As many of us revel and rejoice with the street revolution in Egypt - and Tunis - and hold our sisters and prayers in prayer and respect, we cannot help but look towards our own context, too. Today Bob Herbert's column in the NY Times wrote: As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only. (Please read the full article - it is worth your time - and passionately honest: @ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?_r=1&ref=bobherbert)
Two other articles came my way this morning, too. Both evoke a sense of God's gracious and loving laughter (thank you, Peter) and hope in a hard time as well as something of the Spirit's presence in the 1983 album by The Police.
+ Fr. Richard Rohr in part of his on-going commentary about the presence of the Cosmic Christ in history writes these words to help us not give in to despair, but rather live into the joyful presence of the one who sets us all free.
The reason I believe the Christ Mystery is so hard for us to see in our little tiny moments of history, our little tiny moments of life, is that this groaning and this process of giving birth is preceded by a series of losses and gains, and the losses are very real. There is no doubt that history goes three steps forward and two steps backward; but thank God, there seems to be always a final net gain. And God seems to be very, very patient.
We all see the two steps backward: the violence, the war, the genocide, the repetitive stupidity, the injustice of it all. We see, for example, the Roman Church, circling its largely self-constructed mental wagons around itself, as if it alone and apart was the world Jesus loved and died for (John 12:47). Refusing to die to itself, it remains “just a single grain of wheat” (John 12:24), and becomes much more Roman than Catholic. And yet it was doing this same thing in the first part of the last century—in spades—and the courage of the Second Vatican Council came out of nowhere. Where did this high level and enlightened thinking come from? Now it stands forever as a Council of the Church, and no elderly Pope or young priest can put this toothpaste back into any tube. If we reject this Council, then we can reject the other twenty also. It stands, like the Gospel, and will finally win out.
And we, in our doubt, still continue to hope and chant, “Come, Lord Jesus!” Perhaps this hoping and chanting are his very coming.
+ And my friend Peter (who writes under the blog Black Pete for "Red Wine and Garlic" @ http://redwineandgarlic.blogspot.com/) sent me a copy of his most recent article from his "Heart of the Matter" published in Ontario, Canada.
Shortly after the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill was asked how it felt to have defeated Fascism. His response was unexpected—and chilling: "Yes, we have defeated Hitler and his ilk," Churchill is quoted as saying, "but Fascists like Mr. Albert Speer are not so easily defeated." He further implied that the Fascists may have won in spite of our best efforts.
Albert Speer was the Minister of Supply in the Nazi regime. Among many of his responsibilities was reorganizing Germany's manufacturing capacity toward an efficient, powerful force capable of supplying a worldwide effort at conquest. He was also responsible for the "branding" of Germany with the unmistakable iconography of Nazism. The idea was not merely to be efficient but to appear to be unbeatably efficient. Speer was one of many tried of war crimes and convicted at Nuremburg after the War.
But what did Winston Churchill mean? Our popular image of Nazism is that of a tightly-controlled right-wing society focused on world dictatorship. While this image is accurate as far as it goes, Albert Speer's role was of a different nature from the warriors: he was an "efficiency expert". Speer began his work by instituting a systemic statistical analysis made possible, ironically, by data-processing machines purchased from IBM in the United States. The statistical approach spread into almost all areas of pre-war German life and eventually bore fruit in Nazi armament production and troop movements—it even made possible the horrendous scale of mass murder in Nazi concentration camps.
Perhaps Winston Churchill understood that the core philosophy of Speer's brand of Fascism is that all life can be reduced to numbers. Numbers for Nazi Germany indicated progress, the return on investment in money, personnel, energy and machinery toward the regime's ultimate goal. Numbers are useful, and have been for thousands of years, but Winston Churchill saw that Speer and his fellow Fascists had expanded the use of numbers invasively into new areas of human life, well beyond sensible and compassionate use. What's more, the entire world would go along with them.
In our society, we have bought right into the numbers game. We developed a language that went with it, "hard data" over "soft thinking"—translation: "what is quantifiable is of value; what is not, is not". In our health care system, lengthy stays in crowded waiting rooms are considered unimportant because statistically, fewer doctors are seeing more patients, a sure sign of increased efficiency. It is no news that the business world in general measures only the bottom line—the numbers count—at the expense of such difficult-to-quantify realities as environmental health, quality of life, sustainability and long-term effect of its actions. And this mentality is killing us. A numbers-obsessed society has no room for unquantifiable spirituality, for that matter.
Ironically, Nazi Germany was anything but efficient. There was waste and duplication everywhere and not surprisingly, fabrication of statistics to make the numbers look good. Still, our present-day political and economic leadership seems to have the same numbers mania as Speer's Fascism. In that sense, Winston Churchill was right: the Fascists indeed won the war.
Sr. Joan Chittister once said something like, "The challenge for people of faith is to learn to see the eagle within the egg." As one who finds God's light in some of the darkest places, I draw strength and solace from the words of Rohr and Fergus-Moore as they point out the harsh realities of our day. That so many of us in the West are coming to grips with this darkness is, for me, another sign of God's gracious light within the darkness.
Two other articles came my way this morning, too. Both evoke a sense of God's gracious and loving laughter (thank you, Peter) and hope in a hard time as well as something of the Spirit's presence in the 1983 album by The Police.
+ Fr. Richard Rohr in part of his on-going commentary about the presence of the Cosmic Christ in history writes these words to help us not give in to despair, but rather live into the joyful presence of the one who sets us all free.
The reason I believe the Christ Mystery is so hard for us to see in our little tiny moments of history, our little tiny moments of life, is that this groaning and this process of giving birth is preceded by a series of losses and gains, and the losses are very real. There is no doubt that history goes three steps forward and two steps backward; but thank God, there seems to be always a final net gain. And God seems to be very, very patient.
We all see the two steps backward: the violence, the war, the genocide, the repetitive stupidity, the injustice of it all. We see, for example, the Roman Church, circling its largely self-constructed mental wagons around itself, as if it alone and apart was the world Jesus loved and died for (John 12:47). Refusing to die to itself, it remains “just a single grain of wheat” (John 12:24), and becomes much more Roman than Catholic. And yet it was doing this same thing in the first part of the last century—in spades—and the courage of the Second Vatican Council came out of nowhere. Where did this high level and enlightened thinking come from? Now it stands forever as a Council of the Church, and no elderly Pope or young priest can put this toothpaste back into any tube. If we reject this Council, then we can reject the other twenty also. It stands, like the Gospel, and will finally win out.
And we, in our doubt, still continue to hope and chant, “Come, Lord Jesus!” Perhaps this hoping and chanting are his very coming.
+ And my friend Peter (who writes under the blog Black Pete for "Red Wine and Garlic" @ http://redwineandgarlic.blogspot.com/) sent me a copy of his most recent article from his "Heart of the Matter" published in Ontario, Canada.
Shortly after the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill was asked how it felt to have defeated Fascism. His response was unexpected—and chilling: "Yes, we have defeated Hitler and his ilk," Churchill is quoted as saying, "but Fascists like Mr. Albert Speer are not so easily defeated." He further implied that the Fascists may have won in spite of our best efforts.
Albert Speer was the Minister of Supply in the Nazi regime. Among many of his responsibilities was reorganizing Germany's manufacturing capacity toward an efficient, powerful force capable of supplying a worldwide effort at conquest. He was also responsible for the "branding" of Germany with the unmistakable iconography of Nazism. The idea was not merely to be efficient but to appear to be unbeatably efficient. Speer was one of many tried of war crimes and convicted at Nuremburg after the War.
Perhaps Winston Churchill understood that the core philosophy of Speer's brand of Fascism is that all life can be reduced to numbers. Numbers for Nazi Germany indicated progress, the return on investment in money, personnel, energy and machinery toward the regime's ultimate goal. Numbers are useful, and have been for thousands of years, but Winston Churchill saw that Speer and his fellow Fascists had expanded the use of numbers invasively into new areas of human life, well beyond sensible and compassionate use. What's more, the entire world would go along with them.
In our society, we have bought right into the numbers game. We developed a language that went with it, "hard data" over "soft thinking"—translation: "what is quantifiable is of value; what is not, is not". In our health care system, lengthy stays in crowded waiting rooms are considered unimportant because statistically, fewer doctors are seeing more patients, a sure sign of increased efficiency. It is no news that the business world in general measures only the bottom line—the numbers count—at the expense of such difficult-to-quantify realities as environmental health, quality of life, sustainability and long-term effect of its actions. And this mentality is killing us. A numbers-obsessed society has no room for unquantifiable spirituality, for that matter.
Sr. Joan Chittister once said something like, "The challenge for people of faith is to learn to see the eagle within the egg." As one who finds God's light in some of the darkest places, I draw strength and solace from the words of Rohr and Fergus-Moore as they point out the harsh realities of our day. That so many of us in the West are coming to grips with this darkness is, for me, another sign of God's gracious light within the darkness.
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