Fwd.: Compassion and Revenge.

[Donald Schell]

Dear Howard,

Your question is important-

> The motives for the attacks may not be pain, fear and desperation in your
> naive view of the events.  Why not hatred, envy and religious zeal as the
> motives?

I imagine the whole range of things you have named may be in the motivation
of the perpetrators.

Because I believe God made us good and that nothing we choose ever wholly
unmakes that goodness, and also

because I believe that demonizing the enemy and allow ourselves to imagine
that enemy to be wholly unlike us is a move that we humans have made again
and again, and that when we imagine another human being to be wholly hateful
(rather than the mixed perpetrator of a hateful act) we continue the cycle
of the evil we suffered.  Our blindness and over-simplification makes us
like the perpetrators
and also

because I believe that patience and the hard work of seeking compassionate
understanding of enemies is the doorway, a manageable first step to the
loving of them which Jesus demands of us in the Gospels,

I mean it when I say your question is important.  I would range or order the
five motives you have named in a sequence like this -

badly hurt and fearful people, people who believe they have nothing to lose,
become desperate and look for someone to blame,
envy and their sense of emptiness, loss and deprivation shapes their
understanding of the one or ones they blame and predisposes them toward
destruction,
then religious rationalizations get invoked to 'justify' hating those they
envy, to discount their humanity and act against them in destructive,
hateful, murderous, and self-destructive ways.

As I was being robbed at gunpoint on the street a couple of years ago, I
realized in the very moment when the man appeared out of the dark and
pointed the gun at me that he was far more frightened than I was, in fact
frightened and desperate enough that I needed to do the thinking for both of
us if we were going to avert further tragedy.  I say 'further tragedy'
because I felt the tragedy of the confrontation itself the instant it
presented itself.  This stranger was my brother, like Cain, ready to kill
me, but my brother.

Last year when I stopped the car and jumped out to break up a fight where
two people were beating up a third on the street,  knowing that at base fear
and desperation it what would provoke the willingness of those two to kill
the third enabled me to act decisively to startle and frighten the two so
they ended their attack and ran.  My 'threat' to them was only that I ran
toward them, arms upraised screaming 'STOP!' at the top of my lungs.

This is a pilgrim conversation, so I think it's appropriate to offer that
Matamoros is a terrifying distortion of St. James and one which matters to
us, which demands our reflection.  It appeared predictably when Christian
Spain had a feared and scapegoated enemy.  They wanted to know that God was
on their side and purported visions of the apostle of Jesus fighting for
them seemed reassuring.   The camino cleansed its pilgrims of that folly.
Any of us who have walked the Camino know that the steps we talk in the path
which is so much larger and older than we are and the daily experience of
walking alongside strangers who become companions for their walking daily
strips from us the stance of enemy.  We see it in the iconography too, as
James and then the rest of the disciples, eventually even Jesus appear in
pilgrim guise, humble peaceful walkers in God's path. God creates communion,
compassion and joyful (or sometimes painful) desire to understand the other
from walking together.

When God claims 'vengeance is mine' in the Bible, what I hear there is that
it is the clarity that venegeance NEVER ours.  The terrorist acts that
killed so many in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania are hateful,
blasphemous acts.  If they were committed in the name of Allah, that only
heightens the blasphemy.  'Allah' is simply a name for God in Arabic.
Arabic speaking Christians, Jews, and Muslims all use that ordinary Arabic
word for God and killing in the name of God (or of Justice for that matter)
is blasphemy.  It was when blasphemy when these acts were perpetrated.  The
blasphemy poses us a choice.  I pray that we (not just as individuals but as
a nation) will not imitate the blasphemy of the perpetrators in some
vengeful strike at men, women, and children whose 'sin' is being Muslim or
Arab.  Why is our nation talking about 'paying them back.'  There is no
exchange ('repayment') that can balance this loss.  No number of innocent
dead will heal our hurt, though that would appear to be paying back in kind.
No horrifying level of torture of those directly responsible will heal our
hurt either.  Faintly (and it is faintly) we may see or feel that 'our' hurt
is the hurt of the human family.  How do we heal?  It begins with calmly
working with Arab nations to apprehend those responsible and try them in an
international court of law.

love,
donald

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