Friday
I finished helping with a week-long spiritual formation course and found myself
reflecting on the instructor’s explanation
of Ignatian spirituality’s concept of “holding things loosely.” He learned this
professionally as a church pastor and personally weathering a divorce and as
the father of a daughter with a drug addiction.
After
a Costco run, I retrieved Wade from the Atlanta airport, returning from a week out
of town for work. Then we sat down for our usual evening PBS newscast and
learned of the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris. A Facebook friend posted
that he and his wife had just visited the city two days earlier and found it
gay and vibrant.
I
wept, as I often do watching the news. I wept for those who lost their lives and the wounded and
their loved ones, I wept for Paris and for France and for our world. Like most
Westerners, I was oblivious to a pair of terrorist bombings that killed more
than 40 innocent children, women and men in Beirut the day before.
On
the subsequent newscasts and Saturday’s Democratic presidential candidates
debate, no one was “holding things loosely”—everyone had either questions or
plans on “what we should do” to prevent such violence.
As
usually happens, one idea again emerged in the nonstop commentary, that Islamic
moderates had to speak out forcefully to rein in Muslim extremists.
Easy
to say, hard to do. I remember oh-too-well how little mainstream denominations
in this country said or did to rein in religiously-motivated gay-bashing before
LGBT people became respectable, or at least acceptable, in their eyes.
No matter your religion,
if your god tells you to kill yourself or others, literally or figuratively, that
god is what needs to be eliminated from your mind and your heart.
I
once wrote on this blog that the young men being attracted to ISIS were as
illiterate about the Qur’an as gay-bashers who quoted the Bible when
brutalizing transgender people, gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals.
But
last March’s cover story in The Atlantic
begs to differ. “What ISIS Really Wants and How to Stop It” by Graeme Wood
asserts that the ISIS movement is very well-versed in the Qur’an. Its intent is
to bring in an apocalypse, provoking the rest of the world to a violent
confrontation and destroying the freedoms that make cities like Paris so gay
and vibrant.
German
liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle once struck my survivor’s mentality to the
core when she spoke on nuclear proliferation during an interfaith luncheon I
attended when I lived in Los Angeles. She said that, in a nuclear war, she
would rather be among the killed than among the killers. Why should she be
provoked to change her non-violent nature?
I
have the same beef with capital punishment. I oppose executions partly because they
make us all killers. But I am not a pacifist. ISIS and terrorism of any kind
must be confronted, if only because it’s usually the most vulnerable who suffer
from their actions. Confrontation may have non-violent forms, which would be
preferred, but it will require more, I believe—though we should never equate
the “more” with the will of God.
In
the Ignatian course we viewed the French film Of Gods and Men, the story of a household of Trappist monks
ministering to the needs of Muslims in their Algerian village, ultimately slaughtered
by fundamentalist revolutionaries that even their Muslim neighbors feared. Warned to leave, they followed a discernment
process that led them to the “aha” that this was their home, that this was
their calling, to serve this neighborhood materially and medically—and so they
stayed, despite their peril. They held their own lives “loosely.”
Jesus too knew the risk
of “moving into our neighborhood” to proclaim a spiritual commonwealth, not a
caliphate, which welcomes us all equally and voluntarily, a commonwealth of “liberté,
égalité, fraternité.”
At
the end of the film Casablanca, Rick
urges Ilsa to go with her husband to aid him in his vital work of resisting
Nazis, despite the great love they had found earlier in Paris. “Ilsa,” he
explains, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the
problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy
world.”
“We’ll
always have Paris,” he reminds her.
We’ll
always have Paris. It will always be gay and vibrant. And it will always risk
the crazies who want to diminish its shine and glow, because liberty to be
liberty must hold everything loosely.
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Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser.
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Amen Chris I will have to ck out that French film My husband lived in Paris for years and was just there about 2 weeks ago, All his friends are fine
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