Responsibility For Orlando; Responsibility For The Future

We have met the enemy and he is
us.

I am stunned over the events in Orlando.  Ironically at the very moment the calamity was unfolding, I had been sitting at my computer writing the previous posting in which I wrote that I need to see that Islam—like the other religions, great and small of our world—produces people of wide vision, great tolerance, peace builders and reconcilers and not fall into the trap that only Christian trees bear good fruit.  And now, of course, the blogosphere is replete, once again, with anti-Muslim slogans that would indiscriminately slap the brush of hatred and violence over the hundreds of millions who find in their religion the roots of compassion, reconciliation, and human betterment. 

“Christians” in Nigeria or Uganda can attack and burn a hall where gay men and women gather to socialize and Pope Francis or the Archbishop of Canterbury, much less you or me, aren’t given the burden of blame for the violence.  Indeed some of the same blogs that are now targeting Islam as the ideological tinder that was behind the Orlando violence themselves are filled with hate speech for LGBT persons, claiming that they only have reaped what they have sown.  If all Muslims are to be blamed for the violence of the Orlando attack, then we Christians, in fact, share in the responsibility as well for the judgments we make about those whom we judge to be sinners.  But the problem is much wider than religion gone toxic. 

We need to stand back and see how responsibility for the violence in our world lies as our own doorsteps.  We live in a culture saturated in violence.   Whether it is Game of Thrones or Independence Day: Resurgence or even Bluebloods we lace our entertainment with violence and death.  No one dare take on the NRA and its political agenda funded by the gun industry to prevent at all costs a rational system of legislation to keep automatic and semi-automatic weapons out of the hands of those who lack the responsibility to protect a peaceful citizenry.  Of course we are a society that condones babies being ripped from the bellies of their mothers by the abortion industry—it is all part of a wild and savage cultural imagination in which black lives do not matter, blue lives do not matter, and in fact no life really matters.  The Pope tells us that Capital Punishment is State-sanctioned murder but we close our ears.  Kids are taken to gun ranges rather than golf driving ranges.  We are drunk with violence and while we may profess to be Christian and sing our Sunday hymns, our real religion is blood.  This is not the kingdom that Jesus of Nazareth came to reveal to us.  This is not the Divine ratio for the Incarnation.  This is a fraudulent and inauthentic Christianity and we will be fraudulent and inauthentic Christians until we reject the language, vocabulary, syntax and culture of Death that runs through our society.  Before we dare demonize others we need to take a long hard look at the demons in our own hearts.  Like the first Christians who thoroughly rejected the violence of the Graeco-Roman world with its lion and gladiator shows, with its State-sponsored cruelty, with its contempt for the lives of others and indeed for its own citizens, we must turn our back on this culture of death and construct an alternative world. 

One of the etymologies often given for the word “Devil” is that it is derived from the Greek διαβολος via the Latin diabolus and the French diable.  διαβολος itself is constructed of two words, to force and apart.  The devil is the one who divides us.  Divides us from God; divides us from one another.  We need to see that whatever divides us, in our imagination, from others: Muslim, Gay, Immigrant, whatever—is the work of the evil One.  In the Mind of God every human person is his son or his daughter and his plan is to bring us together—in Christ, we Christians believe—into a conscious sharing of his Divine Nature.  This culture of unification must be our alternative to the Culture of violence and death which is eating out our world from within like the most vicious cancer. 

Earlier today, in looking up an article on Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, I found a reference to the Chemin Neuf Community.  It was founded by Jesuit Father Laurent Fabre in 1973—at the very end of the Paul VI/Vatican II papacy of hope before so much of our Catholic Church descended into the retreat from Vatican II in the protection of the more recent tragically ambiguous papacies of his successors but one.  The Chemin Neuf (Literally New Road) is an authentically Catholic (i.e. canonically recognized) movement.  It was give official recognition by Cardinal Alexandre Renard, archbishop of Lyon, in 1984 and later given the canonical status as a Public Association of the Faithful by Cardinal Albert Decourtray, Archbishop of the same See and Primate of France.  While canonically Catholic, it welcomes and includes members of a wide variety of Christian churches from the Evangelical and Charismatic to the Orthodox Churches of the East who wish to work together, hand in hand, to spread the Gospel.  To spread the Gospel: not to provide apologetics as to why we are right and everyone else is wrong, but to announce the Εωαγγελιον, The Good News of Jesus Christ, a message that calls our human family to reconciliation, peace, and unity.  The community, which follows Ignatian Spirituality, has an extensive outreach to families, including those who have been divorced and remarried.  It has provided a welcome experience of Christian community to many who have found that sense of community in Christ, to be lacking in more traditional Church structures. 

It is a different approach but then it is time for new and different approaches.  Our self-imposed diversities are from the evil One.  They lead only to death and Christ is Lord of Life.  After Orlando I am more convinced than ever that the future requires people of any and all religious beliefs to work together in mutual respect with all people of good will in taking responsibility for making our world better. 

Never Too Old to Learn Some Lessons

It was the flowers that initially 

hooked me

I have to admit that I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.  The last attention I had paid to the man he was still “Gaseous Cassius” and, not having an interest in boxing, when he converted to Islam I turned my back on all the braggadocio and invested my brain cells other where.  You couldn’t escape him entirely of course, not if you read the newspapers or watched Walter Cronkite, but he was only a name from those part of the headlines that came from worlds which I, for the most part, did not inhabit.  He was enough older than me that during the years he made his mark I still had grades and college admissions to preoccupy me.  And I was slow in coming to my more liberal views—Viet Nam in particular was not a quick conversion for me but a long agonizing interior search for a moral compass that transcended the glib and easy slogans being yelled by crowds outside my college dorm.  And more important yet, my life already was the Church.  It was the heady years immediately after Vatican II, and I was taken up with the Liturgy and Ecumenics and outreach to the poor.  So who gave a second thought to a come-lately Muslim of questionable sharia orthodoxy from Louisville Kentucky?  And that is pretty much where I had left it.  So what was the fuss about?

I had no intention of watching the memorial service but sometimes circumstances conspire to the unplanned.  I had been in hospital for a few days with an infection in my lower intestinal tract and was being discharged.  I was waiting for my ride home.  The television was on.  And to be honest I was captivated by the gorgeous arrangements of hydrangea, tulips, orchids, roses and fern.  I have always had a “thing” for flowers and was struck by the incredible garden that surrounded the speakers. 

The first of the speakers I heard was the Reverend Kevin Cosby, pastor of Saint Stephen’s Baptist Church in Louisville and President of Simmons College.  It was the best of African-American preaching—solid, biblical, and yet pulling on the heart-strings for personal conversion.  And, unlike other Christian speakers, he honored the commission to bring Jesus into the conversation, the Jesus of Matthew 25 who shuffles with the lame and the tired through the hardships of Louisville’s (or Chicago’s, or Los Angeles’ or Nairobi’s West End.  Every city has a West End and like the mythical “liturgical east” it isn’t limited to one point of the compass.)

The second speaker to snap me to attention was Rabbi Michael Lerner.  I wasn’t impressed by his mourning prayer—just a little too post-orthodox for me—but the talk was powerful and, like Reverend Cosby’s—was a call for the personal commitment and conversion of the listener.

I didn’t get to hear all the speakers.  My ride came and there was a stop at the drugstore to drop off prescriptions, but as soon as I was back in my suite of rooms, my television was snapped on. 

I loved Billy Crystal’s talk.  I expected more from President Clinton but he didn’t do badly. He was warm and personal towards Mrs. Ali and the family and I suppose a more low-key approach was fitting for the end of the service to usher us back to the everyday world and the promise of a tomorrow in which I –and  I hope others—would have a different perspective on our mission in the world.  I was somewhat embarrassed by the blandness of Monsignor Kriegel. I am not sure what to make of the Buddhist chant; it seemed incongruous.  The Quranic verses were certainly appropriate to the occasion.  And the flowers were magnificent. 

The entire event confirmed in me my conviction and commitment to the Second Vatican Council’s declaration found in Nostra Aetate  

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself.

Secondly I learned that I need to pay more attention to those whom I often dismiss as being culturally, socially and historically marginal because I disagree with their foundational religious, intellectual, or cultural principles.  It is not my role to grade others—public figures or private individuals—for importance but rather to see the results they produce in their lives that effect change on either the global or the individual levels. 

Thirdly, I need to see that Islam—like the other religions, great and small of our world—produces people of wide vision, great tolerance, peace builders and reconcilers and not fall into the trap that only Christian trees bear good fruit.  While I have always defended those who faith follows different doctrines than mine, I do have a strong streak of Christian chauvinism that Friday’s service proved needs rethinking.  And I need to acknowledge that there are those for whom religious faith of any sort is not central to, or even part of, their lives but whose contribution to the betterment of our world far surpasses my own. 

And finally I think—I hope—that I have learned that the future requires people of any and all religious beliefs to work together in mutual respect with all people of good will in taking responsibility for making our world better. 

What Ideology Do Rorate Caeli And ISIS Have In Common?

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, caliph
of the restored Islamic Caliphate 

Kamel Daoud wrote a thought-provoking op-ed piece for the New York Times this morning.  It began

IT might have been an occasion for collectors of omens to rejoice: For the first time in nearly five centuries, in 2015 the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday coincided with Jesus’ birthday. A cause for hope? Too little, it turns out.

Mr. Daoud went on to explain Fundamentalist Islam’s hatred of time and obsession with geography.  With the goal of returning to a “pure Islam,” time becomes the enemy because time represents change and change means decay from the pure ideal.  In the same way, Fundamentalist Islam, represented by ISIS, wants to establish control over geographic space in order to be able to erase the changes of time whether by destroying evidence of time and its changes (the ruins of Palmyra) or by creating the “clean slate” on which the Islamist ideology can be imprinted.

After explaining this Islamic fundamentalist dream of re-creating the world in its own mythic image and likeness, Mr. Dauod goes on to compare it with the policies of the various right-wing nationalist movements taking over European politics right now.  He mentions, in particular, France where the National Front is gaining popularity on its anti-immigrant policy.  He claims that it represents a desire for that pure Gallic society where French culture was unchallenged by the arrival of “The Stranger”—the immigrants from France’s former colonies in Africa.

France has a long history of Gallic xenophobia.  Go back 120 years to the Dreyfus Affair where a Jewish military officer was falsely accused of and framed for passing military secrets on to the German Embassy.  What is so disturbing to those of us who are Christian and who know history is the role the Catholic Church played in the anti-Semitism and xenophobia on which the Dreyfus Affair fed.  The goal was to undo the constitutional changes of the French Revolution and restore the unity of throne and altar of the ancien regime. 

There are Americans who share a similar xenophobic dream for our society.  They want an America that is a “Christian Nation” composed of individuals of European stock.  We not only don’t want those Syrian Muslim refugees, we don’t want our little brown brothers from the south swarming over our borders.  Bring back the America of Ozzie and Harriet. 

You see, there are Christians who, like Islamic extremists, want to establish a “pure Christianity” (or in the case of the Katholik Krazies, a “pure Catholicism”).  Like the Islamic nut-cases they view time and change with a gnostic negativity.  Your Westboro Baptist Church folk or your Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons erase twenty centuries of tradition in their romantic revival of an imagined “primitive Christianity.”  They ignore twenty centuries of biblical commentary to impose their own isolated meaning on scripture.  They ignore twenty centuries of Christian heroes as examples to guide us in discipleship.  They hold in contempt twenty centuries of liturgical and spiritual tradition in a futile attempt to erase the time between us and Jesus. 

The Katholik Krazies take a somewhat different approach.  They pick an “ideal spot” in the contemporary world—let’s say for example, the reign of Pius XII (1939-1958) and presume that the doctrine, liturgy, and practice of that time had remained unchanged from Jesus and Apostles (their well-touted myth that the Tridentine Mass is “The Mass of the Ages,” just like the Apostles said Mass; their obsession with late 19^th century neo-scholasticism as the sole model of framing the faith; their models of a monarchial Church with all its Burke-like trappings) and that all subsequent development represents only decay.

An authentically Christian approach to time sees time, not negatively as decay, but as the context in which the Kingdom of God is revealed.  Time is the theatre in which God has revealed himself in Christ Jesus—and continues to reveal himself in the life of the Church.  While it may be a bit much for some to see time as marching towards that Omega Point in which all creation is brought together in Christ, our Christian faith tells us that time is oriented towards that moment of parousia when Christ returns.  For Christians time is holy and we celebrate that in our liturgical seasons.  The Katholik Krazies and other fundamentalists are trapped in a gnostic bubble of negativity that ultimately denies the redemption. 

Mr. Douad finishes his op-ed piece by contrasting the Right-Wing western danger and the Islamic fundamentalist threat writing

One might counter that of the two groups, only Muslim extremists kill. Which is true, at least when it comes to people. But the extremists of the right kill humanism, and that’s the only thing that could save us all.

This brings up our subject for next time: Christians and humanism.  

Allah God ???? One and the Same or Different Deities

Do Jews and Christians worship the same God?  This question might seem rather silly to any Christian.  Of course we do.  The God of the “Old Testament” (or better put, the “Hebrew Scriptures”) is the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity.  Well, that of course is the Christian interpretation.  Were I a Jew I would have a few questions. 

In Jewish theology there is no room for a Trinity of Divine Persons.  “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One” (Deut. 6:4), is the key creedal prayer of Judaism and is known from its Hebrew first words as the Schema Yisrael.  It is the center prayer of both the Morning and Evening Prayer in the Synagogue (equivalent to our daily offices of the same name or sometimes called Lauds and Vespers).  It is the prayer Jewish children are taught to say before bed and it is the final prayer on the lips of a devout Jew as she or he surrenders their soul to God.  So while Judaism does speak of the Word of God and of the Breath (Spirit) of God, there is no room to give them a personality unique from the Creator.

And that is another difference.  In the Hebrew Scriptures while God is sometimes referred to as the Father of Israel, a devout Jew never assumes any familiarity with him in the way Jesus did (remember, they wanted to kill him for “making God his Father”) or has taught us to do.  God is King.  Master of the Universe.  Lord.  Creator.  He is not Jesus’s Father or any other individual’s Father.  It is the supreme lèse majesté to address God with such familiarity and in Jesus day it was even worse—it was blasphemy. 

Nor in Judaism is it possible for there to be any sort of Incarnation of the Divine Person assuming a human nature.  The Incarnation is the rabbinic equivalent of a square circle, essentially self-contradictory.  God is God and humans are human.  There is an essential difference between Creator and creature that cannot be breeched. 

In the 80’s, about fifty years after the Death and Resurrection of Christ, the Rabbis inserted into the daily prayers known as the Eighteen Benedictions, a “blessing” (actually a curse) on the minim—the heretics or apostates.  While not explicitly identifying Christians as those placed under this “blessing,” historians agree that they were among the various groups the Rabbis were trying to separate out from the synagogues for their “unorthodox” beliefs. 

Given this history it is surprising that most Rabbis acknowledge that Christians and Jews worship the same God.  It would seem even to me that Christianity had so changed the understanding of God from our roots in Judaism that we had in effect “morphed” the God of Israel into a very different Deity.  I suspect that some of the ultra Orthodox (and I mean ultra as in the Hasidim) might think this but they keep themselves so isolated even from other Jews that if they do it remains unspoken in inter-faith circles.  Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Jews express no problem that despite the doctrinal issues relating to Jesus we do in fact worship the same God.

Now to the point: I am not writing about Jews and Christians at all but rather Christians and Muslims.  It is much more clear that Jews and Muslims worship the same God and if they do then Christians and Muslims obviously worship the same God. 

The name “Allah” is the Arabic for “The God” (literaly al ilah) to distinguish Allah from the lesser deities worshiped among the Arab people before Mohamed.  Allah is not unique to Islam but was used to speak of God by Arab Christians both before and after the rise of Islam.  Christians, including Catholics, who speak Arabic, even today refer to God as “Allah.” 

The Name “Allah” finds its cognates in other languages spoken by the ancient peoples of the Bible.  When speaking Aramaic, his native language, Jesus would refer to God as Elah—a Name very closely related to Allah.  The Canaanite Name for God, El, was borrowed by several of the authors of the Old Testament.  In Hebrew God is called Elohim.  These Names are all closely related to the Arabic Name of God, Allah. 

When Mohamed devised his new religion of Islam he rooted it Judaism and Christianity.  As a young man driving camel caravans for his uncle, a merchant, across Arabia to the markets along the Mediterranean coast in what is today Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, he was familiar with both religions.  Moreover, it seems that for several months he lived with a Christian monk who taught him to read and write.  This monk apparently was not Orthodox but belonged to the Nestorian tradition.  The Nestorians believed that in Jesus God did not truly become human but sort of wore a human body to mask his Divinity.  It gave the young Mohammed a skewed understanding of Christianity and its beliefs, but he always maintained—and wrote into the Quran—a deep respect for Christian monks and priests. 

His exposure to Judaism and Christianity led him to the idea that God had first revealed himself to Abraham but over the centuries the Jews had changed the revelation and strayed from the Truth. So God sent Jesus to be his prophet and set people right but again, over the centuries Christians moved away from the Truth, “exaggerating” Christ into a Divine Person.  In the end Mohammed felt that he was the final prophet who came once and for all with a Revelation that would not be corrupted. 

As a consequence of his exposure to Christianity Jesus and Mary play a significant role in the Quran.  The Quran teaches that Mary was and remained a virgin through the conception and birth of Jesus.  Muslims have a great respect for the Virgin Mary.  I remember being in a procession in honor of Our Lady in Trapani in Sicily about 20 years ago.  While the participants were all Catholics, it was mainly Muslims who lined the streets respectfully to watch Our Lady’s statue being carried by. 

There are those who want to tell us that the “Muslim god” is a false god, an idol.  But in fact they know neither their history nor their theology.  Yes there is a significant difference in how we understand God but there is an equivalent difference in how we and Jews understand God.  Whatever divides us one from another is the work of the Evil One and the sort of bias that slams the door of authentic commonality between Christianity and Islam is from Satan and not from God.