Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

by Pat Patterson

I have a deep sense of sorrow and depression.  Our country is, I believe, in a period of profound criminality and loss.  It is an era marked by war, murder, and the unleashing of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan; increasing control and exploitation by corporations in the global economy resulting in bourgeoning poverty; denial of devastating assaults on the environment; and erosion of constitutional, civil, and human rights.  The escalation of destruction on every side gives me a sense of despair, and I wonder if redemption is possible.

These days I confess that I have difficulty praying.  I cannot ask forgiveness, only mercy.  The solidarity of sin confronts me at every turn.  I feel a sense of responsibility for the state of the world, because I am both a Christian accountable to God for neighbors and for creation, and an American, for whom the nature of democracy, government of the people, is that we cannot divorce ourselves from our leaders and our nation’s policies.  The words of Romans 8 ring in my heart and reflect both pain and promise.

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains
until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves,…
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know
how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs
too deep for words.  And God, who searches the heart, knows what
is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints
according to the will of God.”

ILLUSION

We Americans have been for too long a people of illusions, confusing our grand vision with the reality of our national life.  Analysis of our nation demands application of prophetic and spiritual dimensions, not only political, economic, social, and geopolitical.  We have denied the horror of our crimes, including Native American genocide, African American slavery, and military and economic intervention into other lands.  We have used and believed propaganda to meld a disparate people into “the American people,” while relegating minorities and their history to the periphery and imposing racist patterns on our society and much of the rest of the world.  We have permitted the elite power structures to keep us bound to their myths and allowed them to destroy our popular alliances through divide and conquer.  We have fomented an aggressive frontier spirit that runs roughshod over peoples and nature, while feigning innocence and self-righteousness.  It is an irony of our existence that we have been a generous, idealistic people, whose crimes and shadow side have been denied and repressed.  Our own ideals are our most demanding judges.

It is the language of illusion and delusion that has brought us into the war with Iraq.
The war on terror has been cast in terms of cosmic struggle between good and evil.
No self criticism tempers the political and military policies that resulted in the brief but ferocious attack on Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in early 1991; the dozen years of embargo that the United Nations estimates resulted in the deaths of half a million Iraqi children; and now the nearly five years of military assault that have killed more than a million people, unleashed sectarian violence, destroyed the infrastructure and historical treasures of that ancient civilization, and ripped apart what was a dictatorial state but nevertheless one of the most advanced countries in the Middle East.  In the ravaging of Iraq, there has been little or no attention to proportionality, the tools of diplomacy, and concern for the people.  Such savagery goes on under the guise of bringing freedom and democracy.  Not even genuine concern for our own troops with their grave physical and psychological wounds has stopped the surge to further destruction. 

As James Carroll has written: “Once a war begins, everyone is a war criminal.” Or in Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s words: “Few are guilty; all are responsible.” The idolatry of our illusions blinds us and leads our nation into massacre after massacre and exploitation after exploitation.  We watch while Power plays the big game, and we the people play around with our ballots, our political parties, our Congressional lists, our flags and bunting, our slogans praising the “greatest nation on earth.”   

DISILLUSION

William Sloane Coffin cuts to the quick: “Who gave you the right to be illusioned in the first place?” When we begin seriously examining our history, we see how a sense of superiority, of calling ourselves a city set on a hill, of acting as the last refuge of people seeking freedom, mark our social and religious psyches.  Manifest destiny is like a virus in our patriotic bloodstream.  The idolatry of privileged patriotism gives our civil religion a particular virulence.  Our Christianity, and probably our Judaism, maybe even our Islam, in the American context, run the danger of pollution.  The American mythic story is so powerful; it overrides even our altars with its stars and stripes flag.  In this American ideological jumble, where is God? When it comes to matters of justice and injustice, of war and peace, where do religion and conscience fit?

Washing over me are moments of coming face to face with the results of evil and questions of my complicity.  I stand in the graveyard at Wounded Knee while a descendant of Indian massacres, old and recent, tells the stories of death by guns as well as deprivation and poverty.  I ride a train from Kobe to Hiroshima with a man who experienced the atomic bombing and wants to know if Americans really know what it was like and whether it is the kind of thing that a “Christian” nation should do, even in wartime.  I sit in the entry to a restaurant in Pyongyang beside an elderly North Korean Christian leader who with anguish still fresh in his soul, asks me why American planes destroyed even the churches where people had gone for refuge believing that they would be safe.  I cannot answer but I remember US generals saying that when the Korean War ended, there was nothing left to bomb.  I lean against the wall of the tiny museum at My Lai while several elderly women recall the day that American soldiers massacred almost every person in their village.

 It is not enough to salve my tender conscience that I contribute to projects related to Native Americans in South Dakota, and that I have worked on changing government and church policies related to Vietnam, North Korea, and now Iraq.  The burden remains.  Part of it is the fact that death is still being dealt out constantly in my name, and part of it is that I still have too much illusion in my citizen life.  But it is also because disillusioned, I am disempowered.

LAMENTATION

For me this is a time of lamentation.  The cries of Israel’s suffering community in the 6th century BC is one insightful starting point for thinking about lamentation.  It was a time of loss of national sovereignty.  After the fall of Jerusalem in 557 BC, someone in deep agony wrote five poems of lament.  As the commentary in the American Bible points out, these songs of tortured sadness express profound grief, sinful responsibility, and enduring hope.  These are the cries of victims, now helpless and weak, impoverished and homeless, in the midst of famine, physical destruction, and carnage, comparing their favorable life in the past with this catastrophe.  They feel tormented by their enemies and their own people, even by God.  They recognize not merely political outcomes but God’s judgment on them.  The account is drenched in pain, grief, guilt, and betrayal.  But it is also full of a sense of collective responsibility and of continuing trust in God.

Usually when we think of lamentations, we think of people who are oppressed, enslaved, victims of terrible crimes against them.  The poor, marginalized, exploited, violently repressed, cry out in their misery.  Their lamentation and aspirations rise to God, a continual incense.  But with immense courage, many wait and work for justice in their lives, often searching their hearts and analyzing their societies to see the places where they were complicit in the evil that befell them

But increasingly I know there is also the lament of the oppressor, who is part of systems that enslave and victimize people. Many of us who are people of conscience and compassion and yet part of this superpower nation, are in a time of heart-wrenching lamentation. We feel betrayed by our own people, leaders lying and leading us into a cruel, illegal, unjust war against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.  We imagine the mangled and dying and the tremendous grief of people mourning the loss of their dear ones in war. We are horrified by the use of torture and the defense of its use.  We are angered to see national wealth going to pay for war and to benefit corporations that are already reaping tremendous profit.  We are dishonored by the dismissing of international treaties and international law.  We grieve at the destruction and despoliation of earth, sea, and sky.   We fear for the future of the earth and all its inhabitants.

We grieve at the decline of health care, education, and other community services.  We observe the growth of military and police security and the neglect of what makes healthy and thriving communities.  We recognize the shrinking of democracy with the influence of big money in our elections, the impact of the Patriot Act, decreasing government accountability, increasing citizen disillusionment and apathy, and growing racism, poverty, and discrimination in our society. Our priorities as a country have been turned upside down, so that what is promoted and protected is not the people’s welfare.  It is rather the welfare of the corporations, military interests, and political elites.  Wealth has become god, whether as exploitative greed or as consumerism.  Our illusions have come face to face with the dangerous forces of contemporary politics and war.  Our false “heavenly kingdom,” made up of republic, democracy, and bill of rights, is collapsing at our feet, even as it keeps on shattering the lives of millions of people at home and abroad.

We recognize that we, too, like those 2500 years ago, know the meaning of the destruction of the temple and the desecration of our religious beliefs, not so much by external but internal forces.  We see that our rituals and worship are often twisted and corrupted.  Our relationship with God is sabotaged by our guilt, neglect of justice, and failure to work fully for what makes for peace.  We are appalled at the blessing of war; we are shocked at the privileging of the wealthy and powerful.  But too often we wonder if we are too nice and meek and depressed to carry on the struggle that needs to be done.  We too quietly tolerate the distortions of our faith, outside and inside ourselves.  We feel like exiles in our own land.  We have few brave and bold voices to counter corrupt, greedy, and militaristic leaders.  Sometimes we feel as if we have been overpowered by a coup of the neocon/theocons, as Joseph Wilson calls them.

As Christians in a country at war we have a sense of treason against God.  How can we pay for and support the killing of people in Iraq, and withhold resources from the starving and struggling at home and around the world? Is this not sin against the Holy Spirit, the holy that dwells in each person? How can we face the compassionate and merciful God who loves all the people of the world?  Is not our country under severe judgment? We join Jesus in his lament as he wept over the city of Jerusalem, “If you, even you, had recognized on this day the things that make for peace!” (Luke 19:42)  And we know we are the ones he weeps over today.

HOPE

But can it be that sorrow and lamentation open a road to responsibility and redemptive action? The Biblical ancients seem always to have paired their cries of pain with recognition of the need for repentance.  Owning responsibility, whether as victim or victimizer, sets the stage for reaffirming God’s steadfast love and listening to the call to rebuild in the midst of the ruins and make change for a future not bound by the past

There is catharsis in lamentation, for it wakens us to reality, forces us to compare the illusion with reality, brings us back to confession and repentance, restores compassion for the broken, and invites us to walk faithfully in the ways of justice and peace.  It breaks our idols and false images.  Our grief and tears are tools for conversion.  Creating a new heart within us becomes the call to create a new world around us.  The God who leads us forth out of despair and disillusion is steadfast love and courageous possibility.  This is the One who has given us rebirth and resurrection.

Our involvement in struggle for change is a way to draw on God’s forgiveness and power.  Out of the experience of grief and exile from our true selves may come the consciousness that leads to healing and empowerment.  Recognizing our complicity as victimizers, deeply mired in pain and guilt, we can make new beginnings and gain strength for reform and revolution.  Lament, as analysis of the present reality and our role in it, and lamentation as truth-telling, are a launching pad for a new world. Lamentation and repentance are twin engines for change.  We stand in the gap between what is and what ought to be, weeping and hoping, distraught and trustful.

Grounded in a realistic understanding of the power of death and the demonic, we know that we cannot underestimate evil.  We are aware of how the good can be turned to the bad and the ideal to the destructive.  Uncovering our idolatries, revealing our lies and crimes, unmasking the forces that pose as saviors but are really dominators and destroyers, these challenges rise up from the heart of our lamentation.  And there is significant liberation in personal and communal confession, dynamic power in relationship and responsible community.  The cross and the history of other brave struggles of resistance keep us discontent with where we are and remind us that even in the depths, other alternatives are awaiting our commitment.  The foundation is a loving and just God in a universe of possibility, novelty, and freedom.

Rosemary Radford Ruether, in her book “America, Amerkkka: Elect Nation and Imperial Violence,” proposes for the oppressor a “theology of letting go” as the counterpoint to  liberation theology for the oppressed.  She describes in brief the agenda: “Such a theology of liberation and letting go must involve, not only a transformed relationship between rich and poor in the United States and between the United States and the rest of the world, but also the relation of the rich and poor to the earth itself, to the eco-community of our common planetary home.” Dr Ruether states even more urgently the priority issues for us Americans: ”extreme economic disparities worldwide, environmental destruction and inflated American military power.” (pp 250-51, 266)  This challenge is to all of us who despair and hope.

We need to let go of illusion and disillusion; we need to let our lamentation lead us to hope.  And if we would hope, we would follow Jesus.  A man of lamentation, he understood the gap between the brutal Roman occupation and the reign of God.  He confronted the dehumanization and disempowerment of the people.  Standing in the powerful God-history of his people and the prophets, he would not give up the tradition of liberation.  In table fellowship he gathered the despairing and guilty, those impoverished by Empire and those profiting from it.  He healed and cared, overcoming social isolation and demon possession.  He gave alternatives: love the enemy, trust like flowers and birds, care for one another, set priorities that put God and neighbor first, find the ways of peace, share wealth and justice.  He guided us toward letting go.

In the midst of the worst conditions, Jesus leads us to seize the new day, make the fresh start, create leavening models on a small scale like salt and light.  He didn’t exactly tell us what to do, but he made us think about what to do.  He showed us that as we seek first the reign of God, all the other parts of our lives and our visions will take their rightful place.

 In the end we know that his compassionate and visionary way will not take away our tears over the suffering people of the world or wipe out our disappointment and guilt over the failures and misbegotten policies of our government.  As long as power is abused and people die needlessly, as long as we are complicit in and profit from our powerful nation, we will not know rest and relief.  We must denounce what is destructive and announce what is just and beneficial. Judgment marches beside us. We cannot be silent or inactive.  We must repent, resist, re-vision. Our call is to join God in renewing the earth. When we let go of the power of privilege and domination, we will gain the power to transform our nation and world.  With confession and compassion, courage and caring, we have critical work to do.

In the end, I believe that the Spirit does intercede with sighs too deep for words.  And I believe that Jesus does take us through lamentation to hope.  And I believe that the steadfast love of God accompanies us down all the paths of this time and place, our critical moment in history,