OUR MUTUAL HUMAN BLINDNESS
I was born and raised in New York City. On a warm May morning, I was born at approximately 3:35am, much to the chagrin of my mother. [Not that she was unhappy to see me born, but she already had two children at home and probably good have used a good night of sleep. I did not appreciate this fact when I first met her that morning, nor for many years afterwards, but with a child of my own at home I have learned to understand it better bye and bye.]
You may not know that New York City has a very peculiar sense of it’s own standing in the world, of it’s own geography. New Yorkers are unable to effectively grasp that there is this whole world outside the city. If you ask most New Yorkers what is outside of the city, they will respond Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. If you say, “No. I meant beyond that.”, they will probably reply that they have heard tell the tale of a mystic and enchanted realms to the north called Boston - and to the West one called Los Angeles. However, upon further examination, it is usually clear that they are not sure where they lie in relation to Narnia and Middle Earth.
See, New Yorkers have the amazing ability to not only put themselves at the middle of their universe – something most of us are guilty of, at least once in a while – but to make themselves their universe.
It is a pretty amazing this to see. I suffered from this affliction and I am still in a 12 step program to shake off it’s inertia.
Now, I bring this issue up because it is something I think we all suffer from in one way or another.
New Yorkers might be bad, but we New Jerseyans have their own issues on this front. A friend of mine once told the story about how he drove to New York and waited almost 20 minutes in a gas station for the attendant to come out. And while he was waiting, he just got more and more mad. He saw the attendant walking around, checking pumps and cleaning machines. The guy would even look at him, and then just walk on. So, my friend went over to him and shared a long and colorfully worded piece of his mind. The attendant listened politely and then informed his would-be customer that in New York all pumps are self-serve.
We Americans have always had a tendency to assume that our way is the best, that everyone should speak English (even if they live in Japan or China), or that democracy should be everyone’s government. We are notorious throughout the world – not just for our amazing charity and goodness – but also for our inability to realize that not only is there a whole world out there, but that that world is not us. We need to work on that one. This is not a little bit of the reason why we are in this present mess in Iraq.
We suffer from bad vision when it comes to all sort of things. My nephew, when he came to visit us once, was not only surprised to see that there were these things on our kitchen stove that shoot out a small ring of blue flames, but he was actually scared of it – at 15! He did not even know that it was possible to do something other than the electric coils. It never occurred to him.
I have many Catholic friends who do not even know that we non-Catholics have different words for what we do on Sunday. They’ll talk about me going to “Mass”. I’ll say “worship”, or “Sunday service”. And then they’ll say something about our “Mass”, and I’ll say something about our “morning praise”, and they’ll call it “Mass” again. I try to be polite, but soon I am just going to have to start calling their baptisms “bar mitzvahs” and see how they like it.
Some of this blindness is more innocent, even cute. Every morning, I take Cordelia down stair and while I make breakfast for her, she watches something on TV. Then I sit down and eat with her in front of the TV. This is a ritual. And, for weeks now, when I ask her what she might want to watch, the answer is always the same . . . “hah-pee . . . . feeyt”. When I suggest that daddy might want to watch something else, perhaps anything else, anything at all, she responds politely with “hah-pee . . . . feeyt”. She cannot grasp for a moment that Daddy might seriously consider death as an alternative, or child abandonment, or even an extremely late term abortion to get out of this predicament. No. For her, in the morning, it is all “hah-pee . . . . feeyt”. And, while I grumble, I love here more for it.
Young and old, left and right, happy and grumpy, New York, New Jersey, we all suffer from thinking that our world is the way the whole world works or at least the way the whole world ought to work.
A PAPAL FALLIBILITY
So, imagine my surprise when I opened the morning paper a few weeks back to find that the His Holiness Pope Benedixt XVI declared that all other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches and that Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation.
At first I asked myself, “What would Jesus do?” But, the only think I came up with was very violent fantasies of Jesus slapping a pope around. And, while I am not an expert about what Jesus would do, I suspect that was not the right answer.
Then I thought, maybe the press is blowing this out of proportion. After all, if the pope went to a Catholic church, the press might report it as his rejection of all non-catholic churches. Anything to sell more newspapers. So, I checked out the pope’s pronouncement online. And sure enough, we Protestants are not true churches but merely “ecclesial communities” and therefore did not have the “means of salvation.”
That last bit, by the way is the kicker. If we do not have the means of salvation in our churches that means that we are all going to Hell. Now, the pope was nice enough not to say it like that. He may be cruel and insensitive, but he is not impolite. What he is saying is that we do not have the “means of grace” by which salvation is imparted to human beings, or that we will not be saved, which is to say we will go the place where non-saved people go, which is to say we are all going to Hell. See how that works?
THE GOOD SAMARITAN
Now, before you all run screaming from your “extra-catholic ecclesial communion” [I’d call it a church, but I don’t want to offend the pope, who was so kind to not be direct about my impending doom] and straight to your nearest Catholic Church, I wish to share with you the story by Jesus called the Good Samaritan.
It all starts when a religious scholar tests Jesus by asking him what is necessary to inherit eternal life, to go to heaven. Jesus asks the lawyer what the Law of Moses says. Then the lawyer quotes the scripture, saying “Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and all your mind (Deuteronomy 6:5), and the parallel law of “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).
Jesus says that he has answered correctly — “Do this and you will live,” he tells him. But the lawyer then asks Jesus to tell him who his neighbor is. Jesus responds with a story about a man who was attacked and robbed and left to die by the side of a road. Later, a priest saw the stricken figure and avoided him, presumably in order to keep his ritual purity. Priests were not allowed in those days to touch human blood and such or they would not be able to do their job.
Similarly, a Levite (one of those people who helped run the Temple) saw the man and ignored him as well. Then a Samaritan passed by, and, despite the mutual hatred between Samaritans and Jews, he immediately helped the guy out.
That this guy is a Samaritan is the whole point of the story. See Samaritans rejected the whole idea that God was to be worshipped at the Temple of Jerusalem. They rejected the one place on earth where every pious Jew knew that God dwelt personally and really. This guy is a “rejecter of God”. And the other two bimbos who turned their back on the man in need, were good pious Jews. Bu they were even more than just good pious Jews. They were the people who worked at the Temple. They spent every day closer to God than anyone else, not just because they were good and holy men, but because they actually worked in the building where all Jews assumed God lived.
This Samaritan, this God-rejecting Samaritan, gives the man first aid and then takes him to an inn to recover and then promises to cover all the expenses for as long as was necessary. And he pays the innkeeper accordingly. Who knows? This guys wounds might be ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars – and this stranger just says, “Hey, I’ll pay for it.”
At the end of the story, Jesus asks the lawyer, “Of the three passers-by, of the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan, who was the man’s neighbor?” The lawyer, who apparently is unwilling to say “the Samaritan”, responds with, “The one who helped him.” Jesus responds with “Go and do the same.” So a “neighbor” according to Jesus is anyone who needs your love and help.
MOST TRUTHS ARE CONFESSIONAL
I cannot help but notice that it is the Protestant who has rejected the one true worship that walks away justified in the end of Jesus’ story. I will not press that point, since I am arguing with a guys who is supposed to be infallible.
But I will say this much. Even at my young age, there are a few things that I have figured out about the world. I know that Monopoly is the best board game ever, fish gotta swim, cows can come home (just not to roost), and liquid soap is redundant. I also know that most of our opinions, positions, and beliefs are confessional. By that I mean that we have taken a stand and there we stand until we are moved. What I am saying is that we often say what we think and what we feel more than what we know.
When I argue with someone who does not believe in God, at the end of the day, neither of us has true knowledge or accurate scientific data to back us up. What we have is my bedrock conviction and her bedrock conviction. And that is that. Many of our little fights in the world would go better if we just owned that all our statements and arguments really begin with the phrases we do not utter. Phrases like “I believe that…” or “I feel that…”
Most of our truths are confessional. They are statements of where we stand and why. Sometimes, realizing this fact can put things into perspective when you are listening to some one with different ideas than your own.
It can help you figure out if a person is saying, “I love my church and my religion. I feel such warmth in it. I feel close to God when I am with these people and when I sing these songs, and say these prayers” or “Forget about my religion. All I believe and feel is that your religion is not mine and I believe you are going to burn in a big pit of sulfur for forever because you are not enough like me.”
Sometimes, putting these things like a confession, like an expression of feeling and opinion, can show you the true character of the person who speaks. John Paul II probably believed the same thing as Benedict on paper. But, when he was hugging the Dalai Lama, shaking hands with Muslim leaders in Egypt, and holding convocations with Rabbis while funding Catholic-Methodist dialogue groups, it was a little hard to tell.
The difference is that John Paul believed Catholicism was best because he loved his Church. Benedict feels Catholicism is best because – regardless of how he feels about his own church - he just hates mine. And that says volumes about those men.
HOW WOULD JESUS JUDGE?
And it says volumes about where Jesus would stand in this matter. Jesus, who I would remind even good pope Benedict, is the one fellow more infallible than a pope, says your actions, your disposition, your loving of those who are loved by God, matters much more than whether or not you have the right membership credentials. You can be a priest or a Levite, but if you do not love the wounded and abandoned, what does it matter? Those credentials might as well be ash and dust.
It has nothing to do with whether or not you got elected to wear a silly pointed hat to cover you silly pointed head.
It is about love, justice, compassion, caring, and service to God. These ways were not high in the mind of his Holiness a few weeks back when he opened his mouth and set pen to paper denouncing all us fellow servants.
I can only pray that God – who no doubt finds all such squabbles more than a little laughable – will have the good sense of humor to make sure that when Benedict is taken into glory, he will he greeted by Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Wesley.
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Faced with the glory of the Trinity in creation, we must contemplate, sing, and rediscover awe. Contemporary society has become dry, ‘not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder’ (G.K. Chesterton). Contemplation of the universe also means, for the believer, listening to a message, hearing a paradoxical and silent voice, as the ‘Psalm of the Sun’ suggests: ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.’ Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. ‘There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world’ (Ps 19:2-4).
