Missing what is there

Remember the wonders the Lord has done…
Psalm 105: 5

 It’s so easy to miss what is around us or, worse, defile what is beautiful and a gift from God.

As I read today’s lectionary reading from Jeremiah 2, I was struck by two image he used to show how the people – we – have lost our way and misused the gifts of God.

The images are meant to speak of the infidelity of the people, their – our – turning aside from the God of life to things, idols, that bring death.

But Jeremiah used images from nature that speak not only of our infidelity of God but of the ways we devastate creation.

Verse 7:

I brought you to a fertile land to eat of the choicest fruit. As soon as you came, you defiled the land and dishonored my heritage! (Christian Community Bible translation)

I brought you to this country of farm land,
to enjoy its fruit and its bounty;
but you came and defiled My land,
you made My possession abhorrent.
(Tanakh translation)

Verse 13:

For my people have done two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, to dig for themselves leaking cisterns that hold no water.

God has given us fertile land, farm land, and living waters, but so often we look for something that is merely the work of our hands – forgetting the wonders around us – or worse, abusing them, not caring for them.

Jeremiah calls us to turn to God, the fount of living waters, to conversion. I also think he might be reminding us to see, love, and care for the good earth and the pools of living water around us.

Perhaps I am particularly sensitive to verse 13 this year since I went with members of one village to test the quality of their water source, a source for theirs and two other villages. The source was contaminated with bacterial and fecal matter. They, nevertheless, have non-contaminated water in their homes, since they chlorinate the water in their community tank. The other communities, though, are drinking contaminated water – since they had not chlorinated the water in their tank.

Las Casas, a massacre, and the power of scripture

According to the Agenda Latinoamericana 2014, today is the five hundredth anniversary of the conversion of Bartolomé de las Casas.

Las Casas is well known as a Dominican bishop who was a defender of the indigenous peoples in the New World. But this did not come all that easily for him.

He arrived in the New World in 1502 and stayed here for four years. He returned to Spain to study for the priesthood and was ordained in Rome in 1507.

He returned to the New World where he was given an encomienda, a right to have native peoples as slaves to work for him. The Dominicans in Hispañola had condemned slave-holding, but Las Casas did not think they were correct in refusing absolution to anyone who held slaves.

In 1514, accompanying a group of Spaniards on a pacifying mission in Cuba, led by a friend of his, Las Casas witnessed the massacre of indigenous peoples.

Soon after, while preparing his sermon for Pentecost, Las Casas came upon these verses from Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 34:

Unclean is the offering sacrificed by an oppressor. [Such] mockeries of the unjust are not pleasing [toGod]. The Lord is pleased only by those who keep to the way of truth and justice… The one whose sacrifice comes from the goods of the poor is like one who kills his neighbor. The one who sheds blood and the one who defrauds the laborer are kin and kind.

Reflecting on these words, Las Casas concluded that “everything done to the Indians in these Indies was unjust and tyrannical.”

He eventually divested himself of his slaves, He joined the Dominicans and became an advocate of the indigenous.

It took an atrocity to open Las Casas’ heart to the injustice all around him. The blood of the people at the massacre of Caonao, Cuba, moved him to listen attentively to the Word of God.

So much blood is being poured out all around us – but do we let it touch our hearts as it touches the heart of God?

May the example of Bartolomé de Las Casas open our hearts to the cries of the oppressed.

—–
The translation of Sirach is from Francis Patrick Sullivan’s introduction of Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolomé de las Casa, 1484-1566: A Reader, pp. 3-4.

There is still time

There is still time:
come back to me with all your heart.
Joel 2:12
(from the Latin America lectionary)

 The English lectionary begins today’s first reading differently:

Even now, says the Lord,
return to me with your whole heart…

There is still time.

Conversion can happen at any moment in our lives. In fact, the life of faith is one of constant conversion, continuing opening ourselves to God’s call to be one with God, to be reconciled with God and with others.

Today Thursday March 6 is the fortieth anniversary of the death of the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, who is most known for this quote:

When the Nazis came to get the Communists, I was silent. When they came to get the Socialists, I was silent. When they came to get the Catholics, I was silent. When they came to get the Jews, I was silent. And when they came to get me, there was no one left to speak.

Reading about him this morning in Robert Ellserg’s All Saints and in Jim Wallis and Joyce Hollyday’s Cloud of Witnesses, I realized that here was a man who went through a whole series of conversions.

He was a German U-boat commander in World War I. He was disillusioned by the treaty of Versailles and was found Hitler’s critique appealing. Even though he became a Lutheran pastor, following his father’s example, he was still an ardent German nationalist.

But Hitler’s taking over the German Lutheran Church and the banning of Lutheran pastors of Jewish ancestry, moved him to untie with other pastors in a protest, that developed into the Confessing Church.

Niemöller was arrested in 1937 and spent almost eight years in German concentration camps – as Hitler’s personal prisoner!

But after the war, he recognized the real evil that was Hitler and Nazism and helped formulate a Declaration of Guilt. The evil was more than Hitler’s takeover of the church. As Niemöller said, “The issue was whether one saw Jesus as the highest authority, or Hitler.”

But, as the Cold War heated up, Niemöller had a further conversion – against nuclear weapons and against all war. He became a prominent pacifist leader in Germany and throughout the world.

Not one conversions but many.

Yet, in an interview two years before his death, he shared the root of his life of conversions.

I was a schoolboy of eight when my father often took me along in the afternoons when he went around to visit the sick. One day we went to see a weaver who was dying of tuberculosis. Downstairs was his loo, and my father parked me there while he went upstairs to the sick man’s bedroom. I took in the bare room with nothing but the loom and whitewashed walls.
In one corner I noticed something framed and under glass which was embroidered in pearls – nothing but the question, “What would Jesus say?” I’ve never forgotten it – never. And that’s the sum of Christian ethics.

Robert Ellberg gives March 5 as the date for Niemoeller’s death, while almost all other sources say March 6.

Paradigms of conversion

Today the Church celebrates the conversion of St. Paul, the day when he was thrown from his high horse, according to popular belief and many artistic representations of the event.

Yet, if you examine the accounts of Paul’s conversion in the Acts of the Apostles, there is no horse. He is merely surrounded by light and falls to the ground.

This image of sudden conversion and being thrown off one’s high horse has affected many of our ideas of conversion. Many evangelicals, in fact, emphasize knowing the day and the hour when they were saved.

But conversion doesn’t always happen that way. There is not always that sudden moment when everything changes.

There are, I believe, for most of us key moments when the call of God is clearer and more forceful. But real conversion is a process, with many moments.

I think that conversion is never finished – until the final moment when God calls us to live in His presence.

Conversion is a turning, a moving away from our self-centeredness to the all-embracing love of God, an ongoing process of letting God’s love change us and open our hearts to all people, to all creation, and to the God who is “all in all.”

The Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan also talks about different types of conversion, all of which are passages from “self-preoccupation” to “self-transcendence.”

Religious conversion is from alienation to recognition of the Holy Mystery; theistic conversion is from impersonal mystery to the recognition of a personal God. Christian conversion moves from an incomplete community between God and humanity to the recognition that Jesus is the Christ. Ecclesial conversion moves us from individualized religion to incorporation into the People of God, the Church. Moral conversion is the passage from selfish indifference to values to a moral life. Intellectual conversion is from “undifferentiated consciousness” to the “holistic view of truth.”

I find these distinctions helpful – but incomplete. For in all this, conversion is letting God work in us; it’s not all up to us. It’s God’s work – which needs our consent.

And so not all of us will be struck down to the earth in a moment of conversion; most of us will struggle daily on the road of conversion.

But we need to remember that many have gone on this path before and there are many by our side. And most of all, God beckons us: “Come.”