ur world today is a place threatened and in fear, and
grid locked with unforgiveness. Without forgiving our enemies, we create a world of escalating war, violence, and terrorism. Such a world can be a frightening place, indeed.
Until World War I – the “Great War,” the “War to End all Wars” – smart people, most Christian thinkers included, believed the world and they in the world were getting better every day in every war. Then came the guns of August 1914, and it was announced that the lights were going out all over the world.
It was really one long war, some historians contend, stretching from 1914 to 1945, and it included World War II, or even to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the end of the “cold war,” with only a brief and troubled interlude of phony peace from 1918 to 1939. Enemies were not forgiven, and the presumably enlightened twentieth century has loosed more river of blood and piled up more mountains of bodies than any century in history. So, the ‘cold war’ led to the Korean conflict and to the Vietnamese War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then world terrorism was unleashed on September 2001 by Al-Qaeda and its offshoots, the Iraqi War, the train massacre of Madrid, on March 11, 2004…
It all gives the impression that we have gone crazy, as if the planet is spinning wildly out of control, off track, out of orbit, into darkness rather than into light. We are taken into the heart of darkness… And, there, at the heart of darkness, is there hope? Is there God? Does God care? What’s God doing about it?…
Burundi is a small and ‘insignificant’ (?) country of Africa. In the last decade or so, it has ‘gone through hell and back’ with its civil war and genocides, but, as a microcosm of today’s world, it can also tell us that ‘stars also shine in the midst of darkness.’
Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love and then for the second time in the history of the world humanity will have discovered
fire.
Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
Two tiny episodes from this land little bigger than the state of Maryland, as reported in this issue of the Xaverian Mission Newsletter, point to an answer to those questions with the personal experience of native Burundian Sister Janviere Ndotiyobya and the experiment at reconciliation and dialog at the Kamenge Youth Center initiated by the Xaverian Missionaries there.
God’s saving hand does not permit that evil ultimately overcome; rather, in its divine pervasive ways, is acting in the hearts and minds of men and women. In the midst of all the anxieties of our times, God is with us helping us to clean up the messes.
The following parable may help us understand the point:
One day, a man came to know that God was coming to his house for a visit.
“To visit me?” he worried. “In my house?”
Breathless, he started to scurry through all the rooms, up and down the stairs, up to the attic and down into the cellar. He saw his house with different eyes now that God was about to come.
“This is impossible, woe to me!” he moaned. “I cannot receive him in this disgrace. And it’s so oppressive in here!”
He opened up all the windows and doors, and cried out: “Somebody help me, please, and in a hurry!” And began to sweep the house.
Meanwhile, through the dust that he was lifting up, he saw that someone had come to help: two are better than one. They thrashed out useless garbage into a pile, and put fire to it. On hands and knees they scrubbed floors and staircases; washed all the windows. No corner or hidden place was left untouched. “We’ll never finish,” panted the poor man. And the other, “We’ll finish. We’ll make it!”
They worked side by side all day long, until finally the house looked and smelled as good as new.
When darkness fell, they went to the kitchen to prepare the table.
“Now,” said the man, “God can come. Where do you think he may be waiting?”
”I’m already here,” said the Other, and took his place at the table. “Here, sit down, and eat with me!”
Burundi and many other countries, especially in the developing world, are going through birth pangs and growth spasms. And, as is so often the case, stories of suffering and redemption from such “mission fields” hit us between the eyes with their Gospel message of love that saves and “makes all things new.”
Christopher Fry in A Sleep of Prisoners writes: “Dark and cold we may be, but this is no winter now. The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move. The thunder is the thunder of the floes, the thaw, the upstart spring;. Thank God our time is now, when wrong comes up to face us everywhere, never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took. Affairs are now soul-sized. The enterprise is exploration into God.”
‘The longest stride of soul’ is to see in the Cross of Christ God’s own glory. The cross, upon which the hope of the world is dying, is not the eclipse of that glory but its shining forth, the epiphany of the extent of God’s love for this world.
“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” (1John 3:16). “So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” (1John 4:16).
In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kurtz, a slaver who has spent his days trafficking in human misery, cries out as he dies, “The horror! The horror!” We, too, have looked into the heart of darkness and seen the horror. Yet, at the heart of horror there is hope, because at the heart of horror there is Christ, and hence the worst word is not the last word. There, on that Cross, there is a our God. In that same Cross we see also that of which humanity is capable: all the evidence to the contrary, we are capable of love… God is with us!
(From Xaverian Mission Newsletter)