The state murder of Jakelin Caal Maquin and the cruelly awful response of the political and journalistic establishment to it has taken out what seasonal feeling I'd had.
I was going to post something from The Gospel In Solentiname, one of my favorite books of theology, but I listened to the Daily TV Mass broadcast I didn't listen to on Saturday and the homily by Fr. Jack Lynch made the same point in a different way, comparing the insights of people who live lives most like those who first heard and recorded the Gospels to what he learned in one of the foremost university schools of theology in North America. I'll save the insights of the peasants from Solentiname for later this week. The transcription is mine, including all its faults.
You know, as we prepare for Christmas during this time of advent it's a time of expectation but it's also a time to acknowledge that, somehow, God is present in our history, God is present in the events of our daily lives. And I keep thinking back to a time when I lived in Peru many years ago and I got a little bit anxious when one of the sisters came up to me and said, you know we've got to get ready for Christmas. And I, living in a very poor area in a barrio which was characterized by unemployment, people didn't have a great deal to eat and I kept thinking how do you celebrate the feast of Joy, the Feast of Christmas in this particular milieu.
She called together some of the leaders of the people and together we read the Scriptures and the Scriptures, particularly from Luke about the shepherds. As I listened to people speaking about what those readings meant to them, I realized that the men were really taken with the shepherds and I said, What is it you see in these men? And they said, they're like us. They often times were looked down on because they didn't keep the law, the Sabbath. They were poor and yet here they are the ones that were promised the Messiah, to see the Messiah. And they said, that's the gift, the gift that Christmas is for us. Just as they were invited to go and see the Messiah, we too are invited, we too are listening to those words so we recognize that God is to us, the Lord is with us and that's really the gift of Christmas, that God is with us at all times and at all places in all things.
And as I listened to them I was a little bit ashamed because I kept thinking of my time in all the classes and all the time here at the University of Toronto studying theology but I never heard such a lived reality of waiting for a God who was inviting them to believe in themselves.
They had to accept that Jesus was one of them, the Messiah and in so doing that was God's gift to them. To believe in themselves as people loved by God. And here I was listening to these men telling me that's the significance of for us.
That's what it means that God came to be with us God is with us now but God invites us to believe that we are People loved by God. And I think that so often we get lost up in activity and shopping and I thank God I'm beyond that to a certain degree, that I don't get caught up in all the shopping but you listen to the running and yet sometimes we often miss the significance of the Incarnation, this is God who entered history God who is one with us, God who walks with us God was present to us and invites to believe that God walks with us day in and day out.
I am coming to think one of the biggest mistakes that Christianity ever made was to be so impressed with the attitude of the so-called "enlightenment" that it was made to feel embarrassed at the incredible audacity of its central holdings such as the ones that Fr. Lynch sets out - holdings he had to be reminded of and which became more real to him through the articulation of poor Peruvians who understood that, especially for them, that audacity, that audacious holding is their life's blood, the thing they can have that no corrupt local, regional, national or world powers can take from them.
In one of his talks Walter Brueggemann talks about having a discussion with the janitor in the building he taught in at I forget which university it was. The janitor wanted to know what this eschatology that was always being downgraded, the eschatological content of Christianity that was so unfashionable in the university. Brueggemann told him that it concerned the last days, the final judgement, the long delayed day of justice. I don't know how far he went with that, I would go so far as the final redemption of all things, when God finally convinces all creatures of the truth, etc. He said that the janitor said that if they got rid of that he would have nothing, no hope at all. That's something that's a lot more important to you the closer to having nothing you are, I'd imagine. I think that janitor's insistence on believing in that means more than all of the dismissal of eschatological theology that I've read no matter how reputable and currently fashionable it is.
I understand the problem often pointed out with the obsession with personal salvation and the indictment that that has resulted in the distortion of Christianity, decidedly for the worse. But I will point out that the theology that seeks to redress that excess by getting rid of it will never be acceptable to the very people that James and Paul supported over the rich (who James pointed out were the ones attacking them), the people that Paul was told to remember, the ones who Jesus said would be first in the Kingdom of God. That certainly has to count for something. I mean, they're not, by and large, the ones who are responsible for the excesses and distortions.
No comments:
Post a Comment