The Stumbling Block

     

        The indignity thrust upon us during the holidays is exceeded only by the price we are expected to pay for it. The vulgar commercial incentives come as reminders that what we cannot afford to buy measures our worth as human beings.  In this dim light reality is not an option. Nevertheless, the spectacular holiday conjunction of a rising U. S. economy alongside unspeakable violence in the Middle East create obscene contrasts. Monday it was violence in southern Russia; Sunday in Iraq and Syria; the day before in Beirut and Sudan. The dead and wounded are like stigmata—moral wounds—that no candle or carol removes while the victims beg to know what in the world we think we’re doing as they die of violence or starvation and we sing carols?

A practical defensive answer might be that we’re shopping our economy back to health. The other answer, the true answer, is that we’re celebrating our well-earned righteousness.  We are calling on the heroism of the Maccabees, the obeisance of three kings, the beautiful music, the mercies of Allah—all understood to be both transcendent expressions of faith and signs of our superior, if competing, cultures  in this world. That’s the real reason bombs are going off from Boston to Kiev.

The vulgarization of faith for purposes of political empowerment or as footstools for our self-righteousness is the stumbling block to religious perspectives actually intended to bend the arc of history toward justice.

It is this failure to see faith as historic purposefulness that can bring everything to ruin.  As a ferocious 2014 looms with its spreading violent moods, its fossil fuel extractions and climate changes, its growing inequality, its chronic high unemployment, its violent perils, the proper exercise of faith will be finding the courage to stop, think and do justice.   

Have a Good New Year!

Judge More Forgive Less?

   The mourning of Nelson Mandela should include remembering the awesome Truth and Reconciliation Commission he created that brought a deeply divided people through a post-Apartheid trial that was like walking on hot coals. At Mandela’s bidding forgiveness for terrible deeds under Apartheid was on offer to all segments in the conflict—provided the truth could be known and genuine regrets were expressed.  His Commission offered amnesty to wrong-doers by seeking truth through their public recollections and confessions of terrible deeds, whether committed by Afrikaner or Black communities.  Many of the petitioners seeking amnesty were not up to that test.

  

   The political problem was whether reconciliation could serve as an alternative to justice.  Coming from a religious tradition whose core was the forgiveness of sins, Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired the Commission’s work and his civic role became a trial of his religious beliefs.  Could the perspectives of faith grant priority to truth-telling and the pronouncing of judgment ?  Commission members were painfully aware of the biblical admonition that exercising such judgment brought judgment down on themselves.  As the hearings proceeded they also became aware that the biblical proscription to judge not lest you be judged could serve as a home for scoundrels.  In the end the Commission granted amnesty to only 849 persons, refusing  it to 5,392 others.*  

     

The exercise of judgment about what is true or false is an uncommon ingredient in the life of most faith communities where respectability is highly valued. However this ritual pattern of avoidance may have ricocheted into the public square. How else do we explain today’s evidence of such large scale financial frauds?  There is irrefutable evidence of dishonest interest rate manipulation in the trillion dollar global LIBOR market.  Bank fraud in the billions includes hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mortgages written by some of our neighbors that destroyed the homes and careers of other neighbors.  This is all old news by now and while the criminal convictions are mounting (nearly a hundred to date), the cultural environment continues to suggest that we take for granted the ordinary social and political practices that cut along a familiar grain not for the purpose of serving the truth but in order to keep a profitable game going.

   

What ingredient is it that leads people to look the other way?

This brings us to the consequences of today’s dangerous reality of growing inequality: the great majority of financial assets are now in the hands of the top one percent of U. S. population.  This is quickly becoming a tipping point about whether future societies will be able to offer opportunity to all their citizens. Some factions in state and federal legislatures are already clamoring to recognize inequality as the new normal.

Could it be that the foundations of Wall Street fraud are actually built in our local faith communities where granting the remission of sins has come to mean skipping judgment and its sometimes painful truths?  A common diagnosis is that guilt ridden people can be freed toward a new life by a ritual that suspends judgment in favor of a nearly infinite amount of forgiveness (“seventy times seven”).  That’s why it’s worth revisiting the painful journey of Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission where truth was one of the arbiters of judgment. 

*[See Department of Justice and Constitutional Development of the Republic of South Africa, The Truth and Reconciliation Official Website at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans/index.htm]