Repairing the world

Loukas posted a link to Berdyaev´s reflections on hell in a few places on FB, among others in the discussion group ´Gnoza – poznanie duchowe’ (Gnosis – spiritual cognizance). Several comments were written under the link, and one of them contained, among other things, these words:

There is a mess in the world, in human heads there is hell which manifests itself in reality, and the ruler of this world is not a nice… daddy. At most, he likes games. And we are only players on this scene, we have our lousy and boring (mostly, for sometimes tragic) roles to play in this pathetic show.

It is often said about Anglicans that they represent a rather optimistic view of the world, the human being and her capacity. Despite the official refusal of Pelagianism (for example in Article IX of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England), the spirit of Pelagius, with his deep conviction that the human being, working hard on himself, is able to overcome sin and attain perfection, deeply penetrated the English religiosity, and in the 16th and 17th century it was additionally strengthened by the ideals of Renessaince humanism (the Rev. Alan Jones not without a reason writes of Anglicans : “We are, if you will, Erasmian Catholics”).

The mausoleum of J.A. Comenius in Naarden, the Netherlands

This is a difficult issue for me. The Renessaince faith in human progress, in the power of his spirit makes a tremendous impression. When I read, for example, the writings of John Amos Comenius , whose thought is a kind of bridge between the ideals of Renessaince and the upcoming new epoch, I can be really amazed by the ‘study of wisdom, which elevates us and makes us steadfast and noble-minded – the study to which we have given the name of morality and of piety, and by means by which we are exalted above all creatures and draw nigh to God himself.’ On the other hand, however (and here my, in a sense very Protestant, upbringing plays a role) my assessment of human (and in the first place my own) behavior leads me towards the vision of the Anglican priest and founder of Methodism, John Wesley , which the Rev. Gregory Neal describes in his book Grace upon Grace as follows:

We are totally incapable of responding to God without God first calling us, and empowering us, to have faith. This seeking of God, and this empowerment, is known in theological circles as ‘prevenient grace’ …. Prior to prevenient grace we not only lack an ability to say “yes” to God, we even lack the desire to come to God.

But here I have to add something immediately. Living in the “Calvinist” (at least until recently ;)) Holland and being a graduate of one of the most prestigious theological schools of the Reformed tradition, I perfectly realise that SUCH ATTITUDE LEADS MANY CHRISTIANS TO A PATHOLOGICAL SENSE OF GUILT. The Dutch psychologist Aleid Schilder, herself coming from an Orthodox Calvinist background, wrote a shocking book about this, ‘Hulpeloos maar schuldig. Het verband tussen een gereformeerde paradox en depressie’ (Helpless yet guilty. The link between the Reformed paradox and depression), which I sincerely recommend to anyone preparing a sermon about human sinfulness (not only to Calvinists, by the way, and even not only to Protestants). Unfortunately, in the church there is no shortage of those who believe that the human being has to be denigrated first, deprived of any sense of self-esteem and self-respect, in order then – all the more easily – to show him “the only way out” in the form of Divine grace. But then you often have to face not only the “sinful nature” but also depression and its consequences. “Proving” people that “[we are] so corrupt that we are wholly incapable of doing any good, and inclined to all wickedness” (as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it) has about itself something of a firefighter-arsonist who first sets fire and then heroically battles it. Personally, I have to confess, I talk little about sin and I cannot even remember when I used this word in a sermon. My caution results above all from the fact that I simply know that in the congregation I minister to many were fed with sermons on this topic for many years, and hurt by them very much. As a pastor I would like to help rebuild their self-confidence rather than question it. Sometimes, however – rather in private conversations than in the pulpit – I use the word ‘sin’ when I see that somebody ‘entangles’ himself in the experience of his failures and shortcomings, and succumbs to a sense of hopelessness. Then I talk of sin, but above all of GRACE, WHICH, FOR IT IS GRACE, IS A GIFT THAT YOU DON’T HAVE TO ‘EARN’ OR ‘MERIT’. It is simply given – to us all (forgive me, Orthodox Calvinists, I am a convinced Arminian !). ‘Doof de hel in mijn hoofd’ (Extinguish hell in my head), I sing in one of Huub Oosterhuis hymns, and I truly believe, even if sometimes with great difficulty, that He (or She) whom I call God really does it: without any effort of mine, for when I try to extinguish it myself, I mostly only fan the flames…

For my problem with the words written under Loukas’ link is that THERE IS A GREAT NEED IN ME TO AGREE WITH THEM AND ‘WRITE OFF’ THIS ‘VALLEY OF TEARS’, AND LOOK FOR A BETTER PLACE FOR MY ‘HIGHER SELF.’ Better than this world and better than myself, for I like both rather rarely…. Why don´t I do this? I don’t know, actually! I believe that there is no rational explanation for it. I cannot put forward any argument against these words. I can only say that, even though it is often difficult for me to thank God for creating me, that I often see it as an expression of his sense of humor which is definitely not mine, that I’m also convinced that all escapism is a form of BETRAYAL, an expression of INFIDELITY to the FEELING (OR RATHER HOPE), arising perhaps not very often, but arising nonetheless that THAT MY/OUR BEING HERE HAS A SENSE, A PURPOSE, THAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO PLAY A ROLE HERE WHICH IS NOT A ROLE IN A LOUSY COMEDY WRITTEN BY AN EVIL (OR INCOMPETENT) DEMIURGE. This feeling is very weak, and, above all, very often seems completely unfounded. Yet it’s this very weakness and unfoundedness that attracts me in it. It’s easy like hell(!) to succumb to feelings that have some rational foundation, “follow the voice of reason.” But the thing is to listen to another voice – probably the weakest and saying the most crazy things: that there is a God who has madly fallen in love with us and that we have to respond to his love somehow. Maybe it is in this feeling that “prevenient grace” reveals itself in my life?

One of my most important spiritual teachers, rabbi Lawrence Kushner , writes:

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

In sixteenth-century Safed, Rabbi Isaac Luria observed that in his world, like ours, many things seemed to be wrong. People suffered from hunger, disease, hatred, and war. “How could God allow such terrible things to happen?” wondered Luria. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “it is because God needs our help.” He explained his answer with a mystical story.

When first setting out to make the world, God planned to pour a Holy Light into everything in order to make it real. God prepared vessels to contain the Holy Light. But something went wrong. The light was so bright that the vessels burst, shattering into millions of broken pieces like dishes dropped on the floor. The Hebrew phrase that Luria used for this “breaking of the vessels” is sh’virat ha-kaylim.

Our world is a mess because it is filled with broken fragments. When people fight and hurt one another, they allow the world to remain shattered. The same can be said of people who have pan­tries filled with food and let others starve. According to Luria, we live in a cosmic heap of broken pieces, and God cannot repair it alone.

That is why God created us and gave us freedom of choice. We are free to do whatever we please with our world. We can allow things to remain broken or, as Luria urged, we can try to repair the mess. Luria’s Hebrew phrase for “repairing the world” is tikkun olam.

As Jews, our most important task in life is to find what is bro­ken in our world and repair it. The commandments in the Torah instruct us, not only on how to live as Jews, but on how to mend creation.

And a bit further he draws very simple and amazingly concrete conclusions from this:

When you see something that is broken, fix it. When you find something that is lost, return it. When you see something that needs to be done, do it. In that way, you will take care of your world and repair creation. If all the people in the world were to do so, our world would truly be a Garden of Eden, the way God meant it to be. If everything broken could be repaired, then everyone and every­thing would fit together like the pieces of one gigantic jigsaw puzzle. But, for people to begin the great task of repairing creation, they first must take responsibility.

It’s interesting how this idea of the reparation/transformation of the world returns in the reflections of the Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori:

What sort of religion do you practice? We won’t get it perfectly right until the Second Coming, but we also always have another opportunity. This community called the Church is a laboratory for lovers. If we can learn to love each other here, we can transform the world.

I can hear the loud laughter of some readers (or is it perhaps my own?): ‘The church as a laboratory for lovers’? Forgive me, but does our PB have eyes and ears and sometimes use them? For millions of people the churches are the last places where one can learn practicing love, they are places where people and the world are treated in a way completely devoid of love! There is no doubt that Bishop Katharine describes the church ‘at its best,’ which rather rarely is like that in practice – also in Anglicanism. But it’s difficult to deny (or maybe even not to allow ourselves to be captured by?) what she writes further:

At its best, Anglicanism has always held up comprehensiveness as one of its highest values. We don’t all have to agree. There can be more than one right answer. This turf is God’s, not ours,
and it’s broader and more expansive―even greener―than we are capable of imagining. We have said, from our Celtic Christian beginnings, and explicitly from at least the time of Elizabeth I, that the middle way, the middle road, is the most important, because there is something vital to be gained and learned from the people on both shoulders. Gamaliel, the perennial pragmatist in the book of Acts, says, “Well, what you’re about may not be right, but we’ll just have to wait and see what comes of it. If it is of God, then there won’t be any stopping it.”

God in Christ is our peace. In Jesus we are made into a body, one body. But we are not made into uniform creatures, all with the same characteristics, gifts, and ways of being. Can you imagine a football team made up of only quarterbacks―or place-kickers? They’d lose every game. What happens when a farmer grows the same crop in the same field year after year? It quickly exhausts the fertility of the soil or it succumbs to insects and diseases―or both. George Orwell, in his novel 1984, began to imagine for us what a monochromatic human culture would look like. Such a society is totalitarian, prone to violence, and finds it very difficult to be creative or produce new life.

It may be more comfortable to live where everyone agrees with us, but it also quickly becomes boring, stagnant, and dead. Living with people who disagree with us may be challenging, but it is the only route to creativity. The fruit of those challenging relationships will be far more than any one of us could accomplish in isolation. When Jesus says that being angry with our brothers and sisters makes us liable to judgment, that’s what he means―we lose our ability to really live, and to be creative builders of the reign of God. When we insult and reject the people we disagree with, we just make it worse- we exile ourselves from that creative community of godliness. We put ourselves in hell.

This ‘at its best’ is important – for we shouldn’t think that ‘real Anglicanism’ achives this so well! If someone says so, he deceives – himself and others. But I experience something of this in the reality of the church none the less, including in the reality of Anglican communities. And not speaking about this experience would be deception as well… But let us leave the church institution with the countless accusations we can level at it! Let’s come back to ourselves – to how we play the role of ‘lovers.’ In his reflections inspired by the BCP, Bishop Edmond Lee Browning, one of Bishop Katharine’s predecessors, asks:

…God calls us to show the world what love is by loving our enemies. How on earth do you do that? How do you love someone who has hurt you and is likely to hurt you again, someone the mention of whose very name makes you angry?

I think now of people hurt in a really terrible way by others (also by church people!). ‘The commandment to love thy neighbor’ can become an unbearable burden for them. Perhaps those who think that Jesus requires impossible things of us are simply right? Bishop Edmond writes further:

Perhaps it will help to note that we don’t have to like a person to show him the love of Christ; it is a decision, not a feeling. In fact, the very dislike you are feeling can form the basis of your prayer for the one with whom you find vourself at odds; this situation of enmity is hurtful to you and can be offered to a loving God in prayer.

It may be that you and that person will never be on intimate terms. You may rub each other the wrong wayfor the rest of your lives. Not everybody is everybody else’s best friend. But praying for an enemy drains the venom out of your heart, and nobody needs a heart full of venom. The love God plants in your
heart may indeed be love from a considerable distance, but there is no heart in which God cannot plant love if we are willing.

It so happens that almost every Sunday during the Eucharist I pray for someone who claims that our Polish project violates the rights of another Anglican Church. This is not easy, even though I don’t see this person as a personal enemy. Quite to the contrary – we met each other only once, but I have the best memories of this meeting. Yet his attitude to what we are doing, convinced that this is what we are called to do at the moment, hurts me. This is an extremely teaching experience. Even in such a situation where you can hardly speak of personal injury, where it’s actually only about a disagreement, it is not easy to pray for someone honestly. But when I manage to do it, I feel that something changes. Perhaps I manage to repair even the smallest cog in the mechanism of this crazy world?

Loukas just posted the following fragment of Berdyaev’s text on FB:

If people were morally more sensitive they would direct the whole of their moral will and spirit towards delivering from the torments of hell every being they had ever met in life. It is a mistake to think that this is what people do when they help to develop other men’s moral virtues and to strengthen them in the true faith. The true moral change is a change of attitude towards the “ wicked ” and the doomed, a desire that they too should be saved, i.e. acceptance of their fate for oneself, and readiness to share it. This implies that I cannot seek salvation individually, by my solitary self, and make my way into the Kingdom of God relying on my own merits. … Paradise is inpossible for me if the people I love, my friends or relatives or mere acquaintances, will be in hell … All this kind of thing has become impossible for us, and that is a tremendous moral progress. … Moral consciousness began with God’s question, “ Cain, where is thy brother Abel? ” It will end with another question on the part of God: “Abel, where ix thy brother Cain?

I wonder if I can add anything to it. Probably not…

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