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IRev It Up... |
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In 1877 Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce spoke to the ragged remnant of his warriors and wise men as he surrendered to the US Army. “I am tired of fighting... Our chiefs are killed.....the old men are all dead..... It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death.... I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired. My heart is sad and sick. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever. Lately, I have been thinking of other things that are no more forever, some of them fairly frivolous. Phone booths, for instance. No one in my generation would ever have conceived of a time when there would be no more phone booths. You never left the house without a dime in your pocket in case you got in trouble and needed to use one. As long as you could feel that dime down there deep with the schoolyard sand and closet lint, you felt safe, because you could always find a phone booth and call home. And who would ever have thought you wouldn’t be able to take a peanut butter sandwich to school in your lunchbox? That was about as unimaginable as Miss Nelson announcing she was getting married. Oh sure, some kids were allergic to peanuts – I being one of them – but no one every worried about non-allergic kids contributing to the demise of allergic kids. Somehow it was up to the kids to sort it all out, and somehow, in my school, they did. The latest items to be no more forever are the privies on the high trails in the national forests. I guess it’s because they had to use helicopters to fly in there and haul out the 250-lb bags of waste, dangling them on long lines below the aircraft. Now the thousands of hikers who tackle the highest trails are issued doublesealed sanitation kits called Wagbags as they register at the ranger stations for the day. (WAG stands for Waste Alleviation and Gelling.) You kinda wonder why the idea of wilderness outhouses lasted as long as it did, given the cost and risk involved. Mother Teresa’s plight is still making news, and the image of her as the perfectly devout saint is no more forever for a lot of people. We get mighty uncomfortable when we discover our saints are really people just like us, only more so. It’s so much easier when we can keep them on their pedestals, thinking they have been given graces the rest of us have missed out on, thinking that the hard work of hammering out your faith in the face of the atrocities of life is something you can leave to the specially-favored. When she was requesting permission to leave her order to found a new one, with the radical goal of living outside the convent walls, she wrote, “Please let me go. If the work be all human, it will die with me; if it be all His it will live for ages to come. Souls are being lost in the meantime.” “I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, one of the greatest writers of our time, and a Roman catholic like Mother Teresa. “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.” NYT, 9.5.07 One of the marks of spiritual maturity is that easy faith is no more forever. Which brings us to some of the cornerstones of hard-won, grown-up faith: forgetting, remembering, forgiveness and reconciliation. Miroslav Wolf, one of the most listened-to theologians in America today, has a new book out entitled The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Eerdmans). In a recent interview he was asked, “When can we forget the wrongs committed against us?” His answer: “In a sense, forgetting is given to us as the gift of a healed relationship. It’s a gift of the new world, which God gives us. Then we can not remember. And then our experience is like the person who is sitting in a concert hall and listening to a wonderful piece of music. Even though just two hours ago she was experiencing hell at her job, she’s taken up into that music. It’s not that she tried to forget so that she could be in the music; it’s that the music took her out of the remembrance of the past. God gives us the gift of the healed self, healed relationships, and a reconstituted world, and then we can not remember.” christianitytoday.com, May 2007 Imagine some things being no more forever – that deep hurt someone caused you, that harm you inflicted on someone else. Imagine simply forgetting about those things, and in the forgetting, not even thinking about exacting revenge. Imagine the thought never crossing your mind. Imagine a time when first you, and then your sister or brother, and then your neighbor and then everyone in the whole wide world find yourselves saying, as if in one unison voice, I will fight no more forever. Not out of the sadness and sick-heartedness of defeat, but out of the joy of not even remembering that you want to fight anymore. Imagine that. There. Now you know a little about God’s vision for the end of time. The one God promises, without reservation, will someday come to be. May you not miss your chance to practice forgiveness today. |
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Reflections
on Faith and Life