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The Patriotic Spirit

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

A few days ago I posted a mulling on patriotism. (It is the season.) Well, it’s turned into something like an article. If I get it published I’ll post it here with it’s slightly revised beginning. If not I may publish it here angway. That, my friends, is the beauty of blogging. It concludes as follows:

The “patriotic spirit”, which so easily becomes an idol, keeps us tied-up in escalating cycles of retaliation. It’s this “patriotic spirit” that can become the worst form of nationalism-witnessed today in the rise of new-nationalism.

During the early 1990’s, Michael Ignatieff saw this new-nationalism first hand as he traveled from Serbia to Northern Ireland and elsewhere. As chronicled in his book, “Blood and Belonging”, he exposes the deep connection between violence and belonging. Ignatieff reports, “I have been to places where belonging is so strong, so intense, that I now recoil from it in fear.” There was a reason why the good Dr. Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels.

That is not to say a Christian should not have a love for her country, or take part in its political process. But her love will not be for “blood and soil”. It will be a simple love of place and relationships; and her love will not stop at a border. As well, her political involvement will be a provisional involvement. It may look more like a respectful child who sits quietly with the grown-ups after dinner, but who can’t wait to get back to playing outdoors.

It’s this kind of “play” that is at work within Jesus’ notion of the kingdom. We get the impression that Jesus loved his land, his people, but he was no patriot. His allegiance was to a “kingdom that was not of this world” (John 18), meaning, he was profoundly indifferent to our ways of founding and keeping alive nation-states through violence. He was not promoting any kind of escapist formula as though there was a disconnect between this world and the kingdom. He was instead actively inviting us to shed our categories of us and them, categories that are inherent in patriotism.

Now all of this leaves any Christian in agreement open to the charge of supreme naiveté. However from the perspective of Jesus, this naiveté is a kind imaginative innocence that takes no prisoners and exacts no revenge and is willing to stand in front of tanks so as to open up the possibility of human evolution.

The “way of patriotism” has no understanding of this possibility, and so sees it, as Nietzsche saw it, as ultimate weakness and folly. But the supposed sophistication of state-craft through patriotic-nationalism, because it is founded on the mechanism of expulsion, because its unity is at the expense of a violent exclusion of some other group or nation, is doomed to the same tired results. We’ve tried this, in all its variations. What too many of us Christians haven’t begun to try is Jesus’ way of creative naiveté.

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Christianity/Spirituality

A Living Mystery

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“To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda or even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery: it means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.” Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard

I came across this quote by Suhard while reading some church history. Suhard was someone I hadn’t heard of before but his quote stood out and rang true. I needed to share it.

Some may think his thought is on the esoteric side. I would disagree. Perhaps instead, our definition of mystery is impoverished. Mystery is not something we just haven’t figured out yet. It is instead a compelling force that speaks of transcendent beauty and possibility and promise.

“A living mystery”, is something we too seldom encounter these days. St. Paul refers to the “mystery of Christ” or the “mystery of the gospel” over twenty times in his letters. I would think that living in such a way that recalls the “mystery of Christ” is exactly our calling.

As far as I can tell Cardinal Suhard tried to practice his preaching. As the Archbishop of Paris during the German occupation, he protested against the deportation of the Jews. He also protested against the deportation of young workers to Germany for forced labor and when this failed, he organized a program of clandestine chaplains to go to Germany with these youth.

Of course the way a Christian comes to reflect the “mystery of the gospel” will spring out of her own unique mystery, engaged as it is, with the “mystery of Christ”.

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Christianity

Sparrows and Counting Hair

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Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. (Matthew 10)

Yesterday morning I met David. He was in a parking lot, sitting on one of those car-width long, six-inch high, concrete wheel-blocks that are at the front of all the parking stalls. His block was in a handicapped stall.

He looked tired and sad, not like that’s new for guys on the street. I expected him to ask me for money. He didn’t, and I realized that he wasn’t asking anyone for money; only looking up at passers-by from time to time. It was his way, I guessed. I walked past him, but then stopped, and asked him how he was.

Things, of course, had been better. We talked for a while, maybe fifteen minutes. He was clear-eyed, well-spoken, had been clean for a “time”. When we parted we exchanged names and I wished him success as he was a newcomer to Edmonton. Then he smiled at me and I took it as sincere and natural. Perhaps my estimation of that is too optimistic, but I sensed that I made him feel, at least to a degree, that he mattered.

I read in a Madeleine L’Engle book that the reason astrology was so popular–and still is in some corners–is that your day of birth, even the hour and minute of the day you were born, matters. By inference of course, you matter.

I don’t think there is anything so empty as feeling that you do not matter. I’m repeating a thousand other counselors, pastors, writers, in stating the obvious, but we all want, no, need, to matter. It occurs to me that the obvious needs restating…perhaps so that it stays “obvious”. Because this is something that in practice, in giving and receiving, too quickly slips us by.

David needed somebody to talk to. He did not need instruction, or counsel, or a “cheery” good-morning, the kind I’ve given often enough as a way to dismiss my-supposedly-busy-self from contact. There will be a time for counsel and direction but just then, David simply needed to hear a human voice. That’s my take anyway.

And about the verse? Jesus’ words about “sparrows and numbering hairs” only makes sense when we are able to connect them to some experience of having-mattered-to-someone.

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Christianity/Religion

Canada Day and Patriotism

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Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” (John 18)

Patriotism is not a Christian virtue. That’s why Christians make bad nationalists; well, at least they should make bad nationalists. But as it is, too many Christians make “model” nationalists. And as for our Southern nieghbours–which we take pains to differentiate ourselves from, there-by guaranteeing our becoming their double–being Christian, is a positive item on the resume of any political aspirant.

It wasn’t always so. In early Roman society it was a mortal risk to be Christian. The emperor and his counsel understood that anyone with an allegiance to Christ had a proportional indifference to the machinery of state. And indifference, unlike flat-out rebellion, is a cancer of statehood. Flat-out rebellion is easy, its the same game with the same rules.

Of course the ancient Christians deeply desired to live in peace with others, but their presence, because of their lack of allegiance to the emperor, was a kind of anarchy. And so they were dispensed with.

Two millennia later the tables have turned, but the picture is murkier than ever. Christianity, with its “golden rule” as a leavening agent, has had a humanizing and civilizing effect on our western culture. But the foundation and sustaining of our nations has been rarely civil or humane. Thomas Jefferson had no compunction about this grim reality and said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural nurture.”

But as far as I can tell, our place as Christians is in neither arena–patriot or insurrectionist. Allegiance to either camp is adherence to the same old dreary game. In this game the tables eventually turn, insurgents become the patriots, but nothing new ever happens.

The patriotic spirit easily becomes an idol. When it does, it can become the worst form of nationalism.

But we have the model of Jesus who was no patriot. His allegiance was not-of-this-world, meaning, he was completely indifferent to our ways of founding and keeping alive nation-states through violence.

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