here
is an awful lot of suffering in the world.
“There are tragedies which affect countless innocent victims whose
cries of terror and suffering are a challenge to the consciences of all decent
men and women,” decries Pope John Paul II.
Yet, this we would prefer to ignore.
For a culture that is said to be addicted to violence, we can’t stomach
much of it, only the sanitized version on TV.
We express horror at the shootings inflicted by thugs and gangs on our
streets, but such mayhem is mild compared with the personal and neighborly
hacking done in Rwanda and the Democratic Congo, Sudan and Sierra Leone, Kosovo
and Indonesia, Algeria and…
There is a warning in folk-singer Pete Seeger’s verse:
“This story is never going to end
with everybody looking the other way,
getting lost in let’s-pretend
trying to make it through another day.
It comes a time we must face the reality
of what’s taking place.”
Indeed, as Edmund Burke’s oft-quoted aphorism goes, all that’s needed for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Since we are the good people Burke was talking about, it’s not enough to blame the bad guys, individual culprits, this or the other group, the liberals or the conservatives, the rich or the poor. We are the good people. We are basically well-meaning. If we stop to think about the hurt done to the innocent of Africa or Kosovo, the women and children of Sierra Leone, our pity runs over. But confronted by our impotence to do anything, we take refuge in our daily lives where our smaller tribulations are more easily assuaged by the personal consolations nearly all of us enjoy. We may even take refuge in religion which we think of as an individual, pietistic thing. But that is selfish if it does not issue forth in social action. Traditional charity – giving alms to the poor – makes them feel humiliated but you – the giver – great. But empowering them is the other way around. You have to not only feed the poor but help change the system so that there won’t be poor. You have to teach them how to help themselves. “No man is an island,” and for that one must get involved, be it even in politics. Perhaps it’s a cheap shot to put the guilt trip on such good people as we with faraway suffering. But then returns the warning: evil will triumph if the good do nothing. So goes the merry-go-around./ How can we do anything that will matter, either to the child-soldiers of Sierra Leone or the war-lords elsewhere? Even in this most powerful nation on earth, we individuals are remarkably devoid of the capacity to do big-time good. Or so it seems most of the time. What could we do then? A thousand things. But in the face of that awful suffering our best efforts seem a thousand helpless gestures.
Write to your senator? Organize a march? Collect food and clothing? Join an international movement for justice and peace? What good will that do vis-a-vis Slobodam Milosevich or the Hutu killers? We shouldn’t fool ourselves that we have ready answers. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that that gets us off the hook either.
What Gospel is that?
A church that doesn’t provoke any crises,
a gospel that doesn’t unsettle,
a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin,
what gospel is that?
Very nice, pious considerations that don’t bother anyone;
that’s the way many would like preaching to be.
Those people who avoid every thorny matter
so as not to be harassed,
so as not to have conflicts and difficulties,
do not light up the world they live in.
Oscar Romero
Archbishop of El Salvador, assassinated at the altar, on March 24, 1980
There is a basic debate that needs to be joined about “what is good people can and should do.” World events demand that the debris of old answers and clichés be stripped away. Our old pieties were no use to the Tutsis who begged to be shot by the UN troop to avoid being hacked to death by Hutu killers. Even in that we failed them.
Yet, on our planet, on the eve of the year 2000, the millennium, most of us are basically good. That means there is something we must do. For starters, one thing we can not do. We can look at them. Not turn away from them. Keep them in our minds, speak of them. Think and speak of their pain; the unspeakable injustice, of the politicians no one had the courage or the strategy to hold accountable. Think and speak of all this until it becomes unpopular and unseemly not to think of them and speak of their pain. Good people that we are, it’s the least we can do.
But we are also people of a faith, a faith that sustains life, a faith in a God who has died to give life, a faith that refuses to give in to evil. Ours is the faith of a church which must preach the Gospel, even in the midst of contradictions. It’s called to ask forgiveness for sins of the past, such as the commence of slaves. It must beat its breast for having allied itself to colonial governments. It must today run the risk to be on the side of protest. It must still weigh if the struggle for justice and peace and democracy at specific moments and situations is going to cost blood and tears.
The Church must use its prestige to raise its voice for the “voiceless”. On the other hand, its missionaries and prophets may be kidnapped to attract the world’s attention, or to be used as human shields, or even as bargaining chips. In certain grave circumstances, missionaries will have to choose between denouncing atrocities and then leaving the country after shaking the dust off their sandals, or remaining as a thorn on the side of the unjust system until they are expelled, or suffering in silence in the midst of and with their people to share their pain.
That same faith requires commitment and personal witnessing. One of the greatest evils of the day is the sense of futility. People say, “What can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?”
Our own Dorothy Day, in her prophetic voice, give us an answer: “… we can only lay down one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform our actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.”
Every act in favor of justice and peace prolongs the divine action: “Blessed are those who promote peace, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.” True, then, is the popular saying which comes from Mozambique “When good people walk together, it is good medicine indeed.”
(From Xaverian Mission Newsletter)