The striking feature of our time is not the presence of anxiety, but the inadequacy of anxiety to raise our awareness of what is at stake. An apocalyptic monster has descended upon the world, and there is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide: The human worship of power has resurrected the demon of power. The demon does not just dwell in the temple of terrorism but wherever violence is contemplated. All violence is evil. Evil is tantalizing; it is the promise of being in charge. Violence encourages itself. How many shall live, how many shall die—even math becomes madness.
Will help come from those who seek to keep alive the Sacred Word? This is, indeed, a grave hour for those who are committed to honor the name of God. God trusted us in Creation, speaking the Word that made us, giving us wisdom in the Word become flesh, sharing power in the gift of the Holy Spirit. But we have distorted God's Word, Christ's Wisdom, and abused the Spirit's gift of power.
So much is said about an ongoing secularizing conspiracy to squeeze out religion. However, the problem is not the survival of religion, but the survival of humanity. What is required is a continuous effort to overcome hardness of heart, callousness, and above all to inspire the world with the sacred reality of the presence of God in order to prevent dehumanization. Men and women the world over are being afflicted with contradictions and perplexities, living in anguish; even people who live in an affluent society that promises otherwise. Despite our technological boasts, our thinking is behind the times. These are dark ages—high standards of living, vulgar standards of thinking, too feeble to stop the process of spiritual liquidation. We are living not in a time of spiritual revival but of religious manipulation, in this age of shifting boundaries and many-edged issues.
We suffer, all the more, from the fact that our understanding of religion today has been reduced to ritual, doctrine, institution. Who is allowed to lead the prayers, which views will get the stamp of approval and how will the institution's continuance be funded have become the nervous preoccupations within. While, from without, religion is called upon to buttress the social order, animate the cultural milieu and ratify the political agenda. In so doing, God's Spirit is considered a fuel, a utility; in short, that people can put God to use. Yet, God is of no ‘use' to a society or nation because God is not a resource but source. God is not a concept but name. “God” can only be uttered in astonishment. Astonishment is the result of openness to the mystery of sensing the ineffable—the wholly otherness, the uncontrollability of God. It is through openness to this mystery which stands us up or kneels us down or lays us prostrate on the ground that we become present to the presence of God, real with ourselves and available to others.
We do not know it all. And knowing must be preceded by listening to the call which comes to us in holy time and on holy ground; God's way, not ours. For God is not produced by our deliberation. God is never an explanation but always a challenge. Religious existence is a pilgrimage rather than an arrival—again, a challenge rather than an intellectual establishment, an encyclopedia of ready-made answers, or an endorsement of values. No one can claim hold on absolute truth, as if all of God's wisdom were revealed to us completely and once and for all, as if God had nothing more to say. Rather we can listen for the call as we experience in one another the presence of a person radiant with reflections of a greater presence. In holy time and on holy ground we meet each other in personal witness and example, sharing insights and humbly confessing inadequacy. This meeting of people of faith, both within and between different religious traditions, is where our individual moments of faith are recognized as mere waves in the endless ocean of humanity's reaching out for God, where all canonical formulations and ritual articulations appear as understatements, where our souls are swept away by the awareness of the urgency to respond to God's call while we also sense the tragic insufficiency of human faith's response. When dwelling on this holy, common ground, we become more aware of what unites us: our being accountable to God, our being creatures of God's concern, precious in God's sight. While the language, symbols, worship forms and concrete hopes are different, for all people of faith the disappointment, the sigh and the sorrow are the same.
There are moments when we all stand together and see our faces in the mirror: the anguish of humanity and its helplessness, the perplexity of the individual and the need of divine guidance:
… New York City , Washington DC , rural Pennsylvania
London , Madrid
Bosnia and Rwanda (ethnic cleansing)
Cambodia (killing fields)
Auschwitz (crematories)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Nanking (massacre)…
… Jerusalem (destruction of the Temple )
(Noah and) The Great Flood…
In awe before God, and pleading for forgiveness, we confess collusion—sometimes as architects, sometimes as accomplices—with inhumanity.
But faith evokes compassion, neither a broken nor bellicose spirit.
And memorials? Stone and steel are only markers. True memorials are in and through the ongoing witness and commitment of beating human hearts.
The world we live in has become aware of something God intended by the original Creation: we all live in a single neighborhood, and the role of religious commitment, of reverence and compassion, in the thinking of people of faith is becoming a domestic issue. The old boundaries—national and religious—have given way. They no longer hold; they do not make sense as they were. And to try to live in this world by holding to those boundaries, by assuming they are binding by historical precedent or that they come with future privilege actually does further violence. Vicious deeds never usher in a new world order but are rather the very death rattle of peoples and nations unwilling to share power.
Terrorism does not come out of nowhere but is an aftermath of what is conceived n the hearts and minds of people in our tendency to erect a great divide between ‘us and them', ‘me and you'. This polarization of our inner life articulates evil thoughts that are a rehearsal and precursor for the evil actions that take their rise. Yet the response to terrorism, itself, can be just as evil. It is therefore of extreme importance that the sinfulness of thoughts of suspicion and hatred towards individuals or groups of other religions, races or nations, and particularly the sinfulness of any contemptuous utterance that widens the divide, be made clear to all humankind. Words have power, they do not fade. What starts out as a sound ends in a deed.
The urgent problem we face is not a competition or clash between world religions but the condition of all religions, the condition of human beings, the crassness, chaos, darkness, despair. In such a world, fundamentalism might be understandable to many and attractive to more than a few. However, fundamentalism is not faith. Fundamentalism is fear-based ideology; whereas, faith recognizes that the world is too small for anything but mutual care and deep respect. The world is to great a gift for anything but responsibility for one another (including compassionate care for those who are ruled by fear, that they may be loved back into community).
What is urgently needed are ways of helping one another in the terrible predicament of the here and now by the courage to believe that the Sacred Word endures forever as well as here and now!
Our tragedy is the insecurity of faith. Our Faith is too often tinged with arrogance, self-righteousness. It is even capable of becoming demonic. Even the creeds we proclaim are in danger of becoming idolatry. Our faith is fragile, never immune to error, distortion or deception. Humanity is an unfinished task, and so is religion. There are no final proofs for the existence of God. There are only witnesses.
Just as medical and human services volunteers streamed into the catastrophic trauma of tsunami and hurricane in sacrificial giving for rescue, relocation and rebuilding lives, a similar grassroots current is needed whereby people of faith respond, not tethered by institutional boundaries or limits. What these times call for is “Believers without Borders”. People of faith sense that the defining reality is not nation, not religious institution, not even family or self; but God. Our supreme and ultimate allegiance is to God and each other.
The real bond between people of different creeds is the reverence for God they have in common. It is easy to speak about the different dogmas we are committed to and list the traditions we have inherited; it's hard to communicate the impulse to praise or our contrition before the Divine. But souls which are in accord with what is precious in the eyes of God, souls to whom God's love for them is more precious than their own lives, will always meet each other on the frontier—in the presence of God whose glory fills the hearts and transcends the minds. Our response to God's call, on that holy ground, in that holy time, rather than being a defensive, compulsion to protect the home will be a compassionate commitment to live peaceably in a New Land .
© Thomas F. Reese
September 11, 2005