Getting to the Point: justice

Showing posts with label justice. Show all posts

Friday, November 13, 2015

The Scroll of Tears

Be merciful
to me, my God, for my enemies are in hot pursuit;

 all day long they
press their attack.

 My adversaries pursue me all day long;

in their
pride many are attacking me.



When I am
afraid, I put my trust in you.

In God, whose word I praise—

in God I trust and am not afraid.

What can
mere mortals do to me?



All day long
they twist my words; all their schemes are for my ruin.

They
conspire, they lurk,
they watch my steps,

 hoping to take my
life.

Because of their wickedness do not let them escape;

in your anger, God, bring the nations down.



Record my
misery; list my tears on your scroll—

are they not in your record? 

Then my
enemies will turn back when I call for help.



By this I will know that God is for me.

In God,
whose word I praise, in the Lord, whose word I praise—

in God I trust and am not afraid. What
can man do to me?



I am under
vows to you, my God;

I will present my thank offerings to you.

For you have delivered me from death and
my feet from stumbling,

that I may walk before God in the light
of life.

Psalm 56



Reflection – Well, we continue our path through the psalms, at this point a
very rocky and difficult path indeed as we make our way through the ‘gloomy
50s’. Besides being intensely focused on suffering, our enemies, and the
experiences of same, the psalms tend to become fairly interchangeable at this
point, making it hard for a poor commentator who is committed to commenting on
each of them to think of something new to say each week!



But enough about my problems. There is one verse in this psalm
that leaps out at me. It is this business of ‘record my misery; list my tears
on your scroll—are they not in your record?’ One of the terrible aspects of
suffering, something that makes whatever specific thing we are going through
that much worse, is the sense of abandonment, of being forgotten by God and by
man, of being utterly alone in it.



We can take
a lot, if we know we’re not in it alone. It may still be hard, but if we have
some kind of sense of support, that someone (or Someone) has our back, is with
us in it, is truly on our side, it is endurable, doable.



When we feel
utterly bereft of that support, it is much harder to bear. And so this
particular psalm verse calls us to remember that God remembers us. For reasons
known only to Him we are left, often, to go through whatever it is we have to
go through, and this is indeed very hard, very difficult. But 

He is not
neutral, not forgetful, not heedless, not uncaring of us. I like very much the
idea that our tears have been listed on a scroll somewhere, that somewhere in
heaven there is a ledger with all of our names written in it and the precise
number of tears each of us has shed in this life.



This implies
that our sufferings matter. That
there is some greater purpose, some higher meaning, something about the fact
that human beings have to go through such dreadful things (and I’m not remotely
thinking of myself here – my life has been relatively easy compared to most
people’s), something about the earth we live on being soaked with the tears of
humanity that has a heavenly import.



I can’t pull
the quote out of my early morning mind, but there is some literary quote about
us being flies to the gods who like schoolboys torment us for sport (someone
tell me in the comments who wrote that – it’s going to bug me now (no pun
intended)). But this is not the Judeo-Christian understanding of things.



Our understanding
is that, well, we don’t understand a whole lot, frankly. But that God is
intensely aware of the sufferings of his creation, of his beloved people, and
that every bit of it matters, means something, is for something. Nothing is
wasted, nothing is for naught, everything has some meaning in the kingdom of
heaven. And the suffering that most torments our minds and hearts—the sufferings
of innocent children, the terrible unjust sufferings of the most victimized and
brutalized of this world—every bit of that is recorded in heaven, everything is
known, everything is remembered, and everything will be redressed, righted,
rewarded, repaid. 




And while
this answers none of our questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’ regarding suffering, if
we choose to believe it, it is some consolation at least, I believe. Some relief
as we continue our path through the ‘gloomy 50s’ of this world and their sad
song of suffering and sorrow. God knows; God sees; God will (in time) set
things right. Alleluia.

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

I have been dedicating Wednesdays on the blog to going through the chapters of my new book Idol Thoughts, my presentation of the ancient doctrine of the 'eight thoughts', in later tradition become the seven capital sins, and how to overcome them with the help of lectio divina, the prayerful disciplined reading of Sacred Scripture.

It is not my intention in these blog posts to give the whole content of the chapter--that would be, well, unproductive in terms of getting people to buy the book. Rather, I'm just giving an overview and perhaps a thought or two that didn't make it into the book itself.

We are now on thought number four. The first three thoughts were all matters of simple desire, gone awry in our fallen natures. Gluttony for food, lust for sex, avarice for security through wealth--all of these are matters of wanting what we want, and the sad fact that we don't always want exactly what is good for us or what will truly make us happy.

The next three thoughts are all concerned with what happens to us when we don't get what we want. Where do our thoughts go, when the original simple thoughts of desire and possession are thwarted? The first place our thoughts go in these moments is towards the thought of anger.

This is not the raw emotion of anger. Emotions come and go in us and in themselves have little moral significance. But the thought of anger is the thought, confronted with something that is wrong in our lives or in the world, that happiness lies in getting even. Revenge, payback, doing unto others what the others just done did to you, and then some--this is the project of the angry mind. The absolute conviction of the one who has bought into that thought is that 'I cannot be happy, cannot find peace, until I have paid back mine enemies with a mighty smiting.'

This thought does not always come with temptations to physical violence attached to it. There are all sorts of ways we seek payback. There is the whole dreary project of score keeping, the careful tallying up of exactly what everyone is or is not doing, so as to make sure that perfect justice is always being observed in all fields of life.

There is the passive aggressive project - moods, silent treatments, making darn sure the person knows you are displeased with them, not that you intend to tell them why or what they should do about it. They should know! There is verbal abuse, nagging, pick-pick-picking at people until in desperation they just give in and do whatever it is you want. And just plain coldness, withdrawal, the deliberate intention to hurt someone who hurt us, even if it is just by the frigid refusal of any basic warmth or humanity. And oh... a whole host of other angry, vengeful ways--we're not, most of us, the Count of Monte Cristo hatching elaborate schemes to ruin the lives of our enemies, in other words.

Anger is a deep thing in the world today. Be it the truly monstrous evil being done by actors like ISIS and Boko Haram, or the increasingly vicious political climate in our own countries, there is a spirit of anger in the world and every one of us has to address it, first in our own hearts, lest we succumb to its allure. And it does have an allure. Anger comes from something in us that is so deep and true that it has great power in us.

Namely, anger comes from our innate sense of justice, which in turn comes from our being made in the image of God the All Just One. It is indeed a matter of 'getting even', of restoring balance and order to an off-kilter, unjust world. The lie of anger, however, is that we attain justice through violence, through exerting our will on others to deal out reward and punishment as we see fit.

It doesn't work. Never has, never will, not on the personal level nor on the societal or international level, either. The revenge motive, coming so deeply out of this sense of justice in us, has done nothing in human history but beget more evil, more unbalance, more violence, more wrongs that in turn need to be avenged in an endless cycle that leads to mass graves and killing fields.

It is a hard lesson that may take many years for us to learn, but the only way our lives can be a force of healing, restoration, and justice in the world is the path of suffering love, of sacrificial generosity, of forgiveness and mercy. In particular, to be vigilant in our mercy and love for our 'enemies', whoever they may be, and for our neighbour--that is, the small group of human beings who are in our immediate proximity.

It is this and this alone that brings order into the world, this and this alone that 'evens up' an uneven world. And it starts at the level of the individual, of you and me and the choices we are going to make today, in the face of whatever injustice or frustrations we encounter today. Vengeance or love -- what will it be?

And you can read the rest of my thoughts, and the path of the Gospel laid out for us in these matters, in my book, if you would like to buy it! Have a great day, and remember - don't get mad, get even!

Thursday, July 9, 2015

A Matter of Strict Justice

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will… It is Thursday and so time again for my running commentary on the Mass and our living it out in daily life. There is a marvellous sacred logic in the entrance rites of the liturgy—we begin in the sign that encapsulates our whole faith, the sign of the Cross, then are brought together into a communion by the ritual form of greeting. Then we, as a group, acknowledge our failure to live this communion of love with God and neighbour.

Now, having received the assurance of God’s mercy and forgiveness in the conclusion of the penitential rite, we break forth in a hymn of jubilant ecstatic praise—the Gloria. It all makes perfect sense and sheds light on how we are to conduct our whole spiritual life—living in the mystery of the Trinity and the Redemption, ordering our whole action towards communion and love, deeply humble in light of our failures, but in that knowing his mercy and so continually praising Him.

While the Mass will of course go on and all of this will just get deeper and more beautiful, the whole of our Christian life is found within the first few minutes of a normal Sunday liturgy. Isn’t that great? While there is a great need for catechesis and evangelization throughout the Church, isn’t it wonderful that an attentive and thoughtful presence at any old Sunday Mass anywhere in the world can potentially give a person adequate instruction on how to live their lives, at least in the basic pattern?

So, praise and thanksgiving. The Gloria is all of this on overdrive, an outpouring of repetitive euphoric delight in God for His goodness, His mercy, His awesome might and majesty and beauty and power and love and goodness and, well, glory.

What is this about? Why is it so vital to praise and thank God? It is my firm conviction, to be quite honest borne out by long experience, that when we are praising and thanking God continually, there is a peace and order in our lives even if we are in trial and anguish. And when praise and thanksgiving grow weak and faint, there is a heaviness, a hardness, a shallowness or a deadness, a loss of vitality or a rising of anger in us that is inevitable.

The reason for this is as simple as simple can be: to praise God and thank Him is to live in reality. To fail to praise Him, or worse yet to refuse to praise Him, is to step out of reality. Because the reality is that, even when life is full of troubles and sorrows and pain, we have a God who loves us, who gives us being, and who has poured out Himself not only to sustain us in our own being, but to communicate to us His Being, to give us His Life.

And there are natural goods all around us, too. If you are reading this blog post, you are probably not starving to death. You probably have adequate shelter and clothing. You have clean water to drink. I personally live in a place that has so much natural beauty of water, earth, flora and fauna that I am quite honestly dazzled by it every day of my life.

And the people who do lack these things—well, our experience in MH has been that the poorest of the earth among whom we have been privileged to live and work actually are the most inclined to thank God for everything and praise Him in all things. So they don’t need to be told; they need to tell us.

So the most basic response of honesty, of personal integrity, of strict justice for crying out loud, is to thank God for all of the above and for so much more—for all the decent good people we know, and those we don’t know but who keep the world afloat just by showing up each day and doing their jobs. And I could go on, and on, and on. There is literally no end to all of what we really should, really must give thanks for.

And thanking God for His gifts, we come to know that God is the Giver, that God is truly the source of all that is, that God is truly great, that there is something There that is beyond our capacity to even give thanks for. And so thanksgiving yields to praise, to rapturous exultant praise that the Reality which is at the center of all reality is ‘all that’ – all good, all love, all beauty. Simply, all in all.

It is this spirit of praise and gratitude that then places us so deeply in reality that we are rightly positioned to really understand and tackle the real problems, the real evils, the real work that we need to do to make the world the beautiful place, the place of communion and love that it is meant to be.

We cannot do that if we are fuming and fulminating, bitching and complaining and stewing and sulking. Internet culture fosters that, unfortunately. But liturgical culture, understood and lived out, heals that, and out of that empowers us to be people of action and mission, in a spirit of love and genuine care for the world and all who dwell therein.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

The Trouble With Mercy

The Jubilee Year of Mercy is coming, and while it is still some months off, I find myself thinking about it quite a bit, actually. ‘Mercy’ has been the word of Pope Francis’ papacy. Sometimes misused, sometimes abused, it is nonetheless the word we are being asked to contemplate and consider by our Holy Father at this time.

Incidentally, it is sadly typical of our unreflective era that, because some in the Church have misused ‘mercy’ to mean cheap grace or moral relativism, others in the Church have reflexively rejected the word and recoil away from its use. This is the great unwisdom of our era, the endless swinging back and forth of mindless pendulums, the mechanical ricocheting between seemingly opposing positions. This kind of senseless automatism is unworthy of rational minds and grace-filled hearts.

Meanwhile, God’s mercy is indeed at the very heart of our Catholic faith. To correct a misuse of a word requires using it properly, don’t you think, not rejecting it out of hand? In the service of that, may I recommend my book Going Home: Reflecting on the Mercy of God With Catherine de Hueck Doherty? It is all about the parable of the prodigal son, and the depths of God’s mercy that it reveals to us, drawing amply on the insights of Catherine Doherty in service of that. It would be good reading in preparation for the year.

Here is a brief excerpt from the chapter “God’s Panhandlers”, which deals with our struggle to receive and live by the mercy of God:

The trouble with mercy, you know, is that it gets out of hand. I mean, we start by accepting that God is merciful to us. That’s a stretch, but most people can get there at least. Then we manage (barely) being merciful to those who we like or sympathize with, those whose situations are pitiable or who are obviously victims themselves of life’s tragedies.

But God asks more of us. Mercy grows, or it dies. Mercy expands, or contracts. To be merciful to the one we don’t like, to the ones whose situations inspire no pity at all in us. To be merciful to the evil-doers, the perpetrators, the blackest villains, whoever we may consider them to be. To be merciful to the ones who have no mercy themselves. To be merciful towards the ones who hate us or hurt us and don’t seem to care, much, what harm they do. To be merciful in the face of horrific injustice and oppression and wickedness, to everyone involved.

No, we cry! We want justice, not mercy. We want revenge, payback, we want to see them suffer—whoever ‘they’ are. In the tumultuous year of 1968, Catherine was deeply stirred by the protests and violence around the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and what she and many at the time saw as the brutal response of the city authorities [whether or not you agree with her assessment of that event, her point remains, and is a deep one]:

And then there is the terrible word, mercy. Did you ever stop to think what price mercy? Justice and mercy. Put them together. All of you cries out for justice, so that justice may be made to take place. But is there somebody who is merciful to Mayor Daley, to the police of Chicago? And yet the terrible words, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall find mercy.”

Justice tempered with mercy is Christian. But it just tears your guts apart and throws our intestines out on the floor because it is awfully difficult to be merciful. To the whites when you’re black or Indian. To the Mayor Daleys and the police brutality. To Hitler and Stalin. In our Mandate it says identify with the poor, identify with Me [Christ], which poor may be Stalin or Daley. They’re the acme of poverty. In the slums they are richer than them. [1]

Oh, how we resist this, we in the hyper-polarized world of the 21st century. We who align into camps so readily, who spew hatred and venom at our opponents so freely, we who have raised factionalism and partisan division virtually to the level of neo-tribalism. We who are so quick to deride, despise, hate those who we disagree with.

Mercy calls us to cleanse our hearts from hatred, to allow God to remove from us anything that prevents us from loving anyone. Receiving and living by the mercy of God calls us to a totality of forgiveness, a surrender of all anger and violence that is nothing short of crucifying. No wonder we resist it, instinctively. We know we will have to lay down everything, every grievance, every hurt we hug to ourselves, even to the most mortal wounds we have borne.

Here too, in this very struggle, this very hesitation, mercy meets us. Here too we are God’s panhandlers, begging for the coin of his grace to help us. Here too, the Father comes out to us, when we are filled with rage and bitterness, when we are quaking with fear, when we are paralyzed with indecision, when we cannot quite go in. With infinite gentleness, with boundless tenderness, He looks upon us and says, “My son (or daughter), do you not know that everything I have is yours? Give me your sickness and sorrow. Give me your hatred, your fear, your bitterness of spirit. I will give blessing.”

“Enter into my joy.”

Read the rest here.

[1] Talk given in MH dining room, March 31, 1969.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

How Can One Be A Pacifist?

I am doing a tremendous amount of research in Catherine Doherty's writings these days for a project I'm working on (OK, it's my next book, but I'm not able to say what it is yet!). As a result, I come across gems from her now and then that seem worth sharing, so I'll do that from time to time.

This article is from 1970, and of course her specific examples and some of her vocabulary are slightly dated. Don't let that distract you--the woman is saying something here that badly needs saying in our own time and place, with our own issues and problems. She is deep, and is going deep in this article. Enjoy!

Fret Not Yourself

Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers!

For they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.

He will bring forth your righteousness as the light,

and your justice as the noonday.

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him;

fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way,

over the man who carries out evil devices!

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath!

Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.

For the evildoers shall be cut off,

but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.

In just a little while, the wicked will be no more;

though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there.

But the meek shall inherit the land

and delight themselves in abundant peace…

I have been young, and now am old,

yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken

or his children begging for bread.

He is ever lending generously, and his children become a blessing…

I have seen a wicked, ruthless man,

spreading himself like a green laurel tree.

But he passed away, and behold, he was no more;

though I sought him, he could not be found.

Mark the blameless and behold the upright,

for there is a future for the man of peace.

But transgressors shall be altogether destroyed;

the future of the wicked shall be cut off.

The salvation of the righteous is from the Lord;

he is their stronghold in the time of trouble.

Psalm 37

Reflection – Back to the Monday Psalter, with bits and pieces of Psalm 37. There is quite a bit more in this vein in this rather long psalm (to be honest, and meaning no disrespect, it is rather repetitive).

This is a very human psalm, addressing a very human emotion we can all relate to a bit, I think.

Namely, the resentment of the prospering wicked. The experience, which everyone has, that in this life justice is imperfect, bad people do quite well for themselves (often) and good people not infrequently get the short end of things.

This bothers us—which seeing as how it is an incredibly common and normal experience of life in the world, actually is indirect evidence that we are not entirely made for this world, that there is something in us that years for a justice that is not of this world. The human passion for justice is one small argument for the existence of God.

Nonetheless, this psalm is concerned with helping us stay peaceful in the meantime. And the advice it gives is a nice little bit of homely wisdom. ‘Fret not yourself’. This could well stand as good advice for all those using social media. The Internet too often is an Outrage Machine churning out fodder day and night for us to fret over. Whether it is the latest depredations of our political leaders, the latest misdeeds or silly comments by our celebrity class, some disagreeable or offensive move by some high church official, or just some bad behaviour by some random person that happened to get filmed and went viral—there is always something to fret about, something to get all upset over.

Fret not yourself. While Psalm 37 is an early psalm and there is little sense of an afterlife in it, and hence the psalmist has to assert that justice eventually gets done in this world (we know that it doesn’t, often), we who are Christians can confidently assert that all things will be set at right in the end.

If the wicked are prospering and the good ailing, it is woeful for sure, but it is temporary. And there is little good achieved, and much harm done, by climbing on board the latest outrage ride on the outrage machine, adding one’s voice to the latest Greek chorus baying for blood from the latest wrongdoer.

Fret not yourself. And this psalm is really about keeping your focus where you need to keep it, on doing what is good in your own life, in living righteously where you are, in not getting distracted. That is the harm done by the outrage machine—it distracts us, and diverts our natural human passion for justice from where it should go—to self-examination and zeal for the good—to an ultimately futile and useless expenditure of energy.

Fret not yourself, because it does nothing to add to the store of justice and goodness in the world. All flesh is in God’s hands, and we only need concern ourselves with doing the good that is before us today. So let’s get on with it.

Getting to the Point