Christian wholeness

...What surprised us all, when we thought about it, was what a disparate group it was (and if you'd heard our singing you might call us desperate as well...

...Bush has now proved that the richest and most powerful nation on earth, by spending a decade suck- ing funds from the health, welfare, and edu- cation of its children and giving the money to weapons production, can annihilate a third-world country with a second-rate mil- itary...

...The Kingdom of God is not among us, or within us, in order to make us feel good...

...Where one kind of sacramental theology can move in the direction of denying the Incarnation by minimizing feelings and experience, which are certainly essential to human being and development, another can make positive, healthy, and enjoyable experiences the criteria for goodness...

...It may be, as Larry Weiss, a member of the Minneapolis Pledge of Resistance, believes and wrote (Minneapolis Star-Tribune, March 20) that the resort to war was attributable to only one man, President Bush: "Bush had his own reasons for choosing slaughter when waiting would have worked...

...The goal Bush expressed in 1989 had only one practical meaning that from the time he came into office he was looking for a war to wage...

...Clearly he was deadly serious...

...A high-school senior asked about the war in my local diocesan paper was emphatic: "I did not support the war at all...

...Though we were a rel- atively young bunch, our youth was pretty relative, with a fifteen-year age spread between the oldest and youngest member...

...To use the figure of the crucified Christ for anything, to use this to illustrate, or score points, or illuminate--to do any- thing other than stop short before this--is evil...

...We can turn our little liberated zone into another kind of club, one in which ordinary barriers don't apply--that lack of barriers is a hallmark of the society, the way fezzes are if you're a Shriner...

...What they are looking for is the experience of a real community...

...I am opposed to all forms of violence and am glad that the actual fighting is over...

...Where feeling becomes the criterion, the most bizarre cults can flourish, because feelings of virtually any sort can be provided by nearly anyone...

...I hope that true peace can be established and that all people are treated justly and given the respect due children of God...

...An enjoyment of the com- pany--a surprise in that enjoyment, con- sidering how diverse we were--also had a lot to do with it...

...Surprisingly, hawkish columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, in a column acknowledging their prewar errors in prediction (Washington Post, March 8), also fault the president, not so much for his motives as his method: "We do continue to question the means chosen by Bush to go to war: mobilization and deployment eight thousand miles away of an immense military force without a sin- gle vote by Congress...

...This doesn't allow us to keep very much...

...Perhaps not those in OF SEVERAL MINDS this adult generation, but Larry Weiss tells of a California fifth-grader interviewed on CNN who said, "I didn't know how many dead there were...

...We have nothing in common except our common faith, just as the madrigal group had nothing in common but the common love of that kind of music, and fellowship...

...It is understandable to want to feel good, and it is right to enjoy the communities that give us a sense of shared joy in a common love...

...A community of alleged Christians should not inflict that set of unhappy expe- riences on its members, but it must take negative human experiences into account--and not only take them into account to eliminate them or even to heal them, but to reveal the divine depths even of unhealable suffering...

...His reason was that in the Unitarian church his daughter would meet only people like themselves: political liberals, essentially secular in their outlook, usually relatively affluent, Volvo-driving sorts...

...Our bad singing was unintentional, but frequently apparent...

...The argument between advocates of any sort of liberation theology and any sort of conservative reaction to it strikes me as an argument between clubs, both of which want to claim as a symbol something that, if it could be claimed as they seem to want to claim it, will damn them both...

...But the expe- rience is not, in itself, enough...

...There is a Christian truth, anyway, in the way church- es can cut through social barriers that seem to be erected nearly everywhere else...

...This is, however, the scandal we are sup- posed to preach...

...Was win- ning more important than the scores of thousands of lives that were unnecessarily taken...

...All is not well in either civil-war-torn Iraq or in Kuwait, where Iraqi torturers of Kuwaitis were succeeded by Kuwaiti tor- turers of Palestinians and unlucky Iraqi prisoners...

...In smaller church communities this can lead to the most active forms of charity and per- sonal involvement, as it should...

...He resisted...

...The true aggression that caused the fighting will remain and has created an environment that promotes imperialism, injustice, and, very likely, future conflicts...

...The limits are there, however, and they are important...

...If they were going to send their child to any church he would (1) not accompany her, and (2) insist that it be a mainstream, preferably Protestant, church...

...We also question mortgaging U.S...

...Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was the opportunity and Saddam Hussein was the perfect hatable enemy...

...There is hope but the ques- tion still remains: What kind of people are we...

...The desolate boredom of rich sub- urbs can be as spiritually horrifying, as much a trap that will lead to eternal death, as the suffering of trapped peasants...

...But why did Americans buy it...

...Under such procedures, it is hard to imagine any bar on any president waging any war in the future that he says is required to correct gross injustice...

...In baptism we die and rise again...

...Among us were peo- pie of several religious traditions, some who had none, and one who was suffering through a juvenile rejection of his religious heritage--a young Jew, younger than his chronological age, who once thought he would shock us by eating a bacon sand- wich on Yom Kippur and succeeded only in irritating us...

...You might also meet people with whom you do have something in common, and that too is a pleasant thing...

...The church should provide that sense to its members...

...It would almost be enough to prove the church's worth, as the atheist quoted above understood...

...In all likeli- hood he will never be "well" in the terms this society values...

...I know of people who have left large and imper- sonal churches for smaller ones, with no attention at all to the theological differ- ences, sometimes radical, between the community being left and the one being joined...

...And it does work, as well for an atheist as for a believer, and that is part of the problem...

...It's the only thing some of the churches have been good for," he said...

...they were adjuncts to the country club), it is more typical for a church to cut across social and, increasingly, racial lines...

...John Garvey CHRISTIAN WHOLENESS NEVER WHAT WE EXPECT hen our children were young enough to hate it, my wife and I were members of a madrigal group which met regularly at our house to sing, rather badly, some truly beautiful music...

...We may come to question whether the cost in American arms and even the small cost in American lives was worth it...

...It should be a place com- pletely free of the social pressures and status concerns that infect the rest of the culture...

...That was murder, that was wrong...

...The group would sing for awhile, then drink beer or soft drinks and eat and talk...

...But will we recover from our war-induced callousness...

...We had almost nothing in common...

...Our house was the usual location for the group's meetings because we were the only singers with young children...

...The other members of the group were either single, or childless married people, and thus a little more portable...

...I worked for awhile with an atheist whose wife wanted to join a Unitarian con- gregation, for the sake of their child, who, she thought, would miss the experience of church, something every child should have---like piano lessons or braces...

...A church that ignores it, or acts as if it were unimportant, will suffer for it, and deserves to suffer...

...then--at the very flash point--the rush on Congress to approve it...

...This ridicule did not exclude me or Regina...

...If democ- racy and self-determination are only sec- ondary factors, the new world order is diminished...

...The church tends to be free of the obsessions that characterize much of the larger society...

...This denies the Incarnation as well, by ignoring the human facts (more common, perhaps) of pain, abandonment, desolation, and emptiness, experiences Jesus himself endured and shares with us...

...Perhaps our postgame euphoria will be succeeded by a postgame hangover...

...The crucified Christ here is a dramatic symbol that can be brought in from the side, but is hardly at the center...

...These are good things...

...Now our leaders seem passive --even acquiescent--in the face of Saddam's slaughter of Kurds and Shiites...

...They foreshadow the Kingdom of God, and are worth cel- ebrating, within their limits...

...He stated in his inaugural address in January 1989, that one of the objectives of his administration was to put an end to the 'Vietnam syndrome.' It was startling to hear...

...Is this something to be proud of...

...The kids would hide under the piano and occasionally com- ment on the stupidities of one or another of the adults, though not to our faces...

...Was it because we could win this one...

...How open are we to an~r suffering that is really a cry from t h~ depths...

...What we had in common was a love of madrigals, of singing, and a tolerance for hearing both loves challenged by our often slipshod performance in the name of the higher love...

...What did we win...

...We are to be transformed...

...Remembering this I realize that there is a metaphor here for what the church means to a lot of us...

...If our liberation is only a willingness to associate with the like-minded, or the emotionally con- genial, it isn't liberation...

...Churches at their best are classless...

...A friend of mine, a schizophrenic, has managed to bring an astonishing level of compassion and understanding to his relationship with people who have made his life profoundly difficult...

...Liberals argue that the horrors can be bridged by a kind of political solidarity between the bored rich and the tormented poor, as if the parable of the beggar Lazarus were wrong and a great gulf was not in fact set between them...

...We will face the reality of the morning after...

...The fact that after the Resurrection Jesus' wounds were glo- rified, not eliminated, is something a soci- ety oriented towards health needs to under- stand...

...I think he is already closer to the Kingdom of God than most healthy people will ever be...

...To the extent that it is not, it isn't Christian...

...One mark of the church's wholeness must be a willingness to receive and live with the unfashionably wounded, the truly insufferable, the difficult, the wounded who make you want to cross the street to avoid them...

...This experience is a good and under- standable thing...

...I don't mean to be puritanical here...

...This isn't a metaphor we are allowed to use...

...He was, however, only one out of five...

...We worked in a number of different fields...

...In churches you can meet people you have nothing in common with, and that's a good thing...

...Nor is our 250: Commonweal enjoyment of the ways in which the expe- rience of a church can cut through the bar- tiers that exist elsewhere, or the fact that there is often a more active, immediate charity at work in a smaller community...

...The response of conservative churchpeople seems to be to pretend that there is no real horror anywhere here, only a falling away from the right kind of churchiness...

...To stop there, at the sense of community, the church as a liberated zone, would be easy...

...sup- port for freedom movements in the Soviet Union to ensure its forbearance...

...While there are some churches that are more or less defined ethnically (the Armenian church, for example), or reflective of social status (two churches in my home town, one Presbyterian and the other Episcopalian, were for awhile the places Methodist car dealers moved into after they made enough money...

...At the chapel where we worship there are people of all 19 April 1991:249 races, income levels, and classes...

...Where the war was to be waged was not so important as that it be one for which he could gain widespread domestic support...