Reading notes

Fr. John Dear writes —

Last September, I spoke to some 2,000 students during their annual lecture at a Baptist college in Pennsylvania. After a short prayer service for peace centered on the Beatitudes, I took the stage and got right to the point. “Now let me get this straight,” I said. “Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ which means he does not say, ‘Blessed are the warmakers,’ which means, the warmakers are not blessed, which means warmakers are cursed, which means, if you want to follow the nonviolent Jesus you have to work for peace, which means, we all have to resist this horrific, evil war on the people of Iraq.”

With that, the place exploded, and 500 students stormed out. The rest of them then started chanting, “Bush! Bush! Bush!”

So much for my speech. Not to mention the Beatitudes.

This is grievously fscked up. Politics trumps red-letter verses. Who’d have thought? “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” comes to mind as relevant. Is this not what idolatry means?

Wow, I didn’t know about this particular O’Connor book; it’s utterly apt —

I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s great book, “Wise Blood,” where her outrageous character Hazel Motes is so fed up with Christian hypocrisy that he forms his own church, the “Church of Christ without Christ,” “where the lame don’t walk, the blind don’t see, and the dead don’t rise.” That’s where we are headed today. …

The diagnosis —

We have become a culture of Pharisees. Instead of practicing an authentic spirituality of compassion, nonviolence, love and peace, we as a collective people have become self-righteous, arrogant, powerful, murderous hypocrites who dominate and kill others in the name of God. …

We side with the rulers, the bankers, and the corporate millionaires and billionaires. …

We have become a mean, vicious people, what the bible calls “stiff-necked people.” And we do it all with the mistaken belief that we have the blessing of God. …

In the old days, the early Christians had big words for such behavior, such lies. They were called “blasphemous, idolatrous, heretical, hypocritical and sinful.” … As we Christians go along with the Bush administration and the American empire, we betray Jesus, renounce his teachings, and create a “Church of Christ without Christ,” as Flannery O’Connor foresaw.

The prescription —

The first thing we Christians have to do in this time is not to become good Pharisees. Instead, we have to try all over again to follow the dangerous, nonviolent, troublemaking Jesus. I believe war, weapons, corporate greed and systemic injustice are an abomination in the sight of God. They are the definition of mortal sin. [These things] mock God and threaten to destroy God’s gift of creation. If you want to seek the living God, you have to pit your entire life against war, weapons, greed and injustice — and their perpetrators. It is as simple as that.

Yes. And perhaps the second thing, radiating out from the first thing, is not to get caught up in the ongoing blaming, judging, and dismissing, which is my particular weakness: lots of expletives arise in my throat when I read about and observe people embracing these evils. But the truth is, what’s needed is prophetic truthtelling, which I account Fr. John as doing, and then caring about these afflicted ones.

I was knocked sideways a few days ago with the realization that when someone acts this way — say, someone who’d chant “Bush! Bush! Bush!” on being confronted with Jesus’ words in the Beatitudes — against all reason, common sense, and even any partial congruence with what they say they believe, that one is being ravaged by spiritual cancer. Would I condemn and shun a person afflicted by malignant physical cancer? Or would I have compassion and interest in seeing him healed? In seeing him get treatment and make behavioral changes that might save his life? In being present to him?

This is a whopping reframe for me, and a crucial one. Now can I live into it?

[via musing85]