'Do you know Jesus?'

...The United States is not exactly the new kid on the block...

...will be able to enforce a high degree of interna- tional good conduct (good conduct, at least, as we define it) by rattling a few aircraft carriers from time to time...

...We are meant to know, and to grow toward that knowing...

...It's an embarrassing question, and should be, since the answer for most of us, when the question is pre- sented this way, would have to be "No...

...Or "Do you know Jesus...

...It is not handed down from above, as has been pointed out by liberal and conservative scholars alike, but arises within a community...

...For most of us, if we were honest, the answer would be an ambiguous one: I do not not know Jesus...

...They are not answered by his brother Alyosha in a point-by-point way, with log- ical refutations...

...But we are entering a moment in history in which all the kids in the neighborhood, even the old and very familiar ones like the U.S., will have to redefine their roles...

...Given enough time, the blockade and embargo will defeat Iraq at far smaller a cost in money and lives than war...

...That's the reason the new kid in school has for beating someone up on the first day in the new school year...

...All of the Bible comes from the assumption that there is something that precedes, informs, and continues the living truth found in Scripture...

...Recently I read A Journey in Ladakh (Houghton Mifflin, 1983) an interesting account of a young Englishman's journey to a place in India not far from the Tibetan border, where Tibetan Buddhism is lived and taught...

...There is the fact, though, that an experience of truth is what we are called to...

...For it is the state that enforces the rules that govern the rest of society...

...Don't mess with the Americans" will be the message...

...2) Even if it becomes necessary to attack at some later point, it is better to do so after the blockade and embargo have seriously weakened Iraq...

...The most important of these new rules will have to govern that sole superpower, the U.S., just as the most important rules in civil society are those that govern the police power of the state...

...Apart from our encounters with God in sacrament and prayer, encounters which often confront us more with a sense of our own emptiness than the feeling of Christ's living presence (and this sense is itself a kind of mercy, a revelation), these are the places where we truly can say we know Jesus, and not in argument, or even in the most deeply felt conviction...

...But if there is this one good argument in favor of attacking Iraq right now, there are many arguments against such an attack...

...knowing Jesus" comes from being able to see the continuing life of Christ among us where it is manifested--in suffering, in compassion, in forgiveness and forbear- ance...

...We are not bound in any narrow way, even by the New Testament, in trying to see these things clearly...

...This also has something in common with Leon Bloy's famous statement: The one sadness is that we are not saints...

...This is all pretty obvious, but needs to be said because of the prevailing distrust of any certainty at all, any conviction that one's beliefs are grounded in a reality which can really be known and experi- enced...

...There is an argument to be made for the case that fanaticism and false clarity are at their depths ways of masking doubt, and for many they may be...

...Every element of spiritual understanding is important and valuable, including doubt and ambivalence...

...Torquemada might have been thoroughly, sincerely convinced of his rightness...

...To be comfortable with the position of unknowing is irreverent, a refusal to accept the challenge to move into a deeper experience--a little as if the oyster wore its bit of grit as an ornament and not the beginning of a pearl...

...There is a tendency to rest at that point, to be comfortable with unknowing and doubt, and the culture reinforces it...

...We are now in the post- cold war era, an era in which there will be only one superpower for many years to come, and the roles of the global game have to be rewritten...

...If we can defeat them today, we can defeat them more easily six or twelve months from today...

...Something makes us ashamed of a less than straightforward answer, and puts us at a disadvantage before the people who seem to be much more clear about all this than we honestly feel we can be...

...We believe that the Holy Spirit informs the community of Christians, allows it to discriminate, gives it the antennae that allow it to include the Epistles of Paul, the Gospels, even Revelation (which barely made it) in the canon, and exclude other writings whose way of talking about our relationship to God are less appropriate...

...But do we know Jesus, or have a true experience of his pres- ence...

...is not strong to begin with...

...Enough to know that it is not nonsense...

...The person in the hold of the counterfeit cannot, obviously, tell the difference...

...If the U.S...

...There is an unknowing that Jesus himself appar- ently experienced--when at Gethsemane his soul was "filled with dismay and dread," when he begged for the trial to pass (as if there might be some uncertainty as to whether his death on the cross was inevitable), and when he said of the end of this world that no one, "not even the 25 January 1991:41 Son," knows when it will occur...

...help my unbelief...

...It is not only possible, however, but highly probable that many fanatics are unambiguously con- vinced that they are defenders of a truth which, for them, is quite unalloyed with doubt, and they are convinced that an order- ly universe demands stamping out those who have not seen the light and who will not be converted...

...To avoid those doubts or suppress them is to make them disproportionately powerful...

...But there are other doubts as well, doubts we are more likely to experience: doubt that God is real, for example, or that the universe has any inherent meaning at all...

...I~ David R. Carlin, Jr...

...Not enough to live in constant awareness of its truth...

...One of the great religious strengths of Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov-- setting aside its obvious strengths as one of the most powerful and moving novels ever written--is that it does deal with the most serious religious questions in an hon- orable way, unlike those forms of Christian propaganda that fail to take the major chal- lenges to Christian belief seriously...

...It is important to know, however, that this ambivalence is not in itself a bad thing, something to be rejected...

...THE GULF & OUR FUTURE s far as I can see, writing during the second week of January 1991, there is only one really good reason for going to war against Iraq at the present moment...

...Ivan Karamazov's objections to Christianity, offered in the chapter entitled "Rebellion," are among the best possible arguments for a moral rejection of the Christian idea of God...

...The people who passed a death sentence on Salman Rushdie probably haven't a shred of doubt...

...The New Testament makes it apparent that we are meant to have an expe- rience of the resurrection...

...and these may be coupled with a suspicion that our belief is a false consolation, a way of avoid- ing the autonomy of adulthood...

...I've met him----or I have little idea of what that might mean...

...But it is important not to counterfeit that certainty without their struggle, and the struggle will certainly involve the uncom- fortable experience of ambiguity and uncertainty and doubt...

...and if any- one is to be the enforcer of law and order on a global scale in the decades to come, it will have to be the U.S., whether acting alone or, as in the Persian Gulf crisis, in conjunction with others...

...The novel is available now in a brilliant new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, from North Point Press...

...That implies that there can be a counterfeit truth, and a coun- terfeit knowing...

...It makes sure no one will push him around...

...and no one but a serious disciple of Oscar Wilde would consciously prefer the counterfeit to the real, and then only to make some perverse but important point (which would put him into a relationship to the real once again...

...The question, so stated, demands a clear answer...

...The fact that there was a Christian community for a couple of generations before there was a New Testament means that the New Testament alone cannot be considered absolutely normative for us...

...The growth must be honest and unhur- ried, which means that it will contain large amounts of unknowing and doubt, and new doubts will surface along the way...

...The Indian businessman who speaks of having enough experience to know that "it is not nonsense" still struggles to live "in constant aware- ness" of the truth...

...We have met ideas about Jesus, or stories about Jesus, and some of us claim that in the sacraments we encounter the living reality of Jesus, though it is far from clear what we mean by that, or what effect the encounter really has...

...quickly and decisively beats up Iraq, a tone for the new era will have been established...

...It's easy for a believer, in a culture which at its higher levels professes to admire and even pursue ambiguity, to assert both a continuing membership in a religious community and yet remain comfortable with remaining in suspension, not really knowing what it all means...

...Instead, we are shown other things: the life of Father Zosima, the gen- erosity of Alyosha's spirit, the power of compassion and repentance and forgive- ness...

...The New Testament itself can be as embarrassing as the fundamentalist's probing question, but not necessarily because there is any continuity between them...

...they play for keeps...

...They act as if they were quite clear, quite unambiguously certain about their connec- tion with Jesus...

...42: Commonweal...

...Here there is a spirit close to that of the father who says to Jesus, "Lord, I believe...

...and to be defensive about belief in the face of the most profound questions is never to grow into a belief worthy of encountering those questions...

...Our response could be to wave away the question entirely, which would be a mistake, or to try to make it clear on our own terms, which would be another kind of mistake...

...It is an essential Christian teaching that the truth can be known...

...unless the war is brief and resoundingly victorious, what little support there is will quickly erode...

...I have some connection with Jesus, however unclear it might be, however much it may exist at the level of yearning or hope...

...4) Even if the war is brief, there will be little or no support for it among persons- in-the-street in most of the Arab world...

...1) The attack is unnecessary...

...I trust their testimony...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey 'DO YOU KNOW JESUS?' LET ME REPHRASE THAT QUESTION here is a kind of Christian who challenges you with the question, "Have you met Jesus...

...The author, Lawrence Harvey, listens to an Indian businessman's description of the importance of being freed from false per- ceptions of the self, and then asks, "Have you felt what you are talking about...

...I do know him--or I don't...

...These are in fact the only real answers or clues we get when we are faced with doubt...

...Don't call their bluff...

...The only way to avoid this trap is an acceptance of what cannot be known, a willingness to accept doubt as part of our movement toward God...

...What is wonderful in the work of such important Christian writers as Dostoevski (or Endo, in Silence) is that it shows that OF SEVERAL MINDS WORLD COP OR WORLD BULLY...

...The counterfeit can be attained, even after a counterfeit of strug- gle...

...Indeed, it makes sure that he will be able to push others around should the need arise...

...The answer is one that many people on many religious paths could give: "In moments...

...It is at work among us now, and gives us--if we are attentive--a spirit of discernment that can look for signs of Christ's continuing pres- ence among us...

...3) Support for the war in the U.S...

...I am prepared to believe that some saints and mystics actually have encoun- tered the reality of the risen Christ in a way I know I have not...

...we are meant to encounter the living Christ...

...It quickly estab- lishes the new kid's reputation...

...With a reputation of that sort, the U.S...