I’ve been contemplating lately our tendency – my tendency – to feel the need to assign blame, to hold resentments, to understand another person’s inexplicable actions. What is the attraction? And does someone else’s severe act excuse mine if it is a lesser one?
I grew up being sexually assaulted for much of my childhood. Looking at myself as a child undergoing these things, it is easy to differentiate between perpetrator and victim. I can also look at ways I “acted out” as an adult that can be traced back to the lingering damage from these repeated assaults, the way it “set me up” to fail. . Looking at myself as a child undergoing these things, it is easy to differentiate between perpetrator and victim. I can also look at ways I “acted out” as an adult that can be traced back to the lingering damage from these repeated assaults, the way it “set me up” to fail.
There came a time in life, though, when I had to take responsibility for my participation in actions that I knew were wrong but chose to join. I’m not talking about being abused as a child, I’m talking about going along later in life when someone suggested doing something I know is wrong. At times, I was easily coerced into misbehavior because of my childhood experiences and the lack of boundaries they left, but I permitted that coercion to be effective even though I knew what I would do would be against my moral code. Then, I tried to blame them for “talking me into it.” They might have suggested it, but I talked me into it. What do I do with that?
Why try to comprehend the incomprehensible? It is like trying to understand why my friend in Florida turned out to be a serial killer, or why a friend’s 9 year-old grandson was brutally murdered last week by blunt-force trauma when his father apparently beat him with an axe while the boy slept.
I don’t know why a father would rape his son. I don’t know why priests would hold a sexual black mass while assaulting a kindergartner. I don’t know why a lot of things happen in this life. I just know they don’t all happen to me, thank God! It only feels like that sometimes.
This is my slice of the pie, my thread of the DNA of self-destructive behavior that we inherit as children of Adam and Eve. This, to me, is what Original Sin is all about, our nonsensical desire to destroy what should sustain us. We do it to each other as individuals, we do it family to family, city to city, society to society, and as a mass we do it to the very world that gives us life. We riot by setting fire to our own neighborhoods and burning down our neighbors’ businesses. We celebrate league championships by overturning cars and looting merchants.
Humankind has got a crazy streak as long as history can record. Adam and Eve were rebellious. Cain killed Abel. It appears that scripture infers that one of Noah’s sons had sex with him when Noah was drunk. Lot’s daughters got him drunk and had sex with him. David committed adultery with Bathsheba and murdered her husband, and history calls him a great king who was the apple of God’s eye. What the heck is THAT all about? Really? Victims get punished, the evil go free. I’m telling you, it’s crazy, and nothing will make a person as crazy as trying to make logic out of crazy behavior!
The Bible is not afraid of the crazy. It puts it right out there. “Look, there are a few righteous people who show up,” it says, “but even a lot of them are nuts from time to time if not always.” Abraham gets the son he always wanted and then is convinced God has instructed him to kill the boy. There weren’t radios at the time that Abraham could say were the source of the instructions he heard. What if Abraham was schizophrenic and delusional? He could still be a man of faith, he could still be the father of many nations, he could still have his good points. But he could also have his psychotic break.
What if the true story is that Abraham didn’t really hear God right at all? What if he had a lot of stress? He was old, he was cracking up, he heard God a couple of times accurately and then one time thought he heard God, but actually only heard his own moment of human craziness? What if the whole point of the story was not that God asked him to kill Isaac, but that God, seeing what he was about to do, distracted him and provided a ram to kill instead to satisfy Abraham’s blood-thirst? What if God were the life saver and not the life taker in this one?
Isn’t that as prototypical a foreshadowing of the Messiah as any other take on the story? God sees the misdirected blood-thirst that runs rampant in humanity, the need to accuse and blame and scapegoat and destroy, and God says, “If they have to kill somebody, I will let them kill Me, not each other. This has got to stop somehow.”
And then God resurrects, as if to say, “What is the point of all this killing? Death is an illusion. Turn from the greed and follow love!” But God is an optimist, however well-intentioned, and not everybody gets it.
Yet, a few do get it. Over the years, they catch on, they wake, they surrender all to love. And some grow old and are revered, and some die as martyrs; some are heard and some are misunderstood. They become saints and they become Gandhi and they become Martin Luther King, Jr., and they become Mother Teresa and they become Buddha and a million-million others over the centuries who make a conscious choice to no longer buy into the craziness that is human behavior. Maybe they become Jung, and maybe they become anonymous conscientious objectors and maybe they become Quakers.
As Bob Bennett wrote in his song, these are the people who become “Jesus in our time.” Humankind has a short memory. Yes, Santayana, we forget the past and continually repeat it. Every generation re-enacts the first one; every generation has their own version of crazy. And every generation has their counter-cultural souls who rise up in the name of love, who cherish and pursue and demonstrate love against all costs and any odds. The lesson is repeated in every generation.
It is not easy to be Jesus in our time, but it is a lot harder not to be. The cost of perpetuating craziness takes its toll on the perpetuator. The heart withers, the brain devolves, the body sickens, the psyche splits, the emotions disappear. Ethics fall away in favor of opportunity; rationalizations take the place of righteousness; accusations replace empathy. We create a culture of death, the death of others’ hopes and dreams and joy, the death of their bodies, the death of ourselves.
The rainforests are disappearing, yet we destroy more of them. We deny the dying that is all around us. Shocking videos of war scenes no longer bother us, but instead show up in gruesome reality in video games. We can watch commercials about dying children while we eat dinner. We speculate on what famous people did to deserve their deaths when they happen unexpectedly. We have lost our passion for life amid the overwhelming evidence of death.
I don’t think there is anything that stands opposed to death. It waits for all of us, so there is a level of acceptance to it that grows the more we see it. Death is merely the collateral damage to solving a problem. Hitler’s killing the Jews? The final solution. Wipe out two cities with atomic weapons? Solutions. Lynch a man because of his skin tone? A solution. Wipe out a rival clan? A solution. Euphemisms to keep us from noticing our consciences.
Again and again we are told by this culture of death that these things make sense, that killing is always justifiable, whether it is by active means or by withdrawing or withholding aid to a nation suffering from famine or genocide.
We long ago lost our sense of outrage. Cain and Abel should be a story that shocks us! Fratricide! Why doesn’t it shock us any more? Why do we teach it to our children as if Cain had decided to trick Abel in some prank? Why does this not outrage us, sadden us, surprise us?
We have long ago become immune to being shocked. We use murder as entertainment in most of our prime-time dramas, and many successful movies and games. Even ubiquitous family board games like Battleship or Clue trade on the unfelt reality of war or murder.
No, I don’t think resistance is the answer. The violence is overwhelmingly present, and Jesus saw this in its smallest forms. Matthew 5 holds some very strong sayings when it quotes Jesus in this way:
17“Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.18“For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19“Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
20“For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
21“You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.’22“But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.23“Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you,24leave your offering there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering.25“Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way, so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and you be thrown into prison.26“Truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last cent.
27“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’;28but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.29“If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.30“If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell.”
The message is certainly shocking here, but what is the message? The message is that we all participate in the flawed system at one level or another and we need to realize it. If I have lusted after someone else’s mate, I am on that continuum of adultery whether I go further along it or not. I am part of the system. If I murder a reputation, I am on the continuum whether or not I murder a person. It is a call to wake up and see we are all somewhere in this system of craziness, if only by degree.
The only escape is to transform. If we allow love to transform us, we can begin to live according to a new system, a system Jesus identifies as the Kingdom of God. It is counter-intuitive.
Earlier in that same chapter are the Beattitudes. Here is their recounting:
1When Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain; and after He sat down, His disciples came to Him.2He opened His mouth and began to teach them, saying,
3“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
5“Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.
6“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
7“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
8“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
9“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
10“Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11“Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.12“Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."
The arrogant, the unfeeling, the harsh, the greedy, the opportunist, the judge, the rationalizer, the troublemaker and the selfish one are not part of that Kingdom of God. God is not excluding them, they are excluding themselves. It is the humble, the struggling, the gentle, the compassionate, the merciful, the loving, the peacemakers, and the disciples of love who are in the Kingdom, experiencing a different world than those around them. The Kingdom of Heaven is now; coexistent with the crazy train. We choose which camp we are going to call our home.
Some people are deeply involved in crazy, and some are at different points on the spectrum between sanity and craziness, between being compassionate and being a sociopath. The choice to love shakes up our status quo. It is not always - in fact, it is probably rarely - the first choice most of us make in response to encountering another person’s basic human craziness.
As long as I can say, “You are crazy and this is the proof!” I can separate you from me. I never have to say, “But, I am crazy, too, in my own way, or perhaps in the same way as you.”
If craziness is a spectrum, I’ve got my place on it. It’s not “on” or “off.” In the course of my life, if I have done crazy, senseless things, even one time, even to a minor degree, I’m on the spectrum. And, I have done crazy things, more than once, and more than to a minor degree. I have participated in the human condition of doing things that make no sense, and then thinking I am better than someone else who does something that makes no sense.
Feeling superior is not my way out of guilt or shame, it only helps me distance myself from those feelings of guilt and shame by stratifying the crime into felonies and misdemeanors, or into mortal and venial sins. It is a way to deny them, not resolve them. Jesus says such stratification is rationalization. A sin is a sin is a sin, and unless you are without one, as He says in the Gospel of John, 8:7, you have no right to judge another person for having their particular sin. Again and again, He says there are no levels. Just as Yoda says, “Do or not do. There is no try,” Jesus says, “Sin or not sin, there is no between.” In Matthew 7:3 He emphasizes this again, saying, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own?”
The decision to love moves us into a different way of life, eases and sometimes catapults us into a different way of looking at things.
I can spend years – and I have indeed personally spent decades – resenting wrongs perpetrated on me. I am not talking about somebody stealing my favorite pencil here, I am talking about the years of being raped as a child by people who abused their authority over me and the trust that I and others put in them by nature of their role in my life and our society.
These brutal and senseless acts caused a lot of damage, and I lived out of that damage for a long time, and acted out as a result of it time and time again. I took my place on the crazy train, and I spent years trying to parse out who my perpetrators were and to what degree my perpetrators were responsible for anything I did, and why they would do that in the first place.
I was superior to them because I did not rape children or even rape at all. But I was still dishonest, unreliable, uncaring and I broke hearts and disrespected people more than once as I moved through life convinced I was blameless because I was clinging to the innocence of my identification as a victim.
As long as I could ascribe it to the fault of my perpetrators, I didn’t see, or need to see, that I had my own brand of human crazy. I lived out of the basic defense of a child caught misbehaving who protests, “He did it first!” or the older adult child who gets caught for speeding and says, “But why are you arresting me instead of the guy who was passing me? Why didn’t you go for him? What he was doing was worse! It isn’t fair!”
The Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22b). If we realize this, if we see this is what it means to participate in our little part of humanity’s craziness, no matter to what degree, we can find grounds for compassion and a reason for forgiveness.
I don’t believe forgiveness is facile, and it is not my intention to make forgiveness seem easy when the pain and grief we feel as a result of a grievous act is very real. Eventually, though, we either labor forever beneath the pain and the grief, or we forgive. We forge our own life, or live the life someone else seems to have assigned to us.
Yes, Virginia, I have my personal version of human craziness. If I am going to fully follow the path of love, I have to acknowledge this, forgive myself for those times when I acted out, and seek through love to not repeat them but instead to grow in compassion and thoughtfulness. If I fall back into the old patterns, as habit or addiction or ignorance or lack of awareness may cause, I need to repeat that forgiveness as many times as necessary. Not just seven times, as Jesus says in Matthew 18:22, “but seven times seventy times” Or, as we would say in modern parlance, not once or twice, but 100% of the time. There is no limit to forgiveness.
Likewise, I forgive my perpetrators. They too are part of the human tradition of crazy behavior, and regardless of the degree to which they demonstrate it, they are on the same spectrum as I am. If their offense is more severe than mine, I need to let that be a cause for my gratitude to have not injured another to the same degree. I need to see that as a grace in my life, not a point of superiority. When I do, when I see we are all in the same boat, and that hatred perpetuates and feeds the craziness while love forgives and frees me from its effects, why would I not forgive?
No, I don’t understand how someone could rape a child. Thank God that it makes no sense to me! And I don’t understand how people can beat and torture and kill one another. Thank God that it makes no sense to me! What I do understand all too well is my own experience of human imperfection, my own experience of letting a baser instinct blind me to a higher value, my own experience of the rush and thrill of disobedience, and the exhilarating power of destruction.
I can say, like Jesus, in the face of His horrendous treatment and crucifixion, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” (Luke 23:24) and by doing so, enter right here and now into the Kingdom of Heaven, the realm of love. I can also sincerely say, “Father, forgive me, I didn’t realize what I was doing,” and begin to live out that Kingdom in the present world, become “Jesus for our time.”
If someone said to me, “Where would you rather live, in a place where love is the norm, or a place where destruction is the norm?” logically, I would choose the former. But when they add, “OK, then love, and you will live there beginning right now,” I start considering the price and whether or not it is too steep to pay. What?! No paybacks, no grudges, no resentments, no self-aggrandizement, no power trips, no excuses and rationalizations?!
Grace comes to every generation, every individual, every day, every moment, in every situation, and invites us to step out of the crazy life and into the life of love.
Because grace by its nature appears as an invitation, not a demand, the choice is up to us in that moment.
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