Unfamiliar Voices
September 11, 2011
One of the books I read over the summer was a travel memoir by William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain. In it, Dalrymple follows the footsteps of a Byzantine monk, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist, who traveled through the Empire from Mt. Athos down to the Egyptian desert oasis Al Kharga. The book is a totally fascinating and engaging description of the very complex situation Christians are finding themselves in in the Middle East. Mostly it is a tale of the degeneration of Christianity in her historic home — an often tragic and brutal tale. Eerily, the book, written in 1997, already seems out of date. The situation is almost certainly more grim now.
The second part of From the Holy Mountain takes place in Turkey. After a brief respite in Syria, being at the time the most stable and safe home for Christians, Dalrymple moves onto Lebanon. The book to this point was unrelentingly strange to my world. Turkey, though officially a secular state, has systematically suppressed Christians there, including especially a physical and historic genocide of the Armenian Christians. By ‘historic’ I mean that the authorities literally travel around to towns and destroy any physical proof of Armenians: their churches, their homes, their graveyards, their monasteries. I found it very difficult to hear described. One thing I wasn’t expecting was for this memoir to challenge my pacifism. It doesn’t take any sacrifice on my part to say that I affirm a non-violent Kingdom here. Upon hearing these stories, perhaps for the first time in years, I became quite sympathetic to the felt need to defend oneself, one’s family, church, and home. Some monasteries that were taken over or destroyed had been there for well over a thousand years. A thousand. years.
In Lebanon, Dalrymple gives a brief history of the the Maronite eastern Rite Catholics. A shockingly bloodthirsty and cruel band of Maronite gangs had waged a long ‘civil war’ with other ethnic and religious groups in what is now Lebanon in an effort to defend what was seen as their own country — aided in no small part to a close relationship to the French. There is one particularly dark incident where Dalrymple is having a conversation with a certain Christian about the Maronite leader Samir Geagea. This man was comparing two towns, one Christian the other not:
“You can eat in Ehden, but make sure you sleep in Bsharre. Sleep in Ehden, and they will shoot you while you are asleep.’ [Bsharre was a town under the authority of Geagea. Dalrymple proceeds to question this man, listing many of the more gruesome crimes of Geagea, including the night murder of a Christian rival, the killing of women and children, a church bombing, and others.] “Geagea is a very honourable and very holy man,’ he said. ‘We are very proud of him in Bsharre…You must not believe what people say about Samir Geagea,’ said Ch’baat. ‘But you can hardly call him holy,’ [Dal.]
‘Certainly yes,’ he said, quite serious. ‘He went to mass every day and prayed by his bed every night. He had a church built wherever he was, where he fought. Every Christmas his troops expected money as a present, but instead he gave them prayer books and rosaries. Of course he went to confession ever week. He never went into battle without his cros. In his office, he always had a picture of the Virgin and a cross: never any picture of Che Guevara or anything like that.”
Another strange phenomenon was reported on multiple occasions. In some places in the Middle East there was a strange fusion of Christianity, Islam, and paganism that I found, to be perfectly honest, curious but repugnant. Apparently there are several churches, monasteries, and Mosques, where people of both faiths will come and pray to saints for healing, or for a job, to get pregnant, or for good weather. This is itself not too disconcerting, though it seems like it has potential problems. Far more troubling is that if the prayer is answered, that person will return with a goat or a sheep and the (Orthodox!) priest or Imam will sacrifice the animal in thanks to the saint! How strange! How utterly foreign to me, and foreign to the strong anti-sacrificial polemics of the Church fathers and New Testament.
I kept going over these sections in my mind. In the end, I found them impossible to understand. I couldn’t wrap my head around this man who praised Geagea, or this, well, gang leader, who could shoot a woman and child over 24 times one day, and go to Mass the next; or the animal sacrifice for saints. I was beginning to question myself strongly. In what ways has my Christian life been truly normative, and in what ways has it been exceptional? According to how I’ve been taught to understand the Gospels and the witness of the persecuted Church, even under severe pressure, the Church shouldn’t be reacting by taking up arms, but caring not about the risks, they should be testifying to another kingdom. Is that simply a position that one in my position can take? Or can it truly occur? Luckily for my sanity, I found several stories that filled me with joy and relief. Perhaps these Christians are not so strange after all?
It is perhaps predictable for readers of this blog that at least one of us should write about Memorial Day. We are not often shy in our youthful enthusiasm and naivity about our conflicted loyalties as American citizens and also of the Church; and of the necessity of radical discipleship in the face of what we, or I at least, perceive as a nation state who has hijacked a Christian soteriology.
I am an American. My life is pretty good. I am grateful for the gifts and opportunities that I have had throughout my life, some of which I would not have had in some other countries. It would be dishonest of me not to note this. I often hear that these benefits are only possible because of the sacrifices of soldiers who have bravely fought and willingly sacrificed for the United States. That may in part be true, but it also points to a larger picture that I should like to address.
It would be easy to blame Constantinianism, blame the Enlightenment, blame the rise of atomistic politics for war, but the old adage about pointing your finger seems to ring true: “If you point your finger, you’ve three fingers pointing back at you.” My life is what it is with reference to these things. I cannot transcend the history in which my identity is tied up. So a simple blame game can only implicate myself in those things which I blame. I am not an island unto myself: who I am is only as it is in relation to other people and to the past which we narrate into our identities.
I’d like to think through this with reference to a few Christian doctrines:
It is common to hear Augustine blamed for the doctrine of “Original Sin.” This is, as most such “blame the fathers for a doctrine” schemes are, reductionistic and crude. Whatever the case though, we can thank Foucault for making the doctrine much more plausible in the contemporary scene. There seem to be structures of power and violence in place before I even come to be in the world. They are things over which I have little to no control and are fundamental to my existence, so much so that for most of my life they are invisible. I am born into a world already organized politically, economically, sociologically, religiously. This is essentially the doctrine of Original Sin: that structures of oppression, violence and rebellion against God are ‘already in place’ and work to form us as people before we are able to understand or critically resist them.
Because these structures are there from the beginning, they are easily taken for granted; assumed to be a natural given, something inevitable and often even good, as in being American, or at the very least ethically neutral, as in market economics. Memorial Day fits in well here. It is easy to assume that, because we have a relatively good life, the given social structures that we have are ‘how things are’ or ‘how the world works.’ The thought follows, that if we as Americans enjoy “freedom” and “prosperity” then the possibility of war as means to defend this freedom and prosperity are a necessity.
But no sooner is that thought out of my mouth than I realize that this implicates my own well being in a cycle and chain of violence and oppression. We return again to the fact that our world still operates in a cycle of “Original Sin.” My life is implicated and intertwined in the lives of others and that life is often manifested in and guaranteed by war.
This is why classical theology is so very important. Christ enters into this world as one not implicated in this cycle. His sinlessness means for us that by the power of the Spirit we are brought into the life of a God whose very nature from all eternity is one of perfect peace, perfect mutuality. We are not merely shown a way to live well, as if Christ was a mere moral exemplar – which is good as we are rather bad at such imitation – rather, by virtue of our baptism and infilling of the Holy Spirit, we are incorporated into that life of peace and given the means to live it.
This is why the Church is a politics and why it can and ought to challenge the givenness of Memorial Day. In the Church, we are commanded to live reconciled lives to each other, submitting to each other, loving each other, giving to each other even as Christ gives perpetually and without reservation to the Father, a giving we are able to do only on account of the Spirit. There is no other name by which we might be saved.
This then is what I mean by the crisis of doctrinal imagination; that we have become accustomed to imagining the Christian Gospel as one merely effecting ones personal salvation post-mortem. Original Sin, Christ’s sinlessness, God as Trinity, the exclusivity of the Church; all of these reduced to crude propositional statements needed to fill a gap in narrative logic become worn out quickly and whither and die. The Gospel makes a difference as to how we conceive our political allegiances. This isn’t about some stupid “Right vs Left” thing. This is an Isaiah 2.1-5 kind of thing:
1 The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
2 And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD’S house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.
3 And many people shall go and say , Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
4 And he shall judgeamong the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
5 O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the LORD
This raises the problem of the Church’s need to relearn how to read the Old Testament Christologically, but that is for another day. For now I hope I’ve hinted however poorly at the ways in which the Christian proclamation ought to revise other stories which we tell about ourselves. I also hope I’ve done it in a way that does not reduce to finger pointing at American soldiers as such essays as this even of mine have been prone to do.
What Should We Ponder Today?
November 11, 2009
Today I want to look at some hard realities that are the direct result of our sending away troops. It won’t be a long post.
The tragedy at Ft. Hood is indeed a tragedy. But it pales in comparison to a tragedy that occurs with more force and regularity than a damaged psychologists violent outbursts. On average, every month, 10 people commit suicide at Ft. Hood. We can be assured that if a Muslim American soldier killed 10 people a month at a US Military facility people would begin to wonder about the ability of Ft. Hood to take care of and honor the troops.
Indeed, it is a well known fact that an incredibly large percentage of soldiers sent to war return with lifelong psychological damage. An overwhelming majority of our homeless are Veterans and suffer from an inability to overcome their injured minds.
War kills and wounds a much larger number of human beings than the number of those lost in battle. As Christians, it is important that we not lose an opportunity for witness and also judgement in this. When we send ourselves off to war, we are failing to do a number of things.
- We have not properly calculated the real possibility that a Christian soldier sent off to fight against people of other nations may very well end up fighting and killing Christians in these other nations. In this situation we have fully subsumed our service to Christ to our service to a finite, temporal and abstract power; in our case, the Nation State of the USA.
- We have failed to realize in our own lives the Cross and sufferings of Christ. Putting our perceived rights and welfare to such a momentous height that we are willing to kill for them.
- As Americans, we are actually failing to honor the troops. For one, if we really honored them we would make sure they got the attention that they need to overcome their injuries. We also would recognize that this cycle doesn’t end. To honor our injured and dead we might begin to ask about alternative ways of reconciliation.
Even in my own Church this sin is perpetuated. Compare two prayers. One a Thanksgiving from the ’79 BCP, the other the prayer of St. Polycarp before his martyrdom:
“O Judge of the nations, we remember before you with grateful hearts the men and women of our country who in the day of decision ventured much for the liberties we now enjoy. Grant that we may not rest until all the people of this land share the benefits of true freedom and gladly accept its disciplines. This we ask in the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen” – (emphasis mine)
” O Lord God Almighty, Father of your beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, through whom we have received knowledge of you, the God of angels and powers and of all creation, and of the whole race of the righteous who live in your presence, I bless you because you have considered me worthy of this day and hour, so that I might receive a place among the number of the martyrs in the cup of your Christ, to the resurrection to the life of the age, both of soul and body, in the incorruptibility of the Holy Spirit. May I be received among them in your presence today, as a rich and acceptable sacrifice, as you have prepared and revealed beforehand, and have now accomplished, you who are the undeceiving and true God. For this reason, indeed for all things, I praise you, I bless you, I glorify you, through the eternal and heavenly high priest, Jesus Christ, your beloved Son, through whom be glory to you, with him and the Holy Spirit, both now and for the ages to come. Amen” -(trans. Holmes ’07 – emphasis mine)
Reflecting perhaps a “National-Cathedral-theology” we see in the Prayer Book the need to “accept the disciplines” of “true freedom.” In St. Polycarp we see that “accepting the disciplines of true freedom” mean something incredibly different and diametrically opposed to the former. Is it perhaps because we do not witness directly the testimony of the Blessed Martyrs? Then blessed are they where they are privilaged enough to see such a testimony.
What Is It Good For? Nonviolence In A Violent World: Part V
January 19, 2009
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V: Children of Light, Children of Day
She was the only thing that could convince my seventeen-year-old self to actually wake up early on a Saturday just to watch the dawn. It was sweater-weather when I met my young crush at 4am on a grassy hill a short walk from my house. Cuddling under a wool blanket and sharing coffee from a thermos, we watched the horizon change from black to blue to purple to everything and finally to a heart-pumping, Monet-inspired sunrise.
The richness of that dawn wasn’t just in its beauty but in our readiness to embrace all that it promised. Young love primed us for a hope of a future life that was not here yet but would soon indeed come. From the moment I held her hand in the dark, I lived for the sunrise—as if the sunrise had already occurred, a lover in the light.
That picture (a true story that perhaps my nostalgia has enhanced) is an image for Christian existence that I often reflect on. I first encountered the image when reading N. T. Wright exegeting I Thessalonians 5:1-11. He wrote:
[...]Paul states boldly that Christians are already ‘children of light, of the day’. When he speaks of not falling asleep, but of staying awake, he is not envisaging someone staying up later and later into the night, but of someone getting up very early, while it is still dark before dawn. This, he insists, is the present condition of Christian believers. When the day dawns [...] those who are already up and awake will not be startled by it. [...] This has strong ethical implication: it is important to be conducting oneself as though it were already daytime.
N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, pg. 216-7
It is from this poetic image, that I believe the Christian derives his ethics. We have already slept, woke up early, and are eagerly anticipating the coming dawn. In other words, just as the Messiah died and defeated death by coming out the other side, so have we taken up our cross, died to ourselves, and been reborn in Christ. In yet still more other words, the Kingdom of God is coming, and since we’re already hoping for it anyway, let’s live as if it’s already here.
Bad Reasons To Follow A Nonviolent Ethic
By picturing who we will be in the Kingdom of God and living accordingly, we forever change our rationale for obedience. Put in terms of the Nonviolent Ethic, we should realize that:
1. The Church should not follow a nonviolent Ethic because God says so and we’d better obey if we want to get into heaven.
As Paul Stewart observed in an eloquent comment he wrote on this post on our blog: “So the goal of the church is not to produce moral people. Following Christ is about relationship not about rules and regulations. It is not about adhering to lists or following certain formulas or simply trying to convince people to stop drinking, smoking or gambling. However, we are called [to] proclaim and live out a radically counter-cultural ethic that involves living and dying like Christ, modeling our lives so closely after his that we have the mind of Christ and live life together in such a way that we are literally divine representatives to our world.” I might clarify that we are divine representatives to our world, of the coming world.2. The Church should not follow a nonviolent Ethic merely because we believe it will inevitably result in peace.
I touched on this in my comments in Part IV of this series. According to Matt. 5, nonviolent disciples of Jesus SHOULD EXPECT persecution precisely because they are following the way of Christ. While nonviolent resistance can sometimes result in change, we are not nonviolent because it is the best method to create peace but because we live in anticipation of the future peace of the Kingdom.3. The Church should not follow a nonviolent Ethic because we want to be like the secular liberals and bash all those barbarian, onward Christian soldier-types.
Throughout these posts, I’ve done my best to avoid using the word “pacifism,” (though I think I’ve slipped up once or twice). This is not because I think the word is misleading but because I feel it carries too much baggage. Perhaps for some it evokes the image of a kind of hippie, anti-establishment, druggie, “peace, dude” spirituality. I believe I’ve shown in these posts that Christian nonviolence is undeniably rooted in both Scripture and Tradition. While it’s true that at times the Christian’s aim for nonviolence might occasionally match up with those of the political “pacifists”; I believe they arrive at their conclusions through natural reason, whereas the Christian arrives at his or her reasons through the Spirit. While this is certainly not a good excuse to avoid cooperation with pro-peace political entities, it is a good reason to use discernment.
Practical Observations for the Typical, Western Christian
As the world globalizes, it gets harder and harder to preach firm, unmoving ethics when we constantly encounter so many outlandish and unheard of circumstances. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to explore what this Christian Ethic of nonviolence might mean to a potential victim of genocide or a twelve-year-old who must decide to fight or be executed. (I’m afraid at this time in my life, I wouldn’t know how to begin). Still, I suspect most of the readers of this blog are fortunate enough to fit into a context where war is a far more distant and puzzling thing. For you, I offer a few brief observations:
1. The Christian Has No Place In The Military
For those of us in the USA where military service is voluntary, I see no reason why a Christian would ever put his or herself into a position where they would be required to use violence. This is not to say that soldiers cannot be Christians or that a soldier who also happens to be a Christian should be isolated from Christian community. To me this is the same tension we live with every day in the Church—we are broken people who live in a broken world.2. The Majority Christian Opinion on this Issue from the time of Constantine Onward is Wrong
I realize that I stand in opposition to the bulk of Christian tradition on this issue. Empirical Christianity left an ugly stain on Christian Tradition which has been a devil to get out. However, do not think that Church History is without its champions for nonviolence. Beginning with the New Testament writers themselves and extending to the author of the Epistle of Diognetus, Tertullian, St. Francis of Assisi, the Anabaptists, the Quakers, Dorothy Day, and today’s man, Martin Luther King Jr. we find a strain of historic figures deploring violence. I would even argue that these meager numbers of the nonviolent have had influence beyond their small representation because their message resonated so deeply with the message of Jesus.3. The Church Must Liberate Itself From the Agenda of the State
I wrote a bit about this in my two post series on the separation of Church and State last month. It is perhaps too large for a little note at the end of this post. However, I’ll just briefly add that the Empirical Church did its damage from making the state’s issues, its issues. One need only review previous elections in the United States from recent years to see that this problem is far from resolved. While it may serve a Government’s interest to go to war, it will never serve the Church’s. We must especially beware of Christian language and ideals that might be used to convince us otherwise.
I fear that the world will never fully hear the Gospel until the Church can commit itself to an ethic of nonviolence. If we hope to share our hope for the coming sunrise, we must learn how to live in anticipation of it.
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’ll end this series on Nonviolence with his words:
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Martin Luther King Jr. from his Noble Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1964
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