Saturday, October 19, 2024
Memorial of Saints John de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues, Priests, and Companions, Martyrs
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Prophets
Do not worry about what your defense will be, or about what you are to say.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s 20th century transcendent prose broke through the everyday assumptions of both Christians and Jewish believers. Plough Magazine compiled a series of the rabbi’s essays entitled Thunder in the Soul, which constitute a gateway to his thought. As one reviewer said, reading just the titles themselves “offers material for extended reflection:”
   Every Moment Touches Eternity
   The Only Life Worth Living
   In the Presence of Mystery
   The Prophets Show us God Cares
   God Demands Justice
   Modernity Has Forfeited the Spirit
   Prayer is Being Known by God
   A Pattern for Living
   The Deed is Wiser than the Heart
   Something is Asked of Us
   Faith is an Act of the Spirit
   Not Our Vision of God but God’s Vision of Us
Here are parts of “God Demands Justice,” excerpted in a recent issue of Plough Magazine.
The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man’s fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man: no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of this world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophets’ words.
The prophets had disdain for those to whom God was comfort and security; to them God was a challenge, an incessant demand. He is compassion, but not a compromise; justice, but not inclemency. Tranquility is unknown to the soul of a prophet. The miseries of the world give him no rest. While others are callous, and even callous to their callousness and unaware of their insensitivity, the prophets remain examples of supreme impatience with evil, distracted by neither might nor applause, by neither success nor beauty. Their intense sensitivity to right and wrong is due to their intense sensitivity to God’s concern for right and wrong. They feel fiercely because they hear deeply.
The prophets tried to overcome the isolationism of religion. It is the prophets who teach us that the problem of living does not arise with the question of how to take care of the rascals, of how to prevent delinquency or hideous crimes. The problem of living begins with the realization of how we all blunder in dealing with our fellow men. The silent atrocities, the secret scandals, which no law can prevent, are the true seat of moral infection. The problem of living begins, in fact, in relation to our own selves, in the handling of our emotional functions, in the way we deal with envy, greed, and pride.
In today’s stories of Saints Brebeuf and Jogues, and companions, I felt horrified by the descriptions of depravity and torture the men endured at the hands of Canadian and American Indians, especially the Mohawks and Iroquois. These 17th century Jesuits were not alone. Their brothers were first welcomed, then rejected in Japan (see the book and movie Silence), and in many other parts of the world.
But in this case we may not have anyone to tell the stories of the Indians themselves, as James Michener told in his novel about the missionaries who traveled to Hawaii. A book about Daniel Boone which I’ve been reading manages a two-sided version of the white man’s exploitation of the Indians and the Indians’ response. What does Heschel say?
 The problem of living begins with the realization of how we all blunder in dealing with our fellow men.
Heschel wrote most of his best books after escaping from Europe before the full extent of the Nazi genocide became evident. It’s clear in his writing that he did not feel sorry for himself, and that he insisted on the truism that we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. As he reads the prophets he helps us see that they, too, knew this truth.
Plough Magazine’s editors respond as best they can to the tenor of the time, to the vitriol,  one-sided arguments and close-mindedness on every political side everywhere – in the US, in Israel, in Europe, Venezuela, Korea, Sudan, Congo, etcetera. In 2016 Parker Palmer wrote Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit. Palmer encouraged clarifying discussions between people with different thoughts working toward the ideal of agreeing to disagree. I loved that book then, and I love it now:
Are we faithful to the better angels of our nature and to what they call forth from us? Are we faithful to the eternal conversation of the human race, to speaking and listening in a way that takes us closer to truth? Are we faithful to the call of courage that summons us to witness to the common good, even against great odds? When faithfulness is our standard, we are more likely to sustain our engagement with tasks that will never end: doing justice, loving mercy, and calling the beloved community into being. (p. 193)
In Evansville last Sunday at the downtown Methodist church I joined a hundred or so folks as the pastor quietly pointed out that since we usually feel defensive about our thoughts on politics and religion, we don’t express them. What’s left? The weather? But nobody much cares about the weather, it turns out that we just don’t talk at all. There are plenty of headlines to read and opinions on TV, but as far as it goes with our flesh and blood friends and neighbors, there’s nothing much left that’s safe to discuss except what isn’t worth discussing.
Not good.
Still, the “better angels” clamor for a hearing. Heschel, Palmer and many others cry out their cause. As Lincoln believed, so do I: they will win out in the end. God does not abandon his people.
Brothers and sisters: hearing of your faith in the Lord Jesus and of your love for all the holy ones, I do not cease giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give YOU a spirit of wisdom and revelation. May the eyes of our hearts be enlightened.
 (Ephesians 1, Psalm 8, John 15, Luke 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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