"The Christian must discover in contemplation, and in the giving of his life, those symbolic actions which will ignite the people's faith to resist injustice with their whole lives, lives coming together as a united force of truth and thus releasing the liberating power of the God within them." - James Douglass, Contemplation and Resistance.

Monday, September 26, 2005

The Ignored One

The crucified Lord is one of those aspects of reality that seems so eminently ignorable. It is the “still small voice” that we instinctively bypass in the rush to the impossible fulfillments promised by our death-driven civilization. Yet he is inescapable, just like commitment and anger and humiliation and the death we all want to avoid. He is ambiguous like life – we can’t embrace him and we can’t leave him behind. When we grasp for him, he disappears, because he can’t let himself be treated as a thing, as one more datum in the stream of our lives that we can add to the sum of our redemption. He is like the core of our childhood which we will carry forever, but which will grow ever fainter.

Our Lord is crucified with the people of Iraq - he stands with them in mute authority while they are degraded as he was degraded - to prove the omnipotence of the truly degraded. May we pray for a love like his and the ability to act on it.

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