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).

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?