Love In A Time of Hate
We sin, and God ,who is just, punishes the sinner, as a loving father must. “Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline? If you do not have that discipline in which all children share, then you are illegitimate and not his children.” Heb 12:7-8
So we go to Confession and do the penance that the priest asks of us, because it is a small thing to do when faced with the consequences of our guilt.
Yet in our rebellious hearts are thoughts of anger, revenge, hatred and jealousy. These are sins. They may stay hidden, but they have their fruit. Nevertheless we can mitigate the damage which are caused by sins of the heart by practicing the virtue of love. Love never fails.
written by Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael
IF YOU LIKE, READ ALONG WHILE YOU ARE LISTENING:
Early in human history, humans began to live together in groups. That particularly became important when it came to the time that agriculture was developed. That's when the first cities and towns were developed. They would get together for the common good.
Inherent in the common good is that when you have a group of people together, you need rules to govern their conduct. There is something about humans being next to humans, that they do things that aren't appropriate, or disputes arise. And you see this in the Old Testament. You see this in the Code of Hammurabi. You see this in laws. They are a societal construct that is necessary. We see it actually in the gospel today where Jesus appoints the twelve apostles. He's creating a structure.
Inherent in the structure are rules. The teachings of Christ are such that we are called to love God and love neighbor. These are in a supernatural perspective, but out of the ordinary. They are aspirational both within the Church and for society.
So with Christ you have a situation where He comes along and gives His great commandments. Then it becomes a question of, okay, the Church is there, how does it govern itself, and what is the interaction between the Church and the state.
And particularly what happens when you have a human institution that is threatened by an outside force, and this is what St. Augustine dealt with, with justified war. And this is a struggle that goes on.
After World War I, but really after World War II there came a point in time where Western society basically, like Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, when he is talking about women, goes, "Why can't they be more like men?"
Why can't, as an aspirational basis, the world be more like Western society: Extremely egocentric, ethnocentric, any "-centric" that you want to do, but it was a perspective of the world at that time. How do we prevent more war; how do we prevent the turmoil? And you see the advent of the United Nations and you see various Western aspirations spread out to the world. They go out to the world, and they bring benefits to the world, but incumbent in that is, "You just have to act more like we do."
And this is a formula that existed after World War II and, if you read between the lines, that is a big struggle that is going on right now. It happens with the United States. A lot of the issues that people raise with regard to Donald Trump relate to this exact issue. The election in Sweden that they just had yesterday, I believe it was yesterday, where the nationalists were growing in power. That relates to the issue of what I am just describing. And central to that issue in our time is September 11.
You created an environment where certain things are acceptable. Things on September 11 do not fit that model. They are wrong from every perspective that you can imagine. And all of a sudden we came face to face with the understanding that there are people in the world who have not accepted the Western aspirational conduct standards for the world. The rules of the world as imposed or as an aspirational of Western society simply and totally were violated.
The question is, and you see this if you look back on the readings of the Church and if you listen to what Francis is saying, what happens? What is the reaction of the Church to September 11? To pray, but also to preach love of neighbor. That is a central part. And that, in fact, like the war in Iraq was not a justified war under Catholic standards as originally promulgated by St. Augustine. It wasn't.
So, but more importantly it brings to mind in each and every one of us, "Who is my neighbor?" And that's one reason why I like to preach about who is my neighbor. Taken on an individual basis it is comparatively easy for us to say that every single person that we meet is our neighbor. And to treat them accordingly. That is fairly easy. It becomes more difficult on a societal basis because you look and say, "Oh, there are some people over there who are not like us. I don't want to deal with them." You have to work with that. On a national basis, the same thing.
But on an international basis, all of the sudden it is September 11, we realized that there were a group of people living in the world who wanted us dead. They were willing to go to extremes, to conduct that by our aspirations for Western society, and our belief of how Christianity, and our world live, they violated it just about as badly as you could possibly violate it.
Similar to the reaction after Pearl Harbor for World War II. But all of the sudden, there is this nebulous group out there who hate us. Who are willing to kill us. They become "Them." The visceral reaction to terrorist attacks, September 11 being the primary, but the terrorist acts we have, the visceral reaction, the reaction that you would normally have is, "Get those guys! Get rid of them! Do something! Bomb them all! Obliterate them!" You see that. "You've got to do something." Yet at the same time, we are Catholics, we are Christians and we are called to love our neighbor. How do we deal, on that level, from the level of Catholic theology, with people who are different and who have different views of the world; views that are dangerous to us on an individual basis?
And the reaction that we're seeing in the United States, but we see it in Western Europe, these elections going on over the immigration issue, is that the perversion of the world caused by September 11 is having a ripple impact on each and every one of us so that it makes it acceptable to look at "Us" and "Them."
If I am going to look at somebody from... Afghanistan and say, "Oh my, they may be dangerous because of their religious beliefs and from where they are." If we are not cognizant that they are our neighbor, that very uncertainty bleeds out to other places. It causes us to see others who are not part of our world as "The Other," as "Them." So that we have a great suspicion of someone, for example, from Afghanistan, but a somewhat suspicion of anybody who came across the Mexican border without a passport.
It stretches out our credulity on how we define "Us" and "Them." And as Catholics, it is imperative, and Pope Francis talks about this all the time, that we cannot allow our visceral reaction to a horrible event, have us to categorize a group of people as "Them." And we cannot use our categorization of one group of people as "Them" to have an impact overall on how we deal with everyone.
And that is a great moral and theological crisis that September 11 created for us on an individual basis, but also on a societal, national and international basis. And again, pay attention to what’s going on in Europe, it will have a profound impact because that is the precise issue that they’re dealing with.
And I have mentioned this before but I have not mentioned it for a while, but let's go back to the laws. In the United States we have the Bill of Rights. So that anybody in the country has certain rights. But for the most part, in Europe, they can change those laws because they are not Constitutional. And so you can end up with reactions of "Us" versus "Them." And this results in horrible situations in the world where basically you end up with a situation that the world is ripe for genocide because an outside force has allowed us normal people to have a visceral reaction to somebody and classify them as "Them" as opposed to "Us," and to cause us to be in the situation where we no longer accord to them the love that we are commanded to give them by our Lord Jesus Christ.
September 11, 2018