The Imperishable Flame

 

Two thousand years ago, in a land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, a man displaced by legal decree searched desperately for a safe place for his wife to give birth. Two years after the child was born they were displaced again as they fled “The Slaughter of the Innocents.” The king was just “mowing the grass,” a routine part of his periodic killing sprees to remind his subjects who was boss and to make sure no one would rise up against him. The king was paranoid about losing his power even though ironically, his rule was dependent on the whims of  a much larger empire. 

Thirty years later, the child became a man who confronted the power structure not by force of arms, but by rehumanizing the outcasts. The hierarchy of the power structure was built on a foundation of people at the bottom: the diseased, the disabled, the foreigner, and women. This man challenged the system by recognizing their humanity publicly. As a result he gained a following large enough to catch the notice of the powers that be. The religious and political leaders considered him a threat to their precarious alliance, so they conspired to have him charged with a crime and executed in what today we call a targeted killing. 

In the subsequent years this man's followers gathered in his name and broke bread together. They took his teachings to heart to welcome the stranger, bear ill will towards none, nor raise a sword against another human being. Their numbers spread throughout the land. But their growth was perceived as a threat so they were persecuted as enemies of the empire. A few centuries later, the tables turned when an emperor saw their faith not as a threat, but an opportunity. The followers were not just welcomed as friends of the empire, they became the religion of the empire. They would become the empire’s standard-bearers. The persecuted would become persecutors. 

The religion of the empire became so focused on miracle, mystery, and authority that it lost touch with humanity, its own and the humanity of others. The religion and the empire became so intertwined as to be indistinguishable. It fomented internicene battles, inquisitions, tortures, and crusades. It gave its blessings to conquests and subjugations. It became a  grotesque caricature of the beliefs and goodness it claimed to hold. 

But there were those brave few who remembered the teachings and the humanity of the one they followed. They renounced the trappings of empire: wealth, position, and violence. They spread their faith not by argument nor by the sword, but by their example of breaking bread with each other and sharing their bread with those rejected by the empire. They were never a majority. They often faced persecution for rejecting the values of the empire. But they were enough to keep an imperishable flame lit in the hearts of those who followed the way.

Awakening from the Sleep of Inhumanity

 

The Lenten season marks a time of fasting and self-examination for those of us who observe. It is supposed to be a time of repentance from sin and awakening to the spiritual dimension of our lives.  However, if Lent or other religious observances are supposed to be mark a time of awakening, then what are we awaking from? Sin?  Indifference? Materialism? Secularism? Greed? Intolerance? Hatred? Could there be a deeper sleep or torpor that we need to be awakened from?

In his book, The Principle of Mercy, Jesuit priest Jon Sobrino recalls his arrival in El Salvador and his immersion into the grinding poverty and oppression of the people there. It forced him to reframe his life in light a more fundamental question: 

“Are we really human and, if we are believers, is our faith human?”

Living among the people of El Salvador, he discovers the answer to that question: 

“to change our vision in order to see what had been there, unnoticed, all along, and to change hearts of stone into hearts of flesh — in order to let ourselves be moved to compassion and mercy.”

How could we be sleeping in a state of inhumanity? After all, in our personal dealings we are genuinely nice people. To the people we encounter, our family, friends, and co-workers, we are kind. But how about the people we don't encounter directly, the people we don't often see? Those who are part of the  infrastructure of humanity that makes our life possible.

We need to awaken to the fact that our life in modernity is only possible because of the people who work in supply chains, the people who plant, harvest, prepare, and deliver bread, produce, and meat to our grocery stores. Nearly everything we own and everything we wear is manufactured by people somewhere in the world.  The miracle of technology enables goods to be delivered to our doorstep with the tap on our smartphones. But the miracle of technology still needs the labor of human beings. It does not occur to us that the supply chain might be an actual chain, enslavement by other means, forcing people to work for inhumanly long hours, in occupations where people spend every waking hour just to survive. 

The sleep of our inhumanity might just be concealing idolatry. That is a strong statement. Our idolatry might not be our physical bowing down to a golden calf. Our idolatry is our unquestioned commitment to the structures that maintain our comfort, our society, and the social order. Sobrino writes:

“... it is clear that the true God is at war with other gods. These are the idols, the false divinities — though they are real enough — which Archbishop Romero has concretized for our time in speaking of the absolutization of exploitative capitalism and "national security." Idols dehumanize their worshipers, but their ultimate evil lies in the fact that they demand victims in order to exist. If there is one single deep conviction I have acquired in El Salvador, it is that such idols are real. They are not the inventions of so-called primitive peoples but are indeed active in modern societies. We dare not doubt this, in view of such idols' innumerable victims: the poor, the unemployed, the refugees, the detainees, the tortured, the disappeared, the massacred. And if idols do exist, then the issue of faith in God is very much alive.”

We may feel justified simply because we believe in God. But Sobrino shows us that faith is not only a matter of belief but of choice. Sobrino tells us that our beliefs must explicitly specify what we do believe in and what we do not believe in. 

“That is the reason we humans must make a choice not only between faith and atheism but between faith and idolatry. In a world of victims, little can be known about a person simply because he calls himself a believer or a nonbeliever. It is imperative to know in which God she believes and against which idols she does battle. If such a person is truly a worshiper of idols, it matters little whether he accepts or denies the existence of a transcendent being. There really is nothing new in that: Jesus affirmed it in his parable of the last judgment.”

An idolatrous society is necessarily a merciless society. Sobrino says, “idols demand victims.” Who among us can deny that our society is merciless to those on its periphery?  We dismiss the suffering as victims because we don't consider them neighbors. We are all familiar with Jesus' admonition to “love our neighbors as ourselves.” In Luke chapter 10, a teacher of the law responded to Jesus' teaching by asking “who is my neighbor?” Jesus then told him the story of the Good Samaritan and asked the teacher, “who was a neighbor to the man who was beaten by the robbers?” The Good Samaritan was good because he was merciful. He performed a charitable act, a singular act of mercy. The Gospel doesn't tell us anymore about the Samaritan, so we don't know if this was his pattern of life, a principle of mercy. 

If you dare go further down this road, read the book The Principle of Mercy (Google Book Preview).