Looking back on our
adventures in Israel/ Palestine from the vantage point of Washington Dulles, I
can’t see the big picture yet; so this is not a summary. It’s a few loose ends
and the current state of my reflections:
HOLY SITES: I have a bias
toward historic preservation. I would like for a site to be kept as close as
possible to how it was when something important happened there. But we have
built churches – or in the case of the Dome of the Rock, a mosque – on such
places. I started with an aversion to churches built on sacred places. But in
the Hebrew Scriptures, holy sites were marked with holy objects. First, they
constructed cromlechs – piles of rock – to say this spot is holy. Then they
built altars. Abraham built an altar at Hebron. Jacob built an altar at Bethel.
When a place is holy, as opposed to merely historic, we worship there. So I
have come to see that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, etc. are right, good,
and a joyful thing. Some of them are architecturally brilliant at capturing the
feel and the aesthetic of the thing commemorated. Gethsemane does that best. I
have come to grudgingly admit that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a holy
place and that it is even quite plausible that Jesus was buried and resurrected
in that particular place. But I stand by my original reaction that the Church
atop Mt. Tabor is awful. By the way, the church I liked best (Gethsemane) and
the Church I liked least (Tabor) were by the same architect, Antonio Barluzzi.
WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET
ALONG: Israel is not a happy place. I have come to realize how little I
understand about the Israeli/ Palestinian Conflict. I am appalled to discover
how little I even know about the history of the situation. I can tell it is in
part the residue of the disastrous diplomatic resolution of World War I, in
which the Arabic Allies of the West were betrayed. But things were less than
rosy before that. The Ottoman Empire was not kind to the Arabic peoples, the
Armenians, or the Greeks. And the European ancestors of the Israelis were ill
served in both Eastern and Western Europe before coming to Israel.
I was looking for the roots
of our church conflicts in this primal conflict – Abel vs. Cain, Jacob vs Esau,
Joseph vs. his brothers, Saul vs. David, Rheoboam vs Jereboam, Elijah vs. Ahab,
Judas Maccabeus vs. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, etc. to Jesus vs. Herod, Paul vs.
James, St. John the Divine vs. Domitian, etc.
Of course there is a lot to
disagree about, but why do we persistent in disagreeing so disagreeably? I am a
long, long way form an answer on that one. But the Martha Nussbaum book I am
reading – The New Religious Intolerance – raises some possible areas for
exploration. She writes about the “moral imagination.”
On the one hand we have the
power of fear, which Irish Murdoch calls “a dimming preoccupation” meaning it
constricts our imaginations into perceived threats. It diminishes our ability
to experience others as sources of delight or even entertainment. We are too
obsessed with saving our lives to live them.
In contrast, what Nussbaum
(who is Jewish) calls the Kantian-Christian principle of universalizeablily,
the Golden Rule, invites – even compels – us to imagine each situation as it is
experienced by someone else. She says: “The empathic imagination moves in a
direction the opposite of that of fear. In fear a person’s attention contracts,
focusing intently on her own safety, or perhaps that of a small circle of loved
ones. In empathy a person’s mind moves outward, occupying many different
positions outside itself.” Fear diminishes us. The moral imagination, as we try
to engage others compassionately and fairly, makes us larger.
I do not have a solution to
the troubles in Israel/ Palestine. But one thing was very clear to me. Fear is
in charge. Neither the Israelis nor the
Palestinians I met had any insight into the perspective of the other. There is
a famine of moral imagination, a famine of empathy. It is also clear to me that
Israel/ Palestine is an archetypal site of human fear, but not a unique habitat
for it. Islamophobia in the U.S. is another case in point. Fear of Latino
immigrants is another.
What I wonder is how this
same dynamic plays out in the petty power struggles that, to a regrettable
degree, define the life of the Church. I do not mean to denigrate the “big
issues” the Church has fought over in recent years – though issues of LGBT
inclusion are high on Nussbaum’s list of fear-based aversions. I am wondering
instead about the fights over ritual preferences, governance issues, and small
issues of office management. I wonder: what is going on here? Why is so much
emotion being invested where so little of substance is at stake? After my visit
to Israel, I am still wondering that. But maybe I have a few clues to work
with.
Nussbaum says fear is natural
but it gets culturally focused in irrational ways that prevent us from
exercising our moral imaginations. But that is not natural or necessary, “More
generally,” she says, “the imagination makes others real for us. A common human
failing is to see the whole world from the point of view of one’s own goals,
and to see the conduct of others as all about oneself . . . . By imagining
other people’s way of life, we don’t necessarily learn to agree with their
goals; but we do see the reality of those goals for them. We learn that other
worlds of thought and feeling exist.” In order to discover those worlds, she
suggests that we deliberately cultivate “participatory imagination” – the
ability to imagine our way into someone else’s shoes.
I wonder how congregations might
cultivate the ability to see things from another viewpoint, to care about
people different from themselves. What kind of exercises or disciplines might
open our hearts and minds a bit wider? Could the Church make us better people,
larger souls, more creatively imaginative moral agents in the world? If not,
then what is the Church for?
PRAYER FOR THE CHURCH: The
weeks of reading and study leading up to this trip, and now this time spent in
the places where Jesus spoke and acted, lived, died, and rose, have brought me
up against something. Jesus was fully engaged with the institutional religion
of his day – teaching, healing, and prophesying in synagogue, temple, and
domestic ritual settings. Institutions are out of favor these days for good
reason. Most of our institutions have operated in mechanical ways that control
and use people instead of organically in ways that nurture people and provide a
framework of meaning. But institutions per se are networks of committed human
relationship. Jesus would not have fallen for the current fad of
anti-institutionalism so popular in all the “future church” books.
But Jesus was not a company
man. He was at odds with those institutions with which he remained engaged.
Jesus called the religious institutions of his day to repent of their agenda. I
am convinced he is calling us to repentance as well. I am convinced that
neither the liberal nor the conservative voice has got it right. Nor do I think
that I’ve got it right. But when I look at the option of a church boringly
inward looking and repetitive on the one hand or a church so open that it
stands for nothing in particular on the other, when I look at a church whose
spirituality is narcissistically focused on feeling good, or a church that
excludes people who are “not our sort” or that proselytizes people because we
have institutional uses for them – I am not seeing the Kingdom project. I used
to pray for the life of the church, for our institutional strength. I now pray
for our repentance – though I am not sure what that repentance looks like.
There is an old saying, “God
loves us the way we are, but he loves us too much to leave us this way.” The
Church, broken and fallible as it is, remains Christ’s Body on earth. We are
called to love the Church, but to love the Church too much to leave her as she
is.
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