Atrocity and Horror
Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
December 14, 2016
The news about the recapture this week of Aleppo by forces
loyal to the Syrian President and his Russian allies is horrific: poison gas used against
civilian populations, rape of hundreds of women (including children), beheading of local residents (including infants). The word horror comes from the Latin word
meaning something that makes your hair stand on end. Closely related is the word atrocity, from the
Latin word for fierce and cruel.
“Deplorable” is a milder relative, coming from the Latin word for
“something worthy to weep over.”
I personally was witness to atrocity only twice in my life:
both in the spring of 1989 in Beijing China.
It took me years to get over the deep scars that even witnessing such
things caused. These are things for
which human beings were not made, things alien to what God had in mind in
bringing us into existence when he declared it “very good.” But unfortunately, they are things that
happen all too often, and are the prima facie evidence that there is something
very, very wrong with human beings, something that the Church has traditionally
called indwelling or original sin, a general brokenness in the race that,
absent from help from above, keeps us far from the good that God intends in
us.
Years ago, before living in Ashland, I once heard a
parishioner tell me in an unguarded moment that he did not believe in original
sin, since “I’m not a bad person, really!
If I’m honest I can’t think of a sin I need to repent of.” Here in Ashland, I have often heard
complaints about the “overly penitential tone” of the Prayer Book Eucharistic
Prayers, and comments that “Celtic” spirituality is preferable because it
believes in “original blessing” rather than “original sin.” I’m not so sure about that characterization
of Celtic spirituality. To my mind, it embraces both ideas, not one over the other.
Interestingly, the people who seem most willing to deny the
reality of evil in the human heart are the ones who seem to have the hardest
time when faced with such things as Aleppo or even what increasingly looks like
a (so-far) bloodless coup against the American constitution by what one candidate in the
Presidential election called with uncanny clarity “a basket of
deplorables.” The president elect
appears to praise and think highly of the Russian and Syrian Presidents; his
prospective Secretary of State has made a fortune in part by close
collaboration with them.
Carl Jung taught that we have to acknowledge and process the
darkness and evil in our hearts before we can rightly come out into the
light. Those who make a leap supposedly
directly into light without struggling in the darkness are deceiving themselves
and are unstable, not wholly integrated psychologically. Christian mystics have said the same thing
again and again. Today is the feast day
of St. John of the Cross, whose magnificent Dark
Night of the Soul is a meditation on how it is only by honestly embracing
our failings and that we can find hope and unity.
It is easy to see the evil in others, point to them, and
think that somehow if we only got rid of them, we would get rid of evil. But this is mere scapegoating, and is in
itself a major driver in the very atrocity we seek to eliminate. One of the most basic teachings of Jesus is
that evil exists, and that it exists in each of our hearts. Trusting in the loving God he called Abba is
the only way out: surrendering to the God who promised to help us in our
weakness and purge our sin.
In these trying days of turmoil and fear, we must be
attentive in seeing our own darkness,
and eschewing it. We must also be
valiant in honestly naming and confronting the evil in the hearts of
others. Speaking truth to power,
standing up to the demonic powers that express themselves in our laws, institutions,
and society. By
following this “way of the Cross” we can hope to arrive at an Easter morning
without atrocity, horror, or deplorables.
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
Thank you Fr. Tony!
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