Exemplars

One of the earliest ways to teach people about Christianity was through the use of exemplars, stories of people who lived their lives in imitation of Christ.  This is still a powerful way of teaching, and the exemplars page of New Collations will be dedicated to their examples.  Not all of them will be Christians.  One of the most powerful exemplars in scripture, the Good Samaritan, was not a Christian, and the fact that Christ used his story to provide an example of radical love gives us permission to use examples where we find them.

My Brilliant Friend Marco

Here is a video of my brilliant and courageous friend Marco Saavedra, an advocate for immigrant rights, a fine painter and, as is so obvious from this interview, a profound and poetic thinker.

Faith and Theology of Undocumented Youth with Rev. Raymond Kemp and Marco Saavedra from Woodstock Theological Center on Vimeo.

A Jewish Doctor in Auschwitz

excerpts from Robert Jay Lifton’s Witness to an Extreme Century, New York: Free Press, 2011, pp. 326-328

T. completed his medical training in Czechoslovakia but, after the Nazi occupation, fled to Norway, where he lived in a small town working intermittently as a doctor and a logger.  Soon after the Nazis invaded that country he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz in a transport group of two hundred and fifty people, ninety percent of whom were immediately selected for the gas chamber.  T. was permitted to enter the work camp “because I was young – just thirty – and reasonably strong.”  He told me of the horrors of his first days of Auschwitz – the grotesque dying everywhere and prisoners being “depleted of everything, including the hair on your body” …so that “there was absolutely nothing left from life on the outside except your spectacles” (which he still “cherished” as his only personal link at that time to non-Auschwitz existence).

…T. took advantage of his position on the medical block to find ways to help other Jews survive.  Sometimes that meant falsifying diagnoses – using terms like “mild influenza” or “upper respiratory infection” for actual cases of malaria or tuberculosis, since any prisoner diagnosed with either of these two conditions would be sent to the gas chamber.  When lacking medicine to dispense in Auschwitz, his impulse to heal took the form of simple words of encouragement, which in some cases could be surprisingly effective.

…As was frequently the case with those who did most to help others, T. remained highly self-critical, “haunted by” certain things he did, such as kicking a fellow prisoner when trying to bring order to an overcrowded block for disrupting the meager food supply.  He considered that “my worst deed [because I] assumed the same attitude [as the Nazis].”

…At the time of liberation, he played a leading role in restraining those prisoners who sought vengeance by either killing SS men or subjecting them to “the torture they had done on us.”  An understated man, he told me with some feeling how he held on to “my right to be a human being, even if it was withheld by the Nazis.”  Yet whenever he spoke positively of his own behavior, he would feel it necessary to insist upon avoiding self-praise by adding a comment such as “But I must not make a holy person of myself.”

…I know of no one who so combined personal death camp suffering with such a continuous immersion into the experience of fellow survivors and so great a dedication to finding ways to help them.

Alfred the Great

It’s easy to think that he lived in a simpler world, to romanticize the ninth century and see it as a time of short lives, hard labor, and communal values.  The West Saxons were Christians, and they didn’t have to be distinguished as Roman Catholic Christians, because that was the only category available in most of western Europe.  The people of Wessex were mostly farmers, except for the thegns who lived with the king, and except for the monks, although many of these weren’t adverse to tilling their own lands.  These monks had much to worry about, as had everyone else.  Terrible news came repeatedly from the east of England.  The Vikings were invading in great hordes, toppling the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and burning the monasteries.  The poor monks must have heard about the deaths of their friends and brothers with great regularity, and their mourning must have been increased when they were told that the monasteries in the east had been burned to the ground, that the holy relics and worship objects had been lost or defiled, and, most terrible of all, that the books had been burned or torn to pieces.  These books were of vital importance, since the monks kept the only repositories of knowledge in England.  Often they were the only ones who could read.  They had access to the golden legacy of all the human thoughts and hopes that had come before, and because of this, they had a sense of the diversity of the world beyond their own small kingdoms.  The deprivations of the Vikings brought a very real narrowing to the Anglo-Saxon’s sense of what it meant to be a human being.

There had been large Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but Wessex was not one of them.  It had been a client kingdom of Mercia, to the north.  But Mercia soon fell to the Vikings, just like everywhere else.  Wessex stood alone.  Some historians say that leadership isn’t important in history, that the story of humankind is determined by vast material and economic forces, even geologic forces from time to time.  Wessex stands as a counter argument.  It was small and unimportant, but it had the advantage of a wise king, Aethelwulf, who may have been a monk before he got married.  Aethelwulf had five sons, and when he died these sons, adopting the wisdom of their father, decided that the inheritance would pass between them, since they didn’t want to endanger Wessex by allowing one of their young children to inherit the crown.  In ten years, three of the brothers became king and then died while battling the vikings.  In this way, the crown finally came to Alfred in the year 871.  He was twenty-one years old.  The year before he had distinguished himself in battle by defeating the Vikings at Ashdown.  He understood that his kingship had one great task before it.  He had to defeat his powerful enemy and somehow preserve his tiny kingdom.  Wessex had every military disadvantage.  It had no navy, and the Vikings terrorized the coast with their long ships.  The fighting men of Wessex were also farmers, and as they marched and trained they worried about their crops, and about getting in the harvest so that their wives and children wouldn’t starve during the long winter.  If the Vikings happened to attack at harvest time, Alfred’s army had a tendency to drift away, as the men laid down their spears and picked up their scythes to work in the fields.

The first seven years of Alfred’s reign didn’t go particularly well.  The Vikings raided repeatedly and then, in 878, they launched an all-out attack, led by the ferocious King Guthrum.  They penetrated into the kingdom and seized one of Alfred’s palaces at Chippenham.  The West Saxons fled before them.  Alfred himself fled into the Sedgemoor Marshes, to an island fastness with the charming name of Burrow Mump.  He was accompanied by a rag-tag group of thegns and refugee monks, and as he wandered through his remaining kingdom, organizing a guerrilla resistance, he was often alone.  He was so threadbare and bedraggled that a woman living in the swamp mistook him for an ordinary traveller, and set him the task of watching some cakes she had cooking on the hearth while she went outside to cut more firewood.  The king, preoccupied with the task of saving his kingdom, stared into space and didn’t notice the cakes burning.  When the housewife came in she roundly berated him.  This story got about, and the West Saxon’s grew in affection for their king.  Here was a man who was humble enough that the lowliest of his subjects could yell and scream at him, while he sat quietly and admitted his wrong.  But here was a man who was also strong enough that he could gather together an army at Burrow Mump, and lead them out to fight the Vikings.  He met the Viking horde on the northern edge of Salisbury plain, drove his troops between them, divided their forces, and defeated them.  The Vikings went fleeing back to Chippenham.  Alfred followed and lay siege, and the Vikings soon surrendered.  Alfred made peace, and became his enemy Guthrum’s godfather when the Viking king was baptized soon afterwards.

England was split in two, with the Vikings controlling the east and north, and Alfred controlling the west and south.  Now that he had peace and stability, his first concern was how to maintain it.  He called upon European allies to supply him with the expertise to build a navy.  And he created a system of forts, called burhs, which could defend the land.  These burhs didn’t have permanent garrisons, but were defended by the people who lived around them.  They were places that the people could flee to in times of danger.  They were also the places where the people held their markets, and these burhs became some of the most important cities in England.  Alfred reorganized his army by creating a rotating system of service.  When the army was called up, half of it stayed at home for part of the year, working the land, and then rotated into the ranks so that the other half could go home to plow or harvest.  These changes gave the West Saxons a tenacious strength and a stable environment in which to work and raise their children.

It also gave them the chance to reinvigorate learning.  Alfred was a devout Christian who enjoyed spending time with the monks, and it was through their influence that he came to learn Latin and prioritize scholarship in general.  Once he had turned his mind to learning, he was surprised to find how many of his people were illiterate, and how few books there were in his kingdom.  The church services were in Latin, and few people understood what was going on.  Alfred set about the task of translating many of the great philosophical and theological classics into the Anglo-Saxon tongue.  He himself undertook some of these translations.  He also created an enduring record of the social and economic status of his kingdom.  He had monks keep careful records in their separate monasteries, and these records collectively became the Anglo-Saxon chronicle.

He did all of this while living the everyday life of a human being, and the occasionally vexatious life of a leader.  His times were no simpler than our own.  They were in many ways harder, involving a life and death struggle against the Vikings, not to mention against disease and agricultural disaster.  And through it all, people were still people.  They still squabbled and fought over unimportant things.  They still hurt each other intentionally or unintentionally.  They still clung to their petty privileges and cared more about status than they cared about goodness.  But Alfred could see past all of that with compassion.  He bothered to understand them and their needs, and he remained humble before them, dedicated to serving them and keeping them safe.  As he himself said, “It has ever been my desire to live honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that should come after me my memory in good works.”

Goodness Instead of Glory

Robert Loftin met a Jesuit priest when he was traveling in Europe in 1958.  The priest was a victim of the thought reform that the Chinese Communist government practiced on its people and on foreigners who had been living in China.  The priest, Father Simon, had been born at the turn of the century in a small French village.  His family was very religious, and as a child he was austere and conscientious, having decided that “life was something serious.”  He felt the call to be a priest at the age of 11, at at 15 he was old enough to act on it.  He entered the Jesuit order, where he was trained in theology, but also in science and philosophy.  Part of his training took place in the United States.  He spent three years here when he was in his thirties, and when he returned to France he often annoyed his colleagues by singing the praises of American science.  He wasn’t an easy man to work with – always serious and always deeply enthusiastic about some unpopular idea or another.  The Jesuits sent him off to China during the 1930s.  Simon loved living in China.  He was given a teaching post at a university.  He often seemed cold and reserved, but he would take his students on long camping trips every year, and it was obvious that there, in nature, surrounded by young Chinese people, he could relax and be as happy as his personality would allow him to be.

He stayed in China throughout the course of the Second World War.  These must have been perilously hard times.  The Japanese invaded and then, after they had withdrawn, the nation fell into civil war.  When the Communists came to power, they left Simon alone for a couple of years.  But as they began to consolidate their grip on the nation, they turned their attention to remaking the Chinese people in their image.  They engaged in a project of thought reform, inflicting imprisonment, torture, and re-education on their own people, and on foreigners who were living in the country .  Those who disagreed with the communist system were either sent to prison or to special universities that existed for the sole purpose of brainwashing students into accepting Communist ideology.  These institutions were very subtle in their approach.  It wasn’t just the people in authority who exerted pressure on students to give up their beliefs and accept the state-sponsored ideals.  Fellow students were co-opted and used to apply peer pressure.  Anyone who thought for themselves would soon be isolated, derided, and verbally abused by everyone.  It is not surprising that most people caved to social pressures that were applied both by those in authority and by their friends and fellow students.

Simon was imprisoned with other Jesuits.  At first he was deeply rebellious, fighting the authorities harder than anyone.  He was subjected to nights without sleep and constant verbal abuse.  And then, one day, he simply caved.  He told Lifton that: “I thought that I was one of those with the best chance to stay [in China].  I had received instructions from my superiors to stay.  I realized that if I did not change my mind, I would have no chance at all to stay.  I would try to see what was right, and if doubtful, I could try to adopt the Communist point of view.”  It’s easy to abhor this reversal, but in many ways its understandable.  He loved China.  He loved his students.  Surely his individual relationship to the place and people couldn’t be completely warped and distorted by the government’s insistence on thought reform.  What he did next was less understandable.  He became an informer against his fellow prisoners, a stool pigeon who joined the prison officials in trying to force everyone else into his own conversion.

None of this helped him in the end.  While he was in prison, articles were published in the Chinese newspapers that attacked him.  When he was released from prison, he was deported to Hong Kong.  There he found himself once again among his fellow Jesuits.  They were kind to him, but the brainwashing had stuck.  He was convinced that the Communists were right about everything except the existence of God.  It was that one point which had kept him from going over to Communist ideology entirely.  Simon believed that, to belong to a group, you needed to accept all of its ideas entirely.  He called this “writing a blank check.”  He couldn’t write a blank check to the Communists because he believed in God.  Now that he was in Hong Kong, he found that he couldn’t entirely accept the blank check that he’d once written to Roman Catholicism, either.  He argued with his colleagues ceaselessly.  He wanted to return to China.  He wanted to leave the Jesuit order.  The Jesuits were patient.  They waited for him to begin to regain himself.  He wasn’t the only victim of thought reform to have found his way to Hong Kong.  Other Jesuit priests were trying to recover, to rebuild some sense of themselves and deal with the trauma of their experience.  But Simon didn’t want to recover.  He was hard on everybody.  Still, the Jesuits wouldn’t abandon him.  He was sent back to France, where they took care of him, putting up with his ideas and bad manners, waiting patiently for healing to begin.  When Robert Lifton met Simon, he had been back in France for three years.  The Jesuits had calmly made a deal with him.  He could believe anything he wanted to believe, and argue with them privately as much as he wanted, but he couldn’t express his love of Communism openly.  Simon remained alone, isolated in the balance, being pulled by the Chinese Communists on one side and the Catholic Church on the other.

Robert Jay Lifton is a psychologist who has spent his life studying the effects of unwavering, dominating systems of thought.  He has studied the actions of Nazi doctors, the experiences of Hiroshima survivors, the processes of thought reform, while wondering about the effects that these systems have on human life, and how we recover from their influence.  His work is important to me today because of the 32^nd chapter of Exodus.  In that chapter the Israelites give up on Moses, who’s on top of Mount Sinai, talking to the Lord, and they have Aaron make them a golden idol out of their jewelry.  When the Lord hears of it, He wants to give up on the Israelites and start all over, making a new nation out of Moses’s offspring.  Moses talks the Lord out of this option, and convinces Him to forgive the people.  But then Moses himself goes down the mountain and sees the orgy that the people are engaged in as they worship the Golden Calf.  It enrages Moses.  He calls the Sons of Levi to his side and tells them to go through the camp and kill all of the ringleaders, the people who had been most insistent about building the Golden Calf.  He tells them to kill their brothers and their fathers if necessary.  And they do.  Three thousand Israelites fall to the sword.  It is the kind of horrifying massacre that would dominate the news cycle and bring down a government today.  As I’ve been reading Robert Jay Lifton, and thinking about this story from Exodus, I’ve been faced with a very basic question.  How can I claim that Moses’s actions aren’t thought control.  He orders his followers to murder everyone who disagrees with him.  It’s the kind of thing you would expect from a totalitarian state.

In the 33^rd chapter of Exodus, right after this massacre, the Lord tells Moses to lead the Israelites up into the promised land, but tells Moses that they’ll be going alone.  The Lord has decided not to go with them.  “I shall not go up in your midst, for you are a stiff-necked people, lest I put an end to you on the way.”  The Lord is worried about being so provoked by the people that He’ll erase them from existence.  If I were an Israelite, there in the desert, after the slaughter, I would begin to wonder how I could feel any certainty about the Lord at all.  This is not God as we meet God in Jesus.  Jesus tells his disciples that he will be with them always, even until the end of the age.  When Jesus says those words, he speaks with deep reassurance.  All will be well, he says, don’t worry.  When the Lord speaks to Moses, he speaks out of anger.  Maybe its righteous anger.  The people did break their covenant by worshipping the Golden Calf.  But there’s no reassurance there, and I don’t think the people could have felt much certainty in God’s goodness.

I am not a fundamentalist.  I don’t believe that the Bible was written by God and that everything in it is perfect and literally true.  The Bible was written by human beings, and it was written over a long course of time.  It is a record of our thoughts about God.  In the 32^nd and 33^rd chapters of Exodus, it’s safe to say that the Israelites’ thoughts were uncertain.  How could they know that the Lord wasn’t a bully or a tyrant?  How could they know that the Lord wasn’t subjecting them to thought reform?  Did the Lord tell Moses to send out the Sons of Levi to slaughter the three thousand, or was that Moses’s own doing?  They didn’t know what we know, that the massacre was Moses’s initiative, and a wild and unjust one, given that he’d just talked the Lord into forgiving the people.  There, in that crucial moment at the foot of Mount Sinai, the people had one vital question.  Who is the Lord, and will he abandon us?

Again, Moses argues with the Lord on behalf of the people.  “If you’re not going with us, then don’t send us to the promised land.  If you’re going to go with us, first show us that we’ve found favor in your eyes.  Show us, and show the whole world, that you love us.”  The Lord agrees.  “I will go with you.  You’ve found favor in my eyes.”  But Moses keeps arguing.  He says, “Show me your glory.”  He’s wants to know the Lord in His entirety.  He wants to know the Lord so intimately that there can never be any more uncertainty about who the Lord is and what the Lord will do.  But the Lord says no to this request.  He won’t show Moses His glory, all of His power, all of those inscrutable things about God and the universe that we can never grasp.  Later on in the Bible, God will inform Job that our minds aren’t great enough to grasp and understand everything, certainly not great enough to entirely understand God.  So if Moses and the people saw the Lord’s glory, it would do them no good.  Instead of His glory, the Lord chooses to show Moses His goodness.  “I shall make all My goodness pass in front of you, and I shall invoke the name of the Lord before you.  And I shall grant grace to whom I grant grace and have compassion for whom I have compassion.”  In other words, “you shall see My morality, and you will know My name, and you will feel My grace and compassion, but that doesn’t mean you will know Me entirely.”  Some part of God’s nature will always remain inscrutable to us.  It is God’s goodness that we will know.

We do not have to give blank checks to the things we believe in.  No system of thought will ever attain even a passing similarity with the glory of God.  If God is the source of ultimate being, if God is ultimate being, than we must learn to accept that the most important things are always going to be beyond our knowledge.  When we claim that our system of thought is the only true system of thought, we deny the inscrutable glory of God.  When we try to force our systems of thought on other people, we deny not only God’s glory, but God’s goodness, by trying to replace it with the systems of morality that we have built for ourselves.  Poor Father Simon was stuck believing in God’s glory but not in God’s goodness.  He rejected Communist atheism but accepted Communist morality.  To my mind, the heroes in his story are the other Jesuits, who took him in and tried to love him and had the patience and wisdom to let him think what he wanted to think.  These were men who understood that God’s glory would always be just out of reach of their understanding.  But they had seen God’s goodness, and they chose to emulate God’s grace, and God’s compassion.

That is our task, as well.  We can’t know God entirely.  We’ll never see God’s glory.  But we can see God’s goodness, and know God’s compassion.  And when we think about what it takes to be a people of God, what it means to imitate Christ, we must realize that it’s more about goodness than glory, more about morality than dogma.  Do good in the world, and you will be a true follower of Christ.  Get hung up on ideas and spend all your time trying to argue other people into believing what you believe in, and you won’t be a true follower of Christ.  That doesn’t mean that ideas aren’t interesting and fun.  That doesn’t mean that they’re not useful for morality.  But at the heart of a life lived in faith is a simple desire to imitate Christ’s goodness, to heal and bless.

*Translations of Exodus taken from Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses.