Found wisdom from the side of a Starbucks cup yesterday:
Beware of turning into the enemy you most fear. All it takes is to lash out violently at someone who has done you grievous harm, proclaiming that only your pain matters in this world. More than against that person's body, you will then, at that moment, be committing a crime against your own imagination.-Ariel Dorfman (novelist, playwright, essayist)
How different would our approaches to the world be if, whatever our faith our our politics, we worked to see that our pain isn't the only pain that matters in the world? This is so hard to do -- especially when it makes you literally vulnerable, or requires accepting injustice with humility.
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Intending to be observational and not argumentative...
I note an implied but not really examined demarcation between the pain we feel and the pain we cause. Causality is a very interesting component, and worthy -- methinks -- of closer discussion.
Having had my share of experiences similar to what sig above shared with us from her life, I've come to see my administration of quid pro quo to the bully as a form of in loco parentis: the correct response to a child who wilfully causes pain is a proportional experience of that pain, if only to provide a basis for comparison vis a vis the do unto others thing.
We are competitive. We get stuck on the notion that acknowledging the other (whether it be pain, opinion, faith, politics or etc.) means surrendering to that person's POV regardless of what our POV may be. We seem to be particularly embedded in the need to be first, as if being first permits a claim to veracity. In my experience, the best listeners are the one who make a simple choice: there is no first, there is just order. Sharing is sequential and dynamic, not linear in that the next sharing replaces or erases the one just completed. I sometimes wonder if the founders thought about that dynamic when they decided that we needed, in our laws, an explicit right to the freedom of speech. I observe that this dynamic is anathema to the political processes we are currently being forced to witness.
Dorfman's words make sense on an interpersonal level, since they involve the divine commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself. However, all too often, such words become nothing but sentimental gibberish in the face of unadulterated, unrepentant evil, whether interpersonal or geopolitical. Sometimes, another person's or group's POV is so fundamentally evil that it must be opposed regardless of the cost to protect the innocent. Unfortuntately, protecting the innocent or fighting evil aren't as hip or as intellectually fashionable as the gooey, superficial sentimentality plaguing most of the institutionalized Church world today.
Jesus Christ was no gooey sentimentalist. This is a man who cursed a fig tree, after all, for not producing figs! If you don't believe that, then just ask the moneychangers he whipped in the Temple...
Scott, thank you for that post. Really. I think it encapsulates the very SPIRIT of our discourse here, though being imperfect, we do tend to lose sight of it. I learned this lesson (for the first time, lessons do need continual relearning) as a young university student in Vienna. This was even before Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo - I faced on an almost nightly basis, attacks against our foreign policy, our racism, our materialism. I could barely defend myself in English, let alone Vienna-dialect German. Maybe it is for this reason that I learned the lesson of lifting my glass, and stating, with sincerity, once the conversation had passed a certain point, "You know, you may be right."
This was not so much humility as utility but I think there may be some wisdom to it. My nation is not without its faults of course, nor is my faith, nor my family. But past a certain point a person is no longer listening to you, or you can no longer hear.
At any rate, another round of drinks go round the table and we are all, for a brief moment at least, friends taking shelter together from the dark night.
You're quite welcome, Another, though credit for all substance beyond my opening japes is due the formidable Frederica Mathewes-Green, whose wise words quoted take over anon unto close.
"...I learned the lesson of...stating...'You know, you may be right.'" - Another Believer
This was perhaps best amplified for all time, with conditions, from the Epistles of St. Joel to the Americans, in the Glass Houses parables:
Though may be righteous
I may be wretched of mind
But it may come to pass
That the mad man proveth
That which though seeketh
Or, if you like, the words of the Four Fabian Apostles of Merseyside, from their conversion in crossing the Abbeyan Way:
And, upon the Omega
The love thou taketh
Proveth of like measure
Unto the love thou maketh
And to close on a less solemn note, after your reference to your Viennese scholar days, an Austrian recherche of my own, four years after closing my undergraduate studies at NYU with disciples of the great Austrian-school economist Ludwig von Mises. It is my first semester, in the fall of 1988, as a graduate student in modern European history at the University of Virginia. I am in a colloquium on early-20th-century Europe, when my turn comes at the conference table to present an oral report, on the WWI-era father of Czech independence, Tomáš G. Masaryk.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomáš_Masaryk#Biography
After sketching to my newly-fraternal Virginians Masaryk's early life and philosophy studies, I mention his then having "earned his Ph.D at U.Va - the University of Vienna..."
Ouch - make that
"Thou may be righteous"
above, *not* "Though"
Sometimes my brutish, thoughish ways find me blackening my own ayes...
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