ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/cut-all-us-military-aid-israel
When my mind turns to Israel and Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza, the hatred and the bullets, the dead children – and now the assault on the Peace Flottilla – I can’t quite keep down the question: Where is God?
With God, it seems, our senses fail us. In a world made dark by our own doing, God strikes us, to borrow from Daniel Berrigan, as “the God of no comment.” Especially among those who toil to bring to the world a measure of light.
This is not to suggest that I think God is absent or inert or impassive. Quite the contrary. God, I believe, is present and has strong opinions and, moreover, applies divine energies for the disarmament of every nation and every human heart.
An audacious proposition. God works for disarmament? How to know for sure? There is no way to know as a scientist reckons knowledge. Rather to make a commitment for peace, one must, as the Bible says, believe. And I believe in part because of the psalms and the prophets.
A weird epithet from Berrigan, but then, he is a weird guy.
To my knowledge, God never promised us a world without war, want, disease, hunger or suffering. Those are things humans bring upon ourselves. Because of our sin, paraphrasing the Bible, God has set an angel with a sword of flame guarding the gates of Eden. Due to our fallen nature, we aren’t going to return to Eden, but our efforts to do so often bring us into contact with the sword of flame. In the last century, the misbegotten efforts to bring about the various “Gardens of Eden” kept the sword very busy.
Our lot now is the cross, and while we might do things to better the lives of those around us, and should, we are not going to eliminate injustices, suffering or death. To aspire to it on any but the most proximate level and to a degree, is vanity. We aspire to “become as gods”.
We are given to understand that God brings good from evil. We should always fight evil. But at a point we go over the line and arrogate to ourselves more capacity to judge whether it occurs or will occur or not than is given to us to discern. We are always trying to gain the “knowledge of good and evil.” Notwithstanding that we also have an obligation to discern, I think sometimes we get too close to it and get drawn into it ourselves, by intention if not by action. Sometimes in our efforts to be “preventers”, we join the “perpetrators”, and I’m not entirely sure very many of us can truly escape that.
You, jjdrury, do that. So do I. Hopefully we do that unaware. God, not we, will judge us.
War, we know, is a terrible thing. But not everything in war is a terrible thing, and certainly not every participant. I recall reading a book by a priest who was, as a seminarian, drafted into the SS, of all things. He was able to provide some spiritual help to his fellows in that odious service and, while doing it, keep Himmler off his back. Ultimately, Himmler threw him out of the SS into the regular army. He ministered to German soldiers and, while part of the German occupation of Italy, was ordained in a sort of “emergency ordination” by the Pope himself, notwithstanding that he had not completed his seminary training. He continued ministering to the Wehrmacht soldiers who, as we know, were fighting in one of the worst causes the world has ever known. But he did a lot of spiritual good among them, notwithstanding that a wholly unjust war was raging all around him, and one in which he was a participant.
Frankly, and maybe I’m more cynical than I should be about such things, but I do not expect disarmament among mankind until Gabriel blows his horn.
I remember being surprised by the statement made to me by an anti-Zionist Jew. It was his belief (and he wasn’t alone in having it) that instead of the Messiah bringing peace (and the kingdom of Israel) at His coming, the Messiah could not come until men had established peace on earth themselves. It struck me as a pretty notion, but so very different from belief in the Cross. This Jewish fellow and those like him have a belief in the self-perfectability of mankind. Not on the same level, of course, but that struck me as being not entirely unlike the expectation of things like “workers’ paradises”. Determined efforts at “paradise-building”, it seems to me, draw the sword of flame. On this earth, I think, all we now have is the Cross.
In our fat West, we seem not to understand some things,and they baffle us. I remember reading Mother Teresa’s account of the evident joy of so many of the most devasted people on the face of the earth. Where did they find it? I recall reading a book (can’t remember the author now) entitled “City of Joy”, which is about the slums of Calcutta, and it talked about the same thing. I sometimes wonder whether, as we fly about and build our tall buildings and our social systems and drive our sleek vehicles and tot up the numbers in our 401k’s, we get to thinking we are the masters of the earth and expect, somehow, to impose our expectations of Eden on the world, and become very frustrated when we don’t.
And I sometimes think our expectations of “being God” ourselves, lead us to think God is uncaring or absent, whereas we are only really looking to ourselves to be God, and don’t find Him there.
My apologies for being so “preachy”, and I know you and I agree about almost nothing when it comes to world or national politics. I am not, in this post, expecting agreement. This is just a reflection on my part, triggered by your post.
