The Sauntering Pilgrim

For a moment last week, I could have imagined myself in Rick’s Café Américain, in Casablanca in the early 1940s. If you’ve seen the movie, you may recall a scene in which some German soldiers in the café start singing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” a German patriotic anthem. Other patrons, sympathetic to the French Resistance, responded by singing “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. The scene represents the shift in World War II from a conflict over turf to conflict over ideas.

The scene came to mind during breakfast last week with some other clergy. We were searching for a word of grace and gospel we could bring to conversations about the election results going on all around us. We started as if we were singing “La Marseillaise” in Rick’s Café, raising a voice we hoped would drown out the other side and turn the tide our way, which we assumed would be God’s way. How could we regroup and reengage the struggle on the side of what we clearly knew was right? How could we prevent this defeat from being the last word? (Now there’s an Easter question!) And how could we use the gospel on our side?

People are asking lots of questions today – mostly, it seems to me, either to solidify their victory and bolster their defenses for the next round, or to understand their mistakes so they can build an effective resistance movement and mount a successful counterattack. I believe there are better questions to ask.

Two days after the election, reporters for The New York Times wrote, “In more than two dozen interviews, lawmakers, strategists and officials offered a litany of explanations for Vice President Kamala Harris’s failure – and just about all of them fit neatly into their preconceived notions of how to win in politics.” Republicans, along with just about everybody else, are doing the same thing, explaining the results according to their preconceived notions. It will be a long process: according to one observer, if you laid all the political analysts in the world end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.

There’s a bit of wisdom often attributed to Albert Einstein, that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them. We’ve got to approach the election problem from a different perspective. There’s a better way to analyze this election than by endlessly recycling the same old arguments from the same old perspectives, in which someone has to win and someone lose.

Our faith offers a better, healing, life-giving way. “You show me the path of life,” the psalmist wrote (Ps. 16:11). It’s not easy to see, but that life-giving way is there for us to see and follow. God shows it to us, and it’s not about the triumph of good over evil, of right over wrong. To see it, we need to change perspective and begin at the beginning.

According to an ancient story, when we were created, we were given a place in paradise that depended on one thing only, that we not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for in the day you eat of it,” God said, “you shall die” (Gen. 2:8-9, 15-17). So of course, being human, we ate of that tree, we lost our place in paradise, and death entered the scene.

Seeing life dualistically – divided into good and evil, right and wrong – and holding on to that division religiously may be the one thing that prevents us from living again in God’s paradise, from entering the kingdom of God. We have inherited a deeply ingrained tradition of seeing life as a cosmic conflict between forces of good and evil, which will end in the final triumph of good. But that view is not original to our faith; it was adopted from Zoroastrianism during Israel’s exile in Babylon.

Our faith is that in Christ God was reconciling all that was divided, that whenever anyone is in Christ there is a new creation: paradise is restored; divisions are reconciled; everything old, broken, and divided passes away, and everything becomes new (2 Cor. 5:17). Our faith does not point to a final triumph of good over evil; rather, it affirms God’s reconciliation of all opposites. In what God began in Christ, all things – all things – hold together (Col. 1:17).

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise” (“The Crack-Up,” Esquire, February 1936). It’s also the test of a first-rate faith in the reconciliation that unites all political parties, all nationalities and ethnicities, all races, all genders and gender identities, all social strata and cultural affiliations.

When we live in division and conflict, I believe we live outside of God’s will. Our faith calls us to step out of the perspective of division and conflict to live and work and see creation as a divine process of reconciliation, as God’s work in Christ. It calls us to repent of our engagement in the contest of light versus dark, right versus wrong, good versus evil. It calls us to let go of everything that resists God’s reconciliation and to sit with all of our enemies at the great banquet God has spread before us.

“The life we want,” farmer-poet Wendell Berry wrote, “is not merely the one we have chosen and made; it is the one we must be choosing and making. To keep it alive we must be perpetually choosing it and making its differences from among all the contrary and alternative possibilities. We must accept the pain and labor of that, or we lose its satisfactions and its joy. Only by risking it, offering it freely to its possibilities, can we keep it.”

True reconciliation does not erase our differences; rather, it stops allowing division and conflict to define our existence. It looks beyond divisions and affirms that God has given us differences, as St. Luke wrote, “so we could seek after God, and not just grope around in the dark but actually find him” (Acts 17:26-28 The Message). Our challenge these days, as always, is to approach whatever divides us as an opportunity to find God together. It’s not easy work; it’s hard, painful, sacrificial work; it requires that we lay down our psuche, the constellation of personality, acquired perspectives, and values – even religious values – that have defined us, and take up our cross and follow the way Jesus has marked out (Mark 8:34f). ▪