The Fullness of Time

 

"in the fullness of time, Christ was born" —Galatians 4:4

2020 has certainly been a turbulent year. A disorienting year. The year of COVID. A year when the conflicts that have been festering in American society rose to the surface. A year when the scabs covering racial wounds were torn off to reveal the open sores that had never healed. A year when our health care system and its practitioners were strained to the breaking point. A year when so many have died. A year of added economic hardship for the many who were barely surviving.  A year when increasing inequality made record profits for a few. 

A year when so many daily rituals and routines have been upended. A year when it has been difficult to define or even mark time as one day blurs into the next. Christ also arrived in a turbulent year; his birthplace was under occupation. Religious leaders conspired with rulers of the empire to maintain power over oppressed people. It would seem to have been the worst time to bring a child into the world. Yet it was the fullness of time, the completion of time, or better yet, the right time for Christ to be born.

How can a wrong time be the right time?

The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” —Luke 1:28-33

Mary was perplexed:

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” —Luke 1:34

For Mary, this was not the right time.  Yet it was.  The Romans had brought a system of roads, common language, and trade connecting Palestine and Judea with the rest of the known world. The Roman Empire encompassed a huge swath of land, from the Britannia to Persia and India. The reality of travel and communication that was inconceivable in ancient times was now possible. The world was ready for the gospel of Christ to spread.

Hannah Arendt called this time of possibility, this time of new life, natality.

“The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, natural ruin is ultimately the fact of natality,...  It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope,... It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their "glad tidings": "A child has been born unto us".—Hannah Arendt

Prior to the birth of Christ, the people had endured centuries of darkness and uncertainty. The Babylonians conquered the land and took the people into exile.  Persia conquered Babylon and sent the exiles home to rebuild Jerusalem. A moment of hope only to be crushed by another conquest, this time by Alexander. The Maccabees stood fast against the heirs of Alexander to ignite an insurgency against oppression, celebrated to this day as Hanukkah. Another moment of hope. And then the final crushing blow came when the Romans conquered the land. To generations of a people, barely clinging to hope, the times seemed darker than ever. Then, something happened, that Hannah Arendt expresses as “something so unexpectedly and unpredictably new that neither hope nor fear could have anticipated it... [which] set the stage for an entirely new world”. The birth of Christ was about to change the world.

Ironically, news of this pivotal event was not given to the leaders in the halls of power, but to the "essential workers" out in the fields:

“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Christ, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. ” —Luke 2:8-12

Thirty years later, Jesus would grow up and begin his ministry echoing the words of Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

This right time was “the year of the Lord’s favor.” But the right time is rarely a safe time. Proclaiming the right message at the right time almost got Jesus thrown off a cliff:

 “I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff.”

They were not angry with Jesus for proclaiming benefits of healing, freedom, and forgiveness of debt ("the year of the Lord's favor.") They were angry because Jesus touched their idol, their religious nationalism, when he suggested that Elijah was sent to people other than Israel. 

So what about our time? In many ways this is a dangerous time. A plague has overtaken our land. Many are in economic distress. Politics are more divisive than ever. Religious nationalism has reared its ugly head. The sense that this is a dark time is hard to miss. This is definitely a pivotal moment. Things could go either way. As Sikh activist and author Valarie Kaur asks, “Is this a darkness of the tomb or a darkness of the womb?” Is this dark time the transition to the birth of something new? It all depends on how we respond to questions of this moment. 

The fullness of time always culminates in a specific moment. A live birth or a stillbirth takes place. In this moment is juxtaposed the promise of new life along side the risk of death. In choosing to say "Yes" to this moment, new possibilities arise. Possibilities we had not considered before.

We don't get to choose when we encounter these moments. Life asks the question and offers its fulfilment as the answer. Will our response be born of preparedness? Mary had no idea what would be asked of her, no comprehension of the joy and heartbreak that awaited her, but she was prepared to answer. 

So the question is: is this our moment? And what question is life, in this moment, asking of us? Mary answered "Yes". What will our answer be?

Stones of Remembrance

 

And Joshua set up at Gilgal the twelve stones they had taken out of the Jordan. He said to the Israelites, “In the future when your descendants ask their parents, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ 

—Joshua 4:20-22

In this story from the Torah, Joshua had instructed the Israelites to carry stones out of the Jordan river and arrange them as a memorial of their crossing. Leaving memorials in stone is a uniquely human thing we do. From ancient cave drawings, to pyramids, obelisks, statues, or simple grave markers, we leave our mark on stones, so that future generations would know we existed.

On May 24, 2020, the New York Times published excerpts of the obituaries of some of the 100,000 lives lost to the COVID pandemic ravaging this country. People from all walks of life. Parents, children, wives, husbands, professionals, veterans, and laborers. The AFL-CIO had previously posted a scrolling list of their members who died in New York due to COVID. On that list were everyday people, teachers, communications workers, healthcare workers, transportation workers, and grocers. Just ordinary people, “essential” workers in our current parlance. Everyday heroes who carried out their duties despite the risk. While these were electronic, virtual publications, most of these lives will eventually have their names marked in stone by their loved ones. Stones of remembrance. 

May 24, 2020 falls on a Memorial Day weekend. It is a time when we pause to remember the people who gave their lives in our country’s conflicts. Whatever our judgments about the nature of these conflicts, we ought to remember people who fulfilled their responsibilities at the cost of their lives. Their gravestones cover the hills of our military cemeteries as far as the eye can see. Stones of remembrance.

Of all the creatures on Earth, we humans have the ability to build a “durable world” as Hannah Arendt called it. We leave our mark. We alone have a written language allowing us to leave a record, discoveries, and hopefully, lessons learned. We memorialize the people we leave behind. Ultimately, we will be memorialized and become the ancestors of future generations. What will they remember of us?

Will they remember this period as a time when we let our rancor take us into a needlessly lethal pandemic and then onto a second Great Depression? Will homelessness, illness, and hunger reach record levels? Or will we look back on this time and recognize it as a pivotal point in history when people of good will seized this moment to build a more just, a more sustainable society?

The fewest of words for posterity are marked on our grave stones. The name of the deceased. The date of birth and death, separated by a hyphen. In that hyphen is our entire lives. When people come upon our graves one day in the future, what will they remember? What will they tell their children?

Acquainted with Grief

LuciusCommons Wikimedia

We suddenly find ourselves living through a time of a collective loss. Until now we never realized how much of our lives are marked in time and space by weekly schedules and commutes. Now that is gone. Every day feels like the next. If we are not looking at a calendar, we might even forget what day it is. My usually cheerful neighbor revealed his unease by saying, “this is crazy”.

We are also living through a collective loss of connection. Streets are empty. You can’t go anywhere except the grocery store. You are greeted by mask-wearing customers and empty shelves. You can’t visit family. You can’t shake hands. You can’t hug. You can’t kiss. You can’t see someone else’s face behind a mask. This is all very hard. This biggest loss for most of us is the sense of safety and control that we thought we had.

To the extent that the government has been a help and not a hindrance, it has prioritized economic relief for big business, limited relief for small business, and one month's living costs for the rest of us. To some degree that may help, but it won't replace a lost job. No government can compensate us for the loss of workplace routine, loss of purpose, the loss of camaraderie, the loss of loved ones, and the loss of milestones that mark and give meaning to our lives. That impact is profound because the reality is:

“We are all dealing with the collective loss of the world we knew. The world we knew is now gone forever” —David Kessler

We are suddenly inundated with this collective grief as we approach Easter and Passover. Normally we would approach this time looking forward to family gatherings. The spiritual meanings would have received a passing thought if indeed they are thought about at all. What is different now is that we can all relate to a collective grief and sorrow that we had not known before. Now we have made some acquaintance with the grief of Isaiah’s “suffering servant:”

“He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him” — Isaiah 53:3

To add to this grief, is the isolation of being “despised and rejected”. We live in a seriously divided country, with starkly different views of reality. If we voice our concerns regarding the nature of the pandemic, the need for social distancing, and the government’s handling of the crisis, we risk being ostracized from our social groups. We cannot hide our face from this grief. Now we know. Viscerally.

The reality of such mass grief and suffering is largely incomprehensible to those of us with some degree of privilege in the “Western” world. But to people of no privilege, few resources, people of marginalized groups, this is familiar territory. For the most part, the Western world does all it can to deny the inevitability of suffering. It is an irony crystallized in the symbol of the Christian faith:

"It is amazing to me that the cross or crucifix became the central Christian logo, when its rather obvious message of inevitable suffering is aggressively disbelieved in most Christian countries, individuals, and churches. We are clearly into ascent, achievement, and accumulation. The cross became a mere totem, a piece of jewelry. We made the Jesus symbol into a mechanical and distant substitutionary atonement theory instead of a very personal and intense at-one-ment process, the very reality of love’s unfolding." —Fr Richard Rohr

At some point in the future this crisis will be over, but the scars, financial and emotional, will remain. We are in shock now and we will be processing grief for the foreseeable future. We will have to turn to others for support.  We may find that support lacking because so many will be struggling with their own grief. It might have to suffice that we can get some emotional support on someone’s “good day” and they will find support from us on our good days. We should be open to the possibility of needing professional help.

When we come back together, it will be tentative. We will have spent so long developing the habits of separation that coming together again will feel strange and unsafe. We will have to go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. We need to be especially careful with the anger stage, that we don’t inflict harm on others. But we also have to be careful that we don’t hide or bury our grief. Instead we must allow our grief to be seen and witnessed, however difficult that may be.

"Each person's grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn't mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining." —David Kessler

We have to develop habits of grace, both receiving it and giving it. We have to develop a receptivity to recognizing the grace all around us that we’ve ignored in the past. The sounds of birds singing, rays of sunshine peeking out from clouds, kind gestures from others, and most importantly, our life itself. We have to allow ourselves to receive grace. From that place we will be able to supply grace to others as they process their grief and try to reassemble their lives.

It is my hope that we will come out of this with a new gratitude towards life. May we gain a new appreciation for the “invisible people” that harvest our food, transport our goods, stock our shelves, collect our garbage, clean our streets, protect us from harm, and treat our sickness. May we learn to love and appreciate members of our families and be truly thankful for the time we have with them. And finally may we expect more of ourselves, more of our society, and more of our government.

The Sin of the World

Photo by Jmarchn  Wikimedia Commons

This Lenten season I find I am challenged to look at sin, not just my own, but the Sin of the World. It is awful and I desperately want to turn my gaze away from it. It is a knowledge and awareness that disturbs my peace.  In modern literature, few people crystalize this awareness better than author Stephen King, in the agony of condemned prisoner John Coffey:

"Mostly, I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world...every day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head...all the time." 

To see “Sin of the World” is to see its oppression, its racism, its misogyny, its hatred, its cruelty. Distilled to a single word: its dehumanization. It is like the Medusa. Once you see it, truly see it, it changes you irrevocably. The full weight of it is a burden that is too much for any one person to bear. Even the Son of God, who “takes away the Sin of the World” (John 1:29), needed others to help him carry the weight of it in the Garden (Mark 14:34) and while carrying the cross on the Via-Dolarosa (Matthew 27:32).

I submit that the Sin of the World is the desecration of God's Image (Imago Dei) in other human beings. To desecrate what is human is to desecrate the Image of God. At the Crucifixion, that desecration was on full display. Most of us have been taught that Jesus dealt with the Sin of the World by dying on the cross, in our place. We have had that idea in our heads for a long time, yet it seems to have changed very few of us. We ignore the Gospel narrative that Jesus confronted the Sin of the World by challenging its dehumanization. He did so by re-humanizing those he encountered.

The man with leprosy. Peter’s mother-in-law. The demon-possessed men. Matthew. The sick women who spent all she had, whom Jesus not only saw, but called “daughter”. The man with a shriveled hand. The crowds he had compassion on to heal and feed.  Zaccheus. The woman at the well. The “sinners” and tax collectors with whom he ate. Finally, as Jesus was dying on the cross, he saw his mother Mary, a widow who was about to lose her son. Looking at John, Jesus said “here is your Son” and to John he said “here is your Mother”. In that poignant scene, Jesus saw not only those closest to him, but he saw their distress and accounted for it. He could not alleviate the grief of his mother, but he saw to it that she was cared for.

In each case, Jesus truly saw people. He took notice of their existence and their plight. Jesus rehumanized them. He showed us “a new self, renewed in knowledge of the Image of its Creator” (Colossians 3:10). He healed our blindness. He restored our ability to see God’s image in others.

Jesus was God’s “Yes” to Cain’s question:

"And the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I do not know!” Cain answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” "—Genesis 4:9

Cain’s nonchalant answer reflected his indifference to his brother's murder. Whatever happened to Abel, it was no concern of Cain’s. Indifference and dehumanization go hand-in-hand, because if we don’t reckon someone as human, we don’t care if they live or die:

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference." —Eli Wiesel

The Scripture says that the blood of even one human being does not lay silent:

"Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground!"—Genesis 4:10

If that is so, then the blood-soaked soil of the Earth, watered by countless murders, wars, and genocides, must scream to the ends of the universe. If any of us, who claim to know God, cannot sense God's grief at the sound of that cry, that scream, then can we really say we know God at all? Has not indifference to human suffering made us indifferent to God?

Dehumanization is desecration of that which is holy, God’s image in human beings. Once we have trampled that sacred representation of God’s image, our religious proclivities will demand a new object of worship. In America that object is wealth. My father used to say “money is god” here in the States and he was right. The wealthiest people in America are highly visible. The wealthy are revered by the media, the political establishment, and religion. It is no accident that the US spawned the "Prosperity Gospel". In such a system, wealth is the most visible sign of success and holiness, whereas poverty signifies failure and sinfulness. Poverty renders the poor invisible:

"If anyone wants to make himself invisible, there is no surer way than to become poor." —Simone Weil

The only answer to the Sin of the World is to have our sight restored:

"As Jesus and his disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus, was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” So they called to the blind man, “Cheer up! On your feet! He’s calling you.” Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus.
“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked him.
The blind man said, “Rabbi, I want to see.” " —Mark 10:46-51

It would seem an odd question, to ask a blind man what he wanted after he had cried out for mercy. What mercy could he have possibly wanted other than to see? Perhaps it was the mercy of being seen. His blindness, his inability to navigate the world, had reduced him to begging, but also made him poor and hence, in this world, invisible. He not only couldn't see, he was not seen. It is not hard to imagine that countless people stepped over or around him as they scurried about their daily business.

It might be that our redemption from the Sin of the World, the redemption that enables us to see, is the redemption that enables us to be seen. Human vision is not a one-way street when it comes to other human beings. "Human beings strike echoes in each other." (James Baldwin). When we look each other in the eye and recognize each other as human, it creates a resonance:

"When we receive and empathize with the face of the other (especially the suffering face), it leads to transformation of our whole being. It creates a moral demand on our heart that is far more compelling than the Ten Commandments." —Fr Richard Rohr

I surmise that we shrink back from the cure of our blindness because it keeps us in a state of faux innocence:

"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster" —James Baldwin

That may see harsh, but indifference is a form of nihilism. To remain in darkness is to remain in

"the blindness of a world that wants to end itself" — Thomas Merton

To be cured of our blindness means we accept God's "Yes" to Cain's question. We become responsible for our brothers' and our sisters' well-being. It means our prayers become a cry to Jesus, "Rabbi, I want to see!" It means we enact (live out) our faith by turning our gaze towards our fellow human beings in their distress and suffering. It means we look each other in the eye. This takes conscious effort, an effort that in Lent could be considered a penance. Perhaps the best answer to the question, "what are you giving up for Lent?" could be "I am giving up looking to myself, my image in the mirror, and I will look to others in their suffering, in the hope that we will see each other, and see in each other, the face of Christ and God's Image."

What Does It Feel Like to Lose Your Country?

The other day I encountered a posting from Mike Frost, a blogger I follow, titled So this is what it feels like to lose your country  He spoke of the loss and grief that comes when your home, your entire country is destroyed by fire, as was the case in Australia during the summer of 2019-2020.

The post evoked several memories of lost homes and countries. A few years ago, I was working into the Christmas holiday season along with a some colleagues who had also spent their allotted vacation during the summer months. A colleague and friend, a Chaldean Iraqi, invited me out to an Iraqi restaurant in the area, as a break from the monotony of being in the office during the holidays. For me, a Westerner of European heritage, it is always a treat to step outside my routine (and cuisine) to experience another culture. My friend wanted me to feel at welcome in his world, so he ordered up a sampling of Iraqi culinary delights, which needless to say, were delicious.

As I sat and took in the ambiance of the place, murals on the wall caught my attention. On the walls all around me were hand-painted images of village life in Iraq. I imagined these were images of life before the US invasion and subsequent flight of Chaldean Christians. It then dawned on me that my friend goes here to see pictures of a home country he can never return to. The thought saddened me.

Mike Frost's post reminded me also of my father, a refugee from Poland after it was invaded in World War II. He lost his family. The world and the people he knew were gone. Forever. He rarely spoke of his loss and grief. All he would say is "this is my country now". As I look back, I am also sad for his loss.

As a frequent visitor to San Francisco, I am also reminded of the homeless, refugees in their very own country. They are often economic refugees, unable to earn enough to keep a roof over their heads in the face of skyrocketing real-estate prices and stagnant wages. The addicted and mentally ill are also well represented among their number. They are truly refugees, although we don't think of them that way. The former are refugees, thrown out of the control of their own bodies, while the latter are refugees who have been thrown out of reality itself. When they are looked upon with revulsion or just simply ignored, when they are prosecuted or driven away by law enforcement, they are reminded of their status: they have no place in the land.

I live in Metro Detroit, home to a large community of immigrants, and now their descendants, of whom I am one. Metro Detroit is also home to a large Chaldean diaspora. A Lebanese diaspora. A Yemeni diaspora. A Balkan disapora. I could go on, but you get the point. America is home to a lot of ethnic groups, but we don't often think of the reason they are here. We assume that it is for economic opportunity, and often that is true. More often it was simply to escape persecution and violence in their homelands. That is even true for African-Americans who migrated from the South to flee racial persecution and poverty for economic opportunities in the North.

Nearly every one of the situations that cause people to lose their home and homelands are man-made. War and conflict certainly have a direct causal relationship to human displacement. Human-induced climate change also displaces people as ambient conditions and frequent catastrophes make areas uninhabitable. Religious and ethnic persecution add to mass of fleeing humanity. Today, there are over 70 million displaced persons world-wide by some estimates.

Perhaps the Biblical imperative to “not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners" (Exodus 23:9) is not such a dated concept. Rather it is a moral imperative. We should do everything we can to welcome the stranger. Everyone should feel welcome somewhere. We should also do more to change energy and defense policies which promote war and climate change, which in turn, drives people from their homelands. This will require much more of us who are privileged but not as influential as we could be. We will have to organize and engage the apathetic to make our voices heard. Otherwise, we too may find ourselves among those who know what it feels like to lose one's country.