reconciliation
CS Lewis gave a talk once and said that the hardest part of the Christian message is not the sexual purity, but the insistence that we need to forgive.
Heaven knows that one of my worst traits is that I remember grudges and have taken pleasure at getting back at those who hurt me.
Pope Benedict has given a talk at Auschwitz, and much of it is on the need for reconciliation...
This is the same reason why I have come here today: to implore the grace of reconciliation -- first of all from God, who alone can open and purify our hearts, from the men and women who suffered here, and finally the grace of reconciliation for all those who, at this hour of our history, are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred and the violence which hatred spawns.
How many questions arise in this place! Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil? ....
This cry of anguish (psalm 44), which Israel raised to God in its suffering, at moments of deep distress, is also the cry for help raised by all those who in every age -- yesterday, today and tomorrow -- suffer for the love of God, for the love of truth and goodness. How many they are, even in our own day!
We cannot peer into God's mysterious plan -- we see only piecemeal, and we would be wrong to set ourselves up as judges of God and history. Then we would not be defending man, but only contributing to his downfall. No -- when all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!
And our cry to God must also be a cry that pierces our very heart, a cry that awakens within us God's hidden presence -- so that his power, the power he has planted in our hearts, will not be buried or choked within us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism.
Let us cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new misfortunes befall us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from human hearts: whether it is the abuse of God's name as a means of justifying senseless violence against innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to acknowledge God and ridicules faith in him.
Let us cry out to God, that he may draw men and women to conversion and help them to see that violence does not bring peace, but only generates more violence -- a morass of devastation in which everyone is ultimately the loser.
The God in whom we believe is a God of reason -- a reason, to be sure, which is not a kind of cold mathematics of the universe, but is one with love and with goodness. We make our prayer to God and we appeal to humanity, that this reason, the logic of love and the recognition of the power of reconciliation and peace, may prevail over the threats arising from irrationalism or from a spurious and godless reason.
On my other blog, I often support the war in Iraq, not because I didn't see the manipulation of the press by Bush (They were not lies, since independent sources said there were WMD's but there was crude manipulation of the press) but because I saw that a multiheaded hydra of extremism in Islam was arising, and that the failure to remove S.Hussein had only encouraged the other heads of Islamofascist groups to greater aggression. (e.g. India and the Philippines had suffered many terrorist attacks by those trained by various international terror groups...when both Alquada and the IRA are helping the FARC in Colombia, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice there is a connection).
But "unleashing the hounds of war" leads to problems.
Alas, only those who have lived thru war can realize that there is evil on all sides. War leads to murder, and the survivors keep the thought of justice but also the idea of revenge in their heart...so when the war is over, you still have the danger of private reprisals...which is what is behind many of the Shiite killings of Sunnis in Iraq...indeed, if Sistani wasn't a saint who opposed revenge, you would have had a civil war by now...instead of the low grade murder that is occuring. (compare to Ruanda, or to the killings during the Indian/Pakistan independence wars).
Sometimes soldiers are the only ones who keep the peace. Do you chose tyranny or chaos?
But what I despise is when ideology trumps reality...too many people sitting in quiet safe offices can decide to give thousands to "insurgents" while patting themselves onthe back for being more "humane" than those who fight against violence, because these naive peoplevclaim the other side is "evil" without bothering to notice that the "insurgents" are killing more innocent people than the "evil" government.
And here I am not talking about Iraq, but Rhodesia, where the world council of churches funded insurgents against an unjust government without noticing their "marxist" orientation would lead them to willingly kill those they disliked (including 37 missionaries in the last year when I was a missionary)...nor could they see, in their naivity, that those who killed innocent unarmed priests and nuns, nurses and doctors (Both black and white) because their Marxist ideology said it was okay would go on to destroy the economy and allow thousands to starve or die of disease rather than give up their half baked ecomomic ideas.
So a false pacifism that ignores evil is not the answer.
The true answer is conversion of the heart.
Let us cry out to God, that he may draw men and women to conversion and help them to see that violence does not bring peace, but only generates more violence -- a morass of devastation in which everyone is ultimately the loser.
Heaven knows that one of my worst traits is that I remember grudges and have taken pleasure at getting back at those who hurt me.
Pope Benedict has given a talk at Auschwitz, and much of it is on the need for reconciliation...
This is the same reason why I have come here today: to implore the grace of reconciliation -- first of all from God, who alone can open and purify our hearts, from the men and women who suffered here, and finally the grace of reconciliation for all those who, at this hour of our history, are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred and the violence which hatred spawns.
How many questions arise in this place! Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil? ....
This cry of anguish (psalm 44), which Israel raised to God in its suffering, at moments of deep distress, is also the cry for help raised by all those who in every age -- yesterday, today and tomorrow -- suffer for the love of God, for the love of truth and goodness. How many they are, even in our own day!
We cannot peer into God's mysterious plan -- we see only piecemeal, and we would be wrong to set ourselves up as judges of God and history. Then we would not be defending man, but only contributing to his downfall. No -- when all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!
And our cry to God must also be a cry that pierces our very heart, a cry that awakens within us God's hidden presence -- so that his power, the power he has planted in our hearts, will not be buried or choked within us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism.
Let us cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new misfortunes befall us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from human hearts: whether it is the abuse of God's name as a means of justifying senseless violence against innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to acknowledge God and ridicules faith in him.
Let us cry out to God, that he may draw men and women to conversion and help them to see that violence does not bring peace, but only generates more violence -- a morass of devastation in which everyone is ultimately the loser.
The God in whom we believe is a God of reason -- a reason, to be sure, which is not a kind of cold mathematics of the universe, but is one with love and with goodness. We make our prayer to God and we appeal to humanity, that this reason, the logic of love and the recognition of the power of reconciliation and peace, may prevail over the threats arising from irrationalism or from a spurious and godless reason.
On my other blog, I often support the war in Iraq, not because I didn't see the manipulation of the press by Bush (They were not lies, since independent sources said there were WMD's but there was crude manipulation of the press) but because I saw that a multiheaded hydra of extremism in Islam was arising, and that the failure to remove S.Hussein had only encouraged the other heads of Islamofascist groups to greater aggression. (e.g. India and the Philippines had suffered many terrorist attacks by those trained by various international terror groups...when both Alquada and the IRA are helping the FARC in Colombia, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice there is a connection).
But "unleashing the hounds of war" leads to problems.
Alas, only those who have lived thru war can realize that there is evil on all sides. War leads to murder, and the survivors keep the thought of justice but also the idea of revenge in their heart...so when the war is over, you still have the danger of private reprisals...which is what is behind many of the Shiite killings of Sunnis in Iraq...indeed, if Sistani wasn't a saint who opposed revenge, you would have had a civil war by now...instead of the low grade murder that is occuring. (compare to Ruanda, or to the killings during the Indian/Pakistan independence wars).
Sometimes soldiers are the only ones who keep the peace. Do you chose tyranny or chaos?
But what I despise is when ideology trumps reality...too many people sitting in quiet safe offices can decide to give thousands to "insurgents" while patting themselves onthe back for being more "humane" than those who fight against violence, because these naive peoplevclaim the other side is "evil" without bothering to notice that the "insurgents" are killing more innocent people than the "evil" government.
And here I am not talking about Iraq, but Rhodesia, where the world council of churches funded insurgents against an unjust government without noticing their "marxist" orientation would lead them to willingly kill those they disliked (including 37 missionaries in the last year when I was a missionary)...nor could they see, in their naivity, that those who killed innocent unarmed priests and nuns, nurses and doctors (Both black and white) because their Marxist ideology said it was okay would go on to destroy the economy and allow thousands to starve or die of disease rather than give up their half baked ecomomic ideas.
So a false pacifism that ignores evil is not the answer.
The true answer is conversion of the heart.
Let us cry out to God, that he may draw men and women to conversion and help them to see that violence does not bring peace, but only generates more violence -- a morass of devastation in which everyone is ultimately the loser.
posted by Nancy Reyes at
5:19 PM
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