Haiti, American Division, and the Mystery of Compassion

Do we really understand the reality “God”? Well, no, not if God is ineffable, something all of the great traditions claim. God cannot be understood, but God is, better yet, God is the mystery that all is, the mystery of life.

God is the mystery. The Why? And the intellectual grappling with the Why?

As a Christian, I believe that God is love, something that people of many other traditions claim as well. Is it possible to both claim that God is ineffable and that God is love, that is, to posit something about that which cannot be explained and understood?

I think that not only is it possible to hold that God is mystery and that God is love. I came to believe that the two are necessarily connected to each other. Only a mystery can love and you can find love only in mystery. The attempt to control another is necessarily unloving. To love another you must, to quote Sting, set them free. Yes, a pop star is right about something.

Now love. What does love mean? What do I mean by love? Love is caritas—care. Love is agape—unconditional—the unconditional, energizing, transforming embrace of my entire being by mystery. Love is eros—desire. Love is fatherly, brotherly, sisterly, motherly—familial love, which is connected to both agape and caritas.
Let’s consider caritas and agape. Both are a mystery. Reflect on your experience. I will reflect on mine. I can recall being a child and basking in my parents’ approval and hearing my parents tell me that I was special to them. Then there were moments when my parents, like all people, were preoccupied and I didn’t sense that attentive care. There was an ebb and flow.

On another occasion, I can recall the first two times I really heard the word of God in Church. Once, when I was five I heard Jesus warn of the dangers of greed and it resonated. Why did I hear it then? Then, on another occasion, I heard 1 Corinthians 13 for the first time: “Love is patient. Love is kind. . . There is no limit to love’s power to endure.” As I listened, I felt as if some great presence were all around me.

I have even had the experience of agape—that unconditional embrace. It came from beyond. I had no idea that it was coming. I was completely awed by it, and for about 10 months, I felt no sadness.

When I can find a few minutes to pray in silence, I will just sit. From time to time there is that sense of freedom that passes by the edges of what feels like my heart of hearts. If I can sit for an hour or so, I can give myself over to it. I can surrender. Then there are those moments of illumination: at moments of great insight into the world, there is an “aha”, an insight that seems to come from beyond me.

I have experienced the mystery of caring for,being cared for, and being accepted among my wife and children. My three year old continually surprises me with her mystical declarations about the world. My second child, who has Asperger’s, will meltdown into a state that will dominate the entire family scene for a few minutes and then will apologize and affectionately hug me. He will also write incredible books detailing his experiences and offering his unique perspective on life. My eldest dances so gracefully, I weep when I witness it. Most importantly, my wife, who has struggled with me through some anxious moments, is totally committed to me. Her tenderness incarnates God’s love. There is an ebb and flow to that as well.

I have also experienced the agape in moments of teaching. Once I had the privilege of teaching a young atheist who had a pretty solid argument against God’s existence: if God is the cause of the world, then God is necessarily a thing for a cause is a thing. A thing is necessarily limited for it is just that-- a thing; it has some kind of definition. A thing is limited but God is supposed to be unlimited so necessarily God as unlimited cannot exist. It was a pretty impressive thought for a fifteen year old. Borrowing from Rahner and Plato, I asked him how he knew that something was limited and told him that he had a vague sense of the unlimited. If he had some sense of the unlimited, it must necessarily exist. I could see the aha in his eyes, felt the unity in the room, something important had been learned. I gave him some reading and we talked about the nature of the word God as a symbol of something that cannot be fully explained. The moment was dynamic. It ebbs and flows. If I attempt to psychically control that ebb and flow, then the consolation recedes even more. I need to let it be (this time Paul McCartney got it right).

When one is discussing the mystery of God, one must consider the mystery of suffering. Right now, the mystery of Haiti. The mystery that Reverend Robertson violated when he concocted an absolutely bizarre formula that Haiti, the entire nation, is cursed, because some 200 odd years ago, there was a group of Haitians who “made a pact with the devil to end their slavery.” I am a pretty good student of history. I have never even heard of this. It is untrue, but the untruth of the statement goes beyond the historical inaccuracy of it to something more significant. It goes to the heart of much of what is wrong with the far right in this country. They think that they know the will of God, absolutely. They think that God is not a mystery and that their particular hermeneutical method unveils the entire reality of God. They claim to know, at heart, how God feels toward non-conservatives, feminists, gay people, non-Americans. There is no love in this. As a Christian, I am baffled by their approach. God is love and God is a mystery. Haiti is and Haiti is suffering. There was an earthquake. There has been a history of political turmoil in Haiti, just like there was political turmoil in almost every nation on this planet at one time or another.

In Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg explains that Jesus replaced a religious cleanliness system with compassion. Pat Robertson’s claim is an extreme form of a cleanliness/purity system. For Robertson, God punishes people with natural disasters because they are religiously unclean. This kind of thinking is primitive. It is a vestige of what Rene Girard and James Alison call the primitive sacred. It has been part of humanity for a very long time, but it has nothing to do with the spirit of Christ. Jesus completely rejected that kind of thinking. So, for that matter did Buddha. Judaism has grown out of that kind of thinking as well as we witness in the writings of Heschel and Lerner. We also witness it in the dialogue, social justice activities, and educational activities of contemporary Judaism. Recently, I had the privilege of reading an excerpt from Queen Noor’s book Leap of Faith. She and King Hussein of Jordan, along with many other Muslims, reject that kind of primitive thinking. So for that matter did many Muslims in the middle ages. As many know, in the middle ages, Muslims were more tolerant toward Jews than Christians were.

For me, the Gospels are clear: the poor and suffering are blessed, not cursed. Jesus came to call sinners, not the righteous (and the self-righteous miss this entirely). In the parable of the vineyard, those late to answer the call get the same reward as the goody two shoes who answer the call early. The prodigal father of the lost son rejoices and invites his self-righteous older son to join the festivities welcoming the sinner home. Those who serve the poor live in joy. Those who, like Dives (rich man) in the Gospel of Luke, ignore the cries of the poor live in torment. What kind of torment? It is not God’s punishing them. It is the torment of not striving to overcome the primitive impulse to erect barriers between oneself and others. It is the torment of neglecting the poor. And this neglect is rooted in fear. We develop barriers out of fear, and, living in fear, we create our hell.

Now, I am claiming that the Gospels are clear. Does that not reduce God’s mystery? No. The mystery of God is that God is all accepting love (agape). Can we logically prove that God is love? No. We trust that this is the case and then it is confirmed through our experience of spiritual living. In living spiritually, we live the reality that we are also mysteries. As a mystery, I am not satisfied with a social arrangement or system that excludes and condemns people. Such a system categorizes the other and thus robs them of their dignity as mysteries. This is not just a liberal approach. Some liberals have their own purity system and conservatives, feeling judged, have called it “political correctness.” I think that many conservative arguments against affirmative action and certain political advocacy for multi-culturalism stem from a sense that affirmative action and the redefinition of the western canon have felt like attempts to impose a new form of purity system. I am a liberal, but I have witnessed some (a minority) of liberal professors attempting to impose a system of thinking rather than facilitating a student’s encounter with the reality that there are injustices that we need to transform.

To take an extreme leftist (not a liberal, but leftist example): the Maoist cultural revolution in China was an extremely brutal purity system. If you did not think a particular way you were tortured and killed. It is not an accident that Maoists sought to end all religion, including the indigenous Buddhist practices of the people of Tibet. All communists have attempted to erase the idea that reality is mysterious. They have in essence claimed that they can explain all reality and hence have developed totalitarian systems—systems that claimed that they could totally explain and regulate all of human existence.

Right wingers in the US are not as brutal as communists, but they want all to accept the strange idea that America is a “Christian nation.” If so, then we have turned Christianity into a purity system again. If you are not a Christian, then you are out. Jesus does not want this. Jesus wants us to accept that our lives, our social lives, are mysterious and that our lives reach fulfillment only when, with his grace, we train our minds to live in the mystery of compassion for all. For liberals and leftists, that means feeling real empathy for conservatives and for people in institutions like the US military. For conservatives, that means letting go of the whole “Christian nation” idea and feeling empathy toward non-Christians, non-Americans, gay people, and others.

Accepting the mystery of God does not mean giving up on talking about God. It means living the mystery of a compassion that is a lived empathy for all. I find this in the efforts of Presidents Clinton and Bush to raise money for Haiti. Non-partisan empathy for the suffering of others is holy. It is a gift and it is a reality we need to spread, especially in this time of partisanship in the US. Non-partisan empathy is a blessing that God wants to give us at a time when we are cursed by division. I hope we can all accept this blessing with gratitude.