For this past week I've been dealing with a very painful abscessed tooth, a massive dose of antibiotics, and finally on Wednesday, my dedicated young dentist pulled my tooth. My molar had fractured; it had already received a root canal. Nothing was left to do but to pull it.
For a week I moved between two toxic worlds: the inner world of a rampaging infection, and the outer world of a country in the throes of a rampaging infection: incredible polarizations, misunderstandings, blame games, hatreds, murders. Our country is toxic. Would to God we could find one abscessed tooth and pull it.
But we also face other toxic worlds. The sets of friends whom we love but who don't get along with each other. The divisions in our families, at our workplaces, in our churches and neighborhoods. Oh God, our Divine Physician, we cry and we pray. Your people are so broken! Please heal us! Sometimes we can feel like a bleeding Christ on a cross, our hearts outstretched to the people we love on either side of a division, trying to be the agonized bridge that draws them together in peace. And, Christ says to us, that's the point of being a Christian, another Christ. To speak the Truth in Love as we see it. To feel pain about divisions. To try to be bridges. Even when we may be crucified by the attitudes and words of the ones who rebel against our peace-making efforts.
It's so damnably easy for any of us to act as if another person or group is our enemy, even family members. We can find so many reasons to say or do this: our relationship has broken down, this person doesn't share our values, we don't approve of each others' religions - or lack of them - or lifestyles. Easy enough to judge that this other person is bad and we are good, the other person is in the wrong and we are right. We expend so much emotional and spiritual energy devising reasons to back up our attitudes and stances, our actions and inactions, that we have no energy left for a more positive prayerful response.
It's not an easy balance to defend, protect, and simultaneously be able to accept the inner attitude of the Peace Prayer: "Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon... for it is better to understand than to be understood, to love rather than to be loved..." These are radical words. Yet some people have tried to live them. Fr. Dan Berrigan, a peace activist whose methods and actions often generated heated controversy, was once asked how he dealt with his enemies. A slow smile lit his face. "I have no enemies," he said.
Of course our country has political enemies, and in our lives there may be those whom we consider enemies because they lie about us, damage our reputations, treat us with contempt. How could Fr. Berrigan say that he didn't have enemies? I believe he was talking about an inner shift in his attitude and prayer towards those who attacked him. Instead of expending all his inner emotional and spiritual energy in planning attacks and counteroffensives, he chose to prayerfully hold his attackers in his heart as God holds all His children in His heart, desiring their salvation. He followed the commands of Jesus: he prayed for all those who were angry at him. He tried, also, to understand them.
There are many people in our lives who are not our enemies, and yet are so different from us that we may not even try to understand life from their point of view. And there are many people who treat those who are different as being their enemies. How can we begin to understand someone whose life experiences are very different from our own? Recently I've been reading the work of James Alison, an English Catholic theologian who is open about his homosexual orientation. I know in advance that I may not agree with all of his conclusions. But I respect his openness and the depth of his thought and spirituality and I hope to come away with a deeper understanding of what goes on inside the psyche of someone who is not a heterosexual, as I am.
Alison's book is entitled "Faith Beyond Resentment," which is what he is struggling to have - a faith free of the resentment he feels towards people - Christians especially - who cannot accept the validity of someone having a homosexual orientation. He speaks of Joseph, the Old Testament man (immortalized in the musical "Joseph and His Amazing, Technicolored Dreamcoat") who was betrayed and sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, and who later was able to forgive them and share the abundance of Egypt with them. Alison meditates:
"I don't suppose that Joseph was free from resentment as he was sold into slavery by his brothers. He had time for meditation as he was dragged off to Egypt, meditation which could easily have turned into bitterness, resentment, and despair. He had cause for more of the same when his seemingly safe job got turned into a trap by the wife of his master Potiphar. And in whose entrails would the worm not have turned during a long and undeserved jail sentence? Yet it was in the midst of these experiences that Joseph developed an awareness of being loved such that he recognized that none of the people against whom he might justly feel resentment were really worthy of his dedicating to them that weight of emotional involvement. And he moved beyond even that, to a position of such freedom that he began to plot not vengeance, but sustained forgiveness as the gift of humanising others." Alison adds "These pages were written out of (my) brokenness."
Until we write the pages of our lives out of experienced and accepted brokenness, we can't go to the Author of our Lives and humbly pray for healing. Until we have the awareness of being deeply loved by God, His overwhelming love isn't there to free us from bitterness and despair. Once we are free, we can pray for the gift of having a heart large enough and generous enough to forgive the ones who have broken us. Often enough God's love reaches us through the love of people in our lives who lift us up and support us when we're broken.
Until we allow ourselves to inhabit the worlds of others' souls and respect them as "holy ground," we cannot get past dividing humanity into "us" and "them." Joseph was able to forgive his brothers because he refused to divide his life into "himself versus his brothers." He recognized the essential oneness of his family and thus was able to feel the pain of their fear of having no food to eat. Freed from a desire for vengeance on his brothers, he was free to perceive that it was God's Will that he come in slavery to Egypt so that he could prepare the way for his brothers and other Israelites to come to Egypt and receive food during a time of famine. Joseph realized that broken situations can become blessed situations when we allow God to do the mending in God's own time and way.
Our faith, our relationship with God, prepares us to say, often in tears, "God, we know that in Your hands our broken relationships, families, neighborhoods, workplaces, Churches, country, and world can become mended and blessed. We trust You to do the mending! We trust You to lead us and guide us to become bridges of understanding for others. We ask You to stretch our hearts to encompass Your world."
Healing, mending, and reconciliation have to begin first inside of our own hearts and souls. Yes, we have political enemies who want to defeat us and/or kill us. Yes, we might have people in our lives who willfully misunderstand us and make our lives difficult. But until we can identify the divisive and unloving forces in our own souls and in our country's "soul" that need mending, we cannot move forward towards reconciliation. Until we forgive our own brokenness, we cannot forgive the brokenness of another. Until we accept interior responsibility for all of our own misguided actions, we cannot in justice condemn the misguided actions of others. Until we accept that sometimes we have to make the first move, take the first step, to rebuild a relationship, reunions may never happen. And our lives are much poorer for it.
Once we yank the abscessed teeth of anger, resentment, blame, misunderstanding, hatred, and "us against them," our toxic selves can begin the work of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Our bodies and our Mystical Body of Christ can begin to heal. The People of God can accept their differences and work together instead of against each other. It is reality that we will never see fully eye to eye with others. But we can accept the goodness of the others' striving to be good and do good. We can accept that we can help each other on our own individual and community journeys to God. We can view others as equals in dignity and worth. We can mutually accept that the slow healing work of God to mend our brokenness can take months, years, even centuries. We can pledge to have faith, hope, and love, and a deep abiding trust that God is always, always, always at work doing the mending. We may be broken, but in the end, we will always be blessed.
The miracle of the Eucharist happens with the opposite words: "Blessed and broken." Wine is blessed; Bread is blessed and broken to become the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus the Christ, our Heavenly Food for the journey. As Jesus' life and whole person is blessed and broken for us, we pledge to allow our lives to be blessed and broken for and with and in Him. We know that we who die with Christ will rise with Christ. Our daily lives and deaths and resurrections take place within the life, death and resurrection cycles of the entire world. For in the end everyone and everything united to God in this world will be healed and mended and made gloriously one with God and each other in eternity. Have hope that eternity is our final mending!
Today, July 18, my husband Paul and I will be going on retreat at Mt. Saviour Benedictine monastery, until July 25. I - and Paul - will hold all of my Weebly blog readers in prayer. Please pray for us too!