New Year For Islam Or For Judaism Is Something Different; No Doubt Also For A Number Of Other Faith Traditions

By
Canon Alan Amos, New Age Islam
09 January 2017
Dear
Sultan Shahin,
I feel I can do no better thing at the
beginning of this “new year” than to write to my dear Muslim friends. And I have to begin by recognising that this
“new year” is of course a Western construct which has become “universalised”
- which in itself presents a something
of a problem. New Year for Islam or for
Judaism is something different; no doubt also for a number of other faith
traditions. As I write, I am aware that
this “New Year” attachment - or
antipathy – can itself give the opportunity for violence, as we have just seen
in Istanbul. The terrorist attack on a
high-profile “high-life” nightclub on the Bosphorus has rightly been condemned
by Turkey’s Muslim religious leadership.
But there is also an undercurrent in Turkey, where before the New Year
the more popular “religious” press was stoking up anger against this “Western”
and perhaps therefore “Christian” idea of what civilisation is and
represents. And suggesting that it is
shameful for Muslims to be associated with such things.
Well, apart from Muslim viewpoints, I can’t
say that as a Christian I am full of admiration for the partyings of the international
jet set. Not in a world of so much inequality and poverty. However that is a
long way from any justification for a brutal terrorist attack. My son lives and works in Istanbul, and so
for personal and family reasons Istanbul is close to my heart at this
time. It is hard seeing the structures
of communal life threatened and torn apart; and the obvious answer of more
security tightening up, more arrests, perhaps more “repression” cannot deliver
an adequate response.
At such times I turn to those spiritual
guides whom I have learnt to trust, those whom I find helpful in interpreting
to us “the word of faith” from our spiritual traditions. One writes:
‘The
Struggle With Terrorism
There’s an old axiom that says that the
country with the best poets eventually triumphs. The strength of a people, in
the end, lies not in its military power, but in its faith, moral fiber,
imagination, and in the vision of its poets, artists, philosophers, and
priests.[ I might add musicians, theologians, sheikhs, imams, sages and
rabbis.]
Never has this been more true, and harder
to believe, than today in our struggle with terrorism and the merciless
violence it has unleashed all over the planet. To make peace with terrorism, as
we are painfully learning, will require more than guns and military might. It
is going to require new imagination, new poetry, and a moral stretch to which
we are unaccustomed. This is a different kind of enemy, one that seems to grow
the more it is crushed.
The novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, in a book
of essays entitled Small Wonder, brilliantly describes what we are facing:
“This new enemy is not a person or a place,
it isn’t a country; it is a pure and fearsome ire as widespread as some raw
element like fire. I can’t sensibly declare war on fire, or reasonably pretend
that it lives in a secret hideout like some comic-book villain, irrationally
waiting while my superhero locates it and then drags it out to the thrill of my
applause. We try desperately to personify our enemy in this way, and who can blame
us? It’s all we know how to do. Declaring war on a fragile human body and then
driving the breath from it—that’s how enmity has been dispatched for all of
time….”
But now we are faced with something new: an
enemy we can’t kill because it’s a widespread anger so much stronger than
physical want that its foot soldiers gladly surrender their lives in its
service. We who live in this moment are not its cause, instead, a thousand
historic hungers blended together to create it—but we are its chosen target. We
threaten this hatred, and it grows. We smash the human vessels that contain it,
and it doubles in volume like a magical liquid poison and pours itself into
many waiting vessels. We kill its leaders, and they swell to the size of
martyrs and heroes, inspiring more martyrs and heroes. This terror now requires
of us something that most of us haven’t considered: how to defuse a lethal
enemy through some tactic more effective than simply going at it with the
biggest stick in hand.
The enemy, in the end, as Kingsolver points
out, is not a person, a country, or a religion, but hatred itself. Only hatred
can call forth this kind of sickness, indiscriminate murder done in God’s name.
Only hatred sees murder as martyrdom. And, as Kingsolver points out, we’re not
its cause, but its target. This is not to say that some of the things we have
done in history and some of the things we still do today are not to blame for
helping produce this (It’s wise to ask the question ‘Why?’ when someone hates
us so powerfully) but the kind of hatred that foments murder in God’s name
draws upon more sources than those for which we are to blame. Moreover this
kind of hatred can’t simply be beaten with guns because it isn’t like fighting
an army; it’s like fighting a plague, people die but the disease continues on
to infect millions of others.
So what’s to be done? While military
strength can never ultimately subdue this, this doesn’t mean that is isn’t
necessary to contain it. A disease needs to be contained even while it is being
fought. But, at the end of the day, winning this battle will require something
beyond guns and bombs. To win, which ultimately means to win over, will require
poetry, imagination, and a vision drawn from genuine religion.
Kingsolver, in searching for some vision, draws
upon the Greek story of Jason and the Argonauts, Jason finds himself facing a
particular kind of dragon which when it is slain and its corpse falls to the
ground becomes even more deadly because each of its teeth germinate and
instantly produce a new enemy, fully armed. So each time he kills an enemy, the
enemy multiplies. He sees the impossibility of his situation, every time he
kills something, he has more to fight. Eventually a woman who loves him, Medea,
tells him a secret: Hatred only dies when it is turned upon itself. Jason takes
her advice, gives up his sword, and instead finds a way to throw a rock
cryptically so that it triggers an internal riot within which his enemies fight
each other. Later Medea also shows him a way to slip an elixir of contentment
into the mouth of sleeping dragons so that they remain peaceful.
Hatred only dies when it is turned upon
itself. We are right in trying to contain it, but eventually it can only be
defeated from within. In the interim, we need better poetry.’
This was written by Father Ron Rolheiser
SJ, who teaches in Texas. It is a great
deal more profound than anything likely to come out of the Trump
administration, where I am afraid that the “quick fix” will be the order of the
day. Such an approach that Rolheiser
suggests also takes time, and spending lengths of time is not appreciated in
the world of business deals. But the
healing of our world will take time, and lots of it. The comfort of us, as people of faith, is
that the one Lord is Master of time; it is his special “sacrament” of healing,
if I can be permitted to use that word.
Back to the new year. Of course “the new year” is a deception;
whatever has changed between last month and this? Nothing more than the normal flow of the
course of time. And yet in our faith traditions there is always the possibility
for something really new, authentically new, in our personal lives and the
lives of our communities and nations, when we turn to the One who is the source
of life, the source of our renewal, and who promises our resurrection. Let’s put our hope in the right place!
With warmest regards,
Alan
[P.S.
the quote from Father Rolheiser comes from a blog of the St. Louis Jesuit
University, Missouri USA:
liturgy.slu.edu/EpiphanyA16/reflections_rolheiser.html and is
therefore not copyright but the authorship should be acknowledged. I have omitted one phrase from the Kingsolver
quotation which was in the original article, as it seemed designed for a
specifically ‘Christian faith’ audience but was not necessary to the article’s
argument.
URL:
http://www.newageislam.com/letter-to-the-editor/canon-alan-amos,-new-age-islam/new-year-for-islam-or-for-judaism-is-something-different;-no-doubt-also-for-a-number-of-other-faith-traditions/d/109653
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