Ponderings

The bane and blessing of being an external processor is the transparency of my politics. There is no one in my congregation who wonders about my view of the war, or the current administration, or the state of healthcare in America, or any number of issues. Because I process ideas by talking (or writing), I have few secrets. The problem with the transparency has been a lack of dialogue partners. An unabashed liberal, “conservatives” see me coming and cross the road before I get to them.

I have recently discovered a small group of friends who self-identify as conservatives. They are a hearty lot and defy the odds, agreeing to meet with me occasionally to tell me about life on the other side of the fence. Recently one of these dear friends was sharing how hurtful it is when her friends deride our current President. She explained that she has deep respect for both the man and the office and that the casual derision is insulting. Since my job is to listen, not persuade, I was listening rather than thinking of my retort, listening to my friend’s words and also to the emotion that lie beneath them. It is the sadness of my friend’s voice that has stayed with me. Hearing her pain, I find myself wondering about the role of protest in society.

Having grown up in the shadow of the Third Reich, I knew that evil at one time had a name and face. Evil became incarnate in a short man with close-cropped dark hair and a bit of mustache, a man with fiery speech and jerky motions, a man who was popularly elected before becoming a demagogue. As I studied religion at the close of the last millennium, my heroes were the men and women of faith that dared to name the evil in their day. Men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While legions of ordinary German citizens worked in the Nazi war machine, this seemingly lone man of faith dared to name the incarnate evil and actually participated in an assassination attempt. A martyr who was executed for the failed coup, he nonetheless continues to inspire movements of dissent around the world. To be a person of faith, then, is to be willing to put one’s life on the line to name the evil incarnate in our world. If it were a leader in Iraq, in North Korea, or even in the United States, that embodies evil, the call of the faithful is to stand publicly against that embodiment. I want to explain to my friend that if I see even our President embodying evil, I have a moral obligation to name it as such.

The problem is that I cannot be sure. My friend watches the same man make the same decisions, and yet she reaches a dramatically different conclusion. Although I can write a persuasive essay on the embodiment of evil, my counterparts across the aisle can write an even better one about the good embodied in our government. In a war of words, we begin to look like Seuss’ “Butter Battle Book” with growing weapons and diminishing moral ground. With red on one side and blue on the other, we are absolutely convinced that our side is good. Except that, we cannot be sure.

Some things we can know for sure. I can be sure that every child deserves a healthy, safe, and moral start in life. Yet as soon as we begin to talk about the delivery of safe and healthy and moral, my certitude begins to wane. I can be sure that the presence of God wrests in each one of God’s children, but that is all that I can claim with certainty. To be sure, that certainty is not nothing. Believing God’s presence to be within the people, I have certainty about the immorality of torture. That same believing, however, makes it difficult to dismiss any one person as evil incarnate - either George Bush or Saddam Hussein or even Osama bin Laden!

Quite frankly, I find this ambiguity to be annoying. I would like to know which guys are the good ones and which are evil. Perhaps it is not irrelevant that Bonhoeffer died before his 40th birthday. I am quite certain that before my 40th birthday I knew the difference. With my eyesight failing and my friendships growing, I am not so sure anymore. I think if Bonhoeffer had been a little older, he would have survived the war. But we would have been the poorer for it.