There are words we say (almost) everyday, and finally there comes a moment when they strike us with an unexpected force. That phrase from the BCP Morning Prayer, which refers to Psalm 24 (“The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it;”), can be read as a phrase taken from one of the never-ending discussions between creationists and the proponents of the evolution theory. Discussions that, I admit freely, do not matter to me at all. Of course, we can always use the material provided by Biblical scholars, and especially the Rabbinic literature. Then we will learn that the proclamation of God being the Lord of the earth, and the earth being a work of his hands and his exclusive possession, doesn’t in fact refer to some primordial past, whose darkness covers the creation of the world, but to our “here and now.” The earth is the Lord’s, so it isn’t ours, it doesn’t belong to us. Neither to us personally, nor to any nation, ethnic or religious group… But who reflects in that way immediately after waking up, before the first cup of coffee?
But suddenly there comes a morning when one turns on the computer and, even before opening the website with the morning prayer, is confronted with something which seems unimaginable. There is a man who murders more than 90 people, because he thinks that the piece of land he happened to be born on should belong only to his own nation. Only his compatriots have the right to live on it, and everyone who thinks otherwise is such a threat that he or she may, or even has to be killed. Even if this is only a teenager who had the bad luck to be at a youth camp of a left wing political party. No, I do not intend to use slogans like, “this is what losing faith in God the Creator leads to.” By the way, it would be especially pointless in this case, because the Norwegian terrorist considers himself a Christian, so if asked about it, he would probably answer without hesitation that he believes in him. Yet those words were with me the whole past day: “The earth is the Lord’s.” The Lord’s, so not Norwegian, not Dutch, not Polish or American. The Lord’s, so the God’s whom we recognize by his will not to keep anything for himself, to give (away) everything he has, and finally to sacrifice himself. That is what we proclaim beginning each day. But if we took a closer look at the reality we create with our own hands: political, social, economical, there is nothing left but to admit honestly that we become unfaithful to those words almost immediately. Naturally, there are only a few among us who reach for weapons and murder other people. And thank God! But this doesn’t change the fact that we treat what was entrusted to us as our own possession. It applies to the world we live in as well as everything in it, including other people. In the next few days we should expect progressing dehumanization of the perpetrator of the Norwegian massacre. All will cut themselves off of him. And there is nothing strange about it, for Anders Behring Breivik crossed a boundary which most of us won’t probably ever cross. The unimaginably enormous evil he committed seems to justify using epithets like those which will probably be used: “inhuman”, “bestial.” Yet at the source of what he did we can find something very human. Something that we normally cherish, but that can be so easily perverted: the sense of being an owner and the desire to protect what is “mine” against “the stranger.” Asked on Facebook what I think of the events in Norway, I answered that in the first place we should pray for the victims: the living as well as the dead ones. I hope that the prayer will be also accompanied by a reflection, for example inspired by those very words: “The earth is the Lord’s for he made it: Come let us adore him.”
