Two visions for How to Be in the World, shared a week ago, on Easter Sunday, the Christian world’s holiest day of the year, the veritable heart of the faith that has buoyed billions of people over the millennia.
First, excerpts from Pope Francis’s final papal address, his last full day on earth:
“Today at last, the singing of the “alleluia” is heard once more in the Church, passing from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart, and this makes the people of God throughout the world shed tears of joy…Jesus is not in the tomb, he is alive! Love has triumphed over hatred, light over darkness and truth over falsehood. Forgiveness has triumphed over revenge. Evil has not disappeared from history; it will remain until the end, but it no longer has the upper hand; it no longer has power over those who accept the grace of this day.
In the passion and death of Jesus, God has taken upon himself all the evil in this world and in his infinite mercy has defeated it. He has uprooted the diabolical pride that poisons the human heart and wreaks violence and corruption on every side.
What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world! How much violence we see, often even within families, directed at women and children! How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants! On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas! For all of us are children of God!
I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the “weapons” of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death! May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
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And now: from the President of the United States:
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Speaks for itself, that second Easter message does, and I will say no more about it here. Let’s instead visit a little more about the first.
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As longtime readers might remember, I grew up Catholic before realizing even before my teen years the then-church’s lingering emphasis on shame, fear, repression and harsh judgment of those not of the faith made no sense for me.
So I implored my parents to let me decide my own fate upon my confirmation at age 12, and though I maintain an abiding respect for the abundant ritual, social service and moral seriousness of the church at its best, I was outta there within a few heartbeats of my confirmation.
These many decades later, the church’s long averted gaze from the rampant pedophilia of priests and continuing refusal to recognize the full humanity of women still represent dark stains on the faith.
Now: suppose Pope Francis had come along a couple of years before my feelings about the faith coalesced and I had heard something like this come from his mouth, as it did in this Vatican radio speech in 2013:
“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!… If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”
I’ll never know how that message would have played for me if I’d heard it in my early teens instead of my 60s. But I do know this: It would be difficult to cite a more inclusive vision and example of what most all religions portray as the limitless love and grace reflected in the creation. And that is no small matter at all.
The desire for doing good and having good done for us, for loving and being truly loved, undergirds the deepest longings of all human beings, the source of which religions, in one form or other, ascribe to an idea of God, Infinity or the Absolute.
And what Pope Francis said about that is: Don’t worry about whether your “belief” in that idea is good enough to deserve the experience of that love. It is good enough if you just do good.
And listen up now because this is important: Not all at once, not every time!
Not perfectly.
You can instead “go slowly, gently, little by little,” to create a “culture of encounter.” Flawed imperfect human to flawed imperfect human, one slow, gentle—or even hard—step at a time. Do that much, and “we will meet one another there.”
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So: what kind of world is humankind longing to build in the year 2025? One in which “contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants?”
One in which we dare not “hope anew…and revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas?’
This regard for the stranger, the dispossessed, the migrant poor fleeing persecution and violence, runs through Christianity in a straight line, at least rhetorically, from Jesus Christ right through to Pope Francis. That Francis made a point of it with increasing resolve in recent years is only to say he took to heart the words and actions of Jesus himself, who always excoriated hate, retribution, revenge and denial of other’s humanity.
Along with, repeatedly: indifference to the poor.
When my parents fled Budapest in a cattle car just before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1944, they were making an emergency migration to what they hoped was a modicum of safety in Weimar, Germany, off the beaten and bombed path of World War II. The Russians were invading Hungary from the east on their way to Germany to finish off the war, in loose concert with Americans and English coming from the west.
“We were hoping the Americans would reach us first because we were more afraid of the Russians,” my dad told me in a series of interviews I did with my parents once I got old enough to realize the treasure of their stories.
Tales of Russians’ astounding cruelty to vanquished peoples preceded their invasion of Hungary, and with my parents dodging both American and Russian bombs through 1944, any niceties about crossing national borders without proper credentials were far down on their list of concerns.
Notably, the people of Weimar did not reject the many refugees coming their way. My mother said some expressed concern only because they thought it would prolong the war, which they were good and sick of and wanted only for it to end.
Ultimately, my parents stayed in various German cities for another six years—their family grown to three children by then—as displaced persons until their number came up on the roulette wheel of life and we were granted admittance to the United States, home at the time of the free and welcoming and forward-looking people who had helped clinch the victory over the dark fearful apostles of hate and oppression.
Those fleeing war zones are looking only for survival, especially if they have children in tow. (My mother was seven months pregnant with my older sister at the time.) That is true whether the wars are between nations, drug cartels or roving gangs in failed states.
No, this doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be properly controlled and vetted borders. But it does mean that each case must be judged on its own merits, and the default position of every civilized country should be to affirm human dignity by assisting those ravaged by the horrors that every war, civil strife and natural catastrophe visits upon our fellow humans.
All the more so when that country, the most prosperous in world history, claims to be in solidarity with a poor Jewish carpenter with no fixed home or income who wandered the desert and towns of Palestine 2,000 years ago relying on the kindness of strangers, accompanied by a ragtag band of under-employed wanderers he convinced to follow along with him, spreading a message of unbounded love, mercy and redemption for all.
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Migrants Mass 2019 by Catholic Church (England and Wales) https://www.flickr.com/photos/catholicism/
Drew, now is the perfect time for you sit down at your typewriter (sounds better than laptop) and pour your heart and soul into a story about the resilience of the Hidas family to endure and overcome the ordeals of the Second World War and its nightmarish aftermath. I see a family of Hungarian immigrants standing on the Ellis Island pier with more hope than luggage (I bet) and having little or no idea what the future held for them; it’s a timeless tale. You’re such an excellent writer, get to it! Hell, how many years have I been telling you to write it? 50? I guess I’m done chastising you…at least for a few months anyway.
The Easter messages from Trump and Pope Francis, while galaxies apart, need to be sculpted in stone, side by side, to capture the true meaning of the Agony and the Ecstasy.
I am certain of one thing: If our “Christian” President were to read your blog, he’d have no idea who the hell that kind, poor, homeless Jewish carpenter is you were referring to.
Well, ClaireBob, I had my big fat 40-or-so-year file of “Hidas Family History” out on my dining room table again yesterday brushing up/confirming a few matters with respect to this post, and was telling myself much the same thing. Time’s not exactly wasting, because my days feel full, but it is most certainly slipping away, the hourglass doing what it always does. I do take your advice to heart, though, appreciate it deeply, and would just need to figure out how I’m going to make it all work, especially given how humbling it is trying to nail down so much of the factual/historical architecture I’d need to support a book project—and without wholly giving up this blog!
Anyway: yes, love the image of Agony-Ecstasy for Trump & Francis. As shockingly inappropriate as Trump always is, he still manages to reach new lows with regularity. Reading this post from Easter Sunday was one of those lows; I kept going over it thinking if I read something like this blind, not knowing the writer, I would think the person surely wrote it from either an asylum or a maximum security prison. But alas, it was written in the White House—’nuff said!
Two people further apart on the good-evil spectrum than The Pope and The Donald is unimaginable. Using his resources to help the needy and feed the hungry rather than instilling fear and fueling hatred is beyond the soulless bounds of The Donald. The Pope was a man of such feeling and empathy that he was beloved, rightfully, by millions of people around the globe. The disgust we all feel for The Donald and the respect we hold for Pope Francis may well fill response boxes for this post for a long time; hopefully lifting up the light offered by The Pope as much, or more, than serving our need to vent on the darkness of and hopelessness offered by our president. Meanwhile, I agree with ClaireBob that a written history of the Hidas family would be a wonderful read for all. I also know firsthand that writing family histories is all-consuming and that you are in no way overestimating the effort and time required of such an undertaking.
Thanks for this, Jay. Your remark about “lifting up the light offered by The Pope as much, or more, than serving our need to vent on the darkness of and hopelessness offered by our president” is a helpful mantra for these times. Necessary, even, if we are to avoid lapsing into cynicism and despair. Most people, most of the time, stay on the side of their better angels, which we thankfully realize every day in our encounters with the regular world of friends, neighbors and commerce, outside the poisonous bubble of today’s beltway politics. Important that we cleave to that in our darker moments!