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.

All the Lonely People

Wikimedia Commons

"It is not good for the man to be alone." - Genesis 2:18

We like to think of the holidays as happy times when we gather to celebrate friends and family. Yet, for too many, the holidays are salt in the gaping wounds of loss and loneliness. This is borne out in a brief survey of today's headlines: "America's Loneliness Epidemic", "UK Appoints a Minister for Loneliness", "Public Health Relevance of Social Isolation and Loneliness". We have a problem. What we are intuiting and what our lived experience tells us is being acknowledged by governments, healthcare providers, and business leaders. We are lonely. And it's costing us.

There are so many factors that have contributed to this epidemic: our mobility (our lack of roots in a community), drastically shortened career life cycles, relationships based on utility or proximity (usually career) that end when we change jobs or move. Transitioning through life stages: student, career, single, married, parent, empty-nester, widowed/divorced, retired, and care-giver. All these stages are the realities of modern life. Transitioning between these stages disconnects us from others at the same stage. Establishing human connection at each successive transition is more difficult than the one preceding it.

In addition to transience, we have to recognize that modernity is mechanistic, i.e process oriented. Modernity rejects the spiritual, the metaphysical, the deus ex machina, i.e. it rejects any notion of non-material causality. Ironically though, modernity does have a deity: utility.

"Utility is the god of modernity"

― Esther Lightcap Meek  

Utility is the unseen medium through which we move. Every material thing, every occasion, every relationship is measured against it. Utility is the progenitor of work. We work to sustain ourselves and to give our lives a purpose. And certainly, our employer pays us for a purpose. But both employee and employer relate to one another out of utility. Once that utility ceases, so does our value to an employer. At that point, our employment relationship ends. In the 21st century world of work, our workflow can be so automated that we rarely interact with other humans. We report to a digital supervisor as automated systems call us to a shift or track our movements.

This bent toward utility extends beyond employment. It determines how much we will invest into maintaining friendships and family ties over over extended distances and through challenging circumstances. Marriage and significant-other relationships are no guarantee against loneliness, though our culture and technology pushes us to "pair up". Too often, we just end up being alone in pairs.

Whether we live by ourselves or with a significant-other, we will inevitably lose people in our lives. That being the case, we should always be open to establishing new connections. But, alas, we don't. There are many factors that may inhibit our ability to connect, but I will focus on this one:

"A national culture that promotes polite restraint, and which actively fends off and forestalls the forming of relationships between strangers, is one that might as well be inviting loneliness on its population." - Chris Bourn 

The author of this quote is speaking specifically about English culture, but I would suspect nearly all English-speaking countries have inherited this reserve as a cultural attribute. Because "utility is the god of modernity", we call on this god to justify (excuse) our breaking this boundary of reserve to establish a connection but only because something is needed or something must be done. We have forgotten how to connect with people for no other reason than they are people!

Another obvious but neglected connection is with our neighbors. Although I know my neighbors fairly well, I still have to resist the temptation to go buy a tool or contract a service when I could simply ask my neighbor to help me. "Sorry to bother you" is not simply a cliché or a movie title, but is too often our default to connecting with others. We need to view our need for help as an opportunity, not a liability.

Befriend your neighbors. When we truly know them, we are more willing to work for the common good. - Fr Richard Rohr

When we are friends with our neighbors and there is some degree of mutual reliance, it breaks the cycle of isolation. When my neighbor needs some staple item, she will knock on our door. It's happened a few times. One day, she stopped me to apologize for always asking for something. I replied, "No worries, what are neighbors for?" We have a long way to go to change our mindset.

To deal with the consequences of loneliness, many seek out the services of therapists. In this day and age, therapists provide an invaluable service to help us deal with loneliness. However, not everyone can afford therapy. Not to criticize therapy, but have we not commodified what used to be simple friendship? Have we not redefined a basic human need into into a pathology requiring a clinical solution? Yet:

"Healing and well-being are fundamentally political not clinical."
- Dr Shawn Ginwright

What Dr Ginwright is saying is that healing and well-being take place in the presence of others. But it's not enough to be in the presence of others. We have all experienced that feeling of being alone in a crowd. We must be seen and recognized by other people and we must recognize them. We must be open to it. It must be mutual. For that to happen, a mutually safe space must exist. Someone has to take the initiative by asking the other person about themselves. If there is one universal truth, it's that everyone loves to talk about themselves.  That opens up a space. That space has a name: hospitality. To be hospitable is to have a spirit that welcomes others into one's presence. A hospitable spirit is also open to the invitation of others.

In a hospitable space, we may be able to go deeper in sharing and connecting to that which makes us most deeply human:

"I have found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. " - Carl Rogers

If we are able to connect at that deepest level, it would heal our deepest wound, loneliness, the scab of which is alienation. Alienation, that sense of disconnection and distrust of others, is the dry tinder that fuels the wildfires of divisive politics. Alienation is the root of what ails us in the West. It makes us good consumers, compliant laborers, fearful citizens, and an apathetic electorate.

In the end, we must choose to reach out. That requires courage, sparked by the hope of connection, the hope that we are not alone, and faith in a better future. Our willingness to enter the world  of others, to connect with people, is an echo of the Nativity, where God entered our world to connect with us.

What is Truth?

"Pilate asked Jesus, 'What is Truth?' "  John 18:38

I have to admit that lately I have been perplexed and saddened by the amount of lying going on in the world around me. At the highest levels of government, lying is the order of the day. Not that lying politicians are anything new, but the brazenness with which they do it now is over the top. I think we are all reeling from the unprecedented levels of mendacity and corruption we are witnessing. As we are being constantly gas-lighted and worn down, we too slip into a denial (lying to ourselves) believing that this level of mendacity is benign as long as it doesn't affect our daily lives.

I have also observed that lying is quite common in everyday life. I do not limit lying to telling a falsehood. I also include the failure to fully disclose the truth. By failing to fully disclose a truth, we lead people to believe a false narrative about a situation, which reduces to a lie. Decisions are made based on this information, which may have some seed of truth, but because salient information is not disclosed, the situation implied is nowhere near the truth of it.

We expect that a lie is admitted when confronted by irrefutable evidence. Now the highest levels of government, lies exposed are answered with even bigger lies. Having to push so hard to get at the truth is exhausting. It wears us at down. It tempts us to accept the liar's narrative. The status-quo. But going along to get along eats our soul, one bite at a time.

"Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites... It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged..." -James Comey

In the presence of a liar we may find moments of strength to say "We will not cover for you". Many more times we quietly go along with the bullshit. More typically we practice denial. We don't want to believe something, so we tell ourselves it isn't so. We don't want to believe someone is addicted, embezzling funds, take sexual liberties with someone in their charge, or cheating on their spouse. It's risky to the status quo, to our station in life, to challenge the lies. The cost to challenge a lie is high. But the cost of living with a lie is even higher.

Every lie told, every lie believed borrows from a future reality. Life has a way of being real. We can deny (lie) that the science of human-induced climate change is true, but mother nature is having none of it. We can see that with our own eyes. We are experiencing back-to-back weather extremes that should be once in a hundred or five hundred year events. Because we have been in denial, lied to ourselves for so long, we aren't prepared to respond to the immediate consequences of reality, much less mitigate it in the future.

So what are the cost of lies? Belief in others. Belief in ourselves. Belief in objective truth. A completely lost ability to recognize truth itself. Our brains rewire themselves into a state of cynical distrust. Distrust is the PTSD response of having been lied to. This leads to cynicism, the terminal stage of distrust. At that point, we trust no one and no thing.

We may try to maintain a cognitive dissonance that lying in a broader or higher context is benign. That the lying is so far out of our scope that it won't affect us. However life, being real, will smack us back to reality. Ask top career officials in government who thought they could ride out the Trump administration. They were hastily promoted to cabinet offices as their predecessors quit or were fired. They thought they could hide, but now they are exposed. They have to either have to live the lie to preserve their careers or resign to keep their integrity intact.

The truth is always dangerous because it challenges the status-quo.

"Our environment lacks truth. And when truth is spoken, it gives offense, and the voices that speak the truth are put to silence. " - St Oscar Romero

"No person is more hated than one who speaks the truth" - Plato

Yet the truth must be faced, accepted, and ultimately spoken. First, we have to speak the truth to ourselves. This risks the death of our ego. Speaking a truth to others can result in the death of a relationship or even, as in the case of Romero, actual death. But the alternative, though it seems safer and easier, is bleak. To continue living a lie borrows (or perhaps steals) truth and reality from the future. When we eventually arrive at the future, we find we have borrowed against what is true and real and now there is nothing left to live on.

So back to Pilate's question: What is truth?  The answer was standing in front of Pilate in the person of Jesus. Not only in a mystical, metaphysical way, although I'll leave space for that. Truth resided in the earthly person of Jesus because his life and his words were consistent in every context of his life. What you saw is what you got, no matter what the setting. He embodied truth because his life was fully integrated. There was no distance between his life and his words. Those in power recognized the threat Jesus posed. Here was a person of such impenetrable integrity, whose words, life, and being were so unified that no carrot or stick could corrupt him into complicity or silence. Jesus had to be eliminated. Jesus knew the cross was where this would end. That is the challenge and the model for us. 

The Church of St Elsewhere

Mont Saint Michel in Normandy is about as other-worldly as a church can get. It is an island in the sea, one kilometer from shore.  Mont Saint Michel is a monument to wars between kings, kingdoms, and religions. It is a crumbling fortress against the outside world that must constantly be shored up against rising tides (and sea levels).

Mont Saint Michel is among the great church buildings of the world I hope to see: Notre Dame in Paris (though now all that remains are the stone walls), Westminster Abbey in London, and St. Peter's in Rome. For some reason I have a fascination with centuries old church buildings. It would seem to be an odd fascination since I rarely attend a church service these days.

Maintaining these physical structures of the church is a never-ending battle against time, nature, and changing human sensibilities. Hundreds of years ago, wealthy noblemen and kings commissioned the building of these structures to the "Glory of God". Artisans and laborers devoted their energies to buildings that would inspire wonder and awe from both  inside and out. Perhaps this is the all too human response to our mortality. We want to build something that will outlive us, though Jesus warned us, "Not one stone will be left upon another."

We humans are not satisfied with physical structures. We want organizational structure. Jesus exhorted us to gather for fellowship at the table, but we want to know which end of the table is the head. In the Gospel of Mark, James and John decided they want to be in charge. Not only did they want to form a hierarchy, they wanted to be the head of it!

Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” “We can,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.” When the ten heard about this, they became indignant with James and John. Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Mark 10:35-43

Although Jesus told his disciples that  to "lord over" and to "exercise authority over" others was not to be the pattern for his followers, they began to adopt the world's structures of hierarchy. Most of the centuries of church conflict and turmoil was not so much about what the belief was as who was in charge.

A few centuries after Jesus had left this earth, the Roman model of diocese and archdiocese had been fully integrated into church governance, with bishops and archbishops as the heads. In the centuries which followed, the line between government and church were indistinguishable. The combination grew increasingly powerful, leading to the Crusades in the eleventh century. Over time, as nation-states formed, the influence of the church waned, but never completely abated.

Whatever its degree of influence on temporal affairs, the church knew that it was operating against the explicit direction of its Master.  Allowing space for monastic orders was a tacit admission of this truth. Most of the saints designated by the church, were either from monastic orders, founded orders, or otherwise operated at the fringes of the church. It was necessary to put some distance from the structures of power for people to even attempt to follow Jesus.

Jesus never left explicit directions on how to organize the nascent group of believers he was leaving behind, but he was very explicit about what structures and behaviors to avoid. Throughout history, Jesus' wisdom on these matters had to be rediscovered:

“the "small goodness" from one person to his fellowman is lost and deformed as soon as it seeks organization and universality and system, as soon as it opts for doctrine, a treatise of politics and theology, a party, a state, and even a church. Yet it remains the sole refuge of the good in being. ”― Emmanuel Levinas

This is why attempts to evangelize the world end up being an evangelization of the structures of power. The most notable example is the Roman Catholic church and its "Doctrine of Discovery." This gave European colonialists the moral cover to displace and enslave indigenous peoples. A number of non-denominational American churches have picked up on this as they setup satellite churches under the administration of one senior pastor. But truth is not found at the centers of power:

"If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the center, because the center is based on existing knowledge. The guardians of the old order usually determine who gets to reach centers of power, and they tend to filter out carriers of disturbing, unconventional ideas." ―Yuval Noah Harari

Centralized power was always going to be a problem for the church. It's a place to hide all sorts of evil. It's why Jesus operated at the periphery. The margins are where he built his church. Father Oscar Romero realized this in the most trying of places, El Salvador in the late nineteen seventies.

Oscar Romero was appointed and installed as the Archbishop of El Salvador in 1977. He was placed as the head of the Catholic church in El Salvador. His position naturally overlapped with the centers of power at the time, the wealthy landowners and the government. A number of events, culminating with the assassination of his friend, Father Rutilio Grande, changed his perspective about the center of power and moved him to the periphery, the poor laborers of El Salvador. He began to voice the sufferings of the poor and painted a vision of what the Church could be:

"God wants to save us as a people. He does not want to save us in isolation. That is why the church today, more than ever before emphasizes what it means to be a 'people'. And that is why the church experiences conflicts: the church does not want just crowds; she wants a people. A crowd is a bunch of individuals, and the more lethargic they are, the better; the more conformist they are, the better." - St. Oscar Romero 

The "church" Romero speaks of, the communion of life, the church which forms a people, is alien to the concept of "church" in middle America. I have read many of  Romero's words. As I did so, I was saddened by the vast gulf, a great chasm, between the Church Romero speaks of and the church we have today. Romero was martyred as he tried to live out this vision of what the church could be.

Yet I remain hopeful. I see stirrings among the people who want to follow Jesus, who see the truth of his life and teachings. They are tired of living a lie, of putting on a smiling face when inside they are grieving. I am one of those people. I know there are others. Perhaps you are one of them. We can all lament and grieve the state of the church and we probably need to do that. But we also need to realize that the baton has been dropped in front of us. At some point we are going to have to pick it up and "run the race set before us" (Heb 12:1). We cannot run this race alone. We must nurture a hopeful expectancy to find others on the same journey, those who are heading in the same direction. We must learn to recognize the presence of God in people and places where we did not expect to find him. Quite often those places are at the margins of society. We should try to be more spiritually aware, living with a Jesuit expectancy to look for "God in all things." Let us try to learn from those times when we look back, kick ourselves and say "God was in this place and I did not realize it!" (Gen 28:16).

The church we seek, the people that follow Jesus, is the fellowship of saints and the body of Christ. It does not necessarily meet in a building, although it sometimes does. It is a people who will live and speak the truth, however imperfectly. It is a people who have come to terms with their own mistakes, sufferings, denials, and sins. It is a place where people can rejoice, but also grieve together. It is a place where people will bear with one another in all their frail humanity.

It meets at the Church of St. Elsewhere. Service times to be announced.