Sabbath Messages > Sabbath Message: July 16, 2005
Good Sabbath
July 16, 2005
O God, are You our God of hope or a figment of our hopelessness?
Is Your coming miracle one of rapture
Or the pathway to eternal and loving peacefulness?
Our great frustration is having to know You only through faith
As we sift through the evidence of explosive hatred.
Why is it that in your name
The young destroy what kindness can construct?
(My appreciation to Kathy Beard for the following words; she is a gracious friend who acts while others watch and lament, for this is the time that good people must think and then must act to interrupt a new violence that threatens us all.)
"What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet....What we need is not division; what we need is not hatred, but love and compassion toward one another and a feeling of justice toward those who suffer within our community, whatever their color or faith. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world." (Robert F. Kennedy)
My computer gets lock-jaw as it waits for my words, as I wait for my thoughts to assemble out of the debris of violence and interpretation, like a tsunami of words that flood the mind, as my lock-jaw reaches for moments of calm thoughtfulness and analysis:
Why do young men need to find expression in their love of their god by hurting and killing others? Why are most of the terrorists suicide bombers out of one religion, so civilized and creative so many generations ago, the Sunni Muslims?
The love-hate romance of frustration with a western world and its values, ends in self-destruction as their young lives suffer a meltdown of everything a good god is supposed to desire? We frequently ask "why" whenever God seems to encourage or tolerate the monster built out of envy and misunderstanding.
The discovery that the suicide bombers were home grown startles the minds of neighbors ("they were good boys"--the neighbors' universal opinions of serial killers or terrorists) and mutates any feeling of insulation from madness. No you don't think of these fears every moment of the day--no, only when you board a plane or a subway, or sit in a cafe or theatre, or eat pizza at a popular kids' place--only during the joyfulness of innocence.
In real estate, we speak of conversion of rentals into for-sale units. But religious conversion from love to hatred of former friends and religious practitioners--whom you think of only as targets for destruction--that becomes frightening only when you think of it, only while you're awake, only when you pick up your children and see that they are safe, only after you alight from transportation, with a sigh, that nothing terrible has happened. You only worry when your teenager is late in coming home, or off on a European vacation (as our granddaughter is now). Who is to protect my child, my community, my country? Isn't that the job of God, after all that's why we have faith in Him, isn't it?
I was listening to NPR in a series of post-bombing interviews of Muslim clergy, who had been preaching the cause of violence against all infidels and then claiming that they were not responsible for the mayhem--of course not. When the education of the young mind takes the shape of demonizing the infidel, then any one can become the infidel, for only the hater defines who, what and when.
"Lust is a captivity of the reason and an engaging of the passions. It hinders business and distracts counsel. It sins against the body and weakens the soul." (Jeremy Taylor)
"Kindness is the goldenchain by which society is bound together." (Goethe)
"The first step to knowledge is to know that we are ignorant." (Cecil)
"The first creation of God, in the works of the day, was the light of sense; the last was the light of reason; and His Sabbath work, ever since, is the illumination of the spirit." (Bacon)
It is our nature--I feel--to love rather than to hate, but envy is the pathway to hate, for jealousy and frustration kindle our worse passions. We can rise to great heights of achievement for there is no aspiration that is beyond our mind's reach; we can also sink to the lowest forms of depravity that make us question what we are, whether we are creatures of god or slaves to the kings of evil. Religion does not insure our behavior, only that we become aware that love is the glue that keeps civilization from bursting into terror and extermination.
Nothing worthwhile comes easy, not as easy as a baseball game or parents transporting children into organized play. Worthwhile means that we must shape and mould our children's values so that hate never springs from whatever frustrates us; worthwhile means that we understand Whom and why we worship enough to make our deity even better, more godlike, perhaps even more human so that we understand each other.
This Sabbath is the right time for goodness to begin its comeback. Take my hand and help us guide each other.
sandy
