dust and/or cast into the outer darkness” we say, “our hatred would cease, our conflicts would resolve, and our internal scarcity would be filled”.
As I mentioned last week, the revolutionary message of Christianity was not “do good things, and stop doing bad things”. It was that our hearts needed reform, that the very shape and structure of our desires was wrong and needed to be given new shape and structure by God, in the image of God’s desire. This includes our desire for good things, like peace. This is where we most easily see our capacity to settle for fraudulent goods, which is why Christ goes out of His way to clarify it is not the afterglow of mob violence he offers us, the unity found in crushing a common enemy, but reconciliation and union with the very one we would seek to drive out of our society, and may well desire to do the same to us.
The news has been flooded this week with the reports of a shooting in Manhattan, the killing of a United Health CEO by a young man who appears to have had a number of possible and contradictory reasons to have committed the murder. Much news coverage has been given to the killing, and to the online reactions to the killing by people of every political affiliation, which easily demonstrates the “false unity” on offer from the world. Given somewhat less coverage is the murder of a teen who was stabbed to death for not speaking English, another attempt at a type of “Peace” and “Unity” which is anti-christ.
Our hearts are not reformed, and we ought to recognize that, despite the Baptist’s urgent message, we have not yet made straight the way for the Lord to rule over our desires, and to transform our hearts and way of life. We are, the lot of us, a bunch of Herods, casting about trying to find someone to blame for our bad time.
Let’s pray this week for a heart that will welcome Christ as he comes to us, even in the form of an inconvenient or imposing demand on our time and resources, even in the form as one “who has nothing to recommend Him”, who would be easy for us to hate in the name of some cheap, fraudulent unity. Let’s pray that we’ll be inspired by God to seek out true, dynamic, generous, giving, peace, which creates obligations and inconveniences for us.
Next week will be on Joy, so hopefully and news-permitting I will attempt to produce something which is less of a bummer. May God bless and keep all of you.
Wonderful reflection. The idea that the true peace Christ gives should bring increased inconvenience and obligation is as counter-cultural as the rest of the Christian message. I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it or heard of it that way before.