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Human Beings First, Religious People Second
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| 9/14/2008 |
The scripture readings are found here.
When asked this week, “Where did you go?” on my just completed four-month clergy renewal leave (otherwise known as a “sabbatical”), my answer has been “Philadelphia.” Yes, I rode a horse in the Rockies, and fished for flukes in Buzzard’s Bay. I swam with sea turtles, penguins, and sharks (allegedly) in the enchanted Galapagos Islands, white water rafted the Mindo River, and zip-lined through the canopy of a cloud forest. I camped in a fire lookout atop a mountain on the Oregon coast, left my heart in San Francisco, and hugged a giant Sequoia in the Sierras. I trout fished the Kaweah swam with dolphins in Santa Barbara—all by way of coming home to Philadelphia, renewed refreshed and ready. Ready for what? We will have to discover that together.
If I were to sum up what I’ve learned these past four months, this would be the sum: We are human beings first, religious people second.
Early in my sabbatical leave, I flew to Louisville, Kentucky, rented a car and drove an hour to the Abbey of the Gethsemane. It was a pilgrimage to the grave of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who was also a great spiritual writer, an activist, pacifist, and prophet of coexistence between the world’s great religions.
In his early years in the Gethsemane Abbey, Merton was separated from the world, and had little contact with humanity. He prayed and worked. That all changed in 1958, when Merton had a revelation, an epiphany, on a street corner in Louisville.
After visiting his grave, I drove to Louisville to find the street corner, which the city has now named, “Thomas Merton Square.” I learned that to get to Thomas Merton Square, you take “Muhammed Ali Boulevard ”. The irony! The square for a great pacifist intersected by the street of a great pugilist.
Merton had been sent to Louisville on errands, leaving the protection of his hermit-like sequestered existence. He wrote,
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all of the time."
Merton had discovered that God’s call was to be human first, religious second. Until that moment, religiosity for Merton was the illusion of isolation into a separate world, the dream of a different-than-earthly existence. Did he really see the secret beauty of other people’s hearts? Just his own heart, I expect.
What he truly discovered was that to be human is to be authentically religious.
Why are we here, for Christ’s sake? To become human in the unique way that Christ was human. And that humanity is most often counter-intuitive to our simple created nature.
I thought a lot about human nature among the animals of the Galapagos Islands. Sea lions abound, and one morning we watched a cute, cuddly baby sea lion leave his mother and waddle into the surf to look for food. The tide was strong, and the pup was swept down to the other end of the beach. We followed.
When he dazedly (it seemed) pulled himself out of the surf, he crawled up to the nearest pack of sea lions, in search, according to our naturalist, for his mother. She wasn’t there, but far off. Certainly, I thought, these sea lions being so cute and cuddly, would take in the wayward baby, and make sure he was safe. No, they barked at him, and when he tried to nuzzle in with another mother, she attacked him, biting him hard, drawing blood. A look of fear and hurt (could it be a form of sea lion rejection?) filled his face. The naturalist told us that he might never find his mother. If he entered the sea again, he’d be swept further away, and lost.
But we could find his mother, and I assumed we would pick him up and take him back up the beach. “No,” the naturalist said. “Notice how all the species on the Galapagos closely monitor how many offspring they have, often rejecting a weaker one so that the strong survive. This one may die, because he went into the ocean without his mother. It is the way of sea lions; they are not like humans.”
I often wish humans were not so much like sea lions. When we revert to our animal nature, we play by the rules of “survival of the fittest.” But God made us uniquely, to be uniquely human, if we can only learn how.
Jesus teaches us how to be human, and slyly he does. Look at the parable for today.
Peter asks how much he has to forgive when wrong has been done to him. Seven times? “Seventy-seven times,” says Jesus. Forgiveness is incalculable, limitless, and beyond transaction. I expect this from Jesus, receive it piously, and can dismiss it quickly. His illustration of the point rattles me, though. A king forgives the debt of a servant who owes him bazillion dollars. In turn, this slave refuses to forgive the debt of another who owes him a trifling amount.
Allow me to contextualize the parable with a modern example.
On Monday, the federal government assumed control of the mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their respective CEO’s, Richard Syron and Daniel Mudd, were dismissed, but are eligible for $24 million in severance pay. That amount may be reduced, but they get to keep the $30 million they’ve earned the past three years while presiding over this mortgage crisis.
On Monday, I spoke with a family in our midst that recently packed up what was their first house, turned the keys over to the bank, and moved into an apartment with their two boys; all a requirement of the bankruptcy court. “You just feel like you’re bad, full of shame,” the dad said to me. “We thought we were doing everything right, buying our first home.”
What hurts me about human life is that the CEO’s have had their debt to the foreclosed Dad forgiven by the American taxpayer, but that same Dad will always be stigmatized as “making bad decisions,” or “biting off more than he can chew.” He will be seen as weak, and those CEO’s strong, I fear. It seems more like a story from the sea lions.
The parable teaches us that it is mercy that makes us uniquely human. God has given to you and me the possibility of God’s merciful heart, but we can easily rely on our sea lion heart; it pumps blood just as well. God gives us the merciful heart in the mercy God shows us. If we take it, we must share it, for God will “forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
“Among all God’s actions there is none which is not entirely a matter of mercy, love and compassion: this constitutes the beginning and the end of God’s dealings with us.” So says St. Isaac of Nineveh.
I am not so naïve to think that human mercy and forgiveness will solve the mortgage crisis. I don’t expect the new CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to say to our parishioners, “You can have your house back; the debt is forgiven.”
But we must see the meaning found in the first slave’s inability to show mercy to the second slave. We who have been blessed take the blessing for granted that we have it, and cannot find it in ourselves to share the blessing with those who struggle. Are we sea lions, or Christ like?
We who have been blessed with great privileges are often found wanting here. White males too often pretend that there is no inherent benefit in American society to gender and race, so scoff at the notion of breaking through glass ceilings and roll eyes in debates about affirmative action. We hear, “pull yourselves up by the bootstraps” as if we even knew what a bootstrap is.
As we go back out into the world this day, the call to us is to forge in mercy the human solidarity that would make us religious. Let us be human first, in the ways that God has made us human through compassion, mercy and forgiveness.
Nineveh wrote:
What is a merciful heart? It is a fire raging in the heart for creature, people birds and animals, and for the demons, and for everything that exists, so much so that at the thought of them and at the sight of them one’s eyes fill with tears because of the vehemence of the mercy which fills the heart. The heart faints and cannot bear to hear or to know about the slightest harm done to any creature whatsoever, the slightest suffering to which it is subjected, and because of this it also offers at every moment, with tears, a prayer of dumb animals and for the adversaries of Truth, also for those people who offend us, that they may be protected and fortified, because of the abundant mercy which floods the heart, a mercy without measure, in the likeness of God.
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