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).
